Rita looked like she was on the verge of breaking into laughter. “Is that who she was babbling on about?” she asked, pointing to Peggy. She threw her hands in the air, seeming exasperated. “Oh my God, I can’t believe this.”
The conversation was becoming more confusing than a Fellini film. Guy read the blank look on my face. “I think I’m beginning to understand what is happening here,” he said. “Let me explain.” He wiggled a bit where he sat. “When we were...approached by this Rita woman initially, Peggy began to spill the beans, so to speak. In essence, she said that we knew the woman was keeping a man in the house, that he was Clarence’s father, and that our friend Barbara and her husband were at Rick’s bar at that very minute, to get some answers.”
Rita started pacing and Rick just rubbed that beard some more. “Holy crap,” he said finally.
Guy continued. “It would seem,” he looked at Rita. “Correct me if I’m wrong. It would seem that our kidnapping is the direct result of a misunderstanding that we knew you had killed someone. Is it possible that you not only murdered a man, but that his body is still in your house?”
Boy, crime reporting pays off. Guy really could put things together.
“She killed him,” Rick said. “I didn’t have anything to do with it!”
“It was an accident!” shouted Rita.
I needed to confirm my own theory while we were at it. “It’s Orson Sparrow, isn’t it? You killed Orson Sparrow!”
Lennie-Hagrid began chuckling on his stool and I began to wonder if I’d misjudged his kind nature.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“You think they kilt Orson Sparrow, that’s what’s so funny,” he chuckled some more.
“I doubt Orson Sparrow thinks it’s funny,” I countered.
He just couldn’t contain his chuckle. “They kilt someone alright, that’s true enough, but it weren’t no Orson Sparrow ‘cuz Orson’s right here in this room.”
Of the five men in the room, I was sure three of them weren’t Orson Sparrow. I looked at Rick Ash. Certainly, I’d had my run-ins with impersonators, but somehow I just didn’t think he was going to tear off a mask and say, “Hey, there, I’m a grape farmer.” That left one person. Lennie-Hagrid, the gentle giant. “You?” I asked him.
“That’s right, yoo silly goof, me!” the big man bellowed, poking himself with a monstrous thumb. “I’m Orson Sparrow and I ain’t dead.”
Chapter Fifteen
And the plot thickened.
So, if Orson Sparrow wasn’t “kilt,” then whose prącia did I find in the woods behind my house? It was all getting to be too much with my rib cage aching and my head throbbing. On top of that, nausea was creeping up on me just a little too quickly for comfort. And we were no closer to knowing what had happened to Colt.
“I don’t feel so good,” I moaned, and leaned sideways until my head was resting on Peggy’s shoulder. Poor Peggy had been gagged through all of this and tried desperately to communicate, but had finally given up. Now she hummed “Mmm mmm,” which I decided meant, “Poor Barb.”
Rita stomped out of the room and returned several seconds later with a huge wad of plastic grocery bags. She ripped the gun from her husband’s hands and shoved the bags at him. “Tie him up,” she said, pointing the gun in Howard’s direction.
“With these?” he whined. “How am I going to do that?”
“Are you completely useless?”
Rick did as ordered and kneeled beside Howard, starting in on his wrists. Howard winced a few times.
“Maybe we could git the lady some soup or sumthin’ if she ain’t feelin’ right,” offered Orson.
Rita pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers as if trying to relieve the pressure of a headache. “Orson. Go to the kitchen. We’ll be there in a minute.”
Meanwhile, Rick continued to tug and twist and tie until he felt satisfied that he’d eliminated any chance of Howard either hitting him or running away.
“I think it’s cutting off my circulation,” said Howard.
“Good,” interrupted Rita before Rick could do anything about it. “That means you won’t be going anywhere.” She motioned to Rick. “Come on. We need to make some decisions.”
We were left alone, although since there were five of us, that hardly felt alone. At least we were free to compare notes.
“Anyone have a cell phone?” Howard whispered.
“Miss Happy Housewife took ours,” moaned Guy.
“Mine is in my purse. Which is in the back of her car. They’re not entirely organized, but they’re not the stupidest criminals in the world either.”
“What do you think they’re doing?” whispered Clarence. “Making a bomb?”
We all shot him a bewildered glare.
“Any ideas on how to get us out of here?” I asked Howard.
He pivoted his head, surveying the room. “Not yet. I’m working on it.” He began pulling at his plastic bag binding with his teeth. That seemed like a smart idea, so I started to do the same with my ribbons, but Howard stopped me.
“No,” he whispered. You keep talking. Act natural or they’ll come back in.”
I wasn’t sure how natural I could act under the current circumstances, but talking I could do. I proceeded with my original plan: piece together the sequence of our kidnapping. Now we knew why: Peggy talked too much. But how?
“Guy,” I said, “what happened?”
“Could you elaborate?”
“Uh, okay, so we were talking on the phone then Clarence said, ‘That can’t be good’...”
He shook his head, cutting me off. “No, he said ‘That’s not good.’ Not ‘That can’t be good,’ because ‘That’s not good’ means it’s bad, which it was, and ‘That can’t be good’ means there’s the possibility it might or might not be bad. There was no might about it. It was bad. Not good.”
Clarence bobbed his head in agreement. “He’s right.”
I bit back the desire to snarl at him, mostly because the nausea was getting worse and any exertion might put my gastric juices over the edge. “Fine. What wasn’t good?”
He tipped his head backward and looked to the ceiling in a pensive manner. “We were parked outside of Rick and Rita Ashes’s house. It was dark. Pitch black. How you suburbanites manage, I’ll never understand. So I was leaning on Clarence’s car talking to you about how I’d deciphered Colt’s texts, Peggy was standing next to me and Clarence was tip-toeing across their yard. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, that behemoth of a man—Orson, did he say?—appears and lifts Clarence up with his pinky finger.”
Clarence snort-laughed. “Huh, yeah, felt that easy.” More snorting.
“That would have been, I’m pretty sure, when he said, ‘That’s not good.’” He leaned to see Peggy. “Would you say?” he asked her.
She nodded. “Mmm mmm.”
“In retrospect,” he continued, “I shouldn’t have disconnected the call, because out of the blue, Rita the man slayer was beside us with a knife shoved into Peggy’s ribs.” He shook his head as if that might release more information. “She said something to the effect of, ‘Follow me and no one gets hurt’. Or maybe it was ‘Move and I won’t have the Hulk squeeze your friend like a lemon.’ Yes, that was it. The Hulk and lemons reference. I remember now.”
Peggy nodded some more. “Mmm mmm mm.”
“Then Peggy started in on her rambling, which, as we’ve deduced, resulted in our capture.”
“But how did you get here? You couldn’t have been in the trunk of her car when she ran me down.”
“Nah,” said Clarence. “Orson has this boss truck. A real antique. Chevy I think. Ford? Don’t know my trucks except this one was old.”
Guy added, “They tied us up with duct tape, and the tape roll
started running low, but Peggy wouldn’t stop talking, so they used what little they had left on her mouth. The ride was miserably bumpy.” He rubbed his bruised cheek with his bound hands and I understood, then, how he’d acquired the black and blue mark.
“Did you scream on the drive here? For help?”
Clarence shrugged. “We tried at first, but,” he stopped to scratch his nose with his shoulder. “Why do they always itch when you can’t scratch? It wasn’t working. The screaming I mean.”
“We gave up,” agreed Guy.
I snuck a glance at Howard. “How’s it going? Any luck?”
He shook his head and stopped chewing for a minute. “How are you feeling?”
I shifted my weight on the floor, going for a more comfortable position, but this only ignited a fiery pain in my ribcage which caused my head to throb harder. But I pasted on a brave face to save Howard the worry. “Fine.”
He gave me the same look of doubt I give Callie when she says she doesn’t have any homework.
“Really,” I said with more conviction. “Not so bad. A teensy bit nauseous, that’s it.”
“Are you feeling sleepy?”
“A little. What time is it?”
“Don’t fall asleep, whatever you do.”
Clarence held his bound wrists up for Guy to see his watch. “Two a.m. Well, One forty-nine. Almost two.”
“You might have a concussion,” Howard said. “Stay awake.”
“Honey, I love you and thank you for the advice, but concussion or not, I just don’t think I’m going to have trouble staying awake tonight. Not with The Butcher and his two sidekicks, Beauty and the Beast, out there planning our demise. That kind of thing tends to keep me on my toes.” I rested my voice for a minute. Talking was more exerting that one would think. “What about you? How did you get here?”
“Easy. Ash had a gun. I have a healthy respect for guns these days. He forced me into his truck and had me drive here.”
“I won’t say ‘I told you so.’” I said.
“That’s kind of you,” he said with a smile.
The next thing I knew Orson was shuffling back in followed by Rick and Rita. Rick rubbed his beard, Rita played with her hair, and Orson hunched, once again, on the unstable stool.
Rita finally stopped twirling and took a stronger stance with her hands on her hips. “Here’s the deal. We’re not killers.” She threw a leer in Rick’s direction. “True enough, there is a dead man in our house, but it was self-defense, I swear.” She let out a frustrated sigh and looked to the ceiling. “Do I have to tell them everything?”
“The whole story, as true as it is,” drawled Orson.
With another sigh, she continued. “We found this gold-”
“Where’d yoo find that gold? Tell ‘em that, Rita.”
“On Orson’s land. We dug it up on land that we rented,” she emphasized the word rented and shot Orson a frown. “On land we rented from Orson to grow some very rare and hopefully profitable grapes. The grapes didn’t go as expected, but just before the harvest...you get the picture.”
“Tell ‘em what it is,” urged Orson.
She shook her head. “What’s it called again, Rick?”
“Munson’s Treasure,” answered her husband. “Internet articles says it’s probably a myth, but it’s not looking that way, since it’s in the back of my truck right now. Some rich guy by the name of Munson-”
“George William Munson,” corrected Orson.
“Whatever,” sighed Rick, “George William Munson left to travel North during the Civil War. He left his gold with a farmer.”
“He left the gold with Jacob Thaddeus Sparrow, my great, great, great, great grand daddy.”
“Sparrow supposedly buried the treasure, Munson never came back for it and when Sparrow went to dig it up years later, it was gone. Or he’d forgotten where he buried it.”
“Rick and Rita thought they was goin’ to cheat me outta what was rightfully mine, but we come to an understandin’ about it, ain’t we?”
Howard, for obvious reasons, looked suspicious. “Why are you telling us all of this?”
Rita sighed. She seemed to be tiring of the confession game. “Did you not just hear me? There’s a dead man in our basement. Supposedly an expert on historical treasures. Some idiot Rick called, even though I was doing just fine finding the right people, myself.”
“Thugs! Your idea of ‘the right people’ are a pack of thugs.” Rick countered. “Koreans, for crying out loud. What do they know about American historical treasures?”
“We care about the money you idiot, not who gives it to us. The bill collectors do not discriminate. And at least I know Kong. You found your guy on the Internet for crying out loud!” Her face was reddening the way mine does when I ask Howard to help around the house and his big contribution is that he washes his own underwear and then wonders why I’m not more grateful.
“Anyway,” Rita continued, “this sleaze bucket ‘expert’ Rick called, showed up at our house two nights ago while Rick was at the bar, and the guy pulled a gun on me. He was going to take the treasure for himself. I wasn’t about to let any two-bit, hoze-bag get between me and my money...”
“Whose money?” piped up Orson.
“Our money,” she corrected herself. “So I kicked him in the balls. He fell backwards and hit his head on an antique claw foot tub that’s been there waiting for a remodel.”
“He died?” See, I had to ask the question, because she didn’t actually say the fall killed him. I like to get my facts straight.
Rita smirked. “You’re a smart one, aren’t you?”
“So, I don’t suppose you had Rick butcher him up and started spreading his body parts out in the woods, did you?”
Both Rita and Rick had matching confused looks on their faces. “Butcher him up?” asked Rita. “The guy’s still in our basement, in one piece.”
Rick’s face did a tilt on that remark. “Well...’in one piece’ isn’t exactly how I’d put it.”
Orson decided to chime in and help us all understand. “He’s in the tub soakin’ reel good in a warm bath o’ Drano,” he said.
You could’ve heard a pin drop.
So, to recap: we had no idea where Colt was, the suburban swingers were only diffident disco-dancers, the prącia in the woods didn’t belong to Orson Sparrow, and Rick and Rita Ash just wanted to liquefy an Internet shyster and liquidate some gold.
I tried to process the information and could only come up with one logical conclusion. “Howard,” I said, “we are the worst investigators ever.”
“To be fair,” he said, “I’m used to having more technology and reliable data at my disposal.”
Yet, the question remained, if we were barking up the wrong tree, why were we now caged like animals?
Guy was probably wondering the same thing. “I suppose dissolving a dead man is one way of going about it,” he said. “Yet, I still would have called the police. Because, of course, now you’re screwed.”
“I know, right?” Rita agreed. “We just keep getting in deeper and deeper. I mean, I couldn’t call the police – not after my run-in with the Senator. My credibility was already shot, even though I had an invitation. I had one! The press would slaughter me on this one. A dead guy? Then you bozos show up snooping around. What are we going to do? Kill you all?”
“For the record,” interjected Rick. “I voted to keep you alive. But she’s the one going to jail, not me.”
“I am not going to jail!” she shouted.
“So,” I gulped. “You just fed us that whole long sob story about how you’re not killers, but now, if I’m reading this right, you’ve decided you’re going to slaughter us anyway?”
She looked apologetic. “Listen, it’s not the ideal scen
e.”
My stomach churned like a washing machine set on heavy duty. I sat up and clutched my tummy as best I could with my bound hands. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“She does look a little green,” agreed Rick.
“I don’t care what y’all say,” huffed Orson, “I’m helpin’ this little lady.” He rose, pulled a pair of scissors out of his back pocket and lumbered my way.
The scissors scared me. Exactly what kind of help did he have in mind? He knelt down and clipped the ribbon around my ankles, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Ain’t nuthin’ more humiliatin’ than to yodel your groceries in front o’ all the world.” Standing above me, he held out a hand. Pleased that his immediate plans didn’t seem to involve cutting me to shreds, I reached and he pulled me up gently. Holding down Mama Marr’s goulash wasn’t easy, but I managed.
“Don’t take too long,” Rita ordered.
He threw her a disgusted look and led me through the rear door outside, where breathing in the cold night air actually calmed my tummy almost immediately.
Orson motioned to a large plastic bucket with a lid. “Sit down,” he whispered. “And lean over if you feel the need.”
Leaning sounded like a good idea, so I followed his advice and also took deep cleansing breaths while discreetly patting my jacket pocket to feel for the mace. My heart sank when my hand didn’t detect the small spray can. It must have fallen out during my tumble with Rita’s car. Not that I had any idea of what I might have done with the weapon, but it would have been comforting to know I had options.
Orson rubbed my back and as he continued. “Don’t you worry your little head, Mrs. Marr. We’re all in one big heap of a mess here, but I think I got us a plan.”
“You know who I am?”
“Sure, you’re the movie lady. My mama loved the movies too. Why you think she named me Orson?”
Saturday Night Cleaver (A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery #4) Page 13
