“And I made him promise it was over, or I told him he could just stay up there and forget coming home.”
Stella didn’t say it, but she’d lay odds Salty would’ve taken that deal, if Priss had been the one to offer it. He was one seriously smitten man. For the umpteenth time, she marveled at the hold Priss seemed to have on such a variety of men.
“So when she sat her skinny little ass down in my living room, and Salty told me to go to our room and give them time to talk alone…” Doraleigh’s voice was finally cracking, sniffling hiccups punctuating her speech. “Well, I went down the hall but I was listening, of course I was listening to her and she wasn’t even all that nice about it, Miz Hardesty. It was like she thought she could just waltz in and wind Salty around her little finger and get him to do whatever she wanted—with our own two babies sleeping down the hall from her—and she wanted him to help her get rid of a dead body in the trunk of that fancy car. I mean, of all the nerve, she says it won’t take him but an hour out of his evening and he had all the equipment and tools and what-all and didn’t he think he owed her after all the time they’d been together?”
“So that’s when you decided to kill her?”
“No, not then, not quite I didn’t. I waited until I just couldn’t stand it no more, and then I came into the living room and I told her to get the hell off my property and then, and then—” Doraleigh’s sniffles turned to choked sobs, and Stella felt almost a little bit sorry for her. “—and then Salty tells me she’s in a hard place, couldn’t we just help her this once, and I see that she won’t quit until she’s got every bit of him poisoned with her evil desires.”
“Here’s the thing I don’t get, Doraleigh—you’re not a real big gal. How the heck did you get all three of them bodies into Adriana’s pond?”
Doraleigh made a sound of disgust that was half snort and half ragged cry. “I wasn’t gonna kill anyone at all. That’s the crazy thing. After Priss left, Salty had him a couple a tall boys and passed out in the living room and the whole time I was just getting madder and madder. The kids were down for the night and I just thought, well, I’ll go and I’ll reason with her, woman to woman. You know?”
“Uh … yeah. Sure. What time was this?”
“I don’t know … maybe one thirty or so by the time I made up my mind. Anyway, when I got there Priss was so wound up, I couldn’t get a word in, she told me forget Salty, she said we’re a couple of resourceful women, we can take care of things ourselves, and the whole time I’m like whoa, wait, bitch, I’m here to call you out and then she’s waving her checkbook around, saying if I just help her get this dead guy into the Wolforts’ pond, she’ll pay me five thousand dollars and if I don’t, she’ll make it look like Salty did it anyway.”
It was almost refreshing to know that Priss’s shamelessness knew no bounds, but Stella was perplexed. “How would she have done that? I mean, it wasn’t like she had, you know, Salty’s prints or DNA or anything to connect him to the body.”
Doraleigh fixed her with a toxic gaze. “Stella. We’re talking Salty, here. Who knows what she had of his?”
“Uh…” Stella considered trying to explain elementary forensics to the woman, and realized she was out of her depth. “Okay. So … you helped her?”
“I made her put the plastic in the van,” Doraleigh said with a trace of satisfaction. “Them captain’s chairs? Why, they just pop right out and we moved them back and made a nice big area back there. With two of us, it didn’t take much work to get that—that man in here, and then we went in to have a stiff drink to get ready, which was her idea, Miz Hardesty, before we went over to the pond.”
“Weren’t you curious about why she had a dead guy in the first place?”
“Miz Hardesty,” Doraleigh said with considerable dignity. “That was not my business. All I meant to do was come to an understanding and get home to my family.”
“Er … okay. So you’re having a drink…”
“And there’s all this thumping around from the bedroom and we can hear Liman talking on the phone and Priss is like, Oh shit, he’s not supposed to be awake, and she’s all, Don’t worry, don’t worry, but then he comes busting out of there like I told you, like some kind of lunatic—”
“I think she drugged him,” Stella said. “So he’d be asleep when you-all were doing the body disposing.”
Or, more likely, she’d drugged him much earlier, before Stella herself had visited, and after Salty had turned her down. Priss was just full of contingency plans, Stella noted with grudging admiration.
“Well, maybe. All’s I know is he tears out of his room all crazy like it’s the Second Coming or something and Priss hits him with that thing—”
“Beer stein,” Stella interrupted helpfully.
“That’s what you keep saying, but have you ever in your life seen anyone drink a beer out of one a them things?”
“Uh…”
“No, ma’am, and you won’t, either. Not when you can get a frosty mug, it ain’t even a contest. Anyway, Priss hits him and he goes down all twitchy and then it got a little weird for a while because I’m like uh, Maybe he needs a doctor, and she’s all, Shit, shit, shit, and by the time she made up her mind, he was kind of, like, you know, dead.”
“Kind of dead? Did y’all check?”
“Hey, that was her thing, I figure she hit him and besides it was her brother, not mine, but she seemed sure, yeah. And she stares at him a minute and then she says, well, how about if I add a couple thousand bucks, we can get rid of two as easy as one, and what am I going to do? I mean I’m already toting around one body, what’s another? And so we dragged Liman out there, too. And that was almost worse than the first one, Miz Hardesty. I mean on account of he was still kind of warm and all. And his head kept bumping on the ground when we dragged him.”
Hysteria, definitely, Stella figured. “Just one little thing I don’t get. Where, in all of this, did Priss end up dead?”
“Oh. That. So we get Liman out to the van and Priss is like, I’ll take the hands and you get the feet and we’ll just put him up on top of, you know, the other guy. And I’m like, are you sure, it’s your brother, your kin, and that guy’s not fresh, if you see what I’m saying. I say, just let’s get some more plastic from the shed, because Liman had plenty in there, I think they were drop-cloths, they had paint on them. I said we’ll put some plastic on the other guy and it’ll be more, um, sanitary or whatever. Because I don’t care what you say, at the end of the day, it’s still your blood kin, you don’t want to go disrespecting that.”
Stella figured the disrespecting line had been crossed somewhere before Priss had actually killed her own brother, but she kept the thought to herself. “I take it she didn’t agree.”
“So get this,” Doraleigh said, twisting in her seat to look Stella in the eye, momentarily oblivious of the road. “She tells me, why don’t I leave the thinking to her. We haul Liman up into the van and she goes and gets some bungee cords from the shed and kind of wraps the plastic around them two and then I’m like, well, let’s get this done so we head out to the Wolforts’. Only the whole time I’m just thinking about what a bitch she’s always been. And not just to me, to everyone. Leave the thinking to me—don’t that sound like something she would of said back in school?”
“Well, I don’t…”
“I was a couple of years ahead of her, but everyone said it. Everyone.”
“So you get to the pond,” Stella prompted.
“Yeah, we parked on the far side and it wasn’t too hard, we got Liman dumped in no trouble, he floated out a ways and just kind of sunk down real peaceful. That wasn’t bad. And then we’re dragging the other guy and we’re, you know, trying not to breathe his smell and all, and Priss all of a sudden drops her end and flips her hair and says, Look at us, a couple of women doing men’s work, and I’m all, What the hell? And she says men are dumb beasts, you can get them to do anything you want when it’s all fun and games, but when you got troubl
e, it’s women got to clean up the mess.”
Stella couldn’t help thinking that wasn’t too far off of her own philosophy, but she could see where it was a delicate and subjective matter. “You didn’t care for that,” she guessed.
“I said, what do you mean, get them to do anything you want? And she gives me this look like she feels sorry for me, and she says, come on, I think we both know what I’m talking about. And I’m all, you have something to say to me, just say it, and she … she…”
Doraleigh was beginning to choke up again, which Stella had to believe wasn’t great for her visibility. “It’s okay,” she said as soothingly as she could.
“It’s not okay. She says, well, all I ever had to do to Salty was give him this one look and he’d do, he’d do anything I wanted.”
“Oh.”
“And she wasn’t even sorry. It was like she thought I’d agree with her or something. My own husband? I couldn’t get Salty to take out the trash if I offered to flash my tits at a Cards game.”
“Okay, I think I—”
“Now you see where I’m going?” Doraleigh demanded, giving the road a cursory glance and tugging the wheel back into a roughly straight direction. “Now you understand? I just grabbed one of those bungees off those guys and I got her before she figured out what I was doing.”
“You strangled Priss with a bungee cord.”
“Well, yeah, Miz Hardesty, what do you think I been trying to tell you? I mean, Salty couldn’t even help himself around her, she was that evil.”
Poor Salty, Stella thought, getting tangled up with two such utterly reprehensible, unredeemable women. Only, he was the one who’d kept going back for more, wasn’t he? Wasn’t like there was anyone holding a gun to his head to make him keep pursuing Priss after she’d dumped him.
That gave Stella an idea. Of course, she didn’t have an actual gun on her any longer—and if Doraleigh had an ounce of sense, the girl would have tucked it away someplace safe so she didn’t hurt herself with it, but unfortunately she struck Stella as the kind of girl who’d run headlong into trouble, so it was probably sitting on the passenger seat nice and handy for Doraleigh to shoot her with if she got the hankering.
So one course of action was to simply barrel through the car’s midsection, between the two captain’s chairs with their child seats strapped firmly in place, and make a grab for it. But if she was wrong, if Doraleigh had the gun in her purse or pocket or, for that matter, in her hand, something was bound to get fucked up and they’d end up shooting and veering into oncoming traffic, which wouldn’t be a good outcome for anyone.
So Stella rolled onto her side a bit farther, one of the river rocks squishing into her ribs, and reviewed the contents of the floor, considering and discarding food wrappers, empty juice boxes, a stuffed frog … until her gaze lighted on the remains of a plastic car that had once worn a jaunty grin painted on its hood but now, after apparently being stepped on by someone of considerable weight, sported a broken windshield with plastic shards poking out in several directions.
Stella palmed the car, keeping an eye on Doraleigh, who was back to fiddling with the radio, trying to tune out the persistent static. She worked one of the shards back and forth until it tore free from the toy, and regarded her makeshift weapon, a four-inch strip of soft plastic whose edges were soft and flexible, but which ended in a sharpish point.
It would have to do.
Stella closed her eyes and took three slow, deep breaths, the way she’d learned in physical therapy. She conjured up her peaceful vision, the one that Glynnis, her therapist, had suggested she choose to center herself before every session. Stella had told Glynnis that the vision was a tall sunflower bending softly in a breeze, but the truth was that what she saw when she closed her eyes and breathed deep was the very fine rear view of the sheriff, from the broad no-nonsense shoulders straining the limits of his uniform shirt, down to that sweet, tight ass, down those long, long legs to those polished black brogues.
She gave herself a moment to focus on her vision, letting it fill her senses with a feeling of peace and belonging in the universe, and then she sprang from the seat and through the car as fast as she could, slamming into the back of the driver’s seat and hooking an arm around the headrest and Doraleigh’s neck, jabbing her in the space behind her ear with the plastic shard with the other hand.
“What are you doing?” Doraleigh shrieked as the car wove dangerously into the other lane before she righted it at the very last moment.
“Don’t talk,” Stella said quickly. “Keep your eyes on the road and keep driving. What I have here is a kris knife. It’s Javanese, and it’s small, but it’s engineered to be completely fucking deadly, and it’s digging into your sternomastoid which is just dangerously close to your jugular. If I stick you just so, you’ll bleed to death, and there won’t be anything anyone can do to help you. Not many people know exactly how to get around all the nerves and tendons and whatnot, but an old army medic taught me and I guarantee you I won’t miss if you give me reason.”
It was a lot of tall-tale-telling to get done in one breath, and Stella was shaking with adrenaline and the sheer effort of the lie by the time she finished. She glanced at the passenger seat and, sure enough, there was her little gun glinting in the summer sun.
Doraleigh nodded slowly, straining away from the plastic shard. “Don’t hurt me,” she whispered. “I got kids that depend on me.”
“I ain’t going to do anything at all to you,” Stella said. “Long as you do what I tell you.”
“What happened to you, anyway?” Doraleigh asked in a plaintive voice. “You used to be such a nice lady. I remember when you used to volunteer in the school office.”
Stella sighed. “I’m still a nice lady. Only, a different kind of nice.”
She glanced out the window, checked the slant of the winter sun to get her bearings, and recognized a black ridge of cliffs that rose up out of the ground to the right a few miles away, and realized where Doraleigh had been planning to dump her.
“Homer Reservoir,” she said admiringly. “Not bad. If you would a tipped me into the far end, I probably would have got all tangled up in the water weeds and shit, and they wouldn’t of found me until the Second Coming.”
“That was the idea,” Doraleigh said glumly.
Stella dug a little deeper with the shard. “Well, better luck next time you decide to off somebody. Now, why don’t you take a nice wide U-turn and head us back to town.”
Chapter Thirty-one
She would have called ahead, but reaching for her phone would have meant letting loose her headlock on Doraleigh, plus even though she had Goat on speed dial, she was afraid she’d hit the wrong keys in all the excitement, and it seemed to her the situation had become plenty confusing enough.
When they pulled into the sheriff’s department parking lot, she was relieved to see Goat’s cruiser in its customary spot—and dismayed to see that the Fayette folks were still in town, the crime scene van and Daphne’s unmarked Chevy Lumina parked in the guest spaces.
“Pull right up to the front door,” Stella suggested, and Doraleigh sighed mightily and eased the minivan’s front bumper within a few feet of the glass double doors that were a holdover from the Hardee’s days. “Now, lay on the horn.”
It took a couple more applications of the “knife,” but Doraleigh finally set to honking. Irene was the first out, squinting in a burst of weak late-afternoon sunlight, and Stella reached past Doraleigh and poked the window button. When it slid halfway down, she hollered, “Get the sheriff, please, Irene!” and the old gal ducked back inside without a word.
But it wasn’t just Goat who emerged from the building a few minutes later. He was followed by Mike Kutzler and Ian Sloat; Detective Simmons, who was running her hands furiously through her feathered ’70s-style shag; as well as Officers Hewson and Long, the two crime scene techs that Stella knew slightly from the last time the team had come to town. It was a wonder any of them s
till had their jobs, after the debacle they’d shunted onto Goat and his deputies, but it was a sad truth of law enforcement that often it wasn’t the cream that rose to the top, but the dregs.
Stella had an inspiration. “Tell ’em you’ll only make a full confession to Sheriff Jones,” she whispered quickly into Doraleigh’s ear. “The way you want to play this is, keep it local. The minute you get into county hands, why, you’ll fry for sure. Ask for a private audience with Goat, and you’ve got a chance.”
The knot of lawmen and -women circled the minivan. There was a bit of excitement when the Bersa was spotted on the passenger seat, but Mike dug a wrinkled hankie out of his pocket and opened the passenger door and picked it up gingerly.
Goat, meanwhile, stared in the open driver window, ducking down to get eye level with Stella. “What have you got for us today, Miz Hardesty?” he asked politely, giving away nothing in his clipped, cool tones.
“Only a double murderer,” Stella said. “This here’s the Porters’ killer, in the flesh.”
“I ain’t talkin’ to no one but you, Sheriff,” Doraleigh said with conviction. “Now, can you take that knife outta my neck, Stella?”
Daphne had her gun drawn and trained somewhere around the headrest. Stella figured the woman would be just as happy to shoot her as Doraleigh, so she decided to play it by the book.
“I’d, uh, like to surrender my weapon to you, Sheriff Jones,” she said. “Maybe if you could open the slider—”
“I advise you not to,” Daphne barked.
“Oh, can it, Simmons,” Goat said without giving her a glance. He slid the door open and regarded Stella—and her makeshift weapon—with surprise, and then amusement.
“My, my,” he said softly.
“What’s she got?” Ian called from the other side of the car. Daphne’s gun was unmistakably aimed at her now, Stella thought, so she moved very slowly as she handed the plastic shard over to Goat.
A Bad Day for Scandal Page 24
