Bum Steer

by Nancy Pickard

  “Mrs. Benet?” I inquired.

  The heart-shaped sunglasses focused on my face.

  “Sort of,” she said in a deep drawl. “Who’s askin’?”

  I sat down beside her on the waiting-room sofa. The other people in the room were trying very hard to appear disinterested in this fabulous creature. I figured her for about thirty-five, or as the possessor of the name of a great plastic surgeon.

  “My name is Jenny Cain. I’m the director of a charitable foundation to which Mr. Benet bequeathed the Crossbones Ranch. One of the nurses here told me you were married to him. She didn’t tell me your name—”

  “Marvalene.”

  Of course, I thought, of course it’s Marvalene, how could it be anything else?

  “Podhurst,” she added. “But in my heart”—and here she placed both of her plump and tiny hands between her breasts, which was a little like burying a couple of turtle doves in pillows—“I’m still Mrs. Charles Benet IV.” Her beautiful little lips trembled. Tears ran from under the sunglasses, over her plump cheeks. “That’s why when you asked was I Mrs. Benet, I said sort of. I changed my name back to my maiden name when we got divorced, but only ’cause I was pissed at Cat. God, was I pissed! But I wasn’t angry in my heart. In my heart, I loved that rotten, no good, lousy son of a bitch and I always will, damn his copper-plated balls for leavin’ me like this. Oh, my lordy,” she said with a sob, “do you know this means I ain’t never going to get to ball my little old lover again? I mean, it is true that I haven’t in years, us bein’ divorced and all and him bein’ for a time married to my former best friend, but it was always possible that we might get together and do the deed again sometime. And now we can’t ever. Except in my dreams. I don’t think I can stand it, honey, I think I might as well pack it with cotton and stick a Band-Aid on it, ’cause it ain’t gonna be no use to me no more.”

  “Are you, by any chance, from Texas?”

  She lifted her glasses, revealing sexy, slightly slanted, little green, water-clogged eyes. “How’d ya know that?”

  “A lucky guess.”

  “Did you know him?” She said it pleadingly, as if she wanted me to say yes. “I hope you’ll tell me you knew him. I cain’t find anybody in this damn old hospital who knew anything about him but his arse and his arteries. I want to talk to somebody who knew him.”

  “Why’d you come here, Marvalene?”

  She puckered up, as if she might cry. “Where else’m I going to go? I get this phone call from this lawyer saying my little old sweet Catty-fart’s dead, and there isn’t nobody to call, there isn’t no funeral to go to, there wasn’t no house to drop by, hell, I don’t even know where this last damn ranch is he bought—why he bought it outside of Texas I can not imagine—so there wasn’t anywhere for me to go to express my grief, you might say. I could kill that damn Slight Harlan and that old drunk Carl Everett for failin’ to notify me of the fact of my former darlin’s deceasement. There I am, livin’ in San Diego where I don’t yet know a living soul save my little old sweet lady neighbor and my boy, Daniel, who’s in the Navy, and here’s my little old sweet Catty-Balls dead in Kansas City, Missouri, and I don’t even have a grave to weep my lovin’ tears on, and so I come to the last place he was. I have come here.” She jabbed one long, hot-pink fingernail into the sofa. “I figure they have seen a few grievin’ people in their lives and they can just put up with little old weepin’ me. And they can tell me he ain’t a patient no more, and I’ll tell them he used to be, and if anybody’d told me he was here, if anybody’d had the sheer politeness to tell me my little old sweet booby was dyin’, why I would have come and done my cryin’ then, but nobody did, so here I am, and I’m going to stay right here in this little old waitin’ room and cry my eyes out until there ain’t no tears left in ’em and then I guess I’ll go home to San Diego, and you can quote me on that”

  “I’m not a reporter,” I said.

  “Why, honey, I didn’t think you was.” She leaned closer to peer at me. It struck me that Marvalene’s sunglasses might be prescription ones. “You’re awful damn pretty, and I’ll bet that’s natural blond hair you got, too. You sure you didn’t know Cat? He’d of been about ready for a clean-cut-looking girl like you, right after me and Freddie Sue, that’s who he married after me, which we used to be best friends, the lyin’ bitch, I still miss her, I really do. We were friends. Still can be, I guess, now that Cat’s gone. Oh, God, I’m gonna miss that scrawny little rich fucker. I already miss him like hell. You really did know him, didn’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, but I really didn’t.”

  “Aw, shit.” Marvalene put the glasses back on and slumped against the sofa. “I need a shoulder to cry on, and the man with the biggest damn shoulders in the whole Southwest is dead, damn him, and my best friend is not a friend to me no longer, at least not for a while probably yet, and you probably think I’m crazy—”

  “I don’t, Marvalene.”

  “You should of known him, Jenny, honey. Then you’d know I wasn’t crazy, except crazy about him.”

  “Then why’d you divorce him?”

  “Well.” She rubbed her dainty chin. The other conversations in the room had trickled down to nothing, although some of the other people were at least keeping up the pretense of staring at magazines or at a wall. “It was sort of a accident. I kind of didn’t mean to.”

  I wanted to be sympathetic, but I was starting to grin, I couldn’t help it.

  “Well,” she repeated, pronouncing it wahll. Then she sighed regretfully. “I just got pissed at him being gone so much, runnin’ those damn ranches, that I thought, well, what’s the use bein’ married to a man who’s gone all the time? I’ll swear Cat didn’t even drop by the house as often as the UPS man did with packages from Neiman-Marcus. Hell, I thought I might as well be married to the UPS man, if all I wanted was a drop-in husband. Although I suppose it woulda been more practical to marry Stanley Marcus. Well, anyways, so I was in a royal piss one day and I called him and said I’m divorcin’ you and taking all your money, and he laughed and said, you can take the money, Marva, honey, but you’ll have to pay some interest on it, and that really branded my ass with a hot iron, ’cause he thought I was only jokin’ him, so I did it. Me and my impulsive nature, as my mother delights in sayin’. While he was riding the damn range, I lassoed a lawyer and got me a quickie divorce.”

  She pronounced it dee-vorce.

  “When did he marry your best friend?”

  “A year later. I went to the wedding.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure, what the hell, I like a good party.”

  “Weren’t you mad at them?”

  “Mostly at myself. Wasn’t Freddie Sue’s fault I left him, that was my fault. And I couldn’t hardly blame her for fallin’ in love with him, so would any woman with a workin’ glandular system. Nah, I was mad at myself, ’cause it could have been me in bed with him that night, ’stead of her. Now that killed me.”

  “Marvalene,” I said in a whisper, “hasn’t anybody told you he was murdered?”

  “He was what?” She lifted her glasses to stare fully at me. “Well, now. Finally, somebody’s makin’ sense around here. You know any good place we could go to get us some supper, Jenny, honey? I’m sick to death of that cafeteria puke.”

  26

  Marvalene Podhurst attracted as much attention at the fern restaurant we found near the hospital as she had in the waiting room, the only difference being that the restaurant patrons ogled openly, being insensitive to her bereaved condition. I gathered, from their stares, that hers was not a fashion sense common to Kansas City. By Marvalene’s side, I was invisible. If I ever wanted to rob a bank, I would take her along; none of the witnesses would remember me; I probably wouldn’t even register on the security cameras.

  The hostess wisely placed us at an inconspicuous table where businessmen were less likely to trip or to drip salad dressing on their ties when they saw Marvalene. Before the waiter arrived
, I told her what happened to her former husband.

  I stopped talking when the waiter appeared.

  Marvalene filled the silence by saying, “I don’t understand what it is you do, Jenny, honey.”

  “Sometimes I don’t, either,” I confessed, and then we both ordered. Greek salads with pita bread for both of us. Two iced teas with lemon, no sugar. These common interests seemed to please us both. “I run a charitable trust to which Cat Benet, in his dubious wisdom, left the Crossbones Ranch. I am not a rancher. I live on the East Coast. I never met, nor did I ever previously hear of, Cat Benet. Why did he do this to me, Marvalene?”

  The waiter returned with our drinks.

  She unwrapped her straw and then sucked thoughtfully on one end of it.

  “You met him one time, right?”

  “No, honestly, I’d never even heard of him.”

  “No kidding? That’s amazing. I thought everybody’d heard of old Catty. Well, I don’t know what to tell you. He was no fool, except maybe about women. He was awful good with cattle and land; it’s awful hard for me to imagine him leavin’ any of it to people who don’t know nothing about either one of ’em. What’s Slight say about it?”

  “It’s one of the few subjects on which Slight has very little to say.”

  “I don’t suppose Carl says nothin’ but ‘Pass the beer’?”

  “Right.”

  “You got me, honey. Now you tell me, why didn’t they tell me he was sick? I mean, if they didn’t tell me, believe me, they didn’t tell anybody. Cat and me, we wrote to each other more or less regular, well, I guess I mean I wrote and he called—ain’t that usually the way with a man? That bastard never said anything about having cancer or liver disease or anything that was eatin’ away at him. I could just plain kill him for being so stupid brave about it. And if you’re saying that somebody killed him, I’ll skin and fillet the son of a bitch who did it.”

  “That’s more or less what Slight says.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet him and Carl are grievin’.”

  “I think so,” I said hesitantly.

  “Oh, they might not show it, but there’s too many good and hard years gone down between ’em for them not to miss him almost as powerful as I do.” Marvalene smiled, then chuckled. It was a rippling, infectious sound that probably gave every man within earshot an erection. A similar thought may have crossed her mind, because she said, “Good and hard. Hah. That was my sweet little old Catty, too.” I saw the man at the next table tighten his lips, making it difficult for him to insert his grilled cheese sandwich into his mouth. Marvalene was oblivious—or nearly so—to the flurry of reaction she caused merely by existing. Her smile faded and her lower lip trembled again. I reached over to pat her hand. “God, I hate it that his boots ain’t going to walk this green earth anymore. He was some powerful cowboy, Jenny. You woulda loved him.” The lips turned up into a smile again. She winked at me and squeezed my hand. “I have a definite feeling you woulda definitely loved him.”

  She laughed and released my hand.

  I laughed, too, nearly convinced she was right.

  “So, Marvalene”—I spread my napkin on my lap—“did somebody hate him enough to do it?”

  The waiter, who had been staring at her as he approached our table with the food, suddenly shifted his glance to me. He set our food down quickly and left without asking if we needed anything else.

  Marvalene picked up her fork and tucked in.

  “I loved him. Freddie Sue probably loved him. Slight loved him. Old drunk Carl loved him, I suppose. His first wife’s dead, been gone a long time, so it doesn’t matter how she felt about him. I didn’t know the other one. Not to mention all the girlfriends in between.”

  “What about his children? Is your son Cat’s boy?”

  “Nope.” She stabbed a black olive. “Cat, he was one of those men had himself convinced his kids were better off without him. You know the type. They make fine lovers, but you’d best not marry ’em, I guess, and you wouldn’t want ’em as dads. He gave ‘em money, I never knew how much, and he had me send them birthday cards, so I expect he had the other wives doing the same job, but I don’t know that he ever dropped in on them after he left their mothers. Or got kicked out, which is more likely. So I don’t know how any of his kids could love him, not knowing him very well, but I could sure understand it if they hated him. My boy hates his daddy for desertin’ him, no matter how many excuses I try to make for the lousy son of a bitch, which is really not fair to his mother, her bein’ a nice lady, and all.”

  “Who? Who’s a nice lady?”

  “Oh, my first mother-in-law. Sorry, I know I don’t always make sense all the time. Anyway, so his kids might hate him. Cat wouldn’t have understood that, but then that’s also the kind of man he was. Selfish, when it suited him, which I have to admit to you that it suited him quite a bit of the time, which is a good part of the reason why I divorced him and why once I quit cryin’ over the good and rowdy times we had together, why I’m still gonna be glad I did. Divorce him.”

  I swallowed a forkful of lettuce and feta cheese.

  “You ever know him to do anything dishonest, Marvalene?”

  “Like what?”

  I laughed a little. “You mean he did?”

  “The man never paid a parking ticket, I suppose that’s dishonest, and I ’spect he slid out from under every speeding ticket he ever got. But I happen to know he settled fairly with all of his wives and he paid his child support, too.”

  “How long are you going to hang around here?”

  She shrugged and started to answer me. But then she suddenly put down her fork and grabbed for her sunglasses and put them on. She sniffed loudly and put up one of her hands, palm out, toward me. I knew what she was saying: Upset. Crying. Can’t talk now.

  I let her be. We finished our salads in the loud silence that the consumption of raw vegetables always produces. Her salad was salted more than mine, from the big tears that plopped onto it. She pulled herself together well enough to eat banana cream pie for dessert.

  “I always eat when I’m sad,” she told me.

  “Would you like to talk to Cat’s lawyer?” I asked her.

  After a moment’s thought, she said she certainly would. I smiled contentedly to myself as I handed her the business card that Dwight Brady had given me. The idea of putting him and Marvalene Podhurst together in the same room vastly improved my day.

  After supper, we walked to a bank of pay phones in the foyer. I used one to call a taxi. She used one to dial Brady’s home phone number.

  “I’ll get this lawyer fella to put me on a plane or put me up for the night after I get through with him.” Her eyes were covered by the dark sunglasses, but her lips curved up. “If you’re ever out San Diego way, you give me a call, you hear me?”

  “Thanks.”

  She nodded just as she said into the receiver, “Dwight Brady? Dwight, honey, this here’s Marvalene Podhurst…”

  My taxi returned me to the airport, where I took the red-eye flight to Chicago. It took all of the courage I had to get onto a second airplane that night, and I clutched the armrests for a good half of the trip.

  To distract myself from thinking either of crashing or of Slight, I read bits and pieces of the family history that Margaret Stewart had handed to me on my way out of their house. The Barons of Branchwater, by Dr. F. S. Gomez, Ph.D., traced the Benet family from the early 1700s in France. I skimmed, looking for interesting black sheep, but all I found were pure women and noble cowboys. I discovered no clues at all as to what killed the man who symbolized the end of a dynasty spanning three centuries.

  27

  I slept late in a hotel room near O’Hare International Airport. When I finally pried my eyes apart, it was to look out on a perfect autumn day with a sun like a medallion polished to a blinding sparkle and framed in blue velvet. Guessing the temperature to be in the crisp fifties, I dressed in my light wool business suit and my water-stained red leather h
eels. After breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, I rented a compact car.

  Then I drove to Winnetka to meet the Railings: Anna, the second wife, and Mark and Suanna, her children.

  I’d been to Chicago previously on business, but never to the northern suburbs along Lake Michigan. They were beautiful, once you got off the toll roads. I felt more comfortable here than I had in Kansas City, possibly because the architecture looked more like home, or at least like a midwestern version of New England.

  In downtown Winnetka, I parked on a street called Green Bay where there was a railroad track to my left and a store named Scotland Yard Books, Ltd. to my right. At that moment, I wouldn’t have minded consulting a real CID man—or woman—from Scotland Yard. As it was, I had to manage with my wits and a map of Winnetka.

  They led me to a three-story brick house that could surely have brought a half-million dollars in mint condition. This mint had been chewed a bit. The decay of this house was a blight on the otherwise immaculate neighborhood.

  I parked under a bare pin oak tree in front of the house and puzzled over the decay.