Mother Knows Best (A Margie Peterson Mystery)

by Karen MacInerney

  “If you have to shoot,” she said, “try to get it in the trunk. I just spent three thousand dollars getting the exterior cleaned up.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  I nodded, hoping my hog-tying job had held, and she popped it open.

  Thankfully, the man was still passed out. Peaches handed Becky the keys to the storefront; as Becky unlocked the door, Peaches grabbed the janitor beneath the arms and I took hold of his legs. We’re getting the hang of moving bodies, I thought. Was that something you could put on a résumé?

  “They don’t have security cameras here, do they?” I asked, thinking of Wanda—and Detective Bunsen.

  “I disabled them,” Peaches said.

  “Good,” I said. I didn’t want to know how.

  We pushed through the doorway into the darkened waiting room of the Pretty Kitten. I turned right, heading toward Peachtree Investigations, but Peaches pulled to the left.

  “I thought you wanted to question him,” I said, trying to tighten my grip on his ankles.

  “I do,” she said, steering the body toward one of the waxing rooms. “Let’s get him up on the table in here, and then we can strap him down.”

  “Strap him down?” Becky asked.

  “I’ve got some tie-down straps in my desk drawer,” she said. “They come in handy for lots of things.”

  We slid him onto the table as Becky hurried to retrieve the tie-downs. “You got a gun?” Peaches asked me.

  “Two of them.”

  “Point one of them at him while I untie him,” she said.

  “Got it.” I fished the gun out of my pocket and aimed it somewhere toward him but away from where Peaches was inspecting my handiwork.

  “This looks pretty good,” she said, “but you didn’t use a square knot.”

  “How do you know about hog-tying?” I asked.

  “I did 4-H as a kid. Plus, Jess has some hogs; I gave him a hand with them a few months ago.”

  “How is Jess, by the way?”

  “Shut up and I’ll teach you how to do this,” she said. She untied the big knot I’d made in Becky’s wet jeans and showed me the proper way to do it. I had just practiced what Peaches had showed me when Becky came back in with an armful of blue straps.

  “Are these what you mean?” she asked.

  “Exactly,” Peaches said, sniffing her hands. “You might need to burn those jeans,” she told Becky as she untied the knot, leaving the custodian spread-eagled on the table.

  “And you might want to bleach your hands,” Becky said, her nose wrinkled.

  “Once we get him secured, I will,” Peaches said, reaching for a tie. “Man,” she said. “This guy’s thumbs are like cucumbers.” She glanced at his fly. “I wonder if the old saying is true.”

  “Peaches!” I said . . . and then something clicked. “Thumbs,” I said. “When we were at the Sweet Shop, Marty Krumbacher was threatening to set someone named Thumbs on someone else if they didn’t do what Marty wanted.”

  “You think this is him?” Peaches asked.

  “Have you seen his hands?” I said. “Still . . . why would he be working as a custodian?”

  “A custodian with two guns and a bunch of drug packets,” Peaches reminded me. “Who has a gang tattoo and showed up when there was a security breach. Ever thought maybe custodian wasn’t his only job?”

  Now that she mentioned it, it made sense. “Even so, it doesn’t mean there’s a connection between him and Krumbacher.”

  “The good news is, we can ask him all about it in a few minutes,” Peaches replied, cinching the guy’s hands together under the table. Within moments, she had the custodian completely incapacitated. Not for the first time, I reflected that I hadn’t seen a lot of Peaches’s investigative techniques in the official private-investigator handbook. I was a little worried about what she had in mind now that she had him laid out on a table. Could we be arrested for kidnapping? He had tried to go after Becky, but . . .

  Peaches turned to the sink and scrubbed her hands. As soon as she finished, I squirted a glob of soap into my palms and shoved them under the water, glancing over as my boss flipped the switch on what looked like a little Crock-Pot. An orange light glowed on it.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Wax,” she said. “It’s still pretty warm; it shouldn’t take long to get to temperature.”

  “Why do we need wax?” Becky said as she picked up her jeans with a wad of tissues and carried them to the trash can in the corner of the room. It was a very serene space, very spa-like, with relaxing bluish walls and a comforting minty scent that almost eclipsed the smell of Becky’s wet jeans.

  “We’re going to use it to convince our friend to tell us what he knows,” Peaches said, giving the wax an experimental stir with a small wooden paddle.

  “You’re going to wax him into talking?” I asked. The bad feeling I had grew abruptly worse. Interrogation with waxing definitely wasn’t in the handbook. Was involuntary hair removal a prosecutable offense?

  “That’s the plan,” Peaches said, giving the wax a final stir and turning to the custodian. She pulled up his faded red T-shirt to expose a hairy, muscular stomach. “This guy works out,” she said admiringly. “Look at those abs.”

  “He is pretty ripped,” Becky said, staring at the man’s stomach. “How do you think he does it? I do all the custodial work at my house, and my abs don’t look anything like that.”

  “You can ask him in a minute,” Peaches said. She eyed the wiry hair covering his six-pack abs. “At least we’ve got plenty of hair to work with. I’ll be right back; I just have to go get the smelling salts.”

  She sauntered out of the room, and Becky and I looked at each other. “For before she waxes him, or after?” Becky asked.

  “Let’s just hope she doesn’t decide to give him a Brazilian,” I said, and Becky winced. As the smell of melted wax filled the room, we both turned to look at the unconscious man strapped to the table.

  “Is it legal to tie someone down and wax him without his consent?” Becky asked.

  I was pretty sure it wasn’t, but I didn’t know what our other options were. “He attacked you,” I reminded her. “Plus, the guy kept a gun and drugs at my daughter’s school, in an unlocked closet.”

  “True,” she conceded.

  “And more importantly, if we don’t find out what happened to George Cavendish, one or both of us may be going to jail for a murder we didn’t commit.”

  She bit her lip. “When you look at it that way . . .”

  Peaches bustled into the room with a tiny blue jar. She looked at both of us. “Ready?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Before we had a chance to answer, Peaches had whipped the top off the jar and jammed it under Thumbs’s nose. He jerked awake and started swearing.

  “Good morning!” Peaches said in a cheery voice as his head rolled around on the spa pillow. He strained against his bonds, but Peaches evidently had the tying-up thing down pat.

  “Untie me, you fat bitch!” he commanded.

  “That wasn’t very chivalrous,” Peaches said, unperturbed, as she walked over to the wax warmer. His eyes followed her, then darted to me. For a moment, he was confused; then I saw the recognition click.

  “Hi,” I said, giving him a small wave.

  “Your kid goes to Holy Oaks,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Becky piped up. “Speaking of Holy Oaks, you need to step it up a bit. The sanitation in the boys’ room is disgusting!”

  “Becky,” I warned her. He’d accused us of breaking into Holy Oaks—and to be honest, why else would we be running through the woods behind the school after dark?—but that didn’t mean she needed to spell it out for him.

  Peaches pulled a wheeled stool out from under the counter and sat down on it, then rolled over next to him, kind of like a doctor about to examine a patient, if the patient were tied up and the doctor were dressed in a green spandex minidress. “So,”
she said. “If you’re a custodian, why were you racing back to the school when an alarm went off?”

  He shrugged as well as he could, considering his arms were trussed up like turkey legs. “I take my job seriously,” he said.

  “Evidently not,” Becky said. “Those toilets were disgusting.”

  He gave her a confused look. I kicked her to try to get her to shut up.

  Peaches stirred the wax. “Do you know Marty Krumbacher?” she asked him.

  “Never heard of him,” he said.

  “Is that why he’s a contact on your phone?” she asked. On the way back to the Pretty Kitten, she’d gone through his phone. Krumbacher was definitely a frequent caller.

  He snapped his mouth shut, looking nervous.

  Peaches pulled the paddle out of the little pot. It was covered with molten wax. “Does the name Thumbs mean anything to you?”

  His eyes widened. “No,” he said quickly, but his face told a different story.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Never heard of it.” His eyes followed the wax-laden paddle as it drifted closer to his stomach. “What are you doing?” His voice seemed a bit high.

  “Oh, just asking questions,” Peaches said. “Like, do you know anything about what happened to George Cavendish?”

  “The dude died.” He stared at the paddle, transfixed. “Get that thing away from me.”

  “I know he died,” she said. “I was hoping to find out a little more than what I can read in the Statesman.”

  “I don’t know anything about Cavendish,” he said, looking just like Elsie when I’d asked her if she was the one who ate the rest of the marshmallows.

  “Last chance,” she said, letting the paddle hover his navel for a moment. Becky and I watched, transfixed, as a glob of wax oozed off the end of the paddle. It looked a little like vanilla pudding.

  “We’ll start with the stomach, I think,” Peaches said, and scooped up a big wad of wax and slapped it down just under his belly button, spreading it around like frosting on a cake. “See any cloth strips?” she asked, looking at Becky and me.

  “Right here,” Becky said, grabbing one from the neat stack on the counter and handing it to her.

  “Perfect,” Peaches said, smoothing one out over the wax. “I’ve never done this before, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”

  I didn’t think it was possible for the guy on the table to look more nervous, but I was wrong.

  Peaches smoothed out the cloth and let the wax sit on his skin for a moment. Then she said, in her perkiest tone of voice, “I think it’s ready!”

  The custodian’s voice was husky. “If you tear that off of me, I swear I’ll—”

  “Here we go!” she sang out, grabbing one end of the cloth and giving it a tug.

  He yowled, and then spat out what I presumed were a few curse words in a language I didn’t understand.

  About halfway through, Peaches stopped. The cloth strip was covered with hair, and there was a bald, pinkish spot on the custodian’s flat stomach. “Anything pop into your head?” she asked.

  He shook his head. Beads of sweat had sprung up on his temples.

  “All righty, then,” she said, and ripped off the rest. He yelped. “It’s hard to believe people pay for this, isn’t it?” she said as she applied another glob of wax a little bit farther south. “Hand me a cloth, Becky?”

  “Here ya go,” Becky said, handing Peaches another strip of cloth.

  “Okay. So, you were working as Marty Krumbacher’s henchman. Right? Did he hire you to kill Cavendish?”

  The custodian shook his head like a wild animal. “You crazy, lady. Wait until I tell—” He seemed to realize he was about to share classified information, and stopped talking.

  “Tell who?”

  He swore. Peaches sighed. And then she pulled the second strip.

  By the time he started talking, Thumbs’s entire torso was as smooth as a baby’s bottom, I had a migraine from the screaming, and Becky was almost out of cloth strips.

  “Look,” Peaches told him. “I don’t really want to give you a Brazilian. You don’t really want me to give you a Brazilian. Just tell us what we need to know, and I’ll give you an ice pack and a handful of Motrin and we can all go home.”

  “Oh, God. No,” he begged.

  “Just tell us who you’re working for and what you know,” Peaches said, stirring what was left of the wax. “It’ll be easier than the Brazilian. That flesh down there is a little looser; I’ll bet it hurts like the dickens.”

  He was quiet for a moment—he looked like Nick when he was trying to hold it until he got to a bathroom—and then it all exploded out. “Krumbacher,” he said in a strained voice. “I work for him. I take care of problems.”

  “Terrific, sweetheart,” Peaches crooned. “Margie, can you get an ice pack out of the freezer?”

  As I hurried over to the dorm-size freezer in the corner of the room, she asked, “What do you know about Cavendish?”

  “Mr. Krumbacher wasn’t happy with him,” Thumbs said. “He was causing problems. That’s why I was working at Holy Oaks—to keep an eye on the guy, let him know Mr. Krumbacher was watching him.”

  “Were the problems big enough to kill him?”

  “No,” he said. “I warned him we had pictures he didn’t want in the paper. Mr. Krumbacher wanted me around as a reminder. Said the guy was going to pull money out of the business and go to the cops.”

  “About what?”

  “Afterburn,” he said.

  “The stuff you had in your closet,” I said, walking over to him with a blue gel ice pack I’d found on the bottom shelf of the freezer.

  He looked at me. “You were in the custodial closet?”

  “Yes. I hit you with your own gun,” I confessed, then asked, “What is Afterburn?”

  “It’s like marijuana,” he said. “But legal.”

  “And lethal,” I said. “I’ve seen a lot of articles about people dying from it.” Including the article in Cavendish’s pants, now that I thought of it.

  “They were coming out with a new formula as soon as they ran out of what they had.”

  “Where was the distribution point?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Thumbs said. “I just do what Mr. Krumbacher tells me. I swear,” he added, as Peaches gave the wax an exaggerated stir.

  “So you didn’t kill Cavendish,” Peaches said. “Do you know who did?”

  “Maybe it was the dude’s wife. He was into some weird shit. Women get crazy like that.”

  “Or maybe you did it.”

  He shook his head. “No. Mr. Krumbacher never asked me to kill nobody. I’ve roughed up a few people,” he admitted, “but I never offed anyone.”

  “But Holy Oaks was invested in the drug operation.”

  “Yeah.” He looked wildly at Peaches. “But that’s all he told me. I don’t know nothing about how the dude died. All I know is I was supposed to scare him.”

  “Scare him, or kill him?”

  “Scare him. Let him know Krumbacher was watching him. Jesus, lady. I told you everything I know. Will you let me go now? Please?”

  Peaches looked at the wax and at Thumbs’s flat, now-hairless stomach. “We probably should. I’ve never waxed anybody’s balls before. I’d hate to rip the skin.”

  We gave a collective shudder.

  “All right,” she told him. “Are you ready to do what we ask you to do?”

  “Yes.” His voice was hoarse. “Anything you say. Just get me out of here.”

  “My friend here is going to blindfold you,” Peaches said. “And then my other friend is going to point a loaded gun at your wiener while I untie you from the table. She’s at close range and a pretty good shot,” Peaches lied, “so if you like having a sex life, I’d be real careful. Are we clear?”

  He turned even paler and nodded.

  I pointed the gun in a southerly direction while Becky tied a waxing cloth over his eyes. I couldn’t poss
ibly shoot a man in the crotch, but Thumbs didn’t need to know that. I tensed as Peaches untied his hands and legs; fortunately, his limbs seemed to be asleep. Everything was going fine until Peaches tried to help him to his feet. That’s when he pretended to trip, making Peaches lurch forward. He sprang into action, ripping off his blindfold and lunging for her.

  “Margie!” Peaches called. I was still holding the gun, but I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger. Odds were good I’d hit Peaches if I tried to shoot Thumbs; they were right on top of each other. He was moving to get her into a headlock, but she kneed him in the groin, and he doubled over. As she started to stand up, his arm shot up and his fist sank deep in her stomach.

  “That’s for the wax, you bitch.”

  He reared back for another punch. Peaches took a step back, clearing some distance. I aimed at the floor near his right foot and pulled the trigger just as Peaches grabbed the wax warmer and brought it down on his head.

  The gun went off a split second after the wax warmer crashed down on his skull. For the second time that night, Thumbs collapsed, unconscious.

  “Thanks for not shooting me,” Peaches said, surveying both the unconscious custodian and the new divot in the hardwood floor. The walls and ceiling were covered with globs of goo; it looked like someone had tried to make a wax smoothie and forgotten to put the lid on the blender. “That makes things a little bit easier, although I don’t know how we’re going to explain the bullet hole to Wanda.” She looked up at me. “You might keep your kid home from school until they find a new janitor, though.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The house was dark by the time I pulled into the driveway. I checked the clock on the dashboard: it was past midnight. We’d left Thumbs on the doorstep of Holy Oaks, still unconscious, with his phone shoved into his back pocket. After dropping off Becky, who had scuttled in the back door of her house wearing Peaches’s peacock-feather yoga pants and hoping her husband was asleep, I had turned for home.

  My adrenaline was still running high, and I considered the bag on the front seat of the car. It still had the gun and the Afterburn packets in it. I grabbed it and stowed the bag on top of one of the garage shelves, tucking it in behind the inflatable Frosty the Snowman. It was still August, so I figured it would be safe for at least a couple of months—not that I planned on keeping it that long. If the custodian said anything to the police—an unlikely prospect, my instincts told me, but still worth thinking about—someone might search my house tomorrow. I’d have to figure out what to do with it—and fast.