We Boiseans make excellent zucchini bread. And zucchini succotash. And zucchini pickles. And …
Squashed
I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. Didn’t help. The sight of Dave remained. Oh, excuse me, not Dave but Eagle Claw, as he insisted being called, lay splayed out and too still in the dirt between a row of corn and one of overgrown squash.
A watermelon-sized zucchini lay smashed over Dave’s face, with string goo packed with enormous seeds trailing from the squash down to the ground. Indents on the rounded dome of the enormous squash and the rounded impressions of knees to either side of his chest showed how someone had sat on him and pressed the zucchini down until Dave suffocated.
His hands clutched the smashed edges of the squash and one hand held a scrap of cloth as well. Without conscious thought, I knelt down and wriggled the piece loose from his tight grasp and beheld a scrap of lace. I recognized the lace pattern as one of Mrs. McGarrity’s tatted creations.
I curled the lace into my fist and swallowed back the squash-flavored bile that crept up my throat. I disliked the man for good reason, but he didn’t deserve such an ignominious death by overgrown vegetable.
A quavering familiar voice behind me asked, “Timmy, what have you done?”
I stumbled to my feet and whirled around to see Dora, the questioner, and Julie, Dave’s current girlfriend, standing a couple of feet away. Julie clutched a smaller but still large zucchini, this one whole, while Dora held a zucchini cheese casserole clutched tight to her chest, the cheese dripping down her jeweler’s apron. I almost didn’t recognize Julie. She’d thinned from a size 20 down to a size 10, almost cutting herself in half. Ugh, another bad image. Almost as bad as how this must look to the two women.
“Running Bear, not Timmy,” I said automatically. Force of habit from when I first opened my store, Mocs N’ More a couple of years ago.
Even though I could only claim one great-grandmother as a Shoshone-Bannock, my family’s moccasin-making tradition made me claim my Native American heritage. The main contention between me and Dave was his assertion of his own three-quarters Cherokee for his store and his insisting on my removing my Native American designation from everything in my store. He reveled in calling me Thin Blood Timmy.
“I’ve known you as Timmy O’Reilly ever since kindergarten, and that’s what I’m calling you,” Dora said, with hints of her stubborn, obstreperous Aunt Maddie in her words. “Now answer the question.” More hints of Maddie.
“I just got here,” I protested. I pointed at my own dropped bag filled with zucchini as proof. I’d planned to open the bag and use the zucchinis inside as salvos toward Dave’s head, in another act of aggression in our annual zucchini war. Every year, in Starke, this little Idaho town, people grew zucchinis. Every year, people grew way too many zucchinis. Every year, Dave grew the most, because, as he always said, “It’s a true Native American food.” Then he’d drive by drop off grocery bags stuffed with squash to everyone, including me. I despise zucchini.
“You mean you got here before the both of us, Running Bear, and killed my boyfriend,” Julie piped up, pulling me back into my current predicament with her voice as thin as the rest of her. At my glower, she ducked behind Dora and cowered, her protecting squash still pressed against her well-tucked in shirt into her Dockers. The better to show off her new waist, I supposed. No elastic-waist-mom-jeans for Julie anymore.
“Wait a minute, let’s not jump to conclusions, here,” Dora said, in a complete turnaround from her earlier accusation, in her usual ADD-Dora style. Or maybe her style should be called Creative Dora, for she made gorgeous jewelry—and appreciated my beaded wall hangings. “Maybe Timmy is here just like us,” she nodded at Julie, “me to deliver a thank you casserole and you to pick up another zucchini for your diet.”
Zucchini would make a great diet for me. I’d rather eat dirt. I smiled my thanks at Dora.
Julie must have taken the smile to include her, for she said, “But Dave—Eagle Claw—always said, ‘There’s only room for one Idaho Native American in Starke and that’s me.’ And I know he was taking away business from your store.”
“Not only my store, and he did other crime, too,” I protested. Everyone knew that he took advantage of the other artists around town, taking eighty percent of the profit when he sold their art on commission in his store. Mrs. McGarrity in particular, with her tatted lace creations—I thought of the lace still clutched in my hand. “He set himself up to be … squashed, one way or another.”
Dora winced and stared at Dave’s face covering. Julie’s eyes teared up. I regretted my choice of words. Before I could apologize, Dora’s gaze flipped to over my shoulder and I heard Sheriff Mallard say, “Yes, but whoever did the squashing—deed had to have been a big person, or at least heavy.”
I sighed. Yeah, I’m both. With my stocky bottom heavy build, I’m more bear than running. Sheriff Mallard came up and took my arm, with a light touch, but firm enough that he could hold on if I tried to take up the first part of my name. Figured I’d be the main suspect.
“Hold on, Mallard, we don’t even know how old Eagle Claw here died, for sure,” Dora said.
I smiled my thanks at her for speaking up for my possible innocence. Then she added, “Sure, it looks bad and Julie and I got here and found Timmy crouched over the body—” she stopped and compressed her lips. Too late.
Mallard’s hand tightened on my arm. I could feel the slickness of his always-sweaty hand and resisted yanking my arm away. The Sheriff was famed for being able to sweat out a uniform in the middle of a snowstorm. The pressure on my arm eased as Mallard said, “You’re right, Dora.”
“I am?” Dora squeaked out the words. “About which part?”
Oh, my dear friend, Dora, always was going a touch too far, the signature sign of an artistic temperament.
“About the part that we don’t know what Dave died of,” I provided and added, “or even when, or maybe even where.”
Mallard dropped my arm. “Sorry, Timmy.”
“Running Bear.”
He ignored my correction. “But you’ve got to admit, you’ve got motive and maybe means.”
As I could think of no good or honest answer to that, I stayed silent. Great-Grandma always said, “Sometimes it’s better to just shut up.” Wise Indian woman.
* * *
Dora and I stood behind the crime scene “Do Not Cross” yellow tape and watched Sheriff Mallard and the Staties go about their work. A sobbing Julie had been escorted by Doc Byrne to his car. After Doc Byrne cleaned Dave up some, she’d make an informal identification so that the family could be notified and then go to Starke’s, our tiny town’s tiny police station. Mallard ordered Dora and me to stay put behind the crime scene tape until he “could take us in for questioning,” he’d said, all official sheriff of Starke, Idaho.
Dora picked at the remnants of her cheese zucchini casserole on her apron. “I’m betting this will be harder to get off than my casting wax,” she complained. The casserole, along with my bag of zucchini and Julie’s mondo-zucchini, had all been confiscated as “evidence.” Evidence of what, I didn’t know, but good riddance to the squash overload.
“We’ve got bigger problems than your laundry,” I said.
She looked up at that and sniffed in my direction. “Seems to me it might be you who has the bigger problem.”
I sniffed right back at her, smelling the rank deep stench of rotting zucchini. Dave, as always, had overplanted. His garden took up the better part of an acre, so to give Dave a break, it might be easy to do, especially when one zucchini plant could feed a family of ten, twelve, fourteen … many.
“I’m not the only suspect,” I told Dora. “Look what I found in Dave’s hand.” I pulled out the scrap of lace.
Dora gasped. “She couldn’t, she wouldn’t—”
“Mrs. McGarrity,” I said, “might and she certainly could.” Mrs. McGarrity, the heaviest of Starke’s Widows Brigade, a group who took it
upon themselves to be the professional busybodies of Starke, weighed in at three hundred plus pounds. She’d started tatting lace when she’d been a new thin bride—and then added lace panels to her clothing as she expanded, then started making custom clothing for others and then she started tatting lace hearts and other designs for jewelry, earrings and such.
The woman was obsessed with her craft. Then I remembered my own late night, oh heck, all nighters, working over my beaded creations, my own artistic mania, and smiled.
“What are you smiling at?” Dora demanded. “That Mrs. McGarrity is also a suspect?” I shook my head. “No, no. She’s not a suspect until I give this—” I held out the lace “—to Mallard. But I’m going to ask her about it first.” The old woman deserved at least a heads up, murderer or no.
I turned to go, when Dora said, “But Mallard said to stay—”
“That’s why you stay here and if he notices I’m gone tell him I needed to … get something to eat or go to the bathroom or something. Stall him.”
Dora looked dubious, granted she often looked that way, but before she could protest, I took off.
* * *
“What do you mean I killed that evil little man?” Widow McGarrity loomed over me, and boy, could she loom. I didn’t know if it was her height at 5’9” or her generous girth, or both, but the widow didn’t need any assistance in intimidation. She wore one of her own tatted lace creations, a dark grey dress she’d covered with layer upon layer of lace till the cloth below disappeared. She resembled nothing so much as a large roiling storm cloud, about to burst.
From years of knowing the woman, I knew that the best way to stop her thundering was by meeting it head on and never flinch. She’d never struck like lightning and killed, unless she’d murdered Dave, which I doubted. “I never said any of that, even about Dave being an evil little man.”
Mrs. McGarrity huffed.
“Even though I agree with you about that last part.”
That got the widow to quirk a smile and hold up her ginormous teapot, covered in a lacy tea cozy, making it even larger. “More tea?” She poured as she asked, into what must be a 16 ounce tea mug, with its own smaller version of lace cozy.
“Uh, thanks,” I managed to say, even as the thirty-two ounces of the two previous cups sloshed in my stomach, along with Mrs. McGarrity’s fabulous (and zucchini free) banana nut bread.
I took another thick slice to soak up some of the tea and give me time to think of how to accuse—ask—broach the subject of the piece of lace I’d found at the crime scene. Even my opening gambit: “Dave’s dead, murdered and you and me are suspects,” had made Mrs. McGarrity puff up, her lace dress rustling in outrage.
As I chewed, I gazed around at the widow’s front-for-best room at the oversized furniture that crowded every inch. Tatted lace antimacassars covered every chair and the sofa, overflowing the arms and backs down to the floor. Yup, Mrs. McGarrity was a woman obsessed—or maybe only a woman who loved to always go big and generous.
My artist’s eye caught the fine detail, hearts in a ring pattern repeated over and over, on the doily my arm rested on. I swallowed and leaned forward to study the lace pattern, completely different from the lace piece in my pocket. Gazing around, I realized that every lace piece was a different pattern, each unique and distinctive. If that was so for all of the Widow McGarrity’s creations, then she’d know where—
I yanked the lace scrap out of my pocket and held it up. Mrs. McGarrity’s eyes crossed as she tried to focus on her handiwork.
“Where did you get that?” she demanded.
“Never mind that.” I didn’t dare tell her where, that’d set off another round of “don’t you dare accuse me.”
I flapped the lace. “Just tell me what this came from.”
She snatched it out of my hand and ran her fingers over the pattern. “Let me think … I do so much tatting … too much really …”
At least Mrs. McGarrity knew about her tatting OCD.
Her eyes widened. “Why, that’s the lace I added to the bottom of Julie’s new shirt. Don’t know why, just made her look bulkier and her with that nice new figure and all.” The widow smoothed her hands over her own lace, as if to demonstrate how the absence of same would thin any figure.
Julie.
I remembered Dave’s string of girlfriends, all fat—uh, pleasingly plump—okay, obese. Dave always complained about each fat girlfriend until she slimmed. And then she disappeared, to be replaced by another weight-challenged woman. Hmm … a motive, but did slender Julie possess the means? And if she’d killed ol’ Eagle Claw, how to prove it? She could always say that Mrs. McGarrity lied or that some other person, like me, planted the lace in Dave’s hand, or that I’d never gotten it from Dave’s body at all.
I gulped as I realized that with my thoughtless grabbing of the lace from Dave’s hand, I’d destroyed any chance the lace could be used as evidence.
Unless Julie still wore that tucked in shirt, a shirt I suspected had a torn lace border. Maybe if confronted with the evidence of her crime—
Before I could get any further in my ruminations, there came a tentative knock at the door and Mallard’s voice, “Mrs. McGarrity could you please open the door? It’s Mallard—I mean the police.”
Mallard needed to work on his delivery. Although faced with Widow McGarrity, I might knock and speak softly. Especially if I believed she’d killed, she might kill again.
At the idea of innocent Mrs. McGarrity being accused and perhaps more, I plucked the only piece of evidence that could be used against her out of her hand and tucked it away. It’d be too ironic if my mistake somehow implicated the innocent widow. I pressed my finger against my lips in a “don’t tell” gesture as Mallard knocked again, this time with more force.
Mrs. McGarrity raised her eyebrows but said nothing as she opened the door and confronted Mallard mid-knock. Dora, standing behind the Sheriff, peered around his arm, right about at the level of his sweat stained armpit. I glared at Dora, who shrugged, hands out, palms up.
“I’m bringing you both in for questioning?” Mallard asked.
Mrs. McGarrity placed her hands on her hips. “Honey, that should be an order, not an order I’m going to follow, but you are the sheriff, remember?”
Mallard sighed. “Okay, then, how about this? If you don’t both come with me now, I’ll arrest you for obstruction of justice.”
I transferred my glare to Mallard, and then blinked as I realized that Julie would be at the station as soon as she finished at Doc Byrne’s. If I confronted her with the lace, maybe, just maybe—
“Better,” Mrs. McGarrity said to Mallard, “but still not there yet. And I’m not coming—”
I grabbed her arm and earned a glare of my own. “Sure you are,” I said, with what I suspected was a manic grin on my face.
Mrs. McGarrity’s scowl deepened until it threatened to bisect her face. I widened my eyes and nodded, trying to convey via face contortion that I had a plan.
“What’s the matter with your face, Tim?” Dora asked.
Mallard added, “Are you having some kind of a seizure from being guilty?”
I ignored both of them and said, “You and the other members of the Widows Brigade are always ready and willing to help out the cops, right?”
“We don’t need help,” Mallard said, probably recalling the other times the Widows Brigade “helped” the police.
“Hmmm,” Mrs. McGarrity hummed, lips pressed tight.
Dora must have caught on to my psychic attempts to communicate, for she grasped Mrs. McGarrity’s other arm and said, “C’mon, it’ll be fun.”
The widow’s eyebrows raised so high they threatened to vanish into her grey hair, but still she complied.
Fun for unsuspected Dora, maybe, for me and the widow, not so much, but right at the moment all I wanted to do was thank Dora for her assistance in getting us to the sheriff’s, where I could confront Julie.
* * *
“Doc
Byrne called and confirmed,” Mallard said to me from where I sat across from him at his small-for-being-sheriff desk, “that Dave—”
“Eagle Claw, he liked to be called Eagle Claw,” I said. After some thought, I’d decided that Dave deserved to be called whatever he wanted, now that he couldn’t tweak me about his Native American heritage. He couldn’t bother anybody about anything, being dead.
Sheriff Mallard passed a hand over the sweat drops on his face. That man could sweat enough to water all our gardens. “Whatever, he was suffocated.” Here Mallard made a horrifying gesture with knees raised and hands out, palms pressing against an imaginary zucchini, recreating the murderer’s pose.
I grit my teeth and at sight of my face, the sheriff dropped his hands. “Mrs. McGarrity has arthritis in her knees and hands,” he continued, “I don’t think she could have killed Eagle Beak.”
“Claw,” I said automatically and earned a scowl from the sheriff. I sighed. Mallard seemed to think I was his primary suspect, maybe his only one. Certainly he’d planted me at his desk, giving Dora and Widow McGarrity each to State Police officers to interview in other rooms, so “the witnesses” wouldn’t hear each other’s statements.
“And if she couldn’t kill him …” Mallard trailed off, probably hoping I would break down and confess due to his rapier sharp logic.
How to delay until Julie arrived from Doc Byrne’s? Maybe plant a zucchini seed of doubt in Mallard’s mind about my guilt?
“I don’t think Mrs. McGarrity could physically do it either but—”
“So what were you doing at her place?” Mallard jumped in and asked. “Planting evidence?”
More “showing evidence” but telling Mallard that might not help my case. I answered, but not his question. “But, I don’t think you should limit your suspects to large people. Someone with a lot of upper body strength could have zucchini-smothered Dave.”
Mild West Mysteries: 13 Idaho Tales of Murder and Mayhem Page 7
