Lalla Bains 02 - A Dead Red Heart

by Dahlke, RP

  We both knew that wasn't going to happen. Del might be annoying, but his editor was trying like the dickens to hang onto him for as long as possible.

  "What else can I do for you, Miss Bains?"

  "You can tell me where I can find him."

  "Haven't a clue. Comes and goes. In and out, all hours of the day and night, days at a time. Nothing to do for it. He shows up when he's got his story wrapped up. Anything else?"

  I said, no, thanks, and taking him up on his offer of a free copy of today's paper, saw myself out of his office.

  In my car I turned to the page for Police Beat. Last night a truck struck a homeless man jaywalking on H Street. The police hadn't released the man's identity, but if Brad had been right, that the killer was a cop, all I could do was pray that Byron was too embarrassed to let anything drop about finding Del and me in the alley next to Mr. Kim's on the same night a homeless man was run over by a truck. And, hopefully not in front of the one police officer who would also like to know who else might have been talking to Brad that night.

  Chapter sixteen:

  The next day's work allowed me the respite I so desperately needed to get my mind off Billy Wayne's murder.

  I was up in the air, idling along at a hundred and thirty miles an hour, hopper empty, job done, no traffic to dodge, the soporific warmth of the sun on my windshield, the vent blowing at the sweat trickling down into my flight suit, and a repetitive knocking sound that jumped me out of my reverie. Something in the pistons? No, just one cylinder, and it was intermittent. Hadn't I checked the engine out yesterday? Maybe not. Too busy with murder suspects lately to take care of the business that paid the bills. I swore at myself, added that I was an idiot, then eased the fuel mixture to run a little richer, and added another hundred feet between me and terra firma.

  Flying lower would save on fuel, but I'd rather avoid a forced landing and another busted- up airplane to repair. I held my breath for the last five miles until the dark hump of hanger, barn, and office came into view. I banked and kicked the ailerons, grateful that the big aircraft responds to such cavalier treatment, then let go of the breath I'd been holding as the wheels touched the tarmac under me.

  Pushing the flaps to stop the forward motion, I taxied to home plate. Pedro chocked my wheels, and Javier, his face wrinkled with worry under his darkly tanned face, offered me a hand off the wing. I was grateful that my ground crew had the good sense not to call me on the VHF. Some pilots want everyone's attention when the aircraft is coming in under duress. Not me. I'm irritable at the interruption, wanting it quiet so that I can listen to the engine and hopefully diagnose the problem and confirm that I will have air under me instead of go plowing into a field, or worse, into trees.

  The men backed out of my way, waiting, I suppose for me to bounce my helmet off the tarmac in a fit of pique. I ignored the questioning stares and waved them all back to work. Then I stood, hands on hips, sweat still trickling down the back of my flight suit. I gazed down the long fifteen-hundred feet of runway, to the south of us and on to the other side of the canal, to where there used to be a walnut orchard and where it was now a leveled field staked with little yellow flags. We'd protested the building site for the new elementary school, taking it to our lawyer, then to the county. The county commissioner of schools suggested that we should talk to the charter school since it wasn't a public school issue. Or we could reposition our airstrip east to west or west to east. Didn't matter to them. West to east is not the optimum flight pattern for takeoff and landing. It's north and south, or not at all.

  As for today's fiasco, if I hadn't been able to make it as far as I had, or if the problem had surfaced at takeoff, and if I'd had to ditch the plane… I shuddered at the picture.

  Mad-Dog jogged up to me. "You okay?"

  "Fine. I'm fine, thanks." It was a little shaky in the delivery but I wasn't about to let anyone see how frightened I'd been. I was a mechanic and I did my own engine maintenance. So, how could I let myself forget? Or was it something I couldn't have foreseen? I went in the office and rummaged through the desk looking for the maintenance records on my aircraft.

  When my dad sauntered in the door, the crew correctly decided they had better things to do and left. He sat down across from me. Everyone, hearing an airplane coming in underpowered, has one ear tuned for the miss of the engine. "What happened?"

  "I'm not sure." I continued to search through the paperwork, looking for the log. Not wanting to wait to hear the reprimand I knew would be coming, I got up to leave.

  "Wait," he said, catching me by the sleeve of my flight-suit. "It can wait a few minutes. I could use a cuppa joe, you too?"

  I collapsed back into my chair while he poured the coffee, adding creamer to his own, and handing me my cup, he sat down next to the desk.

  "You're safe, that's all that matters," he said, watching the cup as I tried to deliver it to my quivering lips.

  "I know," I said. "It's just, if that charter school they're laying ground for was already in business... and if I wasn't able to make it to the runway... I hate to think… "

  "Don't. It's not going to come to that."

  "What, no school? Did something happen to change their minds? Have they put birth control pills in the water or what?"

  "I don't know. But, it's not anything you need to be worried about right now."

  "And why is that?"

  "Well, for one thing, you're too young to be worried about something that far in the future."

  This was different. Where was the part where he kicked my butt for not making sure my TBO report was done?

  "Right. So besides sweating a forced landing, which I may or may not have survived, I could've plowed into a school yard full of kids. I don't even know what I want on my tombstone."

  "You're forty," he said, exasperation scouring his voice. "When you're sixty-eight you can get serious about your epitaph."

  At my indifferent shrug, he slammed his cup down on the desk. "Wanna trade places? I'll tell you what, you be sixty-eight and I'll be forty again. You can have the bad eyesight, the creaking joints, and I'll get another twenty-eight years to think about what I wanna be when I grow up."

  "Look who's talking. One minute you got a heart condition, can't be bothered with the business you built and slaved for, and now you're a born again ladies' man. And that's another thing—why now? Why not last year, or all the other years since mom died?"

  He tilted his head back and looked at the ceiling. "'First keep peace within yourself,' Thomas á Kempis.'"

  I rolled my eyes at yet another of his irrelevant quotes. That was the way it was with my dad, always would be. When forced to inspect his own motives, he retreated behind some archaic quotation totally off the subject.

  Seeing my eye-roll he put down his cup. "Last year the house almost went up in flames, then you and Caleb got together, and well, you started calling me Dad again instead of Noah, so I decided that I just might have something to live for—and…" his expression showed all of the bewilderment in his voice, "danged if I can figure how to fit another lifetime into what I got left."

  I grinned at him, shaking my head at the peculiar stage in which we'd both found ourselves: I'd found love where I least expected it and my dad, for once in his life, actually said what he felt.

  Then, perhaps uncomfortable with the unmapped territory of our relationship, he stood up. "Well, if you don't need anything else, I'll mosey on back to the house. I have some business to attend to in town. Oh, by the way, Caleb called, said he'd be at Roxanne's by noon, and for you to be there, noon sharp."

  Oh yeah, that, my other job, the one that prevented me from doing the pre-flight check on my aircraft. I found the maintenance records, then disgusted that I'd let my TBO lapse, I locked up the office and took the farm truck to Roxanne's.

  With the remains of our lunch piled up and waiting for a waitress, I sipped from a glass of Roxanne's sweet ice tea and listened while Caleb told me what was new in the case.


  "We've had some leads that take us for long rides in the country. Oh, and one anonymous caller reported that Delmar was abducted by aliens back in high school, but the copy they left in his place is actually a much better looking version."

  "Yeah, and the tinfoil headgear on Billy Wayne's mom is just a fashion statement. Any of those doomsayers happen to actually confess or tell you where Del has stashed his mom?"

  "Don't I wish."

  "Nothing gets this town going like a little murder. So, what do we have? Billy Wayne's mother thinks Del is hiding his mom, that is, Miss Cook, and nobody seems to know where either of them can be found."

  "Detective Rodney is still asking when you're going to return his calls."

  I shuddered at the mention of Rodney. "As annoying as Del is, I'd rather have his mom stay lost than have her tango with that creep." I blinked. "Del must have thought the same thing. Wish I could follow his example."

  Roxanne offered a refill on our ice tea. "Just made."

  Caleb and I mutely held out our glasses. Roxanne examined our glum expressions. "What're you two talking about?"

  We gave her twin blank stares.

  She did a sad shake of her head. "Okay then, do you think these Capris make me look fat?"

  Caleb glanced at the cow-patterned Capris stretched across the great expanse of Roxanne's very ample hips, pulled in the grin, and instead gazed deeply into his ice tea.

  She looked like a walking sofa, but she wasn't going to hear it from me. I asked, "How's Maya doing?"

  Roxanne sniffed. "Haven't heard from her in a week." She thought it my fault Maya was in New York instead of in our local college. I thought Maya should be here to advise her mother on the folly of wearing anything bovine patterned.

  I quickly changed the subject. "Roxanne, you're a poetry buff. What do you think about, 'The more there is, the less you see'? Does it mean anything to you?"

  "Is this a line from a poem? I'm more of a Gwendolyn Brooks and Maya Angelou fan myself," she said, putting the pitcher on the table and motioning for me to move over.

  The bench seats had been recently reupholstered in a cheerful floral pattern in anticipation that a new Motel 8 would be building in the empty lot next door. I had my fingers crossed on that, hoping it didn't go through as I wasn't ready to have my favorite café become another Denny's.

  "We're stumped," I said. "Or I should say I am." With a nod from Caleb, I recounted what I'd learned so far, that Del and Billy Wayne's mothers were sisters, making the two men first cousins, and that Del's mother was convinced that I should find who killed Billy Wayne, and that Billy Wayne's mother was afraid that Del was dangerous.

  Roxanne said, "Uh-huh. Didn't Billy Wayne's mom try to shoot you yesterday?"

  "And she apologized, too."

  "Makes them all sound like crackpots, don't it?"

  "Gee, Roxy, you with a doctorate in psychiatry and that's the best you can come up with?"

  Satisfied, she continued, "And here's another one for you; in my learned opinion, none of them are killers."

  Caleb and I looked at each other. Roxy pulled the glass out of my hand, took a sip and handed it back. "I do make the best sweet ice tea, don't I? Listen you two, Del's silly, his mom and her sister are frightened and grieving, but none of them should be on a suspect list. What would be the motive?"

  Caleb grunted. "If any of them has a motive, we'll find it."

  Roxanne said, "Don' go wastin' your time, cowboy. There're other families in this town who'll happily tear each other to pieces, but not these people." She leaned back in her seat, now confident that she had our attention. "The Cook sisters may seem a little odd to you two, being all normal that you are, but I can tell you that in what counts for family those two old girls are tight."

  Seeing that we needed a lesson in family psychology, she held up her fingers to count off the reasons. "Merriweather was in and out of rehab for years, but when she asked, Margery took her in, didn't she? Then there were the boys, Del and Billy Wayne. Del came home to see his mom through her last rehab. So, though Del appears to have cornered the market on professional nut case, the reality is that he cared enough to put his family first." She looked at me and then Caleb. "You don't get that Del Potts hid his mother so she won't get whacked?"

  I sighed. "You have a point, Roxanne."

  "Yeah, and it's no wonder Billy Wayne was a bit off. I mean, sniper duty—good God!"

  I frowned. "You think he was misdiagnosed?"

  She shrugged. "Not fair of me to quarterback at this late date. No doubt he had PTSD, but the psychotic episodes, well I just don't buy it. I've read about doctors who go and slap the wrong diagnosis on soldiers. I can't speak about what he dosed himself with to keep from going off the deep end, but from the few times I saw him, I'd say that boy was too busy drinking himself to death."

  "Then the poem? Does it sound like a line from anything you've heard?"

  Roxanne pulled on her ear. "Can you repeat it?"

  "'The more there is, the less you see.'"

  "Not anything I can recall."

  "Maybe he poached it from one of Mr. Kim's fortune cookies," I said, frustrated that no one could come up with a winner for Billy Wayne's puzzling last words.

  Roxanne turned her head as if listening to the cadence of silent words. "The Internet might have something. You ought to go through his stuff again. That would help, wouldn't it?"

  "It would, except Mrs. Dobson burned all of her son's poetry."

  Caleb reached into his pocket and took out some bills for our lunch. "I've got to go, ladies. If you think of anything, give me a call."

  When Caleb was gone, Roxanne said, "You two are on again, I see."

  "Yeah, I guess."

  "Can't find any reason to push him away, huh?"

  "I'm finding happiness for the first time in my life with someone who isn't preprogrammed to be a cheat and/or a liar and it's weird."

  "The boys here have a pool, betting on when you'll get hitched."

  "Not if, but when, huh?" Move out of the snug cocoon of my parental nest and get married for the third time? I felt the chilly draft of foreboding. "I can't believe I might even be considering it."

  "Relax. Enjoy it. Count your blessings, girl. Let yourself be in love with someone who isn't going to fail you."

  I looked away, unable to meet her eyes.

  "Sweetpea, you said it, not me. I ain't no hypnotist like that new police woman, but you gotta ask yourself, why did you pick those losers?" When she saw the lines of distress on my face, she held up a hand. "I don't need to know what it was, or who it was that caused you to hang onto your bad opinion of yourself. The question for you is, are you gonna take it out and give it a real good look? Make sure it's worth hangin' onto after all these years? `Cause if it ain't, then get rid of it."

  "How do you propose I do that?"

  "You know us Baptists do our forgiving up front of the whole congregation so's everybody can say 'Amen!' I can see that you're thinking someday, but if you don't do it now before you and Caleb get hitched, you're going to carry it into your marriage, and that ain't good. You got to let go of that grudge you've been holding onto. If that person is already gone," she looked at me meaningfully, and I knew she was thinking of my mother's suicide, "write them a letter, read it again and again, until you believe you've said it enough, then have a little ceremony. Burn it. Burn it, and forgive."

  "Like you did for your dad?"

  "He showed up at my college graduation, sober too, as far as I could tell. It was the second most important thing he'd done in my life besides give me a name. I had to work up to forgiving his hard drinking and wasted life, and my only regret is that I didn't do that until after he died."

  "Then what?"

  "I wrote my dead daddy a letter, thanked him for being my parent. Poor job of it and all, he was still my daddy."

  Roxy was thinking I was still angry with my mother, but that wasn't it. She might be dead, but she got me out of the burning
house didn't she?

  No, my mother wasn't the reason I chose duplicitous men. I simply took it for granted that no man was capable of being faithful. That is until Caleb and I became a possibility. Then why was I feeling skittish? Because Caleb had bungled his first attempt at a marriage proposal? It was even sillier of me to be mad at him.

  "I'll think about it," I said.

  She shrugged at my incomplete answer, giving over to our first subject. "If you're looking for suspects, you might want to ask yourself this question: What would you do if your brother lost his last chance at a heart transplant 'cause it went to a convicted felon instead?"

  I drew in a sharp breath then let it out. "I think—I think if something like that happened to my brother, I'd probably want to commit murder. I just don't know if I would go through with it."

  "Then you see where it might take someone."

  "I'll have to remind Caleb."

  "As for his poetry, what were they like—the one's he sent you, that is?"

  "Billy Wayne's? After the first three I stopped reading them."

  "You still have any of them?"

  "I gave all the snowflakes he left on my car to the police. Evidence, they said. Not that Detective Rodney will let me within a mile of that box now." Then I brightened. "But my new best friend, Pippa Roulette, might."

  "I never heard you say that." Roxanne held up ten fingers to waggle them in front of her face. "I'm not seeing you pull out that cell phone and making that call," she said as she picked up her pitcher of tea and stood up. "And I'm definitely not hearing you talk some police woman into doing something illegal. As a matter of fact, I was never here."

  I got to watch her cow-patterned Capris moo all the way through the swinging doors to the kitchen.

  Pippa listened, and then agreed to meet me at the evidence building in a half hour.

  Chapter seventeen:

  I pulled into a space at the Modesto Police Evidence Building for my meeting with Officer Pippa Roulette, who promised a peek at the box that contained the last known poetry by Billy Wayne Dobson. Looking up at a clear blue sky, I saw none of the telltale clouds that predicted a change in the weather.