False Nails and Tall Tales (The Teasen and Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 5)

by Constance Barker

  "Back then it was usually boys driving us out there."

  She grinned. "True. So it isn’t exactly reliving old times, still…"

  "How is the road?"

  She laughed. "Road is kind of an exaggeration. Even though Joe’s place isn’t that deep in the swamp I borrowed Rudy’s four wheeler. No way am I taking my car down that road."

  Under the circumstances the idea of the outing seemed like a good idea. It would be fun to go into the woodwork and meet one of it’s legendary denizens. "I’m game. So these new flavor ideas come from Joe?"

  "He and Rudy developed together, but I usually assume that anything that doesn’t taste like cheap wine was Joe’s work. He’s a creative guy. Poor and reclusive, but creative."

  "Since he is so good at this liquor making, why hasn’t he applied to have his own shine authorized as artisanal liquor?"

  Nellie grinned. "There are people with a talent for doing things and then there are those with an aptitude for making money at doing things— you know that. It’s a rare bird who's got both qualities and Joe is a good guy but not a rare bird. He’s great at developing recipes, finding innovative things to do with the processing, but the guy is a klutz. He can make anything in small quantities, but he’s helpless and hopeless when it comes to any kind of production scale operation. He breaks things. Trying to run a distillery full time is not his cup of single malt."

  "He could hire people to do that part."

  "Maybe, but managing people is another skill of its own. Look how hard it is for you and Pete to find someone to fill in for Betina, and that’s a straightforward job in town. Joe would have to convince people to work in the swamp. Besides, he isn’t much good around people, other than Rudy and Leander. Most people confuse him."

  "Leander? He knows Old Joe?"

  Nellie laughed. "You didn’t know? He’s known Joe his entire life. His folks were sharecroppers out in that same neck of the woods. Joe was practically their next-door neighbor, given that the next door was through a few miles of swamp. He and Leander share a passion for guitar playing and I think Joe was Leander’s first teacher. Rudy says Leander still comes out to jam with Joe every now and again."

  "It’s amazing the things you don’t know about people right around you. We all have secrets even if we aren’t trying to keep things hidden."

  "That’s one way of looking at it," Nellie said. "Or maybe it's just that there are dimensions to people we know that, for whatever reason, we haven’t uncovered. You see one aspect of Rudy, I see more, but neither of us knows what’s going on in his head. I mean, I love him to death and sometimes he scares me because he is a danger to everyone around him, and then other times he is the very soul of common sense."

  "Really?"

  "The fact that you, who have known Rudy as long as I have, are surprised kinda proves my point. You’ve known Rudy all that time, but only as my boyfriend and then husband. I doubt you two have every had a lengthy conversation about anything."

  "You have a point."

  "Sure I do."

  "Of course that’s partly because he flees whenever it's just the two of us in a room."

  "You intimidate him, but that’s not the issue."

  "I intimidate the ex football player and moonshiner?"

  "Yep."

  "Now that’s a new dimension to me. Savannah Jeffries, the intimidator."

  "Enjoy it. More dimensions are freeing."

  Maybe it was just that I’d sampled more than my share of the new flavors of Bayou Shine, but that made sense. "Then let’s do a swamp run."

  So, after closing, I left Nellie to clean up the salon while I walked Finnegan home. By the time I’d fed him and put him in the back yard, Nellie was parked out front. I changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and went to lock the doors. Finn stood at the back door watching and give me a disapproving look. Going somewhere without the dog was always frowned on.

  "You have a doggie door and come in when you want," I reminded him. "But stay off the couch." He gave me that fake ‘I don’t understand human speech’ look and trotted off to the big tree. The odds were I’d come home to find him on the couch. I could hardly blame him for thinking that my absence granted him certain unusual privileges. He always jumped down when the door opened and I always pretended I didn’t know he’d been on the couch despite the obvious fact that the warm cushions were coated with dog hair.

  Outside the house Nellie honked her horn, or rather the huge air horn on Rudy’s four wheeler. It was time to go into the swamp.

  # # #

  It wasn’t a long drive out to Old Joe’s cabin in terms of distance, but it still took a little while to get out there. The road was windy and twisty and much of it didn’t amount to much more than a track through scrub palmetto and sand—a relatively flat path the size of a truck that ran into the distance. Other paths that looked every bit as much like a road as the one we followed went off in other directions… undoubtedly to other cabins and, likely, stills.

  This was definitely the kind of territory where it would be easy to get lost, very lost, if you didn’t have local knowledge. Fortunately, Nellie knew the area well. That meant I could sit back, stare out at the swamp and scrub and let my brain churn through a few of the troubling things it needed to churn through. Not that I’d make any decisions right now, but sometimes letting thoughts just tumble gives you a new perspective.

  As we bounced along the track Nellie and I chatted a bit about this and that and I half paid attention. She brought me up to date about what Norris and Dale, her younger boys, were up to—what she thought they were up to, at least. The truth was that I knew things she didn’t about their exploits. Sarah saw them in town and often talked to them on the phone and she regaled me with tales that, luckily their mom didn’t know about yet. The offenses were relatively minor, the kind of thing that kids get up to when they have too much time on their hands. It was interesting to know more than Nellie about her kids and I had to respect the confidence Sarah demanded before telling me.

  Overall the drive was a pleasant change from the day to day. Despite spending hours together at the salon, sometimes Nellie and I had to make the effort to really chat the way old friends need to, and catch up. As we drove the fog from the moonshine slowly cleared from my head. That wasn’t enough of a boost to give me any insights or revelations about my concerns, but I didn’t expect any.

  "Here we are," Nellie said.

  I looked around. It took a minute to spot the here we had arrived at. Then I saw it. Tucked back in a grove of trees, through a shroud of Spanish moss sat a cabin—a wooden building with its walls bleached from the weather perched on the side of a hill. It was slightly lopsided and looked like something out of the Grimm’s brothers stories.

  Nellie grinned at me. "Joe calls it his palace akimbo," she told me.

  "A literary man our Old Joe?"

  "More than you might expect from an old bootlegger who hides out here. Much more."

  The front porch of the cabin was slightly above us, so a person could sit in the rocker and look out over the road and see anyone approaching. I pointed at a figure on the porch. He was pacing back and forth. "I don’t know Joe well, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t him or Rudy."

  "Bogdan," Nellie said. "He’s the one with the bad limp."

  I remembered him now. Bogdan Ratkovich was Danilo’s older brother. "Right. He’s the one Rudy shot in the knee."

  "It was an accident," Nellie said.

  "It always is with Rudy."

  "Bogdan shouldn’t have snuck up on Rudy while he was fishing."

  "I suppose not, although how many guys go fishing with a gun?" Even for Rudy that seemed strange.

  "He wasn’t fishing with a gun. That would be stupid. He was using dynamite."

  "And that’s illegal."

  "True. And when he came sneaking up, Rudy thought Bogdan was a Fed. He’d left his shotgun leaning against a tree."

  "So he shot him?"

  "Rudy?"

/>   "Sorry." Rudy wasn’t that kind.

  "Thing was, when he heard Bogdan coming he grabbed it so he could run away. He didn’t mind abandoning the other stuff, but the shotgun was a gift from me."

  "But…" There was always a ‘but’ with Rudy.

  "He tripped over a log. The gun went off and Bogdan caught the blast in the knee."

  "Ouch."

  "Yeah. Recovery was slow, but he gets around pretty good now though."

  "So he hates Rudy?"

  "No. Actually, he decided the whole episode was pretty funny."

  "He did?"

  "I have no idea where it becomes a joke, but the entire Ratkovich family has a strange sense of humor. Rudy gets along great with them as far as I can tell."

  She drove up as far as close to the cabin as she could take the four wheeler, then we got out and walked up to the porch where we found Bogdan staring at us.

  "You aren’t the police."

  "Not so you’d notice," Nellie assured him.

  He seemed to be expecting them, so I was concerned. "Are we supposed to be the police? We just came to see Old Joe. Is he here?"

  "I called the police."

  "What for?" Nellie asked.

  "Joe," he said nodding toward the front door. "He’s dead." We stared in stunned silence, so he nodded toward the door. "In there."

  A chill ran through me. Nellie started for the door but Bogdan stepped in front of her, blocking the door. "The police said to keep everyone out until they arrive."

  "But he might still be alive," Nellie said.

  Clearly Bogdan thought he was doing the right thing, but I wondered who the police thought would be out here, who they expected him to keep out. Our presence was an unusual occurrence.

  "Nadine Hines," Nellie said.

  She was right. When Bogdan called the police he would’ve talked to Nadine Hines. She loved to have an opportunity to say things like that, give official-sounding instructions. She didn’t get nearly enough chances to say authoritative things.

  "Yep," he said.

  "You have to let us in," I said. "If he’s still alive…"

  Bogdan shook his head sadly. "Nope. I checked and the man’s dead as dead can be." He gave us an odd look. "I woulda helped him if he were alive."

  "Get out of my way or I will break your good knee," Nellie said. Bogdan stared, blinked, then moved out of the doorway. We went in. Joe’s body lay on the floor, his eyes bulging. We knelt down and I put my fingers to his neck to check for a pulse. His skin was cold.

  Nellie looked at me and I shook my head. Without a word, without touching anything, we went back onto the porch where Nellie sank down on the rocker. "Poor Joe," she said.

  "How?" I asked.

  The man shrugged. "I found him hanging." He saw my look. "I cut him down in case he was still alive, and tried to help him get breathing, but he was getting cold fast."

  "Do you know what happened?"

  Bogdan shook his head slowly and sadly. "Ms Phlint, I just happened by."

  "This deep in the swamp you just wandered by?"

  "I was out this way, checking my rabbit snares. I was wanting to chat with Old Joe so I figured I’d come by and I found the front door wide open. I went in and found the old man hanging from the rafters," Bogdan said, tipping his head, miming a hung man. "That’s all I know except that it’s a real mess in there."

  "Someone hung Old Joe?" Nellie shouted.

  "He got hisself hung at any rate," Bogdan said.

  "How did you call the police?" I asked. "They don’t have phone lines out here."

  He took out his cell phone. "I got one of these last week. The new cell tower provides really good service out here."

  Once again, I’d forgotten. "Fine."

  "So Nadine told me that Deputy Hayes would be out here right away; I’m suppose to wait for him. Guess she can’t just tell him what I told her, which is everything I know. Not sure what that’s about."

  "Getting it official. They want to be sure they get your story right," I told him.

  He shrugged. "Whatever. I can’t tell them anything that’s gonna help Joe."

  "I don’t imagine anyone can."

  "Poor Joe," Nellie said.

  Bogdan smiled. "Hey, maybe, since you two are here… I could go on home. When the deputy arrives you can just tell him what happened for me. Why do we all need to stay?"

  "Are you in some kind of rush?"

  "I figure ma will be fixing dinner soon."

  "You are going to wait right here with us, Bogdan Ratkovich," Nellie said sternly. "It might take a while, but you are going to stay. The deputy will tell you when you can go home. Your momma will fix you something later if you tell her what happened and why you are late. She can call me if she thinks you’re fooling her. I’ll explain it wasn’t your fault."

  Bogdan looked at Nellie’s face, then sighed. "Yes Ma’am." He sat dejectedly on a bottom step and Nellie and I sat on the top one. I put my arm around her. Her body was rigid with tension.

  "We’ll all wait together," I said. I figured that if we stayed, Bogdan would, but if we left it was probably 50-50 that he’d head out. He didn’t like talking to the police even under the best of circumstances. So that's what we did, sitting silently on the steps of the cabin, with Joe’s body just inside the door and us hoping Digby Hayes could actually find his way out to the cabin. Digby was pretty much a city boy, so he might get lost. And it was getting dark fast.

  Even though I didn’t know Old Joe, coming across the scene of his death was a shock. My nerves were on edge. For Nellie it had to be so much worse. Still, I was surprised at how much his death had her rattled. She was far more upset than when we’d had a client die right in the salon, while she was getting her hair colored. But this time the death was personal in a different way. Joe was a long time family friend and no one had any of those to spare. And, as we sat there, I wondered what had happened to Rudy. She’d expected him to be there, but there was no sign of him.

  # # #

  It was pitch dark by the time Digby Hayes got there. "All these paths look alike," he told me. "Need some roads out here." After he got over his surprise to find Nellie and I there, he went inside and took a look around. "Hard to investigate a crime scene in the dark," he said. "But it’s way out here, so I’ll have to get her done."

  He got out a spiral notebook and had Bogdan sit in the patrol car so he could take his statement, writing everything the man said down. When he finished, Bogdan looked at Digby and scowled.

  "Okay if I go home now?"

  "Yeah, but don’t go anywhere."

  "Anywhere?" he asked, scratching his head. "Thought you said I could go home?"

  "I mean don’t leave town," Digby said.

  "I’m not in town," Bogdan pointed out. "I was in town about a week ago for an hour but I haven’t been in town since."

  "Don’t leave the area," Digby said, making it sound more like a question.

  "You mean don’t go taking off?" Bogdan asked.

  "Yeah. Be where I can find you if I have more questions."

  Bogdan held out a hand. "Gimme that notebook and I’ll give you my cell number. You need something, you can call."

  "Right," Digby said, and shortly that deed was done. "Hold on a sec," he told Bogdan. "Something I need your help with before you go."

  The man lurked on the porch reluctantly as Digby went into the cabin. When he came out, he waved a hand at Bogdan. "Get your butt over here. I need you to give me a hand putting him in the police car before you go," Digby said.

  "You aren’t leaving him for the coroner?" I asked.

  "The coroner can’t get his rig down this road. He called and told me I’d have to bring the body and meet them out at the highway." He smiled. "He said they’d have coffee in a thermos and some donuts."

  As we watched the two men perform that gruesome and awkward task Nellie nudged me. "Me, I would have wrapped the body in a sheet and dragged it, or carried it that way."

&nb
sp; Bogdan was twisting, trying to back out the door, but Joe’s arm kept catching on the doorsill. The Knockemstiff police department had never had a reason to invest in body bags and it was awful watching them struggle with the lifeless, but rapidly growing rigid body. "I would’ve told the coroner to borrow a four wheel vehicle and get down here before I’d have a suspect put his hands all over the corpse."

  "Oh right, we are all suspects, aren’t we?"

  "At least initially we have to be. There aren’t any other people to choose from."

  "But Digby has his own way. And donuts are involved."

  "And we are just women spectators."

  "Of course that’s a far more fun role than being the heroic police officer," Nellie said. You had to know Nellie well to realize that her sarcastic self was going to show through even when she was distressed. She could find the antics of Digby and Bogdan awkwardly trying to move the body humorous without finding the least thing funny about Joe’s death.

  As soon as Joe was in the back seat, Bogdan quietly disappeared into the swamp, probably wishing he’d just done that to begin with and left us to find the body.

  With Bogdan and the corpse taken care of, Digby took our statements. They were short and sweet. I played spokesperson. "When Nellie and I arrived, Bogdan was on the front porch. He told us Joe was dead, that he’d found him hanging and cut him down, but he was dead."

  Digby looked at Nellie and she nodded.

  "Did you go in the room?"

  "With a dead guy?" I asked, doing my best to sound horrified.

  "Okay," Digby said. It was that easy to get around telling the truth. Questions can be useful that way.

  We watched Digby open the trunk of the patrol car and get out an assortment of equipment including some very bright battery operated lights. He set them up in the cabin then started taking pictures of the crime scene. He was surprisingly professional at it, and Nellie pointed that out. "It’s almost like he knew what he was doing," she said.

  "I think he’s been watching a lot of television shows about crime forensic units," I said as we watched him, he marked various objects by writing numbers on a paper and putting them next to them. Then he laid a ruler he’d found next to them before photographing them.