Wedding Bell Blues

by Ruth Moose

  “Don’t talk to me about ‘Mr. Ossie,’ as Reba calls him,” I said.

  Inside was a different story. A new-looking leather sofa took up half the room. There were matching glass coffee and end tables, and a huge hanging copper light fixture. The biggest flat-screen television I’d ever seen covered one wall. In the corner stood a whole modified kitchen unit with refrigerator and a microwave oven, one of those fancy espresso and latte maker units. I knew because I’d priced one of the coffee thingies for the Dixie Dew: $450 just for the coffeemaker. Everything looked top quality. Very nice indeed. Who would have expected such fine, expensive furnishings inside this run-down remains of a motel?

  “I lost something when I was here and wondered if you found it,” I said.

  “Oh, okay. I was kidding about the room earlier. Didn’t think you’d come to rent it, seeing as how you got a big house full of rooms over at your Dixie Dew.”

  Was that meant as a dig? Did she know how desperate my bed-and-breakfast business was these days?

  She reached behind her to shut the door to a bedroom, but not before I saw the rumpled sheets of a king-sized bed and what looked like somebody still in it. Was this where she and Andy lived? Did all this make sense? Fix up the living quarters first, spend your franchise loan fast and furious on “the best,” then deal with trying to get the business going and make some money. I’d done the opposite. I’d fixed up the dining room, guest bedrooms, and the outside of the house. The rest would have to be done later. The plaster ceiling in my bedroom had gaps big as the map of Texas, and the living room … I couldn’t even think where to start on it.

  “Haven’t touched that room,” Allison said, her right hand on her heart and her left arm raised as if she was swearing she was telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. “Haven’t found anything you’d be interested in either.”

  “A man’s wallet?” I asked.

  “Describe it.” She looked at the ceiling.

  “Black leather, old, curled at the corners. Had photos in it. Driver’s license. That sort of thing.”

  Allison reached in a drawer of the desk and pulled out a black wallet, held it over her head.

  “That’s it,” I said, and reached for it.

  She held it out at arm’s length behind her. “Doesn’t look like anything that would belong to you. Why do you want it?”

  “I want to take it to Reba. I think it belonged to her friend, Butch Rigsbee.”

  I lied, crossed my fingers behind my back. So what if I did not intend to take it to Reba? But now I would have proof that the guy flat out on the picnic table was not the Butch Rigsbee in the wallet’s photo.

  “He who? Butch? He’s one of our regulars. Has been for a couple years. Stays here on his route to Florida and back. Funny guy. Good-time guy. We’ve talked of putting in a bar and naming it after him. Always flashing a roll, and Lord, what a roll.” She flapped the wallet back and forth over her head. “There was not one bill in it when I found it. Empty as this town.” Then she started flipping through the photo flaps in the wallet. “But if you say you’re taking it to Reba, then you better be taking it to her. I don’t want to get mixed up in anything not on the up-and-up. I have a reputation to protect.”

  I almost said “Ha,” but checked myself.

  Allison rolled her eyes, laughed a little. “Butch had this thing going with Reba. She thought he was going to marry her. We like to have laughed our heads off. Then she took up with our handyman who wasn’t all that handy, but was the only one of us who knew how to crank and run a bulldozer.”

  “So where is this Butch now?” Maybe he was who I saw in Allison’s bed before she closed the door.

  “On his regular Florida run I guess. He was here Friday night.” She lit a new cigar, waved out the match and tossed it in an ashtray already overrun with spent matches and butts. “His truck’s gone. Gone when I got up this morning.”

  “The white truck was out by the Interstate and Bruce drove it into town.” I gave her that information but I think surely she already knew all this. Had Bruce not explained anything when he asked her to seal off the room? I guess he didn’t have to. Police business with our “trained professionals” had to remain confidential.

  “Oh”—Allison blew a smoke ring toward the TV—“then I guess he must be still around here somewhere.” She came from behind the desk, looked out the back and used a remote to close some very expensive window treatments. “That’s what I told the woman who came looking for him. She saw you come out of the room, then get in the car with Pastor Pittman. She was so mad she could have spit tenpenny nails.”

  I reached for the wallet.

  “Nothing doing.” Allison held it tight.

  I waited.

  “I thought Butch might be in trouble with all the Reba marriage and stuff, but this woman only wanted the money he was carrying. She threatened me about stealing all the money. Me! Little ole me! Money was all that woman had on her mind.”

  “What money?” I asked.

  Allison gave me a hard look. “Honey, if you don’t know dirty business when it’s right in your face, then you don’t know anything in this world.”

  With that she threw the wallet at me. Whiz-bang. I grabbed it as it hit the door behind me, fell to the floor. I picked it up and made a fast exit, didn’t even say thank you.

  Well, I thought as I stood outside. So much for manners. I turned the wallet over in my hand. Oops. The wallet Allison had thrown at me wasn’t Butch Rigsbee’s wallet. This wallet was smaller, newer and must have been buried somewhere. It stunk like a landfill or the bottom of a dumpster. Phew. And it was totally empty. Not even a photo, just the blank plastic holders with not a face among them.

  “Wait,” I said but she had slammed shut the door.

  I tried the knob. It didn’t turn. Had she locked it? Locked me out? Damn. I knocked very nicely. “Allison?” I called.

  She didn’t come to the door and I heard the TV turned up full blast. She didn’t intend to come to the door. I stood there holding the wrong wallet. One that wouldn’t do me the least bit of good or prove a thing to Ossie.

  As I turned Lady Bug around in the parking lot I noticed a red truck, spattered with paint and rust, parked behind the office unit. Randy’s red truck? Randy, who sometimes worked with Scott on construction projects and music gigs. Is that who was in Allison’s bed?

  I had not seen Randy with Scott lately. Had they parted ways? He’d seemed a nice guy, sort of Scott’s right-hand man, but come to think of it, Scott had not mentioned him lately. Randy was also one of Scott’s musician friends. Had they done any gigs together recently? Scott was going to play keyboards for Mayor Moss’s trashion show fund-raiser on Sunday afternoon.

  Things and people in Littleboro surprised you sometimes. Just when you thought you had somebody and something all figured out, they took a left turn. I thought I remembered Scott saying Randy was married, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was happily married. Was anybody ever happily married? I shifted gears and headed home to the Dixie Dew.

  Chapter Nine

  Ida Plum took one look at me, and instead of her usual clucking and fussing made me cream of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, told me she had sheets to hang on the line and then she was going to iron awhile. She was the only person in the world I knew who actually liked to iron. I liked to hear the thump, whump of the ironer that did mainly our bed linens. Regular clothes ironing had to be done the regular way. Board and steam, hand guiding the iron. Mama Alice taught me how to iron, starting with handkerchiefs, her aprons, pillowcases and dish towels. Dish towels! Who even used handkerchiefs anymore? She said it was one sure way to kill germs and most people didn’t know that.

  Then she graduated me to blouses, skirts and dresses. When I got to art school I met girls in the dorm who’d never plugged in an iron. I had to teach them to press creases in their jeans when they “dressed up” for dates. Otherwise all of us wore our jeans like a second layer of skin,
just not washed as often. The more paint caked your clothes, the more impressive. A pallet of paint colors were like merit badges showing how serious an artist you were, how hardworking.

  “You look done in,” Ida Plum said over a heaped laundry basket of wet sheets. “You need a nap.”

  She’d read my mind, which was a frequent occurrence.

  “Not even thinking about a nap,” I said. “Got food to do for the mayor’s big trashion thing. And paperwork in my office.”

  I thought ironing would be much more pleasant with its certain soothing rhythm and the wonderful smell of clean—soap and water and sunshine—than what I had to do.

  I had lied about the paperwork. I did not plan to go to the little Dixie Dew office that used to be Mama Alice’s pantry and bury myself under the stack of forms and bills and just plain stuff. I had other plans.

  I finished the last of my iced tea (June is the time I mostly switch to the iced stuff, but sometimes, at stressed as well as quiet moments, only the hot kind will do), put my dishes in the dishwasher and sneaked out the front door.

  Chapter Ten

  If the wallet wasn’t at Motel 3 and not in Lady Bug where was it? Somewhere, it had to be somewhere. I must have dropped it, but where? Where had I been with this stuff for Reba before I put it in Lady Bug?

  Of course. Pastor Pittman’s car. And where would that car be now? Home, if he wasn’t out rounding up “lost sheep.” Pittman lived in the Presbyterian manse three streets over behind the Dixie Dew.

  I cut through several backyards and onto Iona Street, where I saw the two-story redbrick Williamsburg-style house with black shutters that had always been the Presbyterian manse. Hadn’t changed a bit. I went to a lot of Presbyterian Youth Club things there. Weiner roasts, scavenger hunts, volleyball games.

  There had never been a garage. So where did he park his car? I walked up the flagstone walk between the two rows of boxwoods, thinking, thinking. And smelling. American boxwoods are bigger than their sibling English ones and have a pleasant lemony herb scent. Nice, but I didn’t have time to stop and smell the boxwoods.

  When I got to the front door, I decided not to ring the doorbell. What would I say? I want to look in your car to see if I dropped something, but I can’t tell you what? I walked around back to try to find the car. Maybe a garage had been added on over the years.

  I was right. There in back of the manse was a double garage and lucky, lucky day, both garage doors were up. I could pop in, check inside the car and no questions asked. No explaining to do.

  The garage was dark. Pastor Pittman’s silver BMW was there, parked serenely next to a sporty Carolina-blue Miata convertible. His other car, a fun car, or Mrs. Pittman’s? Hers, I decided. The dome light came on when I opened the door of the BMW. I didn’t see anything on the seat. I crawled in to check the floor. I felt under the seat. Nothing.

  Just as I started to back out, someone said, “You trying to steal my car?”

  I started to rise up. It was Pastor Pittman.

  “No, no, no,” I said from my compromising position on my knees, butt in the air.

  “Beth McKenzie?” He laughed. A nice laugh. He gently shook his head side to side like he was saying to himself, Not again. Not this girl who keeps popping up in all kinds of places. Here she is on all fours in my car. “So,” he said, “if it’s not my car you’re after, you must have designs on me, then?”

  “No, no,” I said again and felt my face flush. “Just looking for something.”

  “And did you find it?” he asked, leaning in so close I felt his body heat.

  “Not yet. Just something I thought I left in your car, or dropped when we were at the motel this morning. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “No problem. Can I help you look?” he asked.

  “Thanks, but no.” I straightened up. “It’s not that important.” It was, but not to him, just to me and Reba and maybe Ossie, and maybe whoever that was sprawled across the picnic table by the Interstate.

  I thanked him and waved goodbye. He stood there shaking his head, looking totally confused, as though this town and some of the people who lived here were beyond his comprehension.

  What next? Where next? The only place left where that wallet could possibly be was back where I had originally found it: Motel 3. Allison had played games with me.

  Lied like a rug. And I sure didn’t want to go back for more, but that had to be where it was. Should I go trucking over there now or put it off and maybe Allison would be a bit friendlier, forget she’d thrown a wallet at me? Cool down, calm down. Maybe she thought she was being cute—but I just didn’t think so. I thought she was hiding something bigger than a wallet.

  I decided no good would come of procrastination so I cranked Lady Bug and back we chugged to Motel 3.

  At Motel 3, Allison had parked her cleaning cart in front of the room where Reba and the mystery man had their fateful picnic. The door was open, the crime scene tape taken down. That sure was some fast “collecting evidence from a crime scene” if indeed that’s what Bruce had done.

  “Knock, knock,” I said as I marched right in.

  Allison had the vacuum cleaner going and a radio playing reggae music, but she turned around. “You must like this place. You keep coming back like some warped boomerang.”

  I didn’t answer.

  She turned off the vacuum, came from behind the bed. “What now?” She stood with her arms crossed across her wide and blooming chest.

  “The wallet, please.” I held out my hand. “The real one this time.”

  “I don’t know what on earth makes you think you have to have the damn thing. There’s no money in it.” She now stood with both hands on her hips. A defiant pose if there ever was one. A pose that said, you’re going to have to knock me down and take it.

  “Believe it or not, it’s not money I’m after.”

  “I don’t believe it. Everybody in this world is after money. The most they can get and get away with.” She gave a long, lingering sigh.

  “I need the pictures … the photos.” I was tired of playing games with her.

  “I should have buried the thing.” Allison reached down and pulled the wallet from between the mattress and box springs. “Take it if you think it’s going to do you any good. Been bad luck for me.”

  She handed it to me with a kind of good-riddance thrust.

  I knew that wallet was not between the mattress and box springs when Bruce did the room for evidence. Even if he or someone else had done a cursory job, they would have found it. Anything between the mattress and box springs was an old, old cliché of a hiding place. Anyone would look there first. Allison probably had the wallet the whole time. But why?

  This time I said, “Thank you very much,” whirled around and left as fast as I could, got out the door before she changed her mind and tried to snatch it back. Life had sure seemed to toughen up Allison. Remembering the rumors I’d heard in high school as well as fairly recent ones, she wasn’t somebody I wanted to trust. Not even with an empty wallet.

  Chapter Eleven

  This time when I went into the police headquarters I stopped to speak to Wanda Purncell, who only sighed and nodded me toward Ossie’s office, where he was at his computer working. He sat bent to the screen, staring intently. Even the set of his shoulders said, I’m into serious business here. Don’t interrupt me.

  “I got it,” I said and waved the wallet.

  He looked up and blinked, like he was asking, Who are you? What do you want and it better be important?

  I said, “Proof. You wanted proof the guy on the picnic table that Reba absolutely did not kill is not the husband who is missing. The husband of this bonko lady who’s threatening me. Here it is.”

  He reached for the wallet.

  I held it away from him, flipped it open to the photos. “This,” I said and pointed to the photo, “is the woman who is threatening me. And this is Butch Rigsbee, who I think Reba kept calling God.” I told him about the phone
call at Motel 3 and my other suspicions that this woman was following me and meant to do me harm and that Allison said Butch Rigsbee had left, but his truck was the one Bruce drove here. “The one right out there in your parking lot.” I pointed out the window, but Ossie didn’t even look.

  Instead he took the wallet, glanced at the photos, opened it all the way flat and felt in the compartment that would have held cash. “It’s empty,” he said, folded it back together and slid it in his desk drawer.

  “That’s evidence,” I said, shocked at his nonchalance. “Aren’t you going to tag and bag it?”

  “Tell me something I don’t already know.” He turned back to his computer.

  “I know this woman is threatening me. Threatening me with bodily harm. And her husband is missing. Missing. Maybe murdered.” When I said it, my voice shook and I felt like crying. “She called me a hussy.”

  “So, are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “A hussy.” His voice almost sounded like it had half a chuckle in it. He gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “Little girl, go home. You are into something you don’t know anything about.”

  “But…” I said.

  He didn’t even look up.

  I let myself out and when I walked by Wanda’s desk she gave me a look of pure sympathy and an uplifted finger of a wave that seemed to say, Honey, you just got a taste of what I work with every day. Goodbye and good luck.

  Near the back entrance I saw Bruce Bechner’s office. Hmmm, I thought. Maybe Bruce would be the one to get his mind on what was going on in Littleboro since he didn’t have wedding jitters.

  I opened the door and poked my head in. No Bruce. The office was empty except for a desk, a file cabinet, a one-cup coffeemaker and a whole windowsill of African violets in a profusion of purples and pinks and whites.

  Out the window I saw the white van and on Bruce’s desk lay a set of keys that looked like a jangle of truck keys.