by Dixie Cash
“How about the windows? Any broken or left open?”
Judd’s eyes widened in an expression of mixed confusion and surprise. “Oh. I didn’t think about the windows.”
Debbie Sue swung her attention to her partner. “Ed, would you please check the back door and the windows while I keep talking to Judd?” She looked back at the distraught café owner. “Who has a key to this place?”
“Just about half the population of Salt Lick,” he answered. “You know how it is. Every time we hire somebody, we give ’em a key. In forty-some-odd years, that’s a lot of keys.”
Indeed Hogg’s had been a Salt Lick landmark since before Debbie Sue was born. “You’ve never changed the locks in all that time?” she asked, unable to mask her incredulity.
Judd opened his hands defensively. “Never had to, Debbie Sue. This is Salt Lick. Nobody steals from us. Everybody knows we ain’t got any money.”
Debbie Sue frowned, reminded that she hadn’t changed the locks on the Styling Station’s doors since she opened it several years back. “Who else knows about this?”
“Just Billy Don. That’s all.” Judd stared at the floor, forlorn, his big head shaking. “Everything was gonna be so great.”
Edwina reappeared, frosted cinnamon roll in hand, a half-moon-shaped bite missing from one side. “Doors and windows A-okay, Deputy Debbie Sue. All locked and none broken.”
Debbie Sue glared first at her partner, then the cinnamon roll. “Ed. Has it occurred to you that you could be eating evidence?”
“Well, evidently I didn’t think of that,” Edwina snapped, her eyes blinking rapidly. “So sorry.” She helped herself to a coffee refill. “I don’t know what the big deal is. I’ll bet that museum owner has those shoes insured.”
Another moan took Debbie Sue’s attention back to Judd. They were roughly the same age, had gone all through school together. She hated seeing him in so much despair. Hogg’s and the citizens of Salt Lick had bent over backward to put Elvis’s birthday celebration together and provide hospitality to all who had journeyed or were soon to journey here. And how had they been repaid? By the theft of a prized possession. As Edwina would say, that was rude behavior.
Fury, sudden and white-hot, combusted within Debbie Sue. She planted her fists on her hips and set her jaw, ready for a fight. “No sonofabitch can come in here and steal something and ruin what everyone has worked so hard on. By God, we are gonna get to the bottom of this.”
“Who’s we?” Edwina asked, half of her cinnamon roll suspended in the air.
Debbie Sue leveled a firm look at her partner. “Ed, by we, I mean you and I.”
“Oh, yeah. Roger that.” Edwina gave her a salute with what was left of her cinnamon roll.
“Judd, you look like hell,” Debbie Sue said. “Why don’t you go to your office, where you can sit down. Billy Don and I’ll look the place over a little more. We’ll be there in a second.”
Billy Don moved closer to Debbie Sue’s side. “We sure will, Judd.”
Debbie Sue dug a pen and a small notebook from her purse, along with a disposable camera she kept just for emergencies. She hesitated with the camera in hand, wondering if the thing had an expiration date. It was possible it would be of no use. Fuck. Being prepared for an emergency was not the same as having one.
“What do you want me to do besides stand here and look pretty, Deputy Debbie Sue?” Edwina asked.
“Ed, will you stop with the deputy stuff? This is no time for jokes. This is serious. This isn’t just any old pair of shoes that’s missing. These shoes belonged to Elvis Presley. It’s the shoes that might have helped launch his career. They’re one of a kind. That is, two of a kind. What I mean is they’re a pair of a kind.” Debbie Sue sliced the air with her flattened hand. “Dammit, what I’m trying to say is that they’re irreplaceable. And we’ve got to find ’em.
“Not to mention…” She inhaled deeply as her vision for the investigative agency she and Edwina had started unfurled in her mind. “It could be a huge break for the Domestic Equalizers. How often does a case like this come up for any small-town investigator?”
“Humph,” Edwina said. “That’s what you said about that murder in New York City. Okay, DDS, I’m serious.”
On a sigh, Debbie Sue retreated from her aggressive posturing, giving her partner a long look. She loved Edwina like the sister she had never had. It wasn’t Edwina’s fault she had never taken the Domestic Equalizers as seriously as Debbie Sue had.
Edwina was comfortable with her life and with who she was, but Debbie Sue…well, Debbie Sue didn’t know if she could ever be completely comfortable. A competitive streak coursed through her system like a mighty river. It had always driven her, had produced both minor victories and major defeats. She had failed at many endeavors, but now she was hell-bent on making the Equalizers successful. She wanted her existence to matter. She wanted to make her mark on this life, not just sail through it. She wanted to be more than Texas Ranger James Russell Overstreet, Jr.’s wife; she wanted to be someone he was proud of. “Ed,” she said calmly.
Edwina stopped short of taking another bite of her doughnut. “What?”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Without me, you’d get into a helluva lot more trouble, that’s what. So what is it you want me to do?”
“Make sure no one goes into the back room where the shoes were going to be on display. This place will be open for business in less than an hour and everything should appear normal. I’ll take some notes and some pictures and talk some more to Judd. If anyone comes in, don’t tell them what’s happened. I mean it, Ed. Tell. No. One.”
Edwina saluted again. “That’s a big ten-four, DDS. We’ll solve this case PDQ. Or we’ll be SOL.”
“Ed, stop with the initials.”
“Just trying to be a real cop,” Edwina said innocently.
With Billy Don breathing down her neck, Debbie Sue walked around the dining room jotting notes and snapping pictures. Some of the information she gathered might be useless, but you never knew what could be important.
A few minutes later she made her way to the tiny cramped office off the kitchen. There she found a dejected Judd Hogg sitting behind a desk, his elbows propped on the desktop, his hands holding his head. His eyes were closed and he was moaning softly. A piece of notepaper lay before him.
“Judd?”
He looked up. “Oh, Debbie Sue, sorry. I didn’t hear you come in. I was just trying to keep from bawling again. Listen, we gotta find those shoes PDQ.”
Debbie Sue’s mouth flatlined. She hated acronyms. Half the time she never knew what they meant. She moved a stack of menus and newspapers from a chair facing Judd’s desk and sat down. Billy Don remained in the doorway, his thumbs authoritatively hooked on his sagging belt.
Judd drilled him with a hard stare. “You’re the law. What do you intend to do?”
The skinny deputy shrugged. “I already done it, Judd. I called Debbie Sue.”
That remark brought an unpleasant huff from Judd and a shake of his head. He turned back to Debbie Sue. “This could bring a lawsuit down on us. It could bankrupt us. It could cripple our whole family for generations.”
Debbie had been too focused on the crime to think about lawsuits. But Judd was right. If the shoes weren’t found, their owner might be able to sue Hogg’s for an enormous amount of money.
“How about Buddy?” Judd demanded. “Where’s he? We need to get the Texas Rangers into this.”
Debbie Sue knew that typically the Texas Rangers wouldn’t take on the investigation of such a minor crime, that might not be a crime at all. They had all of these rules about jurisdictions and so-forth. But as she thought of Buddy back home in their nice warm bed, a tiny panic pricked her. While Texas Ranger Buddy Overstreet might not get involved, he had the names and phone numbers of serious law-enforcement professionals who would. She leaned forward and rested a reassuring hand on the café owner’s forearm. “Look, Judd, there’s no need to
call in the Rangers.”
She felt a sliver of guilt at dismissing real law enforcement, but only a sliver. She wanted desperately to solve this mystery on her own. No sir. Calling in Buddy—or anyone else—was not an option. The Domestic Equalizers would do it, or she would do it alone if she had to, but sure as the sun rose in the east and set in the west, it would get done and the Domestic Equalizers would get the credit.
“There’s probably an easy solution to this,” she said. “A good chance we can clear it up without outside help. Now, just tell me all the details you can. Start with last night.”
For the next ten minutes, Judd talked steadily, interrupted only occasionally by Debbie Sue asking questions. The upshot of the story was that last night had been like any other. Judd was the last one out the door and the shoes were inside the plastic display case where they should have been when he locked up. He couldn’t remember if the display case was locked, but he assumed it was. When he came in this morning, the shoes were gone.
Debbie Sue glanced at the piece of notepaper on the desk. “What about that piece of paper you keep looking at? Is it important?”
Judd picked up the page. “This is the return address that was on the package the shoes were delivered in yesterday. I’ve been trying to get up the nerve to call this guy and tell him what’s happened.”
Debbie Sue leaned forward for a closer look. “Would you like me to do that for you?” she asked soothingly. “I might need to ask him some questions. We could kill two birds with one phone call, so to speak.”
“Oh, Debbie Sue, that would be great.” Judd pressed the page into her hand. “I can’t thank you enough for doing that. I’ve dreaded having to tell him myself.”
Debbie Sue frowned at the name on the notepaper. “What kind of name is this? Adolf Sielvami?” She struggled to pronounce the last name.
“I wondered that, too,” Judd answered. “I decided it must be Hungarian or some other foreign name. It sure ain’t apple-pie American.”
“And it sure as hell ain’t Texan,” Edwina quipped. She had come into the office and was standing behind Debbie Sue, looking over her shoulder. A sprinkling of white grains drifted down onto Debbie Sue’s notes. Debbie Sue glared up at Edwina. Now she had a powdered-sugar doughnut in her hand.
Holding the paper closer to her face, Debbie Sue read aloud, “Adolf Sielvami, Keeper for the King Museum, Eight sixteen Heart Break Hotel Lane, Las Vegas, Nevada, 89109.”
She disliked the idea of calling a stranger with a strange name and telling him a museum piece he had loaned a small town in Texas had disappeared, but if Judd dreaded doing it, Debbie Sue was willing to help him by doing it for him. “Judd, why don’t you go ahead and call up everyone who’s worked here in the past week. Tell them to come on in here. Don’t tell them why. Just say you need them to come in earlier than scheduled.”
“Besides my family, that’s three people,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred and three. We gotta talk to them.”
“What should I do, Debbie Sue?” Billy Don asked.
“How about you interview the employees when they get here? Don’t say the shoes were stolen. Tell them some money was missing this morning.” She rose from her chair. “Oh, and Billy Don, when you finish with the employees, go out to the RV park and interview the campers.”
Anderson’s Cactus Patch RV Park was a rustic, often totally vacant RV campground just outside town on the Odessa highway.
“The RV park?” Edwina said. “Why?”
“Because, Ed, I refuse to believe any Salt Lick citizen would steal the shoes. The thief has to be a stranger. And just where might there be a concentration of strangers? Who was in the beauty shop just two days ago saying they were having the best week they’d ever had?”
“Ahh,” Edwina said, her brow rising. “Rosalie Anderson. You’re ahead of all of us, Debbie Sue.”
“I’ll get it done, Debbie Sue,” Billy Don said, hitching up his utility belt again. “You can count on me.”
Judd glared at the sheriff, moaned and dropped his face into his hands. “I should have taken those shoes home with me. Oh, God. What have I done?”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Judd,” Debbie Sue said. “You couldn’t know someone would steal the shoes. Holy cow, there hasn’t been a robbery in Salt Lick since those old ladies broke into the laundromat looking for quarters of the states. I’ll go back to the salon and call this guy in Vegas. I hope he’s not mad when I tell him.”
Edwina licked her fingers. “Mad? I hope he’s not made, as in mob connections. He could send somebody to do a whack job on us.”
“Made guy? Whack job? Ed, you sound like The Sopranos.” “Who’s The Sopranos?”
Debbie Sue stared at her partner, then chose to ignore the question. She turned her attention back to Judd. “You said the shoes were delivered yesterday? Has anyone besides you had a chance to see them?”
Judd shook his head. “I had planned to put them on display today. You know, let the locals get a look at them before the festival starts tomorrow. Oh, man, what am I gonna do? What are you gonna do?”
“Trust me Judd, I promise to do everything in my power.”
Judd picked up the phone receiver. “Guess I’d better call those employees.”
Debbie Sue walked to Edwina, took her elbow and urged her out of the office doorway, into the dining room.
“Did you mean what you said a few minutes ago?” Edwina asked, licking white icing from one of her red talonlike nails. “About not knowing what you’d do without me?”
“Of course I did, Ed. I was trying to tell you I’m sorry for growling at you. You know how I get at the beginning of a case. It’s like when I was running barrels. The excitement gets to boiling, my adrenaline gets to pumping and I turn into a horse’s ass. I know it. I try to help it, but I just can’t. This is the biggest case we’ve ever had. I want us to succeed.”
“I want us to succeed too, hon,” Edwina said, “but you can’t let yourself think this is more important than finding Cher’s killer in New York. That was the biggest case we ever had. That was murder.”
Debbie Sue’s eyes fixed on Edwina’s. And just like that, she calmed down. Ed was right. A girl had to keep her perspective. A pair of shoes, even Elvis Presley’s shoes, wasn’t as important as a human life. Debbie Sue sighed. “You’re right, Ed. Gimme a bite of that doughnut.”
Edwina handed over the doughnut and Debbie Sue walked back to the lunch counter and picked up the mug of coffee that had turned cold. “Listen, an idea has been cooking in my head. Does Vic have any shoes that could pass for blue suede?”
Edwina ducked her chin and gave a puzzled look over the top of her rhinestone-rimmed glasses.
“Maybe not real blue suede,” Debbie Sue added. “But does he have any slip-on shoes that are kinda blue? All Buddy’s got is cowboy boots and some sneakers.”
“Where you going with this?”
“Judd is the only one who’s seen the shoes. You and I haven’t even seen them. People who come to view them won’t know what they’re supposed to look like. If there’s some shoes of some kind to gawk at, maybe we’ll be able to keep this quiet for a day or two, which will give us a chance to work the facts.”
“And you want to use Vic’s shoes? You know he wears a size fourteen. Compared to Vic, Elvis was a shrimp.”
Indeed. Vic Martin, at six-feet-five and over two fifty, was an even larger man than Judd Hogg. “So what? That doesn’t mean Elvis couldn’t have had big feet.”
“Okay, lemme think,” Edwina said, frowning. “He’s got a pair of gray house slippers.”
Debbie Sue grimaced. “Is that the best you can do?”
“Well pardon the hell out of me. I’d have bought him blue suede shoes for Christmas if I’d known how important they might become.”
“Are the slippers new?”
“No, they’re old. I’ve thrown them out twice, but he keeps dragging them out of the trash.”
>
“That’s great. They need to be worn. Go home and get them. I’ll tell Billy Don to make sure no one goes into the back room until you get them into the display case.”
“Roger,” Edwina said, starting for the door. “Listen, y’all be careful in that back room. It looks like somebody spilled a sack of flour in the pantry and tracked shoe prints all over the floor. I swept most of it to the side so you wouldn’t get it all over your feet. You can thank me later.”
The air whooshed from Debbie Sue’s lungs. She opened her mouth to shriek, but stopped herself, letting Edwina’s words settle. Debbie Sue didn’t know whether she should laugh or cry, but she did know what she wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t berate her friend for destroying evidence. Even that wasn’t worth damaging their friendship.
With Edwina sent home to get Vic’s house slippers, Debbie Sue returned to the Styling Station to make the difficult phone call to the owner of the missing shoes. Ten minutes later she was still on the phone, her whole body as well as her voice tight with frustration. “It’s S-I-E-L-V-A-M-I, Operator.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. We don’t show a listing by that name.”
“Nothing? Nothing at all? Okay, how about Keeper of the King Museum?”
“We have a Keeper of the King church.”
“No, not church. Museum.”
“Will you hold?”
“Yes, I’ll hold.”
The door opened and Edwina came in, giving a small wave. Debbie Sue looked over the receiver’s cord, shook her head and rolled her eyes at her partner. Edwina came over and sank onto one of the teal padded hair-dryer seats.
A voice on the other end of the line took Debbie Sue’s attention back to the phone. “Yes,” Debbie Sue said.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t find a Keeper of the King Museum.”
“You don’t? Are you sure?…Okay, one last thing, Operator. If I give you an address can you tell me whose it is?”
“Yes, ma’am.
“Super. It’s Eight One Six Heart Break Hotel Lane.”
“Like the song?”
“Yes, like the song. I’ll hold.”
