Slow Dollar dk-9

by Margaret Maron

  “How did Mike take it?”

  “You mean was he the one killed Polly?”

  “Scorned lover? Jealousy?”

  “Scorned and jealous, yeah. Do anything about it? Nah. Just kept getting stoned. Eve took it worse.”

  “Eve?”

  “She’s Mike’s daughter. I don’t think she was pissed at Polly so much for dumping her dad as because he quit pulling his full weight here and that made more work for her and Kay.” She put the mustard jars in the ice chest. “And of course, Tasha was with Sam before Polly moved in on him.”

  “Really?” That fresh-faced kid I’d just met at the floss wagon and the road-worn Sam?

  “Sam’s got a great sense of humor,” Tally said. “And he’s dependable. You get to appreciate things like that when you’re out here on the road.”

  “Who else didn’t like Polly?”

  “Well, you heard Skee. No love lost there. She didn’t think he did all he could for Irene before she died and she got mad because Irene was barely in the ground good before he moved another woman into their doublewide, somebody who took him for almost everything he and Irene’d built up together. By the time that little possum belly queen did a rake ‘em and scrape ‘em on him, all he had left was his camper truck and his Lucky Ducky. And Polly wasn’t above rubbing it in about what a jackass he’d been. Like some juicy young thing was going to love him for himself alone.”

  My nose wrinkled as I thought of the woman who could crawl in beside Skee Matusik’s scrawny body or kiss that nearly toothless mouth. “Some men don’t ever take a good look in the mirror. Don’t you reckon she earned whatever she got from him?”

  Tally sighed. “Maybe she did. But when I think how hard it was for Irene out here on the road with her bad heart and all, and then to have some little whore walk away with everything she’d worked for? I tell you, if it hadn’t been for Braz, we wouldn’t have let Skee book in with us this season. But Irene was good to him and he knew she’d feel bad if Skee went down the slop chutes, so he talked me into it.”

  “Anybody else have problems with Polly?” I asked.

  She was silent for a moment and I didn’t push it. Just kept scrubbing.

  “Oh, well, hell, doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Your deputy’s probably snapped to it already. It was Braz, okay? They didn’t get along worth a damn. And don’t ask me why. I don’t think it was over Skee, though, ‘cause he used to razz Skee about that little bitch, too. Braz was another that thought women couldn’t resist him. Maybe he came on to her and she slapped him down too hard? I didn’t ask and they didn’t bring it to Arn or me. Sometimes it’s better not to know stuff when you’re going to be living this close with somebody for the season.”

  She sighed. “Val and me, we went over and picked out his casket this afternoon. The last thing we’ll ever do for him. Poor Braz. I should have made more time for him. Been a better mother.”

  All I could do was make consoling noises. There are never any easy words.

  By now, the wagon was almost spotless. I rinsed out the dishcloth I’d been using, then went and dumped the bucket in the weeds behind a shuttered balloon-bust stand while Tally turned off the lights and closed down the flaps.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

  “Hey, what’s family for?” I said, draping my jacket around my shoulders.

  She turned and looked at me steadily. “You’re not just shitting me, are you? You really mean it.”

  “I mean it.” I looked straight back into those blue eyes. “I made a promise almost twenty years ago that you would be part of our family if you ever wanted to be.”

  “To your mother?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you know, I only saw her that one time, but I still remember her as if it was last week. She was the nicest woman I’d ever met.” She finished locking the wagon. “You don’t know what it meant to me when she put that bracelet on my wrist and it was just like yours. I mean, you were her daughter, so sure, you’d have a pretty one. But mine was just as pretty and shiny. And that candy! No chocolates I’ve ever had since tasted as good as what she gave me that day.”

  “Till the day she died, she was sorry she didn’t just put you in the car and bring you home with us,” I said. “She went back a week later with Andrew, but you were gone.”

  Tally’s face lit up. “Did she really? Because she promised she’d come back to see me, and when my mom came to take me away, I told her I couldn’t go till Mama Sue came—that’s what she told me to call her, okay? Soon as I said that, Mom slapped me and said I’d been played for a fool. That your mother never had any intention of coming back.” She shrugged. “I always wondered.”

  “Oh, Tally,” I said helplessly, my eyes misting over.

  If Mother had followed her first instinct, Tally would still be Olivia and we would have grown up together like sisters. Life would have been so different for her. No baby at fifteen. College. A settled life instead of gypsying from town to town. Different for me, too, maybe. She would have been there for both of us when Mother was dying. And she was just enough older that she might have kept me between the ditches instead of taking it off road, straight through the underbrush.

  We faced each other across that wide, wide river of might-have-beens and she gave me a wry smile.

  “If wishes were horses,” I sighed.

  “Yeah,” she said. “C’mon. I’ll buy you a beer, okay?”

  At her trailer, she pulled a couple of long necks from the refrigerator. “Want a glass?”

  I shook my head and we went back outside. Her trailer and Polly’s were at right angles with only a few feet between the back ends. Several lawn chairs were there between the two doors, which were about fifteen feet apart, and a charcoal grill stood off to the side. We could hear the murmur of girlish voices inside the other trailer, and Tally went over, stuck her head inside, and called, “You guys all right?”

  I gathered that Kay was tearful still, but no longer hysterical.

  “Where’s Sam?” Tally asked.

  The girl who’d been working the Guesser earlier in the evening—Eve, daughter of the spurned cook—came to the doorway. “He was so zonked that we thought maybe it was better not to wake him up. Just let him sleep. He doesn’t need to see Polly like that anyhow.”

  She stepped out onto the grass and gave me a neutral nod as Tally introduced us. She had long dark hair that reached below her waist. At the Guesser earlier, she’d had it tied back. Now it fell like a dark lustrous veil across her shoulders and down her back.

  “Candy and Tasha and Kay are in there really freaking,” she told Tally. “First Braz and now Polly. What’s happening here, Tal? Somebody picking us off one by one?”

  “Of course not,” Tally said briskly, pulling keys from her pocket. “Look, why don’t you take the girls and go find a grocery store? Get some fresh fruits and salad greens?”

  Eve frowned.

  “They were saying earlier that they wanted to do laundry. Maybe you can find them a Laundromat?”

  “Okay,” said Eve. “I’ve got laundry, too. Might as well be doing that as sitting in there scaring ourselves to death.”

  She reached for the keys just as Deputy Mayleen Richards rounded the front of the trailer.

  “Mrs. Ames? Can you tell me which trailer was Polly Viscardi’s?”

  “This one,” Eve told her, pointing to the other trailer.

  “And you’re one of her roommates?”

  “Yes, but we already told those other officers we didn’t see anything.”

  The other three young women had come to the door by now. They ranged in age from late teens to very early twenties. All four of them wore sneakers, shorts, and T-shirts. With six people sharing one trailer, there couldn’t be much space for extra clothes.

  Richards took down their names, but when she asked to see Ms. Viscardi’s quarters, they tried to talk her out of it.

  “Her boyfriend’s in there asleep,” sa
id Tasha protectively. She was a tall coltish girl, all arms and legs with a long face and small dark eyes. “He was driving all day and half of last night. He doesn’t even know Polly’s dead yet. Do you have to wake him right now?”

  “It’ll have to be done sooner or later,” the deputy told her, “but I can start with you-all. Which of you saw Ms. Viscardi last?”

  It turned out that they couldn’t be sure. Certainly not today.

  “She was already up and out by the time I woke up around nine-thirty,” said Candy, who was probably the oldest, but also the smallest, maybe five-two with blond braids pinned up across the top of her head. “We thought she was still asleep, didn’t we?”

  The other girls nodded.

  “Her door was closed,” said Kay, the baby of the group, “but when I peeked in around noon, the room was empty.”

  “Had the bed been slept in?” Richards asked.

  “We couldn’t tell,” said Candy. “Polly never made the bed except when she put fresh sheets on. But she didn’t make coffee, either. Usually the first person up starts it. The pot was still sitting on the drain board when I got up.

  “I didn’t see her on the lot today,” Tally said.

  “What about last night, then?” said Richards.

  “She was here.” Tally gestured to a nearby lawn chair. “Sam had gone to pick up some plush and—”

  “Plush?”

  “Stuffed toys for prizes. We drew a bigger crowd this weekend than we expected so Sam drove down to Florida to bring back enough to keep us going through Kinston next week.”

  “I see.”

  “After we closed up last night, we sat out here and talked awhile.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me, the girls, Polly, my son Val, only he went to bed around twelve-thirty. My husband was already in by then, too. Windy Raines, Skee Matusik, and a couple of the independents came by for a beer. Windy and Skee left right before I went in around one. Polly was still here then, right, Eve?”

  “We all turned in about then, but Polly said she wasn’t sleepy yet. She was going to read awhile at the table.”

  “Yeah,” said Tasha. “That’s right. I remember waking up around four to go to the donniker and the light was still on out here and her magazine was turned down on the table. She’d left the door unlocked, too. Her door was closed, so I turned off the light and locked the door before I crawled back in my bunk.”

  “You were gone a long time,” said Candy. “I needed to go, too, and I thought you were never going to come back.”

  “Sorry,” Tasha said tightly. “You should’ve come and knocked. I took Polly’s magazine in with me and I guess I lost track of the time.”

  “Who didn’t like her?” Richards asked.

  “Nobody,” Eve said flatly, and the others murmured prompt agreement, closing ranks against the law.

  “She was like a mother to us,” said Kay, beginning to sniffle again.

  “What about you, Mrs. Ames?”

  “This was the first season she’d worked with us,” Tally said. “Far as I know, she got along with everybody.”

  I took a swallow of my beer and kept my face completely blank. Tally was family now, wasn’t she?

  “How did she die?” Tally asked, going on the offensive.

  “We’re not sure yet if it was suicide or murder,” the deputy said frankly.

  “Suicide?” gasped Kay.

  Richards nodded. “Does that seem unlikely to you?”

  “Well...,” said Eve. “She had been a little quieter than usual, didn’t you think?”

  Candy nodded. “Like she had more on her mind than making her nut.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Kay said tearfully.

  Tasha was skeptical. “Even if she was worried about something, she wouldn’t off herself. She’d either stomp whoever was messing her over or get somebody else to do it.”

  Stomp was probably not her best choice of words given the work shoes that sturdy woman had worn, and I about strangled on my beer.

  “You okay?” Richards asked when Tally had stopped slapping my back and I was able to quit coughing.

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I must have swallowed wrong.”

  She turned back to her agenda. “Mrs. Ames, how did Ms. Viscardi and your son get along?”

  “Val? Fine.”

  “No, I meant your other son. Brazos Hartley.”

  “The same, so far as I know. I don’t think they had much to do with each other, okay?”

  “She didn’t have any reason to want him dead?”

  “No, of course not! What are you saying?”

  “Nothing. Just trying to see if there’s a connection between your son’s death and hers.”

  “If there is,” Tally said stiffly, “I don’t know what it could be.”

  The other four professed to have noticed no tension between Polly and Braz.

  With that, Mayleen Richards said she was sorry, but she was going to have to take a look inside if that was all right with them. She and I both knew that she’d need a search warrant if they refused. But the trailer belonged to Tally and she offered no objections.

  As it turned out, the girls’ worries about bothering Sam weren’t necessary. He slept right through Mayleen’s search, even when the deputy lifted the mattress beneath him.

  “Didn’t even turn over,” Kay marveled.

  “Yeah, he could sleep through a tornado,” said Tasha without thinking.

  The others went silent for an instant, then started chattering like finches, but Richards didn’t pick up on that slip of Tasha’s tongue. She asked again if anyone had anything to add, and when they all shook their heads, she headed back to the Plate Pitch.

  The girls took the keys to the truck and went of mournfully with duffel bags of dirty laundry and a shopping list from Tally.

  “If I can just keep them from running off on me for three more weeks, we’ll have our nut for the winter,” Tally said, watching Eve maneuver the truck through the parking lot.

  She offered me another beer, but I was still nursing my first one and passed. I hadn’t eaten since my early lunch with Portland, which now seemed a million years ago. The moon was rising and another beer would put me right over it. But it was pleasant to sit here in the cool early fall night and listen to Tally talk about life in the carnival: on the road all summer, their winters in Gibsonton, Florida—Gibtown to its citizens—a town founded by a giant and a half woman, where everything was zoned Residential/Show Business instead of Residential/Agricultural as it was in our corner of Colleton County.

  “What does that mean exactly?” I asked.

  “Means you can have an elephant in your backyard if you want to.”

  I heard about January trade fairs where the latest thrill rides can sell for close to a million dollars or a pizza trailer with ovens and icemaker for a hundred thousand. I heard about buying goldfish wholesale for seven cents apiece, where to buy the best stuffed toys for the least amount of money, and why iguanas don’t make such good prizes. (“Too hard to keep warm on the northern routes.”) She told me how to cool the marks and how you can get sucker sore after weeks on the road.

  “Like the time we were with this little gilly outfit up in Pennsylvania. I was working a shoot-till-you-win hanky-pank. That’s what the sign said: shoot till YOU WIN. So up steps this big wide farm lady. She looks at my store, she reads the sign, she lays down her money and picks up the gun, then she looks at me and says, ‘Hey, lady. Which one of them things is Till?”

  She talked of the friendships and how much she missed Irene Matusik, who really had tried to mother her and grandmother her sons.

  “When did she die?”

  “Last winter. Her heart had been bad for years and last October, right after we finished the season, it just quit on her. She died in her sleep, all peaceful—the way I hope I go when it’s my time, but God, how I miss her!”

  She spoke of how Eve and Skee were third-generation carnies and how young
Kay was first-of-May. “We picked her up in Georgia and I think she’s going to be a keeper.”

  “You really like the life, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Yes and no. Every new place is a challenge. But it’s rough at times, like being nibbled to death by ducks when equipment breaks down, your help runs off or gets drunk, and the festival committee lies about the draw and then tries to stiff you on the percentages. That’s why we’re thinking of becoming forty-milers. Sell off some of our stuff and just play small festivals around the Carolinas and Virginia in the summer, do something with the farm for the fall, maybe work the flea markets in the winter.”

  “That would be great,” I said, thinking of the spice they’d add to family reunions. I couldn’t wait to see Aunt Sister’s reaction to this new grandniece. Especially if I could persuade Tally to contribute fried elephant ears to the picnic table instead of banana pudding or pimento cheese sandwiches.

  I told her about Daddy and as much of his first wife as I could, about my brothers and their children, and about A.K. and Ruth, her half siblings; but that seemed to make her uncomfortable so I remembered something I’d read about on the Internet and I asked, “Did you ever do a hey rube?”

  “Me personally? Nope.”

  “Not even when those guys were ripping up your Pot O’Gold?”

  “For three drunks?” Her voice held amused scorn as she shook her head. “You only do one when you need a lot of backup quick, okay? First one I ever saw was at the Brandywine Racetrack, about a month after I was with it. One of the towners had some problem with a guy on one of the rides so he got about thirty of his buds together about eleven o’clock one night and they all climbed up and over the back of the ride to attack the eight guys who were crewing the ride. Well, the guy on the mike at the ride booth saw what was happening and he hey rubed over the mike, which brought about fifty carnies running. It was a real short spat.”

  She smiled in memory. “If you yell ‘Hey Rube,’ everyone drops everything to assist. I mean, games are empty, rides stop in midturn, food’s left to burn on the grill, so it’s a serious thing. I’ve only seen about five in all my years.”