“Darn it all,” she announced to her guests. They’d soldiered on through the dessert course without her. The twins—back from their brief television break—were wearing smears of pie on their darling faces, and Todd was well into a second piece. “I have to go help Mindy Jorgenhammer—her alpacas got out.”
“All of them?” Todd demanded. “That’s a shitload of alpacas.”
“Todd!” Sherilee exclaimed. “Watch your mouth!”
“I’ll help you, Stella,” Goat said, pushing back his chair.
“We could all help,” Sherilee said uncertainly. She was that particular breed of lady who never failed to offer to lend a hand, despite juggling three children and a mortgage and a pain-in-the-ass no-good ex and a shit-for-pay job in another town.
“Sit, sit,” Stella said as cheerily as she could manage. “This happens all the time, and it’s just a two-person job. You all would be in the way. And you’d scare them. Very skittish, alpacas. Really, it’s best if I go by myself.”
She turned to Goat, who was standing at the ready next to his chair. She allowed herself one last appreciative up-and-down view of his fine broad-shouldered form before sighing and grabbing her purse off the breakfront.
Duty called.
“Y’all know where I keep the good stuff,” she said a little wistfully. “Just make sure to leave me a little shot of Johnnie for when I get back.”
Chapter Three
In the car, she queued up her lookin’-for-trouble playlist and turned up the heat. Winter was hanging around this year, and it was a clear, star-dusted night, the latest cold snap dappling everything with a sparkly coating of frost in the moonlight.
As she pulled out into the street, Melissa McClelland filled the Jeep with her moonshiney voice singing “Solitary Life”:
Better keep the heat off ’till the snow falls,
I’ll fill up on whiskey, rye and reruns
“Hmmph,” Stella muttered to herself. A dire expedition, indeed. She turned down the volume and hit Chrissy’s number on the speed dial. After a few rings, her assistant picked up and Stella could hear what sounded like a drunken fraternity party fast deteriorating into a riot in the background. In fact, it was a sort of family reunion, occasioned by a distant cousin’s wedding. The ceremony itself had been a modest noontime affair, but it was the extended post-nuptials house party that prompted Chrissy’s many siblings and aunts and uncles to make the trip to Prosper.
“It’s me!” she hollered.
“Well, I can see that from the caller ID, Stella.” Chrissy, too, was shouting to be heard. “Everything okay?”
“Not sure. Got a call from Priss Porter, of all people, wants me to come over to the farm, but she won’t tell me what for.”
“Did you say Priss Porter?” Stella could hear high-pitched screaming in the background and what sounded like dueling air-raid sirens. “I didn’t know she was back. Man, I hate that stuck-up bitch.”
“You know her?”
“Yeah, she babysat a few times until Mama found out she was going around calling us trash. Like the Porters was some sorta fuckin’ royalty or something.”
“What-all you got going on there?” Stella asked as a man’s voice started barking orders.
“Oh, we’re just cleaning up from dinner. My brother Mac’s boys brought this toy car thing and they’ve run track all over Mom’s sofas and I guess she’s fit to be tied, and Dad wouldn’t help so she threw a plate at him, and Tucker’s got gum in his hair and Ginger’s upstairs trying to get the boys to apologize only she’s threatening to take a hairbrush to their butts and so things got a little out of control.”
Stella never ceased to be amazed at the sheer velocity and volume of goings-on in the extended Lardner clan. Chrissy was one of six kids, most of whom had run through a spouse or two and produced a slew of towheaded cousins for Chrissy’s two-year-old boy, Tucker. Chrissy herself was a widow; she’d started out as one of Stella’s clients.
“I hope y’all are keeping the firearms locked up tonight.”
“Stella!” Chrissy gasped. “Of course we are. There’s kids here. We put everything away after the turkey shoot, and that was hours ago.”
“Get anything?” Chrissy had told her all about one of the more colorful Lardner family traditions, which dictated that every male family member over the age of twelve sneak out to the state forest preserve early the morning of a wedding to shoot at wild turkeys. Lardners were generally crack hunters; the fact that they never managed to bag a bird was due to the other Lardner tradition of starting such mornings with ample amounts of schnapps in their coffee.
“Well, Pete and Mac got them a couple of squirrels. And then Dad almost took out a cow that wandered into the woods—that would of sucked. But Mom had a couple a store turkeys in the oven by the time they got home, so it all worked out. How’d your dinner go? Git you an extra large serving of sheriff?”
Stella ignored the teasing tone. At twenty-nine, Chrissy was about two decades more modern in her thinking than Stella was, and saw nothing wrong with a lady pursuing a gentleman full steam ahead. Stella herself was stuck in the wait-for-him-to-make-the-first-move habits of another generation, which might account for the fact that, despite the blistering kiss that had ratcheted up their relationship back at a party Stella threw to celebrate the wrap-up of her last big case a while back, things hadn’t moved along perceptibly since.
That, and the man had been busy. A series of snafus at the county sheriff’s office in Fayette, related to a recent murder case Stella had accidentally gotten involved in, had led to a flurry of butt-covering and reviewing of policies and reassessing of procedures by Goat’s boss, Sheriff Dimmit Stanislas. Goat and his fellow deputy sheriffs, who hailed from Fairfax and Harrisonville and Quail Valley, had been spending a fair amount of time commuting to Fayette to be retrained and reoriented and rededicated and otherwise made to suffer for mistakes they hadn’t personally made. The experience had left Goat both irritable and largely unavailable in the evenings and on the weekends, until now.
Tonight’s make-out session in the kitchen could have been a breakthrough—at least, if Priss’s call hadn’t messed things up.
“I used the alpaca thing,” Stella admitted grumpily.
“Aw, you did? That was one of the best ones!”
Stella had lined up a number of get-out-of-trouble contingency plans here and there all over the county. Most had been set up with the help of grateful ex-clients happy to do her a favor. Mindy, for instance, owed Stella for dealing with Rayburn Gish, a neighbor who made a habit of wandering over drunk and standing in the driveway howling up at her to come down and party with him, occasionally hauling out his man-parts and waving them around as an additional enticement.
Luckily, he hadn’t been too tough to discourage, and in return, Mindy had promised to serve as an alibi the next time Stella needed one.
After making a quick call and apologizing for cutting Mindy’s evening short, which Mindy reassured her was no big deal, since she’d only been watching the History Channel, Mindy rang off to let the alpacas out of their pens—to lend credibility to the story—and Stella drove the rest of the way to the Porter farm with nothing but Melissa McClelland’s soulful tunes to distract her.
Lights were, if not blazing, at least switched on here and there around the Porter homestead. Set in a clump of dispirited-looking trees amid a patchy sprawl of alfalfa fields, the farming of which Liman Porter had contracted out to leave himself more time for lounging around the house in his undershorts after his mother’s death, the house had seen better times. Paint blistered and peeled off the siding, the chimney leaned, and rails were missing from the front porch banister.
A car was parked at a haphazard angle in the roughly circular gravel drive that wound crookedly up to the house before quickly veering back to the main road as though it didn’t want to get too close. The car didn’t share the same hangdog air as the rest of the place: it was glossy and sleek and expensive looking
.
Stella spotted a figure wrapped in blankets sitting in a weather-beaten wicker chair on the porch. She parked the Jeep behind the Mercedes and cut the ignition, then approached the porch cautiously, icy wind whipping her face.
“That you, Priss?” she called. Now that she was closer, she could see that there were towels layered with old quilts around the shivering figure, and that the person was huddled miserably against the wind. “What on earth are you sitting out here in the freezing cold for?”
“It’s Priscilla now,” the person said, standing and letting the blankets and towels fall to the porch. “I didn’t realize you were going to take forever to get here. How far could it possibly be, Stella, not more than four or five miles—what took you so long?”
That gave Stella pause—here she’d left the comfort of her toasty warm home and that nice spiked coffee and the promise of more Goat than she anticipated being able to handle, to come out to what was left of the sorry Porter homestead to visit with a woman who was pretty much despised by everyone in town.
“I had to change. I wasn’t about to come out here in my nice clothes.”
Priss gave Stella’s outfit a flick of examination and lifted her nose in the air—a nose that, Stella noticed in the dim light cast by a buggy porch lamp, had had the bump carved out of it. Porters all had ungainly noses; Priss was the first one who could afford to do anything about it, as far as Stella knew. She climbed the porch steps and took a better look, but in the poor light, she couldn’t make out the rest of Priss’s features to see if she’d bought herself any other alterations and enhancements.
“Is that your, ah, professional attire?”
Stella looked down at the hot pink fleece jacket she’d layered over a T-Bones sweatshirt and a pair of flannel-lined jeans and her fake-fur-topped snow boots. The jacket was sprinkled here and there with little sparkly crystals and featured a rhinestone-studded zipper. It had been a birthday gift from her friend Dotty Edwards, who had purchased it from QVC and owned one herself, in lime green. Dotty bought everything from drain uncloggers to fine faux jewelry to handcrafted teddy bears with little knitted sweaters from QVC, and she often got so swept up in the online-shopping rush that she couldn’t stop herself from buying twos and threes of things—Stella was frequently the lucky recipient of the excess.
“This’ll do, I guess,” she said, narrowing her eyes at Priss’s own cold-weather gear, which included a pair of shiny black boots with high pointy heels, and a shimmery black cape sort of affair that swung around dramatically but left long swatches of Priss’s forearms exposed. “Depending on what you want to hire me for. Speaking of which, if you have in mind to get right down to business, which I guess you must, seein’ as you’ve been waiting for me out in weather like this, how about if you show me a little good faith cash.”
Up-front payment was something Stella rarely insisted on. In fact, finances were generally among the last things she and a client talked about, well after the litany of misdeeds and mishandling and mistreatment that brought them to Stella in the first place, and generally after a soothing cup of hot chocolate or a resolve-firming jolt of Johnnie Walker Black or a steadying can of ice-cold Fresca, whatever the client seemed to require. Sometimes it was several meetings before payment came up at all.
But Priss was pissing Stella off. Part of the reason was obvious—the woman had left town at the age when most other local gals were trying to decide whether to pop out their first baby before or after racking up a Prosper High School diploma. She’d headed for the city, where rumor was she’d earned not just an undergraduate degree but also a business school diploma, which showed the kind of gumption Stella could respect—but then she somehow landed a job that rained money down on her but didn’t leave her time to come back and visit any of the local folks, even the few who’d managed to tolerate her when she still lived in Prosper. And that kind of thing—turning your back on the ones who brought you up—Stella didn’t cotton to that one bit.
Still, an unpleasant thought lurked around the edges of Stella’s mind, and she sighed and dragged it into focus: Priss’s life path—all but the frosty, ungrateful bitch part—was uncomfortably close to the dream Stella had carried around for Noelle for many years until she finally got it through her head that her daughter had her own ideas about her future. Specifically, Noelle did not wish to be a doctor or a teacher or a scientist—she dreamed, since the age of five, about becoming a beautician, and now that she had become a darn good one, the girl had the sort of career satisfaction that Stella guessed everyone was entitled to.
Maybe, she admitted to herself, she ought not judge Priss quite so quickly for her own ambitions and decisions.
“Well, I guess you can describe the job first,” she said, softening.
“I’ll do better than that—I’ll show you,” Priss said, going down the steps in her high heels with surprising agility, leaving neat little footprints in the dusting of snow that had accumulated on the ground. She practically sprinted across the drive, the loose gravel not even slowing her down, and aimed a key ring at her car. It beeped and the trunk popped and Stella caught up just in time for the expensive German-engineered mechanism to glide soundlessly open, the tasteful interior lighting revealing one sorry-looking dead man who, judging by his color, had been departed from the living long enough to get used to the idea.
Chapter Four
“There you have it,” Priss said, hand on a hip in the manner of a game show hostess, gesturing at the unfortunate fellow with a flourish. “I think it’s time we expedite his disposal, don’t you agree?”
“Holy fuck,” Stella breathed. “He’s dead.”
Priss shot her a look of surprise. “Well, yes, obviously. That’s why I called you.” She gave the trunk lid a little shove, and it closed as easily as it opened, sealing its ghastly cargo inside. Stella couldn’t say she wasn’t grateful not to have to look at the dead guy—his lips had pulled back from his teeth in a sort of leer that, combined with his glassy open eyes, gave him the effect of an especially bold voyeur.
“Me? What do I want with your dead guy?”
Priss turned and started toward the house. “Stella, I realize that you usually like to do the job beginning to finish, but I just got it started for you. Don’t worry, I’ll pay your full rate, but all I really need from you is the, ah … cleanup.”
“Hold on a minute,” Stella said to Priss’s retreating backside. Her heart was going at a solid clip. She’d seen a variety of dead guys, starting with her own husband, four years ago. Ollie hadn’t been very pretty with the side of his skull cracked open with his own wrench, but then again, he hadn’t been a whole lot to look at on a good day, and the expression he gave her before slumping to the floor was one of mildly disappointed surprise, as though Stella had served him tuna mac twice in one week.
Besides Ollie, there had been that crew of Kansas City mobsters down at the lake last summer. They were a lot more pissed-off looking about being killed—and considerably bloodier—than Ollie. And then there were the mummified remains of Brenda Cassell that she’d accidentally gotten wrapped up with—not literally, of course—but Stella had never really got a clear view of that body before getting hired to figure out who did it.
The man in Priss’s trunk was different from the rest of the bodies on Stella’s list in one key way: He was decidedly not fresh. His odor confirmed it, if his unflattering coloring left any doubt. And to Stella’s surprise, that made a considerable difference. She felt her tummy gurgle and surge in horror and realized she was close to losing the pleasantly digesting remains of the corned beef and Irish soda bread.
Priss turned just in time to see Stella lurch across the gravel drive to a row of winter-deadened lilacs that were in need of a good pruning. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Stella, how are you going to dispose of him if you can’t even stand to look at him?”
* * *
Stella’s yakking did have one happy side effect, which was to get her invited inside the
house, out of the cold.
“But you must be quiet,” Priss cautioned, holding a manicured finger to her lips as she opened the front door. “Liman is asleep—and he is ignorant of what has transpired.”
Liman’s ignorance was legendary, but Stella didn’t bother to point that out. There was no way she was going to take the job Priss was offering her, but she also was well aware of why the gal had come to her rather than seeking out some other thuggery expert, and the situation called for a little finesse.
Stella didn’t kill husbands or boyfriends for her clients. The only deaths she was responsible for were of the self-defense variety—and Stella had no problem including Ollie’s demise in that category, since thirty years of getting smacked around surely justified some defensive maneuvers on her part, and Stella had long ago forgiven herself for unleashing them all in one three-second torrent.
She wasn’t a killer for hire, but—understandably, since rumors of mayhem and mercilessness were part of her stock-in-trade—she didn’t dispel that perception either. There had been half a dozen occasions when her case strategy had included intimidating and threatening a wrong-doing man right out of town—even out of state—with a clear understanding that return visits and, in fact, any sort of contact at all were actively discouraged. These men were missing, though they weren’t missed enough for anyone to go filing reports or hire detectives to find out what parts they’d lit out for, and if folks presumed them dead, why, who was Stella to argue?
But that didn’t mean that Stella had any intention of getting started in the murder business. Not even in the abetting of it, which getting rid of Priss’s dead body would surely be.
“I’ll come in and get warm,” she said, “and then I’m going to turn around and head for home. You can count on me to keep my mouth shut, but that problem you got there, you started it and I’m afraid you’re going to have to be the one to finish it.”
“Oh, why don’t you wait until we’ve had a chance to discuss things further, before you make a final decision on that,” Priss murmured in a low voice. She tiptoed down the hall and peered into a darkened room, listened for a moment, then gently closed the door. When she came back, she pointed to a chair in front of the fireplace, which looked as though it hadn’t been used in a long while, if the Hustler and Off-Road magazines stacked in sloppy piles on the hearth were any indication. “I’d offer you a drink, but my brother isn’t exactly a connoisseur of spirits. I believe all he has is Budweiser. In cans.”
A Bad Day for Scandal Page 2
