Murder in Her Stocking

by G. A. McKevett

  “Flo’s got some problems at the moment,” Stella told Elsie, choosing her words carefully. “I’m sure she’ll share them with you and everybody else once she’s got everything all settled in her mind.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought it was.” Elsie shook her head, disgusted. She made a clucking sound with her tongue. “That good-for-nothin’ weasel done left her, and him bein’ tighter than the skin on bologna, he’s probably gonna take her for all she’s worth. I don’t know why I’m surprised. That’s just the sort he is, to take off and leave a good woman behind, like she is nothing but a sack of half-rotten potatoes.”

  Stella stared down at Elsie and said, “How on earth, Elsie Dingle, did you get that outta what I said? All I told you was—”

  “Oh, I heard what you said. Ever’ word. And I know exactly what you meant. Bud’s done gone and dumped Flo. Lord o’ mercy. Here ever’body thought when the time came, she’d be the one doin’ the dumpin’, what with ol’ Bud being short on understandin’ and long on mean.”

  Eager to divert the topic of conversation away from Florence, Stella looked around the room and saw Allison and Jake Neville walking up to the casket hand in hand.

  “Glory be!” Stella exclaimed. “Just look over yonder at that! Principal Neville and his wife have made up!”

  Elsie shrugged. “That’s old news. Ever’body in town knows that already. Where you been, girl?”

  “Busy, apparently. When did it happen?”

  “Around suppertime.”

  “That was less than an hour ago.”

  “Sounds about right. Seems he got sick and tired of livin’ with his mama. You know her. Can you blame him? So, he drove all the way to Atlanta and bought Allison one of them fancy diamond bracelets—though Rayleen Shields says it looks more like that cubic zirconia stuff to her—and he got down on his knees in front of Allison, like he was proposing or something, and cried and begged her to forgive him. As you know, Ally’s always set great store by jewelry, so she finally told him she’d give him one more chance and . . .” Elsie waved a hand in their direction. “Bob’s your uncle.”

  “That’s mighty big of her, forgiving him like that, bracelet or not,” Stella observed. “But then, unlike other wives with wayward husbands, she won’t have to worry about the other woman rearin’ her ugly head again.”

  “True. Course, if he’s that kind, and Jake is, it won’t take him long to latch onto another one.”

  “Ain’t it so? They’re like egg-suckin’ hounds, men like that. Once they get a taste, you have to shoot ’em to git ’em to quit.”

  Both women bowed their heads solemnly in homage to unfortunate women everywhere who were cursed with wayward husbands.

  Suddenly, the sacred peace of the visitation room was shattered by a scream, then another, followed by total bedlam!

  Stella jumped and grabbed Elsie. “What on earth?” she exclaimed, trying to discern the center of the commotion.

  “It’s up front!” Elsie answered, her voice shaking with fear and excitement. “By the coffin!”

  From the corner of her eye, Stella saw Sheriff Gilford rushing from the back of the room to where the casket and the guest of honor were displayed.

  Emboldened by the fact that he was on the way and would have things under control in a minute, maybe two, Stella put her fear aside and decided to indulge her curiosity. “Come on,” she told Elsie.

  Elsie needed no additional coaxing. Together, they fought their way through the agitated, confused crowd to the front. They arrived shortly after Gilford, just in time to see him receive a hearty right jab to the face.

  Delivered by Allison Neville.

  “You get your hands off me, Manny Gilford!” she was screeching. “You’ll stay outta this if you know what’s good for you!”

  Seeing that blood was pouring from Manny’s nose, Stella decided it might take a bit longer than a minute or two for the sheriff to seize control of the situation.

  “Honey bun, don’t!” Jake Neville was yelling in his enraged wife’s face. “You just assaulted an officer of the law! You can’t be doin’ that, darlin’!”

  Allison froze, fixing a most evil eye on her husband. The crowd was silent, watching, waiting to see what would happen next.

  They didn’t have long to wait.

  Allison pulled back a fist, let it fly, and clobbered her husband, too, landing a good one squarely on his right eye.

  Onlookers gasped, then stared in complete amazement as she whirled around to face the coffin.

  Before anyone could stop her, she leaned over the casket and made a violent snatching motion in the vicinity of Prissy’s neck.

  When she turned back around to the multitude, she lifted her right hand and displayed her prize, like Attila the Hun, in the heat of battle, lifting a severed head.

  “This necklace is mine!” she screamed to the crowd. “Mine! My husband gave my necklace to a whore!”

  “Sugar, don’t—” Jake wasn’t able to finish his sentence, because his wife was on him again, swinging at him with the fist holding the heavy gold chain.

  When Gilford tried to pull her off, he got a mouthful of the chain, too. In seconds, his lip was bleeding as much as his nose.

  “I was looking for this necklace for better’n six months, you sumbitch!” Allison shouted at her husband as she dangled the chain a few inches in front of his eyes. “I turned that house upside down and inside out. The car, too, and you stood right there and said nothin’ the whole time. Even pretended to help me look. I oughta kill you! Kill you dead!”

  “Mrs. Neville, please,” Manny said, his voice muffled because he was holding his hand over his nose and mouth. “I can understand that you’re upset, but this isn’t the time or place to discuss a private family matter.”

  But Allison paid him no attention as she continued to rail at her husband. “You just wait till I tell your blessed mama about this. She thinks the sun rises just to hear her son crow! And you in charge of a school full of innocent children.”

  That got the crowd riled up. Instantly, they were nodding and discussing it among themselves, and they became louder and angrier by the moment.

  Stella even heard snippets of conversations that included phrases like “I figured Jake was the one who killed her.”

  “Murdering a pretty young woman like that . . .”

  “Oughta string him up here and now.”

  “I got a rope in my truck.”

  “Okay,” Stella heard Manny say. “That’s it.”

  She saw him reach down to his duty belt and retrieve a pair of handcuffs. “Mrs. Neville, I’m arresting you for disturbing the peace. You have the right to—”

  But he had no time to finish informing Allison Neville of her rights, because another woman had made her way past the affray to the casket.

  Gina Wallace leaned over the body, took a closer look, and began to scream, too. “She’s wearing my earrings!” Gina shouted, whirling around to address the sheepish-looking fellow behind her. “You gave me those for Valentine’s Day!”

  “You never wore ’em,” he offered in weak defense.

  “Because they are ugly! But that’s not the point!” she screamed, her eyes bugging out like those of a demon-possessed troll doll.

  A second later, Prissy’s earrings had been snatched from her as unceremoniously as her necklace.

  Gina began to pummel her husband’s chest with her fists. In the process, the unattractive heart-shaped red earrings went flying across the room.

  “And that’s my bracelet she’s wearing!” Melinda Hicks yelled. “The one my mama gave me when I married you, Daryl, you no-good piece of crap on a cracker! Don’t you run away from me, Daryl James Hicks! When I get my hands on you, boy, you and me are gonna mix!”

  * * *

  Much later that night, in the quiet of her own home and the comfort of her easy chair, Stella would recall the moment Melinda Hicks chased Daryl James Hicks from the room, the moment the mayor’s wife spot
ted her watch on Prissy’s wrist, and the moment the mailman’s longtime girlfriend noticed her hair barrette decorating Prissy’s golden locks.

  That was when the real trouble began.

  Chapter 19

  “Ow! That hurts, Stella May! What the hell’s in that stuff? Carbolic acid?”

  Manny Gilford sat next to his desk, grasping the arms of his chair like a fighter-plane pilot who had just pushed the EJECT button. Stella stood beside him, holding a bottle of Merthiolate and some cotton balls that were stained with the red tincture and the lawman’s blood.

  “Oh, for mercy’s sake, Manny. In the line of duty, you’ve been shot, beaned with a baseball bat, knocked down a well, shocked with a cattle prod, and run over by a bull. I think you can handle having a little bit of Merthiolate smeared on your boo-boos.”

  “Yeah? Well, that junk hurts worse than all those others put together. When are you gonna be done torturing me, woman?”

  She dabbed a bit more of the liquid on his cut lip. He groaned, stomped his feet and, when she had finished, shook his head like a dog with a big sticker burr in its ear.

  “Not the sort to suffer in silence, are we?” she said with a grin as she replaced the bottle top, with its long glass applicator wand. “But then,” she added under her breath, “you being male and all . . .”

  “What was that?”

  “Nothin’. Didn’t say a thing.” She tossed the soiled cotton balls into a nearby waste can as he pulled a mirror from a drawer and examined his wounds.

  “That one on your lip’s gonna leave a scar,” she said.

  “Won’t be my first. Or my last,” he replied, deepening his voice half an octave.

  “Now we’re gonna play the manly man.” She winked at him. “A bit late for that.”

  “Watch that sharp tongue of yours, gal. I’ve had a rough night.”

  “You have. I’ll give you that. About the roughest I’ve ever seen in this little town of ours.”

  They both paused and listened to the cacophony of shouts, curses, shrieks, and sobs drifting down the stairs from the cells above.

  “When’s the last time you had ever’one of your cells full like that?” Stella asked.

  “Never. That’s when. There’s a first time for everything, and tonight we broke an all-time McGill record.”

  “When are you figurin’ on lettin’ ’em out?”

  “As soon as I know they aren’t gonna be killing each other.”

  “That might be a spell.”

  “It’ll take as long as it takes. I’d rather be having them cool their heels in jail than make national news about a bloodbath here in little McGill.”

  “I can see it now, the footage of all the men’s bodies bein’ carried out, and the women holdin’ their bloody knives in one hand and their retrieved jewelry in the other.”

  Manny sighed and shook his head. “I never saw the like. If you and Elsie and the others hadn’t jumped in to help, I’d have had a wholesale slaughter on my hands.”

  Suddenly, Manny thought of something, and a frightened look crossed his face. “Damn! How am I going to feed all those people?”

  “You’ll have to ask the mayor to appropriate some funds to . . . oh . . . never mind. I forgot.”

  “Yeah. He and his old lady are upstairs with the rest.”

  “You can forget about keepin’ it outta the papers. You’ll be famous by sunrise.”

  He looked horrified. “You think?”

  She laughed long and hard, until tears streamed down her cheeks and she could hardly breathe. After collapsing onto a chair near his, she finally collected herself and said, “Time will tell, Manny. I’ve stopped speculatin’ on how things around here are gonna go lately. I’ve been surprised at every turn in the road.”

  “Me too,” he admitted. “From all I’ve ever heard—contrary to what you see on television—most murders are pretty easy to solve. Generally, the killer’s somebody closest to the victim, and everybody around them saw it comin’ a mile off. It’s usually a woman getting murdered by a husband or boyfriend that she just kicked to the curb. Or some bad-tempered dude, who’s lived his whole life bullying and hurting people, stabs his brother with a steak knife because he grabbed the biggest T-bone off the grill. But this one . . . It’s a stumper.”

  “Especially now, when you’ve got your cells filled to the brim and runnin’ over with suspects. Could’ve been any one of those guys who was messin’ around with Prissy. Or any of their wives, for that matter.”

  “A woman strangling another woman to death?”

  “Could happen. It’s not like Prissy necessarily put up a big fight. She’d already been hit on the head, bless her heart, and either fell or was pushed down a flight of stairs.”

  “True. Neither Herb nor I saw any scratches on her neck.”

  “Scratches?”

  “Yes.” A sad look crossed Manny’s face. “Unless their hands are bound, strangulation victims usually claw at whatever’s choking them, to get loose. They wind up scratching their own necks in the process.”

  “That’s a sorrowful thing to have to know.”

  He looked down at the cuts and bruises on his own hands, compliments of the wives who were occupying his cells upstairs. “There’s a lot of miserable stuff you find out in this job,” he said. “Sometimes I feel old and exhausted just thinking about it.”

  “I’ll bet you do. I don’t think I’d wanna have your job, Sheriff.” She reached over and smoothed his hair, as she often did Waycross’s after he’d been out in the wind or roughhousing with his sisters.

  He smiled at her, silently thanking her for the kind gesture. “It’s not so bad,” he told her. “It has its perks. Once in a while, you get to help a good person who truly deserves it. That feels pretty nice.”

  “I’ll bet it does.” She paused for a moment, then said, “Which reminds me, there’s something I’d like to do for somebody. Two somebodies, for that matter. Only with your permission, of course.”

  “What’s that, Miss Stella?”

  Stella drew a deep breath. “I feel real bad for them women upstairs. I know they’re suffering from what transpired tonight. In an awful public way, they found out not only that their husbands were unfaithful to them but also that the low-down skunks even gave away their jewelry to that woman.”

  “I’m sure they’re in a world of hurt. Who wouldn’t be?”

  “But I also feel a bit bad for Prissy Carr,” Stella admitted.

  “Why? Do you really think she didn’t know that jewelry was stolen? And who it was stolen from?”

  “I’m not saying she was innocent. Obviously, she didn’t mind setting aside the Golden Rule when it served her purposes. She probably knew or at least had an inkling where the stuff came from. But whether she did or not, it hurt me to see her gettin’ the jewelry snatched right off her corpse like that.”

  “It was an ugly scene. I’ll give you that,” he admitted with a slight shudder. “What’s this good deed that you need my blessing for?”

  “The jewelry box that we saw there in her apartment—it had a lot of stuff in it.”

  He looked alarmed. “No! No, Stella May! I’m not going to put the contents of that box on display and have the rest of the women in this town going crazy when they find their things among them! I’m all for returning stolen merchandise to its rightful owner, but I got enough trouble housing the ones I’ve already got upstairs.”

  “There, there. Don’t get your britches in an uproar. That’s not what I was gonna suggest.”

  “Thank goodness. You had me worried there. What is it, exactly, that you want to do?”

  “First, can you tell me if that jewelry box is still in her apartment?”

  “I believe it is. Herb said he went by to pick out a dress and some jewelry for her to be laid out in. But to my knowledge, he left the rest of it there. Why?”

  “Prissy took a lot of pride in her appearance. She always dressed nice and had her sparklies on when she was ou
t and about town. With your permission, I’d like to go get that box, pick out a few items, and take them to Herb. He can put them on her right before he closes the casket, without anybody seein’ or, heaven forbid, identifyin’ them. I know she would have wanted it that way.”

  The sheriff thought it over for a moment, then said, “Okay. That’s kind of you, Stella. If Herb doesn’t mind, I have no objection. As long as no wives get a look at what’s in that box.”

  “Thank you, Manny.”

  “What’s the second thing?”

  “I want to send the rest of the jewelry to Prissy’s aunt, the one who’s taking care of her little girl. I don’t think Prissy owned much in this world. But what she did have should be handed down to her daughter. It’s the only thing that child will have to remember her by.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I assume you’ve got the door to the apartment locked now.”

  “I do. The key was in her purse.”

  “Can I borrow it?”

  He opened a desk drawer but hesitated. “I’m a mite uneasy about sending you over there by yourself.”

  “I know it’s still a crime scene. I promise not to touch anything. I’ll wear gloves if you want me to.”

  He smiled. “I’m not worried about you messing up my crime scene, Stella. I’m worried about you.”

  “You think the killer might come back there for somethin’?”

  “It occurred to me.”

  “It occurred to me, too. But I’ll not be dawdlin’ once I get inside there. I figure it’ll take me less than fifteen seconds to walk in, pick up that box, and walk out.”

  “You work fast.”

  “I can when I need to.”

  He placed the key in her hand. “I’d go with you if I could. But I don’t dare leave that bunch up there unattended, and I don’t know for sure when Jarvis is gonna show up.”

  “I understand, Manny. Really, I do. I swear I won’t be in there longer than two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

  “Go along then. Promise you’ll call me when you get to the funeral home?”