What Are You Wearing to Die?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “She wasn’t killed in the truck and she wasn’t killed out at her place. Both of them were clean. We have no idea where he killed her.” Buster tore open the wet wipe that Dad thoughtfully provides with sandwiches just as Joe Riddley came back with our tea.

  “Did you solve it while I was gone?” he asked.

  “Nope,” I griped. “Buster just mentioned some ‘he’ who killed her, but he’s being as close as a clam.”

  Joe Riddley sat down, took a swig of tea, and said, “You might as well tell us, Buster, or she’ll keep us here all night. I heard a couple of mosquitoes on my way back out.”

  I was dying to press him: So who is it, Buster? How’d you find him? Anybody we know? I settled for a harmless question: “Why haven’t I seen a warrant?”

  Before he got around to answering, he had to finish his drink and neatly fold up all his paper. Sometimes Buster is too finicky to live. At last he said, “Judge Stebley was down at the detention center for a bond hearing Friday when the word came in, so I asked him to issue the warrant. The alleged perp is a kid of nineteen from Hall County, who was arrested up there a year ago for possession with intent to sell. He got probation, but he must have moved on to bigger stuff, because his conviction was for marijuana and Starr had been using meth. She was nearly eaten up with it. We identified him because he left some prints that matched up. His name is Roddy Howell.”

  That didn’t answer all my questions, by a long shot. “Have you talked to the guy?”

  “Nope. We’re still looking for him.”

  I pinched one of Joe Riddley’s fries, hoping salt might help settle my stomach, which was still queasy from remembering the slaughter of Daddy’s calf. “It’s great that you’ve identified him, though.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, but all we can get him on is accessory to murder. He left enough prints on her body to show he lifted her into the truck, and some in the truck as well, but there’s nothing to tie him to the actual beating.”

  “What about the weapon?” As I spoke, I saw a glower in Joe Riddley’s eyes. “I’m not investigating,” I protested. “I’m expressing interest in what Buster has to say. Given the kind of thug this kid probably is, I have no inclination to get any closer to him than the other side of my bench.”

  Joe Riddley sucked up the last of his drink in that noisy way he knows annoys the dickens out of me. “You might as well tell the rest of it, Buster. Have you got any leads on the weapon?”

  He might act like Mr. Cool, but I suspected he was as interested as I was.

  “Not yet. There’s evidence the weapon was in the back of the vehicle for a time—behind the front seat where the jump seats are, not in the bed—but it wasn’t there when we hauled the danged thing up.”

  “They could have thrown it into the kudzu before pushing the car over,” I suggested.

  Buster gave an unfunny laugh. “You know how long it would take to search that much kudzu? Not to mention how many snakes we’d meet in the process.”

  Joe Riddley had finished his ribs and was positioning a slice of lemon icebox pie as his next victim. With fork poised, he paused long enough to point out, “The stuff’s deciduous. They might not have thought about that.” Having said all he planned to say, he turned his full attention to his pie and changed the subject to Georgia’s chances in the current football season.

  I reached under the table and patted his knee to thank him for helping Buster solve the case. Until he did, folks would keep jumping at every noise and looking over their shoulder half the time, expecting a baseball-bat murderer.

  9

  When Starr’s body was released, we turned out in force to pack Trevor’s church for the funeral. Two odd things happened that morning. First, Robin and her girls sat in the pew with Trevor and Bradley. Second, Wylie glared at me off and on during the whole service.

  It occurred to me that if I could hear Trevor from Missy’s place, folks down at Trevor’s might have heard Missy. Had that been Wylie out in the yard with Trevor, carrying in the big animal? Had he overheard what Missy shouted at me? An ex-boyfriend turned out to be the killer in a whole lot of cases. Had he known the kid the sheriff was trying to find? I considered his anger and grief over at Trevor’s, and wondered if he’d ever done any acting.

  At the reception in the fellowship hall afterwards, I overheard two women talking. One said, in a gravelly voice, “I saw that pitiful man and his grandson wandering the aisles of the Bi-Lo yesterday, and I ached for them both.”

  The second voice was sweet and high. “Why on earth would they need groceries? Folks are keeping their larder stocked.”

  “Yes, but who takes a gallon of milk or a dozen eggs to a grieving family? You can eat only so much ham and potato salad.”

  They glanced across the room to where Trevor was shaking hands and trying to be pleasant to people when he would obviously have preferred to be alone with his grief. The first woman heaved a sigh. “I wonder if Trevor is eating at all. He seems to have fallen off considerably since Starr died.”

  The other reached over and patted her arm. “Go talk to him, honey. You know what they say: The best way to catch a husband is to wear your prettiest hat to his wife’s funeral. You’re looking fetching today. Go on, now. Give him a smile.”

  Poor Trevor. It wasn’t Starr whom the vultures were circling.

  The next morning I had enough distractions to forget Starr’s murder for a time. Lulu and I arrived at the store to find Evelyn so excited that her face was bright pink. “Look!” She sported a big button that featured a beaming Hubert encircled by a red doughnut with white words:

  SPENCE MAKES SENSE.

  I bit my tongue to keep from retorting, “Spence makes nonsense.”

  “Aren’t they the cutest things?” She craned her neck, trying to read her own chest.

  “Cutest thing I’ve seen all day,” I allowed, “but I’m not sure we need a cute mayor.”

  “Oh, but Mr. Spence really does know how to run things. He’s run that store for—how many years? And he’s got great plans for Hopemore.” She was breathless, giddy. Sounded to me like Hubert had been handing out charm with his buttons. I also suspected that this was the closest Evelyn had ever come to hobnobbing with a celebrity.

  “Running a store isn’t exactly the same as running a town.” I glanced out the front door. “Speaking of running a store, shouldn’t you put the bedding plants on the sidewalk? It’s almost nine o’clock.”

  “Oh!” She hurried to pick up a tray of asters. “I was fixing to put them out when Mr. Spence stopped by. He left a whole box of buttons for us to give out to folks.”

  I hated to disappoint her, but it was time she remembered the facts of life. “We can’t endorse Hubert. I’m a judge. I can’t endorse any candidate.”

  She looked confused. “Will the poster be all right?”

  “What poster?” I had come in the side door from the parking lot, as usual. When she made a helpless motion toward the front, I made tracks out onto the sidewalk. In our front window was Hubert’s face, big as life and twice as ugly, beaming above his SPENCE MAKES SENSE slogan.

  Lulu must have recognized him, because she climbed up on her hind legs and tried to lick him through the glass.

  “Sorry, but the poster has to go. I’ll get a rag to clean off the dog spit.”

  Evelyn’s only response was to carry out another flat of asters and slam them onto the sidewalk in a manner calculated to do permanent damage to their roots.

  “Why don’t you take it home and put it in your window?” I suggested as I wiped down the glass and discouraged Lulu from making another attempt at reaching Hubert. “Politicians kiss babies and dogs,” I informed her. “Not the other way around.”

  I was inside removing the first piece of tape when I saw Hubert bouncing down the sidewalk. That’s the only word I can think of to describe how he was walking. He could have been traveling on air cushions. His eyes, of course, went straight to the poster—and me removing it. His face flippe
d from surprised to mad in two seconds flat. Hubert’s temper was legendary in town.

  He stormed into the store. “What you taking my poster down for? I paid good money for that sign.”

  I spoke as calmly as I could. Hubert’s temper, coupled with his blood pressure, had already been catastrophic to his health once. “I’m a judge. You know I can’t endorse a candidate.”

  That didn’t mollify him in the least. “You ain’t endorsing me. You can put up a poster for that housewife, too, if she ever manages to get her act together and print up some. We can face off over the flowers.” He motioned toward a new display Evelyn had created Saturday, a green wheelbarrow full of mums in bronze, yellow, and white.

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Hubert. I would if I could, but I can’t.” I’d heard that line in a song when I was a child, and it had stuck with me ever since.

  He slicked back his hair and let out a huff of frustration. “You’re as bad as Maynard. He won’t let me put a sign in his window, either. Says it’s bad for business to endorse one candidate over another. But folks gotta stand up for what they believe! We can’t be wishy-washy in these perilous times!” He smacked one fist into the other palm.

  Lulu yipped and danced in delight. This was more exciting than the store generally was.

  Underneath Hubert’s anger and bluster, I saw the hurt. “Evelyn could take it home and put it in her window,” I told him. “She lives out on the far end of Oglethorpe Street, right near the superstore. You’d get a lot of traffic past there.”

  Why was I trying to help Hubert, when I wouldn’t vote for him unless he was the only candidate running against Hitler? Because friendship is one of the strangest relationships in the world. It makes us do all sorts of things we would never do for either strangers or family. If it had been my brother running (and if Jake were as obstreperous as Hubert), I’d have done all in my power to talk him out of running, and I’d have told him exactly what I thought of his capacity to administer the town. Yet here I was trying to help Hubert with his campaign because I hated to hurt his feelings.

  “I’ll be glad to put the poster in my window,” Evelyn told him as she came in from arranging the sidewalk display. “And if you’ve got signs on sticks, I’ll put one in my yard. If you have bumper stickers, I’ll take one of those, too.”

  He snatched the poster from me and trotted over to thrust it toward her. “Here. If you want more, let me know. I hadn’t thought of bumper stickers.”

  Evelyn looked up at him earnestly. “Don’t get the permanent ones—they hurt the paint. Get the kind that peel on and off, or work with magnets. I’ll bet lots of people would take one. I’ll be glad to help you distribute them. I think it’s wonderful that you’re running, Mr. Spence.”

  He turned pink and stretched to his full five-foot-six. “Call me Hubert,” he said gruffly. “I’ll bring over a sign later. And I’ll think about the bumper stickers.”

  Evelyn raked both hands through her hair—which was a lot more attractive mahogany than it had been carrot orange. Then she realized what she was doing, patted it down, and blushed.

  Hubert looked over his shoulder at me. “I guess you won’t be handing out my buttons, either?”

  “Nope. Sorry. Evelyn can wear hers, though.” I was hazy about whether that was legal, but we would presume it was until somebody told me otherwise.

  “I’m planning to run to the superstore during my lunch break,” Evelyn told him. “I could stand on the sidewalk out there and hand out buttons for half an hour. And bring me a trunk full of signs. I’ll go out after work and put them on the right-of-way of every road into town. You can’t put up too much publicity.”

  Sounded to me like Hubert was quickly getting himself a campaign manager. He could do a whole lot worse.

  An hour later Slade Rutherford, editor of the weekly Hopemore Statesman, strolled into my office, notepad and pen in hand. “Hubert Spence has charged that while judges aren’t supposed to endorse candidates, you are showing partiality to—and I quote—‘that housewife who thinks she knows how to run Hopemore.’ You got any rebuttal to make?”

  I exhaled a long breath of relief and disgust. “None that’s fit for the printed page. But let me say for the record that I’m not showing partiality to anybody. I told Hubert I can’t put his campaign poster in our window because I’m a judge. He suggested I put one for both candidates, and I turned that down for the same reason. End of story. You’d better get that right, after the story you wrote last summer on the investment club murder, or I’ll hang you up by the fingernails and let Ridd’s pig nibble your toes.”

  “Ouch.” His loafers bulged as he curled his toes under. “I take it Hubert is referring to Nancy Jensen?”

  “Right. And between us, the paper might do worse than endorse her.”

  He tapped his pen on his notebook. “I’m between a rock and a hard place. Last summer, Horace Jensen and Middle Georgia Kaolin contributed more than half the cost of the summer camp our paper sponsored for needy kids. We want to run another camp this summer, so I don’t like to rile Horace, and he’s not feeling too charitable toward Nancy right now. Have you heard she’s suing him for more than half their financial worth?”

  “I believe the argument her lawyer is putting forth is that his ability to make more money than she can is an ‘intangible asset’ he is taking out of the marriage, so she deserves more cash.”

  “Horace isn’t going to like that.”

  “Horace doesn’t like much of anything, or anybody—except someone we don’t need to name. That’s not for publication, either. I’d be willing to bet, though, that the reason his company contributed to your summer camp was because Nancy told him to, so you’d better think about where your donations are likely to be coming from in the future before you decide who to endorse.”

  Slade shifted in his chair, a sign he was thinking about what I was saying, so I pressed on. “At least get to know Nancy better. She’s an intelligent woman with a number of interests, and I think she’s going to bloom once she’s divorced. Besides, if you don’t endorse her, who are you going to endorse? Hubert?”

  “It’s a tough call,” he conceded.

  10

  Not one thing happened in the Starr Knight case for another month.

  Sheriff Gibbons called one Friday afternoon toward the end of October. “We’ve found the weapon. It was a bat!” He was crowing like he used to crow as a kid when he correctly identified a sneaker print on the playground.

  “That’s great! Where was it?”

  “In the kudzu, like Joe Riddley suggested.”

  I considered pointing out it was me who had suggested the kudzu, but I let it pass. Like the Bible says, there are times to make war and times to make peace. Besides, Buster was still crowing. “I noticed this morning that the leaves were off, so I sent somebody out there with binoculars. It took him a couple of hours, but he found it, stuck in the vines. Getting to it was a trick, but we managed to lower a man on a rope to retrieve it. And I know you and Joe Riddley have been cursing the drought, but it has its uses. The bat still shows bloodstains and prints.”

  “You are a painstaking and patient man. Do the prints match the others you found?”

  “We’re working on that.”

  “Did you ever talk to Missy?”

  “Yeah, and to the DEA, too. Starr called them in early September from a throwaway cell phone and said she had information about drug dealing in middle Georgia, but she would need to meet them somewhere, because she was afraid for her child. They made an appointment with her for the following Monday evening in Augusta. That would have been four days before we found her. However, she never showed. They figured she’d gotten cold feet.”

  “The coldest,” I said soberly.

  After we hung up, I couldn’t sit still, so I headed out front to check our inventory. Lately I had been of two minds about buying products. On the one hand, it could be likened to pouring money down the drain. On the other hand, we had to have s
omething on the shelves if we stayed open. The big question was, what could we buy that we wouldn’t eventually have to mark down below cost to get rid of?

  Garden clogs—the plastic kind—had been real popular that year, and ours were superior in quality to those at the superstore and not much more expensive. I was behind a rack debating whether to order more when I heard Robin Parker greet Evelyn.

  “Hey. We’ve come to get pansies for the girls to plant beside our front steps. I’m glad we got here before closing time.”

  The older girl—I couldn’t remember their names—begged, “Can we buy a pot for Uncle Billy? Can we, Mama? He likes flowers.” Her high voice carried so well, they probably heard it across the street at the bank.

  “I don’t know.” Robin sounded like a woman who was about to say no.

  “You have family here?” Whatever her personal feelings toward Robin, Evelyn was, first and foremost, a merchandiser, and that friendly manner sold a lot of goods.

  “Is Uncle Billy family? Is he, Mama?” the child demanded.

  Robin answered in the resigned tone of a mother who spent her day answering questions. “Yes, honey, he’s my brother. That’s why he’s your uncle.” She added, to Evelyn, “He lives down near Tennille, but he gets up here every week or two.”

  “He brings me candy, and they cook when we go to bed,” announced the older one importantly.

  I was wondering whether Billy was indeed Robin’s brother, and whether “cook” was a euphemism for something else, but Robin said irritably, “You don’t like spicy food.”

  “Yuck,” the child answered.

  The little one asked in a soft voice, “Can I go home with you?”

  I knew she was addressing Evelyn even before I heard Evelyn’s puzzled reply. “Not today. I’m not going home for a while yet.”

  Robin had better break that child of the habit of asking to go home with strangers. Even in Hopemore, it could be dangerous.