Just as he reached the door Tammy staggered towards him, her face frozen in horror. She was spitting pink mucus and she couldn’t breathe. She lurched forward, grabbing Carl, nearly pulling him to the floor. “Holy shit!” Carl had no idea what was happening, but he knew it was bad. He had never seen such terror in anyone’s eyes. “The hell’s wrong?”
Tammy convulsed and managed to say, “Carl.” Then she collapsed. Carl was paralyzed as he watched Tammy’s face lapse into a hideous twitching seizure. He thought about giving her mouth-to-mouth, but quickly decided against it. He could tell this wasn’t about needing air. And the unsightly foam gathering around her mouth was damn unappealing. It seemed like he stood there for an hour watching her die, but she actually stopped moving within a couple of minutes. Carl squatted down and felt for a pulse, but there was nothing. She had died all at once. Carl suddenly got a terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach. Fuck! The Chinese food’s poisoned! I’m going to die! With my pants half on! He raced into the bathroom and tried to make himself throw up but he couldn’t do it. After a minute he tried to get a grip on himself and assess his health. Other than being scared sick, he felt fine. Maybe it was just the orange beef. He was suddenly glad Tammy had refused to share.
Carl’s mind raced as he considered his options. What the hell do I do now? If I leave her here, someone will eventually find her and God knows I left plenty of DNA evidence. I shoulda used a damn rubber. Plan B? If I call the cops and tell ‘em what happened, Eddie and my wife will find out we was screwing around but at least I’ll be less of a suspect, since suspects don’t usually call the cops, do they? Hmmm, that’s a plan of last resort. Plan C? What if I dump her body in one of the big lakes? Sardis? Arkabutla? Enid? Hell, there’s no time for that, I’d be late getting to work, besides which there’s bound to be a hundred people at every lake in the state this time of year. Plan D? What if I make it look like somebody killed her? No, wait, somebody did kill her, right? Or did they? Why the hell was she dead? Wait a minute! Plan E! Best idea yet. He thought it through the best he could and decided it was the right thing to do, all things considered.
Carl knew he had to act quick. He didn’t think the plan would work if Tammy started to get cold on him from the feet up. First thing he did was run into the kitchen and put on the pair of bright yellow rubber Platex gloves. They were two sizes too small but they’d prevent the further spread of fingerprints. Next he ran back into the bedroom and grabbed the little .22 pistol Tammy kept in the dresser drawer. He stopped for a second to think about everything he’d ever learned from television cop shows, then he put the gun in Tammy’s hand, put it to her head, and helped her squeeze the trigger. He looked the other way and got as far as he could so nothing would splatter on him. Pop! The .22 kicked a little when it fired. Carl looked and was relieved to find it wasn’t too messy on his side of Tammy’s head.
He left the gun in her hand and watched her for a minute. Dammit! He’d waited too long. There was hardly any blood coming out of the wound. Without more blood, even the dumbest cop would know she was dead before she was shot. Carl decided to give her some CPR to pump some out. Once he’d coaxed a little blood onto the floor, he started to wipe his fingerprints off everything he’d touched. He went into the bathroom and put everything back into the medicine cabinet, including the box of Dr. Porter’s Headache Powder. He looked at the clock. Thirty minutes before he and Tammy were supposed to be at work. Just one thing left.
Carl took a piece of paper and a pen and wondered where to begin. He had never written a suicide note. What would she say? Wait a second, I can’t write the damn note. Eddie’d know her writing. Quick, Plan B? Uh, got it! Carl rummaged though drawers until he found some scissors, some glue, and a couple of People magazines. Like a frantic kidnapper, he cut letters out of big print ads and story headers. After a few minutes he had what he needed. He took the glue and pasted together the shortest suicide note in Quitman County history. It said, simply, “Depressed.” He put Tammy’s fingerprints all over it and propped it up against the flower vase on the dresser.
Fifteen minutes till his shift started. Carl made the bed, then ran back to the kitchen where he grabbed a plastic garbage bag. He gathered the Chinese food to-go boxes and the beer cans, then he stopped and looked around for anything he might have forgotten. It looked good. He put on one of Eddie’s baseball caps and snuck out the back door.
7.
Henry Teasdale had political ambitions. They weren’t big ones, but they were ambitions nonetheless. The Teasdales had lived in Quitman County for five generations and, over that period, had evolved from a clan of clay-eating peckerwoods to a family of social standing. Henry was well known throughout the county as a successful businessman. He had a controlling interest in a large catfish farm, owned significant tracts of arable land, had some oil and gas holdings, and he owned the county’s largest retail business, The Dollar Store in Hinchcliff, Mississippi.
Recently, after his district’s incumbent was convicted of taking kickbacks from an FBI agent posing as a culvert contractor, Henry decided the time was right for him to run for a seat on the County Board of Supervisors. With the election still five months away, Henry still spent most of his time managing The Dollar Store. It was the best way to keep his employees from robbing him blind and it was also the easiest way to campaign. He just roamed the store pressing the flesh and handing out twenty-percent-off coupons to anyone who agreed to vote for him.
Carl had been at work for about an hour when his boss walked into sporting goods. Carl was nervous as a frog on a busy road with a busted jumper but he tried to remain calm. There was no way Mr. Teasdale could know anything, right? Still, Carl was afraid there was something about the way he looked that might give away his terrible secret. He feared Mr. Teasdale could see his heart pounding beneath his polyester shirt and vest. Carl knew sleeping with the boss’s daughter was against company policy, but, as Carl knew better than anyone alive, that wasn’t the worst of it. Just relax, Carl told himself. Take a deep breath. Speak. “Hey Mr. Teasdale, how you doin’?”
“I’ve felt better,” Mr. Teasdale said, “but it cost me more.”
“Yes, sir. Me too.” Carl fiddled with a display of aluminum baseball bats, trying to look busy and worth having as an employee.
“Carl, you got any idea where that useless daughter of mine’s at?”
Carl swallowed hard and acted ignorant. It was the easiest thing he’d done all day. “I thought she was working.” He looked over in the direction of women’s wear.
“No, she didn’t show up for her shift. I called over to the house but got the damn machine.” Mr. Teasdale leaned an elbow on the shelf with the catcher’s mitts and rubbed at his forehead. “How the hell am I supposed to run a business if my employees don’t show up, huh? Tell me that, Carl.”
Carl shook his head and shrugged, hoping his anxiety didn’t show. “I don’t know, Mr. Teasdale. It’s not like her to miss a shift.”
Henry nodded. “I guess I’ll ride over to her place and see what’s going on.”
“Yes, sir.” Carl almost broke down and told his boss he’d been with Tammy just a few hours earlier and that she had died suddenly from a bad serving of orange beef and that in his panic, he’d made the whole thing look like a suicide and Lord knows he was sorry. But somehow Carl managed to keep his big fat mouth shut. He knew if he let that cat out of the bag, the rest of the litter would follow. If it was known Carl was present at the time of Tammy’s death, the coroner might go poking around in areas that would lead to certain foreign bodily fluids and, what with Eddie being out of town and all, Carl would be in the awkward position of having to give some blood. And that would lead to Carl losing his wife, his job and, depending on how jealous a husband Eddie was, possibly his life.
8.
Henry Teasdale didn’t want to believe his tormented eyes, but there she was, lying on the floor, too dead to skin. “Oh honey,” he whispered. “Why’d you do it?” It was a terri
ble sight, the sort of thing no man should have to see, but Henry’d seen it and there was nothing he could change. Or was there?
You ask anybody in Quitman County and they’d tell you Henry Teasdale was nothing if not practical. Yes, he had emotions and feelings and such, but he had become successful not because he was in touch with his inner child, but because he was a pragmatist. So after the initial shock wore off, he got to thinking about things he could fix. He couldn’t fix the fact that Tammy had killed herself and, in so doing, had committed a terrible sin, but he could fix whether it looked that way.
His daughter was dead and he’d have to grieve, but that could wait. God would pass judgment on what Tammy had done, but unless Henry did something about what lay in front of him, every voter in his district would pass their own judgment on Henry and his suitability for the Board of Supervisors. After all, this would be the third Teasdale suicide in the last fifteen years. The rumors, already bad, would become unbearable. Henry knew he’d never get elected if his opponent started raising the question of insanity in the family gene pool. He had to do something. He decided to make it look like murder.
He went to the kitchen and got the rubber gloves. They were small but he managed to squeeze his hands into them. He returned to the bedroom and pocketed the suicide note. Next, he wiped the gun clean. Then he wondered what to do with it. Put it across the room? No, there were powder burns on her head. Why would a killer shoot her at point blank range and leave the gun across the room? Now that he thought about it, why would he leave the gun at all? Henry decided he’d take it with him and drop it off the Talahatchie Bridge. That was fine, but still, something seemed wrong. But what? Oh. Tammy wouldn’t have just stood there and let the intruder shoot her. She’d either have something under her fingernails from putting up a fight, or her hands would have been tied or something. Reluctantly, Henry went to the back yard, pulled down the wash line, and returned to the bedroom.
After wrestling Tammy’s stiff arms behind her back and tying them, Henry set about making it obvious that Tammy had walked in on a burglar with anger control issues. He rifled through all the drawers, throwing stuff on the floor, overturning lamps, taking jewelry. Having achieved the desired walked-in-on-a-burglar effect, Henry picked up the phone and dialed 9-1-1.
9.
Nashville, Tennessee
Whitney Rankin sat in Owen Bradley Park wide-eyed and wondering if he’d come to the right place. He was an unknown songwriter, just arrived in Music City after spending ten years honing his skills in thankless places. He was sitting at the north end of fabled Music Row, directly across from the original Country Music Hall of Fame. It wasn’t there any more, having moved downtown a year or two ago. Whitney wondered if that was symbolic of anything.
His tight-lipped smile was in conflict with the vague sense that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he wasn’t sure where else to go to do what he did. “Damn,” he whispered as he looked around. “Now what?”
Whitney knew Owen Bradley was one of the most important producers in the history of country music, having made Patsy Cline and Brenda Lee huge stars by applying to country the songwriting and production techniques of pop music. Depending on your point of view, Owen Bradley was the man who deserved either credit or blame for having paved the way for what became known as the Nashville Sound. Whitney gave him credit. He didn’t subscribe to the notion that one type of country music was better than another. They were just different. They were all part of the music’s evolution where the worst thing that could happen was stagnation. So it was no wonder to Whitney they’d honored the man with a park of his own, even if the park itself wasn’t much to speak of. It was small and unassuming and brought to mind Hal Ketchum’s notion about how country music was just three chords and the truth. It consisted of some trees, several pine straw-lined flower beds, a few concrete benches, and a life-size bronze sculpture of the man himself seated at the piano. It was a nice little patch of calm, Whitney thought.
He was twenty-nine and dressed like a songwriter who’d never had an appointment on Music Row, which was okay since he’d never had an appointment there. The standard dress code up and down The Row was country club casual and golf course ready. Every now and then you saw someone wearing a suit and tie or dressed in full country regalia, but not as often as the tourists expected.
At first glance Whitney looked more-or-less like he belonged. But on closer examination he somehow looked. . . different. He was six foot three and, as his mama used to say, he was so skinny he had to stand in the same place twice to cast a shadow. He wore tight black Wranglers, a black t-shirt with a dark gray vest over it, and a worn pair of black Tony Lama ropers. He wore a ragged piece of an old red bandana tied around his wrist. He had a turquoise stud in one ear and a dangling silver earring in the other. His hair was long and dark and dangerous as it fell from under a black Resistol Lancer with a thin leather lariat hatband with a small red feather in it. He had a dark patch of stubble on his chin but it wasn’t enough to spoil his narrow, still boyish face. It added up to an off-kilter country look that tended to draw queer looks but, having always been a little different than others, Whitney was used to the stares.
He suddenly hopped to his feet to stop a woman who was walking by. “Excuse me, ma’am.” He sounded southern as fried okra. “I’m sorry to bother you, but could you do me a favor and take my picture?” He handed her a disposable camera. “Over here by the statue? I appreciate it.” Whitney was creating a photo chronicle of his journey to wherever it was he was going. The woman took Whitney’s picture then smiled at him. She saw his guitar case and knew why he was here and what he was up against, especially dressed the way he was. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said as she went on her way.
Whitney was alone in the world, but he was all right with that. He figured every good songwriter needed his share of bad fortune. Whitney’s mom had died two years ago and his dad had disappeared long before that. He didn’t know much about his father. His mom told him only that he was a good man, but troubled. She had remarried, to a man named J.C. Rankin who adopted Whitney and gave him a new last name, but that was about all he’d given. He hadn’t wasted much gas on being a father to the boy. Whitney was all right with that too, after all J.C. hadn’t fathered him, so it was enough that he’d fed and housed him until he was seventeen. And he rarely hit him. You couldn’t ask more than that from a stranger, really.
Whitney had grown up with a guitar in his hands, a guitar that his father had left behind. Whitney could play it too. And ever since he was fourteen, he’d been writing songs. He had a suitcase full of them but, like many songwriters, Whitney had one in particular that was his favorite. He couldn’t wait to play it for somebody in Music City. And now here he was. Now he’d find out one of two things. Either he had what it took or he’d come to the wrong place. Either way, he hoped his mama was looking down, watching him. He wanted to make her proud.
Whitney was sitting on a concrete bench, so uncertain about his future that all he could do was look around and say in a funny way, “Oh boy.” He didn’t know exactly what to do next, but it was time to do something. So he stood and picked up his guitar case. Just as he about to leave he heard a splash come from behind the tall wooden fence that bordered the south end of the park. Whitney wandered under a magnolia tree and looked for a spot in the fence where he could see through. He wedged the toe of his boot between a couple of slats in the fence and pulled himself up to look over the top. What Whitney saw sent a tingle up his spine. It was the crystal blue water of a swimming pool in the shape of a great big guitar. He shook his head slowly. “Well, check it out,” he said slowly. It even had strings painted on the bottom.
10.
The Mississippi Highway Patrol did the decent thing, sending a patrolman out of the Gulfport substation to break the news. Eddie was in his hotel room working on a new song when the knock came to his door. “Mr. Long, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”
Eddie blanch
ed when he heard Tammy had been shot. Of all the things he might have imagined the patrolman saying, that his wife had been shot would have been way down the list. The patrolman reached out to catch him when it looked like Eddie’s legs might give way, but he made it to a chair and sat down. “She was shot?” He couldn’t believe it.
Eddie canceled the rest of his shows and made the long drive back to Quitman County. The whole way back he thought about what his future held now that Tammy was gone.
It was a bleak day in the Mississippi delta when they laid Tammy to rest, overcast with thunder rolling in the distance. The humid air was dead still and thick as two dogs’ heads.
Eddie did his best to be strong. He walked on one side of Mrs. Teasdale offering support while Henry was on the other. There was a good turn out at the church. The preacher kept it simple and let anyone speak who was of a mind to. Carl sat in the back of the church with his wife and toddler. He kept his mouth shut and felt guilty about everything he’d ever done.
Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders Page 4
