A Bad Day for Scandal

by Sophie Littlefield

  Not by her, though, and she knew how to work them to get the most out of their collective wisdom.

  “What do you mean?” Linda wheezed, eyes widening.

  “Well … I probably shouldn’t say anything, but when the boys got over there, there wasn’t hide nor hair of Liman or Priss on the property,” she confided, making sure to imbue her revelation with as much breathless gravitas as possible.

  “No,” Gracie whispered.

  “I’m afraid so.” Stella caught Chrissy’s eye; the girl was standing back a bit from the rest of them. Her assistant always had a hard time hanging on to a straight face whenever they dealt with the Green Hat Ladies. Learning to maintain a sense of calm decorum was part of her ongoing training.

  “But how can we help?” Lola asked, rising to her full five feet three inches and putting her fists to her hips.

  Stella assumed a serious expression and let a few dramatic seconds tick by. The ladies drew even closer, resembling a scrum of fashion-challenged female senior citizen rugby players.

  “It’s like this,” she said conspiratorially, keeping her volume just high enough for their challenged hearing. “I need to know who-all Liman’s been, you know, consorting with. Who his known accomplices are, and all.”

  There was a collective murmur. The ladies loved jargon, so Stella laid it on thick.

  “If he’s been in any illicit relationships … any deals gone bad…”

  “Well, now, he is a homely one,” Shirlette cut in. “Weren’t any good looks wasted on him.”

  “He ain’t getting any action,” Lola said decisively, “’cept the kind that costs twenty dollars over at the Trucker World.”

  “Lola!” Gracie gasped.

  “I think I would know what I’m talking about,” Lola said, folding her arms over her chest and lifting her chin. “Pete can’t hardly help but hear the other fellows talk.”

  Lola’s husband, Pete Brennan, had been a long-haul trucker for over four decades. Stella doubted he was much of a familiar of the sorts of commerce that went on in the Trucker World parking lot on the far side of the truck showers. He was a nice old guy.

  “What did, ah, Pete say?” she asked gently. “If it doesn’t pain you too much to talk about it.”

  “Oh, Liman was a regular over there. Pete said he’d sober up once or twice a month, long enough to get his chain yanked.”

  “Lola!” Gracie repeated, her face turning a florid red that signaled cardiac distress.

  “What? I’m just telling Stella what Pete said. It’s important.”

  Chrissy rushed forward and took Lola’s arm. “Are you all right, Mrs. Brennan?” she murmured. “Can I get you something?”

  “No … no, dear. I’m just saying what needs said. I suppose we can’t keep the evil out of the world, now, can we?”

  “No, ma’am.” Chrissy flashed Stella a fleeting you owe me glance as she worked up a wistful expression. “The devil does come calling every time we turn our backs, don’t he?”

  “He surely, surely does,” Lola murmured, taking advantage of Chrissy’s strong grip to do a modified swoon, though Stella noticed she positioned her ample backside against the iron railing for support.

  “So Liman … uh, indulged in the comforts over at Trucker World,” Stella summarized. “But no other known vices or regular habits. No gambling, no drugs.”

  “None of that,” Linda agreed. “He’s just drunk, and kind of nasty, nothing else. But what about Priss? She always did seem to think she was a cut above other folks.”

  There was a round of vigorous nodding and harrumphing around the circle. Stella seized the opportunity; there was rarely a better time to get to the heart of a matter than when the ladies were in high dudgeon. “Can you think of anything, anything at all, that would help me gain a … a better understanding of Priss? And her possible whereabouts?”

  There was a moment of silent concentration, and then Shirlette piped up. “Well, you know, she had a reputation for leadin’ the fellas on in high school. Remember that? She could be quite a teasing bit of tail.”

  Stella reeled in her own startled expression. “You mean, ah…”

  “Well, I’m just repeating what they always said about her,” Shirlette said, coloring. “What, did I say something?”

  “Pete said she was coldhearted,” Lola said generously. “I think you’re right.”

  Stella fought to control her facial muscles, which were dangerously close to betraying her. “So you are saying that Priss was, um, unfriendly to her suitors.”

  “Well, except for Salty,” Linda exclaimed. “Remember?”

  Nods all around. Even Stella vaguely remembered: Dalton “Salty” Mingus, captain of the marginal Prosper High golf team back in the early nineties. He had squired Priss around for most of their senior year before she left for greener and more prosperous pastures. He’d moped for quite some time, drifting from one job to another, even—if Stella remembered right—moving up to the city for a while, but nothing seemed to stick until a few years back when he finally got married and went to work in his father-in-law’s restaurant supply business. Since then, he’d done well enough to buy a four-bedroom trilevel and lose any lingering traces of his once-athletic build.

  “You don’t think he was still in touch with Priss,” she ventured. Her impression of the grown-up Salty was a wide-bodied guy in an assortment of colorful double-knit golf shirts, his ample gut gamely restrained with pleated shorts for his post-church nine holes, while his wife and couple of young Minguses repaired to the homestead to put on a buttery spread.

  Bland. If she had to come up with a word for Salty, it would be bland.

  “Well, love does demand its due,” Shirlette said mysteriously, turning her lined face into the biting November winds that whipped down the street.

  “What do you mean, doll?” Stella asked cautiously.

  “Only, sometimes them things ain’t over when they’re over,” Shirlette allowed, though she kept her face averted from the group. Stella wondered if she’d experienced her own tragic love and made a mental note to explore the subject at a later date.

  She made a few more stabs at stirring up the ladies, but they didn’t have anything more to contribute, and when she and Chrissy left them a little later, they had resumed their brave campaign up and down the steps, Linda checking her watch and demanding they get over to the Popeyes before it filled up with lunchtime customers.

  On the ride home, Chrissy chattered about her cousin’s wedding, and Stella tried to keep track of the story’s extensive cast of characters, the members of the vast Lardner extended family, but her thoughts kept going back to Priss. Priss with her ridiculous boots and coat, her fancy car, her condescending airs.

  Priss with her—on reflection, desperate—bid for help with the body in the trunk. A body that Stella knew as little about now as she did when she first laid eyes on him. Maybe things were not as they seemed. Maybe Priss was in over her head. Maybe she was being stalked or framed or threatened—all kinds of terrible scenarios flashed through Stella’s mind, and she began to feel a wee bit remorseful.

  Until she remembered the pictures of her beating the crap out of Ferg Rohossen.

  Then the remorse evaporated in a hurry. If those pictures fell into the wrong hands—say those of Detective Daphne Simmons, who had made it clear that she didn’t care a whit for Stella—there was going to be all kinds of hell to pay. At the very least, if the pictures got out, it would make it nearly impossible for Stella to continue her covert benevolent aid society for the abused.

  But it would probably also mean that a lot of sketchy episodes from the last few years would be dug up and reviewed by Sheriff Dimmit Stanislas as he sat on his wide and lazy ass up in the county seat, and Stanislas had shown how eager he was to find scapegoats for any blight on the department. He’d be pleased as punch to go after Stella—especially if a conviction could boost his dismal reputation.

  And even if Goat wanted to help her then—which w
as very doubtful, since he’d probably be fit to be tied when he realized the extent of Stella’s lawbreaking—he’d be forced to join the efforts against her if he wanted to hold on to his job. Stella figured it was only the crazy red-hot pheromone-drenched electricity between them that had allowed him to overlook her escapades this long. But all the sexual chemistry in the world couldn’t help her if he ever found out just how far she’d gone to deliver her brand of renegade justice, a brand that flew in the face of everything Goat stood for.

  At least the envelope of pictures and the flash drive seemed to be blessedly missing, along with Priss and Liman.

  But Stella had a sinking feeling that she wouldn’t be able to track down the former without getting tangled up further with the latter.

  Chapter Nine

  “That’s quite a striking outfit you got on,” Stella observed that night as she and Chrissy hiked through a frost-dead field toward the Porter place, eyeing her assistant’s stretch fleece yoga pants tucked into a pair of pink fake-suede Ugg knockoffs, and the camo-print sherpa-lined flak jacket she’d borrowed from one of her brothers, the hood cinched tight around her pretty face. “You could take that anywhere from a dinner cruise in the Arctic sea, to a hoedown in a hunting camp.”

  “Well, you might as well get your mileage out of me now, seeing as I got to mind the shop tomorrow,” Chrissy said, ignoring Stella’s teasing.

  Since the farm was a suspected crime scene and all, they were taking the precaution of approaching it overland in the dark. Stella’s Jeep was parked off-road on Monroe land, hidden by a grove of scrubby staghorn sumacs.

  “I don’t know about these here flashlights you got,” Chrissy added dubiously. The Blue Dot police models had been a splurge that, on reflection, didn’t merit the price; the white light could blind a person but didn’t do the best job of illuminating the path in front of them.

  Stella sighed. “Yeah, sometimes you don’t get what you pay for.”

  She gave her backpack a reassuring heft. It was a BlackHawk R.A.P.T.O.R., designed for special ops use, which she bought herself for Christmas after an earlier model was lost in the summer’s deadly outing to the lake. She might never use all the features—she doubted that the built-in jump harness would come in handy any time soon, for instance—but she loved how slick and lightweight and intimidating looking it was.

  Inside the pack was her Tupperware spaghetti box full of lock tools. Some were professional models Chrissy had helped her find in dark and illicit corners of the Internet, but her favorites were the homemade jobs she’d crafted out of beer cans. That, and a vibrating Oral-B flossing wand that had its uses in certain situations.

  The Porter house was dark. The winds from earlier in the day had died down and now another storm threatened, illuminated by a silver moon that drifted in and out of the clouds. Their footsteps on the porch sounded much too loud, and an answering skittering sound from the bushes gave Stella a momentary start, but the inky form that went flying across the scrubby yard was nothing but a large rat or a small raccoon.

  Stella unzipped her pack and got out two pairs of latex gloves that she’d rubber-banded together. She handed one pair to Chrissy and slipped on the other.

  “Going uptown, I see,” Chrissy said, tugging the gloves over her hands. For everyday breaking and entering, Stella economized by using Ziploc sandwich bags, which were just fine when a person didn’t need a whole lot of manual dexterity, and cost a fraction what the gloves did.

  “Nothing’s too good for Priss,” Stella said sarcastically. “Why, she probably wipes her ass with silk scarves.”

  She jiggled the door handle, finding it locked but cheap. “Here, hold the flashlight for me, this won’t take but a minute. I swear, you can’t find a challenge anywhere around here these days.”

  “Whyn’t you let me try,” Chrissy said. “Might as well learn something, seein’ as I’m missing family poker night at my folks’.”

  Stella selected a narrow tension wrench and handed it to the girl. “What happened to your principles? How you were just going to focus on the shop and the computer stuff and stay out of all the hands-on lawbreaking?”

  Chrissy snorted, an unladylike sound that contrasted with the sweet frown of concentration on her full cherubic lips as she held the tool up and examined it in the powerful white light of the flashlight.

  “Well, now, I guess I just ain’t got enough starch to resist the lure of the dark side no more, Stella, not when I’m exposed to you every durn day. Which end of this am I supposed to use, anyway?”

  Stella tapped it delicately with a fingernail. “That there—see where it’s bent? Jimmy that into the keyhole.”

  Chrissy got it started, and Stella showed her how to finesse the pins with a narrow hooked pick, and soon the door opened up with a little rattle. “Why, it’s just like Liman’s begging to get robbed,” Chrissy marveled.

  “Don’t go getting any ideas. We don’t run that kind of outfit.” Stella slipped the tools back in the Tupperware container and snapped it shut with a satisfying little burp. Chrissy pushed open the door and entered the house, snapping on a light switch, which lit up a ’70s-era bean-shaped lamp with a macramé shade. The single bulb made little effort to illuminate the room, casting yellowish shadows over the huddled low-slung furniture, the piles of newspapers and magazines on the coffee table, the collection of dusty beer steins lining the shelves of a laminate entertainment center. “You start on the bedrooms. I’ll take the main rooms. And remember, this flash drive we’re looking for is just a little thing, a—”

  Chrissy stopped cold, so that Stella walked right into her, nearly falling on Liman’s musty brown carpet. When Chrissy put her hands to her hips and planted her feet wide and gave her a withering glare, like Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Stella knew she’d messed up.

  “What I meant was—”

  “You were not about to tell me what a fuckin’ flash drive looks like, Stella Hardesty,” the girl fumed.

  “I only meant that it’s not very big, that we need to be looking in—”

  “Whyn’t you tell me what one looks like. Since you know so much.”

  “Now, Chrissy, don’t be like that. You know I respect your skills. You know I consider—”

  “You best be considering telling me exactly what I’m lookin’ for. Take your time, Stella, and tell me all about it. Since you’re the expert and all.”

  Most gals, Stella reflected, tended to the hysteria end of the spectrum when they got flustered. She’d seen it over and over among her customers: The female brain seemed to require a lot of extra oxygen and bosom heaving when it was processing trouble and disharmony.

  Not Chrissy, though. Ever since the girl had faced down a pack of angry professional killers during Tucker’s rescue over the summer, she’d developed a repertoire of reactions more suited to, say, a ninja warrior. Her eyes narrowed and her breathing slowed down to what a person might experience if they were laid out on an iceberg and chilled like a shrimp cocktail, and she managed to radiate pure focused menace, as if she could kill with her mind alone.

  And that was with people she loved. Because, as Stella reminded herself now, Chrissy did indeed love her very much.

  Only Stella had done it again, had crossed that one line that provoked Chrissy like nothing else.

  She’d questioned the girl’s competence. Unwittingly, perhaps; without judgment, perhaps; but she’d done it, and now there was a whole field of hot coals sizzling between them. Chrissy had taken up computer hacking a few months earlier while she was recovering from being shot up like a prize buck, and she’d spent enough of her growing-up years being told she was just a shade smarter than a stump, that she’d need to trade on her voluptuous good looks to get anywhere, that discovering her own innate technical aptitude was like a junkie discovering the powerful allure of crack.

  Chrissy wasn’t just good with computers; she was a tech goddess, a byte-whisperer, a cracker of codes, a bloodhound of
networks. But on the inside, she was still dragging around the outdated self-image of a girl who barely graduated from Prosper High, who was more likely to be propositioned by her science teacher than expected to complete a lab report, whose own mother hoped only to marry her off to a boy who would support her while she started popping out babies.

  “A flash drive,” Stella said carefully, “is, like, a little old thing you stick into your computer that holds a bunch of documents on it. Or, you know, pictures.” Pictures of me beating the shit out of a scumbag in a barn, she didn’t add.

  “Uh-huh. Right. You still ain’t told me what it looks like. Bigger than a lipstick? Round? Square?”

  Stella knew she was being baited, but there was no graceful exit. She sighed heavily. “I don’t know. Um, like a, you know, plug or something?”

  “A … plug? Stella, do you even know how to turn on your Mac?”

  “I. Uh. Well, see the thing is, you always have it on already when I come in and—”

  “Forget it,” Chrissy snapped, and started down the hall. “Once I look around in here, I’ll come back out and help you out, since you obviously don’t know your butt from your elbow.”

  Stella went to work with a smile on her face.

  They kept at it for nearly an hour. Stella worked the living room and kitchen and tiny foyer with the gloomy attention of someone who knows she is going through a pointless exercise. She didn’t want to admit it, but she felt in her bones that the drive wasn’t here. That nothing helpful, in fact, was here—no lingering trace of Priss’s presence at all.

  The beer stein that had been used to pummel someone in the head—that’s what Stella was assuming, given the hair and skin; knock someone over the head and you were going to get that particular kind of detritus—was sitting safe and secure up in Fayette, under the watchful eye of Detective Simmons’s crime scene staff.

  Otherwise, there wasn’t a whole lot to go on. Blooming smudges of black fingerprint powder surrounded the doorframes leading in and out of rooms, the light switches, objects on tables. A pair of chairs that looked as though they belonged on either side of the fireplace had been stacked next to the scratched old walnut hutch in the dining room. In lieu of the usual personal tchotchkes—framed snapshots, ashtrays, figurines—the tabletop surfaces featured wooden bowls of pretzel crumbs and empty beer cans and expired issues of TV Guide. Stella checked in drawers and behind the sofas and under the rugs, but the most unexpected thing she came up with was a ticket stub from a matinee showing of Lethal Weapon 2. Which suggested nothing other than the possibility that Liman hadn’t cleaned under the rugs in two decades.