Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop: 2 Bugman Novels in 1

by Tim Downs

  “That’s how,” Nick replied. “It looks to me like someone made sure the room was dark and then stepped out behind Teddy when he first entered the trailer.” He pointed to the two crumpled grocery sacks. “He never even made it to the counter.”

  “I don’t buy it.” The sheriff shook his head. “The way I see it, your friend just picked the wrong place to live. This is the cheapest part of town all right—it’s also the worst part of town. We get a lot of lowlifes passing through this way looking for a quick buck. Did your friend own a TV? A VCR?”

  “No,” Nick said, “but he did own an exceptional sound system.”

  “Where?”

  In the corner of the room a small particle-board cabinet lay overturned, and a bare extension cord snaked across the floor.

  “Looks like a drug-related murder to me,” the sheriff continued. “Some pothead breaks in and grabs the first big-ticket item he can find—but before he can run, your friend comes to the door. The killer backs into the corner and waits for him to step inside. Your friend goes to set his bags down before he hits the lights—the killer steps in behind him, and …” He formed a gun with his right hand and made a recoiling motion. “If your friend had gone for the lights first, he’d still be dead. He just would have got it from the front—like old Mrs. Gallagher did.”

  Kathryn spun around. “Mrs. Gallagher? What happened to Mrs. Gallagher?”

  “Like I said, it was a busy morning.” He looked at Nick. “Mrs. Gallagher lived just a quarter-mile from here, on the other side of that windbreak. Lived in a trailer just about like this one. Last night somebody walked in and put a bullet through her head too—the front of her head—and then walked off with the TV and VCR. Her boy stopped by to look in on her. Found her early this morning.”

  No one said anything for a few moments. They had all known Mrs. Gallagher for years—for decades. She was a kind and gentle woman who had outlived her beloved husband by thirty years and quietly and patiently awaited their reunion in the seclusion of her little trailer.

  “Was there any sign of forced entry?” Nick asked.

  The sheriff looked around at the flimsy trailer. “In these things? There is no forced entry—just entry. Anybody can walk in who wants to.”

  “Or who is asked to,” Nick said. “What about the light bulb? How do you explain that?”

  “I can explain that”—the sheriff looked at him—“but I don’t think you want to hear it.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay. I think you did it.”

  Nick slowly smiled.

  “You know,” the sheriff said, nodding to the floor, “your boy here called me last night.”

  The smile disappeared from Nick’s face. “What time was that?”

  “About midnight. He was all excited, said he had some big news for you—but he couldn’t find you. You two left a hotel number for him, but apparently you never showed up. Find better accommodations?”

  Kathryn flushed. “We were at the Mologne House at Walter Reed, not that it’s any of your business. It was a last-minute change of—”

  “Did you go over to the lab?” Nick broke in.

  “At midnight? I got better things to do. I told your boy to let it wait till morning. I told him the two of you would be back then, if you hadn’t run off together.”

  “Shut up, Peter.”

  The sheriff turned to Kathryn. “If your friend here had a little more company last night, he might still be alive. Ever think of that?”

  Kathryn glared at him hard. “I don’t deserve that.”

  “I’ve tried to humor you as long as I can, Kath, but it’s time to wise up. Have the two of you come up with any answers yet—any real answers? ’Cause if you have, I haven’t seen ’em. I think what you’ve got here is one desperate Bug Man. He’s on your payroll; he knows he’s got to produce something, so he leads you around on a wild goose chase. Says you need to do research, collect evidence, conduct interviews—but where are the answers, Kath? Now he loses his friend—and he still doesn’t have any answers—so he makes his friend’s murder part of the story, part of the conspiracy. Only he needs things to look a little more sinister, so he unscrews the light bulb. Now he’s got an execution, not just some senseless killing.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Kathryn said. “I don’t believe Nick would do that.”

  “Really?” the sheriff looked at her. “Did the two of you arrive together or did the doc get here before you did?”

  He turned back to Nick now. “That’s how I explain the light bulb. Now here’s a question for you: If your friend was executed, if someone purposely waited here for him, then how do you explain Mrs. Gallagher? How does she fit into all this?”

  Nick said nothing. There was an explanation for Mrs. Gallagher’s death—a simple and obvious explanation—but it was so monstrous that it would have sounded absurd. There were only two possible explanations for Mrs. Gallagher’s death: Either it was nothing more than a random and unrelated act of violence, or the sheriff had committed a double murder last night. He had chosen a second victim, an innocent old woman, for no more reason than to draw attention away from Teddy’s death. It was possible—but Nick knew he could never give voice to such a possibility. Even to him it sounded almost unthinkable …

  Almost.

  Nick slowly turned to Kathryn again, studying her anew as though he had never looked at her before. Here was a woman who had led one man to the altar, another to depression, and a third to pathological devotion—and possibly murder. One loved her, one lost his mind over her, and one killed for her. What was the power this woman possessed? Nick suddenly felt like Odysseus, longing to understand the seduction of the Sirens’ song, begging his shipmates to unlash him from the mast. He looked again at the graceful curves of her hips and thighs, the thick mane of fiery auburn hair, the glistening emerald eyes—but there was something different about her eyes now, something he had never seen before. For the first time there was a strange darkness—it was a look of confusion or hesitation or uncertainty. Then her eyes met his, and he knew in an instant what it was.

  It was doubt.

  “I should go,” Nick said quietly, “and leave you two professionals to your work.” He stepped to the door and pushed it open, passing Kathryn without a word.

  “Don’t go far, Doc,” the sheriff called after him. “I’ll need to ask you a few questions about all this.”

  Well done, thought Nick as he slid into his car and started the engine. You not only got away with murder, you managed to shift the suspicion to me. Not even Mrs. Guilford knows who to trust now.

  Well done, Sheriff. Well done indeed.

  The memorial service of James and Amy McAllister was held on an unusually pleasant June morning. An unexpected cold front had driven out the two-headed monster of Carolina summer—the oppressive heat and the clinging humidity—and had left in its place a flawless spring day.

  Kathryn felt cheated. She didn’t expect everything to stop for Jimmy and Amy, but it would have been nice if the world had at least tipped its hat in the form of a drizzling rain, or perhaps a dramatic haze over the cemetery grounds. Instead, the skies were a crystalline azure blue.

  The change of climate was not overlooked by the people at Mount Zion A. M. E. Church, who all seemed a bit more cordial and cheerful than usual—and in Kathryn’s view, a good deal less mournful than the occasion required.

  Long folding tables hauled from the church fellowship hall were now draped in white and lined up in long fluttering rows. People stood for the most part, while the older folks sat on folding garden chairs and picked halfheartedly at sagging paper plates. The adults mingled in small groups and did their best to shush the smaller children, who found it impossible to contain themselves on such a day.

  Kathryn worked her way through the considerable crowd, patting a shoulder here and accepting a heartfelt condolence there. Conversations seemed to center on the spectacular nature of Amy’s demise or the dark curse that hung l
ike a shroud over the McAllister family. And did you hear about old Mrs. Gallagher? Shot through the head just two nights ago—and in her own trailer!

  Not a single soul mentioned the death of Dr. Eustatius Tedesco.

  Kathryn looked up to see Nick slowly approaching from across the yard, dressed exactly as he was the last time she saw him at Teddy’s trailer the day before. She hurried to meet him halfway. He seemed stooped and disheveled and profoundly tired, but there was still an unquestionable alertness in his eyes.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I know you’re not big on funerals. A body ceases to function, it decomposes—what’s the point, right?”

  Nick smiled faintly. “A wise man once told me: Sometimes, you have to believe.”

  “I wish all this was for Teddy. I wish there was something—”

  “He’s on his way back to Lancaster County,” Nick said quietly. “Back to family. Ever been there? It’s beautiful country.”

  Kathryn reached up to straighten his collar. “When was the last time you slept?”

  “My species doesn’t require much sleep,” he said. As he spoke his eyes searched across the sea of heads until he located one familiar face.

  “Come on,” he said to Kathryn, “I feel like mingling.”

  The sheriff and deputy stood together near the center of the throng. As they approached, Kathryn flashed Peter a lukewarm smile; the two men exchanged no greeting of any kind. Kathryn reached up and hugged Beanie, then brushed back his wild brown hair and straightened his tie. He hardly seemed to notice; his eyes were fixed longingly on a half-dozen children playing at a picnic table thirty yards away.

  Kathryn looked at Peter. He nodded his reluctant approval, and Beanie frolicked off to join his waiting friends.

  “I was wondering,” Nick spoke up, “now that the investigation is over, would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions? Just out of curiosity.”

  The sheriff glanced at Kathryn. “Why not?” he said pleasantly. “Fire away.”

  Nick rubbed hard at his chin. “What was Jim McAllister’s problem anyway?”

  “What problem is that?”

  “You know—in the Gulf. Everybody says he had some kind of problem—it seemed to bug him constantly. He never got over it—thought it was worse than anything that happened to him in the war. Imagine that—worse than the war! What was the problem anyway?”

  The sheriff folded his arms and looked at the ground. “The 82d was based at a place called Ab Qaiq,” he said. “Andy and Jim were in the 4-325, assigned to Camp Gold. It was a temporary deployment, a tent city. Everybody got packages from home, and we used to stash the good stuff under our cots—and we’d raid each other’s stuff from time to time. One day Andy was digging through Jim’s stuff, and he found a little container of white powder. Got it?”

  Nick squinted hard. “I ran across an old friend of Jim’s up in Washington. He seemed to think Jim’s big problem was with some guy.”

  “Jim was afraid Andy was going to turn him in.”

  Kathryn broke in. “Andy would never have turned Jimmy in!”

  “Of course not,” the sheriff grumbled. “But Jim was afraid he might. That stuff can make you a little paranoid, you know.”

  “You know what they say about paranoia,” Nick said. “Just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get you.”

  The sheriff rolled his eyes.

  “How do you know all this?” Nick asked. “Did Jim tell you?”

  “I never saw Jim in the Gulf. We were assigned to separate units, remember? Andy came to see me a few days before the ground war began. He wanted me to know.”

  Nick stared thoughtfully into the sky. “So this big problem was that his old friend found out he had a nasty habit—and that was worse than the war? Worse than bombs and tanks and dead people? So bad that he could never even talk about it—even years later?”

  The sheriff shrugged. “You’d have to ask Jim about all that.”

  “Yes,” Nick nodded. “And that’s not easy to do.”

  The sheriff grew impatient. “Anything else?”

  “Yes,” Nick said. “Where did Jim McAllister get all his cocaine? In a small town like this, for all those years?”

  “Beats me.”

  Nick did a double take. “You don’t know? You knew your friend was a user when he came back from the Gulf. You knew he must have had a supplier. You mean there were drugs being sold in your nice little town for all those years, and you never even knew about it?”

  “Not in my town. Maybe his connection was up Fayetteville way. That’s a rough town, an army town. There’d be plenty of connections up there.”

  “You knew your friend was a user, and you didn’t like it. Didn’t you ever think about cutting him off from his source?”

  “I didn’t know the source, okay?” the sheriff said angrily. “Jim stuck to himself a lot. Disappeared for weeks at a time. Nobody knew what kind of people he was hanging around with—nobody,” he said with a glance at Kathryn, then turned back to Nick again. “Any more questions, Doc?”

  “Just one more.” He paused. “The night before last—the night Teddy was murdered—where were you? I checked the phone records. Teddy didn’t call your office, and he didn’t call your home; he called your cell phone. Where were you when he called?”

  The sheriff shoved his hands deep into his pockets and kicked furiously at the dirt. He muttered something to himself and glanced quickly up at Kathryn—but it was a full minute before he finally answered.

  “I was … with Jenny McIntyre,” he grumbled.

  “After midnight?”

  “After midnight.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Most of the night.”

  “All night?”

  “All night, okay?”

  Nick smiled.

  Kathryn stared at Peter in embarrassment and confusion, and Peter did everything he could to avoid her gaze. “Will you excuse me?” she said awkwardly, and the two men watched in silence as she walked away.

  “Okay, Doc.” The sheriff turned to Nick. “It’s just the two of us now, just you and me—so why don’t you drop the act and tell me what’s on your mind? I’d like to know how you’ve got this whole thing figured.”

  Nick studied the sheriff’s face carefully.

  “I figure you’re in love with Kathryn. It’s not really love, of course—it’s more like a pathological obsession—but it’s the closest thing you’ve got. It must have really popped your cork when she decided to marry Andy. But then you got a lucky break when he was killed in the Gulf, and you had a second chance. You played the knight in shining armor to the grieving widow—you were her savior, her deliverer. You couldn’t win her love, so you tried to earn it—but it didn’t quite work, did it? I think she wants to love you, but for some reason she can’t—maybe because deep down inside she sees through you, just like I do. You kept pursuing her, but somewhere along the line she started to feel the heat, so you backed off. Like they say in these parts: If you send in the dog too fast, you flush the bird. That’s where Jenny McIntyre comes in. The sheriff got himself a girlfriend—in name only, of course—and that took the pressure off Kathryn. Now you two could be buddies again. That was a neat bit about spending the night with Jenny. Boy, I would have loved to be a Diptera on that ceiling. You should have seen the look on Kathryn’s face when you told her—but then, you were staring at the ground at the time, weren’t you?”

  The sheriff stared at Nick with the eyes of a shark—eyes gray and flat and impenetrable; eyes capable of masking an entire ocean of rage and wrath with utter, absolute coldness.

  “You seem to enjoy pushing me, Doc,” he said with no hint of emotion. “Why is that?”

  “It’s hard to say,” Nick said thoughtfully. “You seem to bring out the worst in people.”

  “I’m not a fool, Doc.”

  “Believe me,”
Nick said, “I never took you for one.”

  There was a long, icy silence.

  “Something really bothered Jim McAllister after the Gulf,” Nick went on. “I call it guilt. I think ol’ Jimmy knew more about what happened to Andy than he let on. They served in the same unit, went into battle side by side … I think Jimmy saw an opportunity to have a second chance at Kathryn—and I think he took it.

  “So he wrestled with his conscience—but it wasn’t bad enough to stop him. He still had to deal with you—after all, only one of you could have her. That’s where you come into the picture. I’ll bet the two of you had a very interesting competition going over the years—vying for position, trying to outdo one another in service to the grieving widow.

  “About a week ago it finally came to a head, and that’s when you murdered him. I’m not so sure you planned to. Maybe the two of you had an argument, and it got out of hand. Maybe he wanted to kill you; after all, he had his gun with him. Maybe you just meant to hit him, and he fell backward—with his right leg propped up. Then you saw your opportunity, so you shot him in the head with his own sidearm and then placed the gun in his hand. No gunpowder residue, remember?

  “Not very sophisticated, was it—a phony suicide? I mean, for a professional like you who’s seen enough murders to know how to do it right. So sloppy, so many potential questions. Now what do you do? How would you ever get away with it? It took you several hours to figure that one out—time enough for the lividity in the left leg to become fixed. Then it suddenly dawned on you—what better place to bring the body than your own backyard, where the county coroner is the ice cream man! You knew that Mr. Wilkins’s incompetence would allow you to avoid an autopsy and all the nasty questions that would go with it. So you dumped the body here—with the leg flat this time—in a meadow where you knew hunters would stumble across it in just a day or two. Very neat. But the ironic thing—the funny thing—is that your plan was spoiled by the only person in the world you care anything about.”