by Unknown
It was better not to give Chrissy any more to worry about than necessary. By leaving the girl at the shop, Stella hoped Chrissy would pour all her attention into selling a few packages of elastic or fetching fixed-up machines for the ladies who came to collect them. And if she messed up the day’s receipts or rang up a package of straw needles as a box of silk pins, well, that was just part of the cost of doing business when you were breaking in new staff.
That particular thought was still on Stella’s mind as she pulled into Benning’s. No guard today; the big metal gates had been folded back, leaving the dirt entrance clear, and a couple more cars were pulled in the area between Benning’s trailer and the start of the rows of ruined and wrecked cars and parts.
She eased Chrissy’s ’96 Celica into a space between a dusty late-model pickup and a fenced-off dog run. Chrissy’s car, with its rust-spotted panels and rear bumper attached with a length of steel cable, was Stella’s ostensible reason for the visit, though Stella didn’t intend to need one. She meant to see if she could just deal straight with Benning, especially since it wasn’t too likely that his friends from up north would be hanging around the yard on a Wednesday morning when very little was stirring, including the drooping black walnut trees lining the fenced edge of the property, their branches looking like they were ready to give up from the heat.
As she turned off the ignition, the radio guy announced it would get up to a hundred again.
Stella wasn’t too excited about that, but as she walked around the front of the car, the fevered braying that went up in the pen next to her indicated that the dogs, at least, didn’t intend to let a little heat and humidity keep them from their duties.
Stella considered herself a dog person. Years ago she’d brought home a stray, a little dog that was at least part beagle, with some mystery elements mixed in. She’d named the dog Buttons for the spots that ran along her soft belly, but when Ollie took to kicking Buttons for no reason at all, Stella gave the dog to a family on the other end of town, crying all the way home, and swore she’d never put a pet in harm’s way again. Besides, there was Noelle to think about; even if Ollie never hit the child and mostly ignored her, it wasn’t good for a child to see acts of violence carried out right in front of her. While Ollie did most of his wife-beating when Noelle was asleep or out of the house, he kicked Buttons any old time he felt like it, no matter who saw him.
Stella had been meaning to get a dog ever since Ollie died, but she’d been waiting for things to calm down a bit so she’d have time to raise a pup up right. Unfortunately, her side business had remained strong, with a new client showing up every time she thought she’d finally hit a dry spell, and it was beginning to look as if Stella would just have to bite the bullet and get herself a broke-in dog. Not the worst thing in the world, of course; Stella had a fair amount of hard miles on herself, and she wouldn’t hold that against any potential canine pet.
But the huge, angry beasts throwing themselves against the fencing just inches from her hip were another story. With the boxy snouts and barrel chests that indicated pit bull blood, they had their dog-lips bared and their snapping teeth exposed, and the ruckus they were sending up had an edge of crazed fury to it that Stella knew only too well came from a particular dog-raising philosophy.
It took mean to breed mean. Always had, when it came to dogs. Unlike men, who’d produce a bad apple now and then even in the best environment—like Roy Dean, for instance—it was near impossible to raise up a mean dog if you just gave the thing a little attention and didn’t take to abusing it.
The pair in the cage, though, with their quivering, muscled bodies and drooling vicious grins, appeared to have developed appetites that were downright terrifying. Stella could imagine the huge jaws clamping down on unprotected flesh, the forearms scrabbling for purchase as they went in for the kill, and she backed away from the fencing.
“Aw, now, they wouldn’t hurt nothin’,” an amused voice said behind her.
Stella turned and found herself face-to-face with Earl Benning.
“What can I do for you today, young lady?” he continued, and then a curious thing happened: his eyes, which had been all squinty in the bright sun, opened a little wider, and the smarmy grin snapped off his face as though someone had knocked it down with a plank. “You’re Stella Hardesty, ain’t you.”
So much for the whole “just looking” ruse. Oh, well, Stella wasn’t one for subterfuge. Down and direct, that did the trick more often than not.
“I am. And you’re Earl Benning, am I right?” She jutted a hand out, but after Earl just kept staring at her face, making no move to shake, she finally withdrew it.
“You used to be a brunette, I think I remember,” he said. “Had a tight little figure, too.”
Stella hadn’t been planning on a tea party, but Earl’s manners were a little much even for the circumstances. “I’m still a brunette,” she said, touching a hank of her hair. “I paid good money for this. And as for my figure, I seem to remember there was a little less of you a decade back, too.”
“Nah, I’m talkin’ about back when you first married Ollie. Course, I was still a kid then, but—mmm, man, you sure used to fill out your blouse.”
Stella, who was almost never at a loss for words, gulped air. What the hell? If it was just a matter of filling out her shirt, well, she could probably manage two for the price of one these days. She’d been a 34C when she walked down the aisle. Now she was a 40DD. But she doubted that was exactly what Earl Benning had on his mind.
“Thanks, I guess,” Stella said. “Course, I don’t recall ever checking out your package, so even if I wanted to now, which I don’t, I wouldn’t be able to do any comparin’. Look, this is real fun and all, but if you’re fixin’ to ask me out I’m not interested, and besides I got some other stuff to talk over with you.”
The expression on Benning’s face darkened from amusement to something a sight more cruel. “Ain’t it just my bad luck,” he said. “Here I was wondering if you were free for the prom. All right, what is it that I can do for you today, Stella Har-des-ty?”
The way he enunciated each syllable of her last name gave Stella a chill that started around the bottom of her spine and snaked its way up her back, shivering along her nerve endings. She was glad to have extra insurance in her big purse.
“How about if we take a little walk?” she asked. “That okay?”
“I suppose that’d be all right,” Benning said. “Gimme just a sec here.”
He pulled a walkie-talkie-type device off the worn belt that hung low beneath his drooping gut and muttered into it for a minute.
“Why don’t we take this way?” he suggested, replacing the walkie-talkie and giving his pants an upward tug.
Stella followed without a word. They walked down a gravel lane through rows of automotive refuse that were arranged in rough rectangles. Most of the cars either had the front or back end caved in, or had taken a T-bone to the side. Some had apparently died of a series of unfortunate encounters, damage extending all the way around. A few looked as if they’d succumbed to old age. In the distance, a yellow front loader was moving scrap toward a towering pile of crushed cars.
“Let me get right to it,” Stella said. “I’m looking for Tucker Lardner. Little boy, eighteen months old, just a baby, really.”
Benning glanced quickly at Stella, his eyes narrowed; something flickered within their flinty depths. “No babies around here,” he said quickly.
“Just hold on,” Stella said, watching him carefully. “I ain’t saying there was. What I know is, Tucker disappeared last Saturday with Roy Dean Shaw. Now, I don’t have any business with Roy Dean. Don’t even care where he ended up, though I wouldn’t mind knowing just so’s I could, you know, cross all the t’s and dot the i’s on this.”
“Cross the t’s, huh,” Benning echoed, muscling his expression back into indifference. “I ain’t seen Roy Dean since, since ages, and I definitely ain’t seen no kid.”
&nb
sp; “Well, okay, like I say, I’m really just looking to find the boy. Now, there’s some talk that Roy Dean was doing a little work for you and some of your, ah, business associates. That’s none of my concern, either. Hell, looks like a nice place you got here, all this . . . stock, and whatnot.”
“You like my place, do you?” Benning laughed, a short, percussive sound that was almost a bark. “Well, now, that’s a nice compliment, coming from a businesswoman such as yourself.”
Stella kept walking, keeping her eyes on the gravel and clumps of weeds on the ground in front of her, but her heart did a little speed-up. “You mean my shop,” she said. “The sewing machine shop. I did some nice business last year, but—”
“That ain’t what I mean, Stella Har-des-ty,” Benning said, his voice going low. He leaned closer, conspiratorially, so that their shoulders brushed as they ambled along, and Stella had the weird thought that they must look like lovers strolling together. “I mean your other business. Course, I don’t know what sort of numbers you got on that. You know, expense ratios and receivables and all that. Yeah, surprising, right,” he added, giving her a little poke in the ribs. “My daddy didn’t raise no dummy. Didn’t get to be the biggest salvage outfit around by letting it run itself.”
“Clearly, you’re no dummy,” Stella agreed. “Though I’m not sure what you’re talking about with—”
“Can it, Stella. Let’s just get this said. I know what-all you do, and if I wanted, I could get a lot more information pretty quick. You know, in the form that might be useful for law types. See where I’m going? I run a nice, tight shop here, but I don’t like the idea of anyone coming around snooping into my business, any more’n you probably like someone coming around doing it to you. So here’s what I propose. I don’t have any idea where Roy Dean is. Yeah, he’s brought a few cars around, and we buy now and then, but I run a clean shop and if he can’t provide title, I take a pass. So I haven’t seen him in what, two, three weeks. I can check the books if you want to know what we last bought off him, though seems like it was an Odyssey, front-end collision, if I’m not mistaken. As far as that boy, I didn’t even know Roy Dean had a kid. It never came up.”
“He doesn’t. Tucker’s his wife’s. Chrissy’s.”
Benning shrugged and nodded. “Well, there you go. No reason for him to be hauling the kid around anyway, then. Wish I could help you, but looks like we’re just a dead end for you.”
Benning took a left and led her down a rough section of road that veered back toward the main lot. Stella glanced behind her shoulder and could just make out the edges of a shed big enough to fit Arthur Junior’s description past the fields of cars and several structures holding various parts suspended from metal gridwork. Reluctantly, she followed Benning.
“You say ‘we,’ ” Stella said. “Who all you got working here, anyways?”
Benning shrugged impatiently. “I got a part-timer most days. Chuck Keltner, you probably know his mom, and a guy moved up here from Morrisville. Not full-time, you know, no benefits or nothing. Mostly it’s me for the big stuff.”
“Yeah, see, way I hear it, you got some out-of-town interest, too.”
Benning said nothing, but Stella could sense him tense up next to her.
“Some friends of yours maybe bringing you in on some other avenues,” Stella continued. “Look, like I said, it’s no concern to me. You want to grow a little pot patch on your back forty, whatever. Just trying to keep this a two-way flow of information, hear what I’m saying?”
“If I knew anything, I’d tell you,” Benning said, his voice soft. “But you’re way off the mark with that last comment. Yeah, I got some friends come down from the city from time to time. We go out on the lake, fish a little. Play cards. Hunt or whatever. I don’t know who’s been giving you your information, but let me tell you, the biggest thing around here is maybe a little weekend party from time to time, and if someone stuck their nosy face in and saw something that wasn’t there, well, that would be their problem, see where I’m going?”
“I think I see,” Stella said, keeping her own voice low. “Anytime you had a bunch of visitors after hours, maybe taking the party over to some of your other facilities on the site, why, you’re just eating pretzels and playing Crazy Eights. That about the size of it?”
“Yeah, I’d say so,” Benning said, nodding. “Now you’re getting it. Roy Dean’s not exactly on my A-list, and we sure don’t have no little kids around when we party, so I guess that’s about all I can do for you today. Unless you want to see if we can find something to fix up that rust bucket.”
They had arrived back at Chrissy’s car. The sun had climbed higher in the sky, and the heat shimmered inches above the opaque, faded paint on the car’s roof and hood.
“I appreciate the offer,” Stella said as the dogs hurtled across their pen, braying and crashing into the fence, “but I think I’ve changed my mind about it since talking to you.”
“Yeah? How’s that?”
“Well, this little ride don’t look like much on the outside,” Stella said. “Lots of miles, just like I got. But under the hood? That’s a scrappy little engine. Gave me plenty more get-up-and-go than I was expecting.”
“That so.”
“Yeah.” Stella got in the car and rolled down the window. She gave Benning her sweetest smile as she stuck the key in the ignition and fired up the little Celica. “Sometimes you just can’t tell from looking how much trouble your ride’s going to give you.”
Hardesty Sewing Machine Sales & Repair shared a parking lot with China Paradise, a generally decent restaurant run by the eternally grumpy Roseann Lu. When Stella pulled into the lot at eleven thirty, she figured the three cars already parked there were Roseann’s customers, getting an early start on the lunch special.
In her shop, though, she was surprised to find Chrissy with not one but two customers, Lila Snopes and a second woman in her sixties, both of them talking at once. Chrissy’s wide, pale blue eyes darted from one to the other, and when she saw Stella she blurted, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re back! We got us a situation here!”
Lila turned away from the counter and, at the sight of Stella, pursed her features into a frown that caused the many wrinkles around her smoker’s mouth to focus in like arrows. “Not a situation, just a case of the customer is always right,” she said primly.
“Hello, Lila,” Stella said. She noted a heavy resemblance in the woman’s companion: same steely, severe bob haircut, same pronounced chin and flaccid cheeks. “And this must be your sister.”
“I’m Delores,” the woman said, nodding.
“I called Delores to tell her you were running the binding two-for-one,” Lila said. “I love the wide stuff for quilts. I’m stocking up.”
She pointed to the counter, where packages of binding were piled up high. Her sister had her own pile. There were probably thirty packages between the two of them.
Stella took a deep breath and said, “Sorry, ladies, but I’m not running any specials. I think there’s been some misunderstanding.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell them,” Chrissy stage-whispered in a singsongy voice.
“No misunderstanding I can figure,” Lila said. “I was in here at ten and I bought two packs of the inch and a half. Kelly green. And your girl here charged me for one. So I says, you charged me for one, deary, and she says no, that’s no mistake, that’s what you told her to do.”
“I said no such thing!” Chrissy said. “I said I was just doing what Miz Hardesty told me, and it wasn’t my fault the cash register wasn’t ringing up the numbers right.”
“Well, you took my money, didn’t you?” Lila said, the jut of her chin taking on an even more stubborn set. “Way I see it, that means you agreed on the two-for-one.”
Lila’s sister nodded along to everything her sister said, and Chrissy’s face was getting blotchy and red. “Now let’s just slow down a minute, ladies,” Stella said. “This is Chrissy’s first day on the job,
and she’s still getting used to our . . . system. I don’t think—”
“I did drive up from Quail Valley,” Delores said primly. “Seein’ as you had the special.”
Stella tapped her foot on the floor. Did the math in her head. “Okay,” she said after a minute. “How’s this. Twenty-five percent off. That’s the best I can do.”
“Well . . . how about you throw in one of those serger books I know you ain’t sold in two years,” Lila sniffed. “And maybe you ought to consider getting some more qualified help.”
Chrissy went very still for a moment, and Stella was trying to figure out how to diffuse the old bitch’s comments, when she noticed something interesting.
A deep purple flush was creeping upward from Chrissy’s collarbones, and her eyes had narrowed to slits. She slowly drew herself up to her full height and drew in a breath, and then she made her hands into tight fists before extending her fingers out like a boxer getting taped for a fight.
“Excuse me, lady, what did you just say?” she demanded, her voice very soft.
Lila put her hands on her hips and glared back. “Just that seein’ as you’re not even able to run a simple cash register or add up a purchase, maybe Stella here ought to—”
Chrissy’s hand shot out so fast that Stella jumped. Chrissy made a crisscross motion in front of Lila’s face, snapping her fingers twice.
“Lookie here,” she said, voice full of menace. “I have had a very bad couple of days. I have sat back and took what assholes like you have been dishing out for way too long, and I’m about sick of it. I am not dumb. I am not helpless. And I’m not taking any more shit. I’m done, and I’m about to get very, very pissed off and I’m tellin’ you now I don’t think you want to be around when that happens, hear?”
