Towhee Get Your Gun

by J. R. Ripley

  “So-so.” He pulled himself up straighter. “Really good,” he said then. “Really good,” he repeated more firmly, as if to convince himself. He waved to the chair beside him. “Have a seat.”

  I gazed out the window panes with him. The trees were leafing up nicely now. There was a clear view of the mountains in the background. “I hear you’ve sold your house.”

  Floyd nodded. “The old place was getting to be a bit much for me to take care of on my own.”

  At his age, and with his wife gone, it was no wonder. He’d been mugged recently, too. An event like that, added to everything else that had happened in his life, probably weighed heavily on him.

  “Is there anything you need?” I asked. “Anything I can get you?”

  “Nah.” The old man waved away my offer. “They give me everything. Food, TV, books.”

  I watched his eyes spark to life as a northern flicker attacked a dead oak limb in search of hidden insects. “This is a nice place to bird-watch,” I remarked.

  His eyes never left the northern flicker. “Yeah. It’s okay. Not like home though,” he said with a touch of sadness creeping through, “like it was with Della’s feeder.”

  Della had been Floyd’s wife of nearly fifty years. She’d been the one who was an avid bird-watcher and feeder. Floyd’s trouble trying to fill her feeder had been the impetus for our meeting. He’d been one of my first customers at Birds & Bees.

  I had a sudden thought. “Why don’t I bring you a new feeder?” I suggested. “From the store?” There wasn’t a bird feeder in sight.

  “Thanks,” he said, turning his rheumy eyes to me after the bird had flown. “But I can’t ask you to do that.” He sighed heavily. “Besides, it wouldn’t be the same.”

  I thought about that beat-up old feeder of his wife’s. No, it wouldn’t be the same. New is not always better, lacking the character, the history, the memory that some objects can hold, like hidden, priceless treasure.

  “Who’s the girlfriend?” cackled a stooped man with dazzling grey eyes and a shock of white hair on his shiny bald head. He pointed his wooden cane at me with an arthritic hand. His brown trousers were held up with red suspenders. His checked shirt pocket, I noted with surprise, held a cigar.

  “Girlfriend is right,” said Floyd with a smile. “So I guess you’re going to have to get your own girl.”

  The second old man hooted. “Karl Vogel”—he swapped his cane over to his left hand and extended his right—“at your service.” Thick, black-rimmed glasses balanced on his nose.

  “Vogel.” I tapped my cheek. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

  Floyd chuckled. “Old Karl used to be Ruby Lake’s chief of police for some years.” He shot his friend a look. “Still thinks he is sometimes.”

  “Couldn’t do no worse than that colt Kennedy!” Floyd snorted. He pulled up a chair and joined us.

  “Of course,” I said. “I remember.” I patted his knee. “Not that I ever gave you any reason to remember me.”

  Karl Vogel laughed too.

  “Did you know that Vogel is the German word for bird?” I told him.

  “You don’t say?” He turned to Floyd and said with a wink, “Your girlfriend’s got brains and looks.”

  I blushed. “So you reside here at Rolling Acres, too?”

  “Yep.” He plucked the cigar from his pocket, rubbed it under his nose, and inhaled deeply. “Got a bungalow in the West Village.”

  “West Village?”

  The corner of Floyd’s mouth turned up. “That’s this place’s fancy name for the bungalows down that way.” He pointed to his right.

  “He’s jealous,” Karl said with a heavy wink.

  “I’ve got a one-bedroom condo in the main building,” Floyd explained. “Karl here thinks I’m jealous just because he’s got a two-bedroom bungalow.”

  “And a prettier housekeeper,” added the ex-chief of police.

  “Yeah,” Floyd admitted grudgingly, “I’ve got to give you that.”

  “So you’re the famous bird lady, eh?” Karl stuffed the cigar between his lips.

  “What do you mean, famous? And is that thing even legal?” I pointed to the fat cigar dangling from his face.

  He extracted the cigar and looked at it with what I took to be a combination of love and frustration. “Just so long as I don’t light up.” He shot a dirty look at the white uniformed orderly clearing dirty dishes from a small snack and beverage station along the far wall.

  Karl returned the damp, tattered cigar to his lips. “Floyd here told me all about what happened at your store a while back and that dead kid.”

  My brow went up and I shot Mr. Withers a look.

  “What?” said Floyd. “It’s not like it was a state secret or something.”

  “Besides, I hear you were responsible for catching the guy’s killer.” The cigar bounced with every word.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that exactly.”

  The former chief shrugged. “Give yourself credit. You couldn’t do any worse than our fair town’s current chief. Like now.” He looked from Floyd back to me. “Damn fool calls in a suicide, then has to backtrack when he finds out it’s murder!” Karl hooted and slapped his knees.

  The hairs on my arms stood up. “What?”

  “I may be retired,” Karl said, plucking the wet cigar from his lips and stuffing it back in his shirt pocket. Now I understood the dark brown stain. “But I have my sources.” He winked at me. “I’m retired, but I’m not dead.”

  “Are you talking about Patsy Klein?” I said, struggling to keep my voice down. It seemed wrong, somehow, to be speaking about death in a senior living facility. Besides, such talk might get me thrown out.

  Karl and Floyd bobbed their heads.

  I leaned closer. “Do you mean to say that Patsy Klein did not shoot herself?”

  Karl barked out a laugh and everybody turned our way. “What are you all looking at?” he said loudly. “Can’t a man spend a little time with his girlfriend without everybody sticking their noses in?”

  Everybody went back to what they were doing, or at least pretended to, while I waited for the red to drain from my face. Though my mouth was dry, I managed to blurt, “About Miss Klein, are you certain she didn’t shoot herself?”

  Karl Vogel grinned from ear to ear. “Young lady, nobody shot Miss Patsy Klein.” This time it was Floyd who was the recipient of his wink. “Greeley told me himself.” He held a finger to his lips, intimating that his communication with the coroner-slash-mortician was to be kept in confidence.

  “But that can’t be,” I stuttered. “I saw the body with my own eyes.” I’d seen the gun. I’d seen the blood. I cast a beseeching look at Floyd, thinking maybe he could make sense of his friend’s words. But it was to no avail. I was beginning to suspect the dear old man might be senile.

  Karl was shaking his head from side to side. The cigar left a growing brown puddle in his shirt pocket. “Nope. Nobody shot Patsy Klein.”

  Vogel leaned in so close our foreheads were a hairbreadth from touching. His breath came out smelling of wet tobacco. “Patsy Klein was stabbed to death.”

  10

  My brain was reeling. Was it true? Why would Karl Vogel lie? The former chief of police had nothing to gain by telling me a falsehood. Besides, Mr. Withers would never be a party to such a thing.

  So Patsy Klein had not committed suicide. And she had not been shot. She had been stabbed to death. In Ava Turner’s dressing room.

  Ava Turner’s locked-from-the-inside dressing room.

  While Ava Turner had texted that she was about to kill herself. Which she’d claimed she had never done. She’d also implied that she would never commit suicide. Did that mean she hadn’t sent the text?

  Nothing made any sense.

  Were Lou and August lying? I rather doubted it. Surely, Jerry Kennedy would have asked to see their cell phones as evidence. Did I dare ask them to show me the same? Did I dare ask Jerry?

  No. He’d
never share any information related to the investigation with me. At least not on purpose. And, according to Mr. Vogel, a murder investigation was exactly what Patsy Klein’s unusual death had become.

  And what had Patsy been stabbed with? A knife? Or maybe something more obscure like a sword or a screwdriver? For all I knew, there might have been swords around the theater, used in some play or other. There were certainly plenty of sharp tools lying about, including screwdrivers.

  I explained all this to my mother over dinner at Ruby’s. Not only was the food excellent, the location was unbeatable, being directly across the street from Birds & Bees.

  Mom had the open-face roast beef sandwich with gravy. I’d opted for the homemade chicken pot pie. I could have used a glass of wine, but the diner does not have a license to serve alcohol.

  “What do you think, Mom?” I slid my empty casserole dish toward the center of the table. Had I really eaten the entire dinner pie? It had been my intention to eat half and save the other half for tomorrow’s lunch. I groaned, feeling my jeans dig into my belly. I really needed to start watching what I ate. Perhaps I should switch to birdseed? Maybe three times a week. I could call it the Birds & Bees diet. You don’t see a lot of birds flying around with love handles, I realized, surreptitiously pinching my waist under the table.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Mom replied, carefully sipping her coffee. Personally, if I drank coffee this late in the day, I’d be up all night. Mom scrunched up her brow. “The name of the dead woman doesn’t sound familiar. Was Ms. Klein from around here? Does she have family?” Mom prided herself on knowing almost every family in town.

  I shook my head in frustration. “I don’t know if she has family or not. I suppose she must.” I was certain the police would discover that soon enough. “I heard she wasn’t from around here.”

  “Do you suppose they will cancel the show?” She wiped a spot of gravy from the table with her napkin. Mom doesn’t like to leave behind a dirty table, even when that table isn’t her own. “I was looking forward to your debut,” she remarked, with a mischievous glint in her eyes. She was wearing a comfy pair of dark blue slacks with one of our Birds & Bees V-neck T-shirts. I’d ordered a small quantity in each of three colors, blue-jay blue, cardinal red, and raven black. Mom was color-matching in the blue.

  I tilted my head at her. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind if they did pull the plug on it. On the other hand . . .” I paused for a defeatist sigh. “I know how important the theater is to the community.” It created jobs, sure, but it went further than that. The theater brought in locals and tourists and, as my friend Susan at The Coffee and Tea House reminded me, also supported other local business owners.

  “Speaking of the community,” Mom said, shifting gears, “are you prepared for tomorrow’s meeting?”

  I sipped my orange soda. “If by prepared you mean, ‘Am I ready to butt heads with those jerks on the planning commission,’ then yes.” I crumpled up my used napkin and tossed it into my empty casserole dish. “If you mean, ‘ready to kowtow to a bunch of conniving crooks out to—’”

  “Maybe I should go with you tomorrow, Amy,” Mom interrupted my tirade, placing her hands over mine. I felt the tension that had been building inside me begin to subside.

  “I’ll play nice, Mom.” I smiled. “I promise.” All of a sudden, I felt myself being slammed sideways in the booth.

  “Shove over.”

  “Riley!” I blurted, loudly enough to cause heads to turn. “What are you doing?” I shoved back, and he was stuck with one half of his backside in the booth and the other dangling over the edge. Mom shot me a look of disapproval so I grudgingly made room for my cousin.

  “Hi, Aunt Barbara.” Ever the fashion plate, my cousin wore a baggy black BEER MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER T-shirt, droopy jeans, and dirty work boots.

  “Hello, Riley,” Mother said very graciously. “How nice of you to join us.” She kicked me under the table. I wasn’t sure if it was an accident or on purpose. “Isn’t it, Amy?”

  I pasted on a smile. “Yes, nice of you to join us.” I gave my cousin one last hip shove for good measure. Some things never do change. We’d behaved the same way when we were kids. “Why are you joining us?” If he was here to mooch a free meal, he was a little late. We were finished eating.

  Riley laid his hands on the table and nervously pulled on the ring on his left hand, glancing anxiously at first me, then Mom. “It’s about Rhonda.”

  Mom straightened. “What about Rhonda?”

  Riley licked his lips and leaned across the table. “Well, you see—”

  Tiffany LaChance, once married to my pal Robert LaChance and now working as a waitress here at the diner, chose that moment to approach. She grinned as she pulled out her ticket book and pen. “Hi, Riley. Can I get you something?”

  Tiffany’s a buxom, green-eyed blonde a few years my senior. If the guys didn’t come here for the food, they came here because of her. She is very easy on the eyes, and I don’t even think she realizes it.

  Riley was clearly under her spell. “Hello, Tiffany. Good to see you.”

  She smiled in reply. “Do you know what you want, or do you need to see a menu?”

  Riley looked greedily at my mother’s plate, now bare except for the merest hint of gravy. “Open-face roast beef sandwich?”

  Mom nodded, and I waited impatiently for Riley to order his food and drink before prodding him to continue. His eyes followed Tiffany’s departing backside, as if he might ever have a shot at her, and I called him back to the real world. “You were saying something about Cousin Rhonda?”

  Riley turned his head in my direction, looking as if he’d forgotten I was there. “Oh, yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Kennedy’s got her.”

  My mother and I shared a look across the table. “What exactly do you mean when you say Kennedy’s got her?” I finally asked.

  Riley gulped down half my glass of orange soda before answering. “He’s talking to her down at the station. He seems to think she might have had something to do with Patsy Klein’s stabbing.”

  So, apparently everybody now knew that Ms. Klein had been stabbed to death, not shot. That really had to be getting under Jerry Kennedy’s skin.

  “What on earth makes him think that?” My mother was first to ask.

  Riley ducked back as Tiffany slid a plate of hot, gravy-slathered roast beef under his nose and departed. “That idiot Nathan—”

  “Longfellow?” I said.

  Riley nodded. “He went and told the chief when he interviewed him that Rhonda and Patsy had been going at it.” Cousin Riley scooped up his fork and cut into his dinner, quickly shoving a big chunk in his mouth and chewing loudly.

  I waited for him to get the lump down to a manageable size. “And were they? Going at it?”

  “I suppose you could call it that,” admitted Riley. “Patsy was a pain. Always nitpicking Rhonda about the hair and makeup.” He snorted. “Like it was any of her business.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a reason to kill a person,” my mother said.

  I agreed and said so. “Not even for Jerry to think so.”

  “Well,” Riley said, his mouth full of bread, gravy, and beef, “there may have been a little shoving.”

  The corner of my mouth went down. “Just how little?”

  “Sort of a catfight, really.” Now he was beaming from ear to ear.

  “You really ought to go down to the station,” Mom said, “and see what you can do to help.”

  “Yes, Riley,” I said with satisfaction. “You should.”

  Mom arched her brow my way. “I was speaking to you, Amy.”

  My face fell. “Me? Why me?”

  “You are her cousin,” Mom replied.

  Riley watched our conversation as if it were a tennis match.

  “Riley’s her brother,” I retorted. “And you’re her aunt.” Hey, I’m no slouch in the debate department.

  “Amy . . .” Mom drew my name out in a way t
hat I’m sure she’d practiced in the mirror a dozen times or more. Per day.

  I gave Riley a shove. “It’s not fair,” I said. Getting up, I grabbed my purse from the end of the booth and headed for the exit. “Hey, Riley,” I yelled back across the dining room. A question had come to mind. “What do you know about Miss Turner’s cell phone?”

  “Don’t look at me!” he hollered with a look of alarm, bringing his right hand to his chest. “I didn’t take it.” He blushed as the other diners looked at him with renewed interest.

  “So it is missing?”

  Riley lowered his head and shoveled a chunk of dripping sandwich into his mouth, but that didn’t stop him from replying. “I guess so.”

  Moire Leora Breeder, the café’s owner, stood by the cash register and grinned as I approached. “Everything okay tonight?”

  “Terrific,” I said. I nodded to our booth. “They’re paying.”

  “That’s cool.” Moire Leora is older than me by a few years. She’s of Scottish and Italian descent and lost her U.S. Marine husband in a training accident half a dozen years ago. Still, she remained remarkably optimistic.

  The diner had once been Ruby Lake’s first gas station. Moire couldn’t resist adding the hand-painted slogan in the window that read EAT HERE, GET GAS in a nod to the diner’s previous incarnation. The tall neon sign with the big green dinosaur on it still stood proudly in the parking lot at the edge of the street. Moire Leora serves up her own take on a bronto burger as an homage to the corporate apatosaurus.

  There’s a row of stools running the length of the counter along the back. The cash register’s up near the door. A lot of the original gas station décor and fixtures remained, giving the diner a pleasant small-town, days-gone-by sort of ambience.

  In addition, all Ruby’s Diner employees, including Moire, wear khaki slacks and kelly-green shirt uniforms with white name patches, stylistically reminiscent of those worn by old-school gas station attendants. Tiffany elevates that look to a whole other level. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times Riley had quipped that she could pump his gas anytime.

  Moire Leora reminds me of a slightly plumper version of Jennifer Aniston with blue eyes and naturally blond shoulder-length hair with a touch of gray, which she normally parts over her left eye. At about five-four, the diner owner is several inches shorter than me.