Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  “Uh-huh,” he said, but he must have been remembering the smirk on Ricky’s face, because he shrugged and turned his back to the rest of it.

  I smiled grimly, then pulled out my small, but very sharp, pocketknife and sunk it into all four white sidewall tires.

  “I’m leaving now!” I yelled, and jogged back to join Caleb, who was trying hard not to smile. I hopped into his car and slammed the door.

  Caleb jammed the car in reverse, and in a swirling cloud of dust, Ricky disappeared from my life.

  “I still can’t believe I let you commit battery with police equipment—on your husband’s car no less.”

  “Oh, save it, will you? You were ready to punch him out.”

  He acknowledged my comment with a grunt. “And if he files a complaint?” He was just looking for affirmation that he’d done the right thing, bringing me out here, letting me lose my temper.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Caleb. What’s he going to say, ‘I was making out with my secretary on a back road, when my wife caught us and single-handedly destroyed my vintage Caddy’? Nope. Not if I know Ricky.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I’d almost forgotten what you’re like when you get your nose outta joint.”

  I shook my head as the adrenaline melted into heartache. “I can’t believe it. I mean, did Ricky really think he could keep screwing his secretary and I wouldn’t find out?”

  He stopped the car on the side of the road. “I wasn’t planning this.”

  If that were true, then why was he giving the squashed bugs on the windshield all his attention?

  “You knew? You did! And you didn’t tell me? I see you almost every day at Roxanne’s. Hell, you’re at our house once a week shoveling down food and swapping jokes with my old man, and not one word! You didn’t think I deserved to know?”

  He chewed on his lower lip and then stared at the dotted line in the road ahead like it was a homing beacon. “No one, and believe me I’ve become an expert on the subject, appreciates being the first to tell a friend they’ve got a cheating spouse.”

  I retrieved a tissue from my purse and blew my nose. “Can this get any worse? Oh God, does everyone know?”

  He reached over and gave my shoulder a quick shake. “Lalla, when have you ever cared what other people thought? Besides, the ones that do, care enough not to rub it in your face. And the rest of them, well, they don’t count.”

  I looked away. “I just want to go home.”

  “Then I’ll take you home,” he said, putting the car in drive and pulling out onto the road.

  We drove the rest of the way in silence, and when he turned into the driveway at the ranch, I got out and called over my shoulder, “Don’t come in, Caleb. As a matter of fact, I’d rather you stayed away from me for a while.”

  He rolled down the window and called after me, “That’s right, shoot the messenger!” Then he spun the big cruiser around and, laying gravel and dust out the back of his tires, headed for the highway.

  The memory of Ricky’s duplicitous nature, and the embarrassment he caused that day chimed like an off-key tuning fork.

  ~*~

  I stacked my paperwork on the desk, gave Mad Dog’s birthday flowers a bit more water, and left for the house. I showered with the cast in a plastic garbage bag, toweled off, and peered in the mirror at ten years of neglect. From a hundred eight to a hundred thirty pounds in ten years isn’t bad. Most people say I’m still a rail, but for a New York fashion model, I am fat, old, and forty is twenty years past my prime. My hairdresser says I look good for my age. Sure I do, as long as you don’t take off my clothes.

  While I practiced stuttering “Fo-fo-fo, forty,” I glared at the little lines forming at the sides of my mouth. Poking at a drooping fold of skin above my eyes, I considered making an appointment to have something done about it. It could be my birthday present, I told myself cheerfully. Oh, just forget it, Lalla. You’re forty and falling apart. How will I ever be able to make it through my birthday if I can’t say forty in the same sentence with my own name?

  Wrinkles on Caleb’s bony face just made him look more rugged. Where’s the justice in that?

  I dismissed my disappointing image for something that would make me happier. Dressing in my standard uniform of jeans, boots, a white T-shirt, and, because it was Sunday, I added a heavy silver Concho belt, I headed for the barn.

  People are surprised at my slavish devotion to this car, but the heavy steel frame, powerful muscle of the V-8 engine, and sleek lines are far sexier than most men I know. I love this car, and besides, with only a little oil and gas, it’s still there in the morning.

  On the way to the barn, I raised my face to the morning sky. It was going to be a hot one, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t even bothered that I still hadn’t fixed the air-conditioning. It was still morning, the paperwork was finished, and I was going to take my “baby” out for a ride.

  I slid back the doors of the barn and gawked at the empty space where I’d left my Caddy. The canvas car cover lay on the straw floor like a discarded magician’s prop. There was nothing inside but a lone moth gently circling in a dusty sunbeam. I waited for the trick that would make my Caddy reappear. But no amount of magic was going to pull all that muscled steel out of an empty piece of cloth.

  “Ricky! You thieving rat!” Though the car was mine by decree of our divorce two years ago, Ricky was obviously still having a hard time letting go.

  I turned on my heel and stomped back to the house, cursing at his duplicitous, underhanded, sneaky… Finishing with an expletive, I pushed through the back door and passed my dad, BP cuff on his right arm and bulb dangling, dutifully entering the results of his morning routine into a journal.

  “What’s caught in your craw this morning?” he growled, as I attacked the kitchen phone.

  “Ricky stole my Caddy!” I growled back, dialing numbers into the old yellow rotary. Dad thought number pads were part of the fast lane and should be avoided at all costs, never mind cell phones.

  Too annoyed to deal with the antique, I hung up and bounded up the stairs. Sitting on my bed, I fiercely punched more numbers on my cell phone and started calling people. I called Ricky first. Of course, no answer there. Then I called everyone else I could think of who might know the whereabouts of my car and/or Ricky.

  Twenty minutes later, I gave up, punched in the sheriff’s office and Caleb’s direct line. The ring lasted less than half a sparrow’s croak before it was knocked off its perch by a deep, if preoccupied, male voice. “Sheriff Stone.”

  I bawled into the phone, “Ricky stole my Caddy!”

  “Lalla? How’s your dad?” he drawled, irritating me no end with his ploy to get me to slow down.

  “Working on inner enlightenment. Now will you please focus on me here—I said, Ricky stole my Caddy!”

  He sighed into the phone. I could hear his old office chair creak as he sought a more comfortable position. “You don’t have to yell.”

  I did feel a little guilty for yelling at him. After all, he hadn’t stolen my car. I started again, slower this time. “It’s either at his house, his car lot, or his latest girlfriend’s.”

  “Miss Bains,” he said, the humor sneaking into his voice, “don’t tell me you’ve misplaced that cherry red Cadillac. It’s kinda hard to hide, you know.” The chair creaked again, and I thought of Caleb, his phone to ear for anyone who would need a careful, considerate listener. Caleb owed the chair and his job as Sheriff of Stanislaus County to his dad, who died in a shootout about the same time my mother died. I love Caleb Stone as my best friend in the whole world. He’s a veritable Job of patience to my frequently irritable nature. But right now, I wasn’t up to patient or considerate. I wanted Caleb to find the bastard for me. Now!

  I tried begging. “Caleb, please? I’ve called everybody I can think of. I’ve got people looking from Ripon to Merced.”

  “Mmm-mm.”

  “I’m telling you, if he takes it as far as Fresno, he’s dead meat.”


  “Awright, settle down, Lalla. You want to report it stolen? Come in and we’ll write up a report.”

  Uh-oh, this could get complicated. Ricky and I had history, and it wasn’t pretty. The Caddy was my trophy from our divorce, and though I secretly enjoyed being the butt of jokes locally, I didn’t want to see this most recent escapade get ratcheted all the way up to the nightly news.

  “Uh, do we have to do it so formally? Can’t you just tell some of the guys to be on the lookout for it?”

  Caleb, being one of the few who knew my angry history with Ricky, also liked to rib me about it. “So, that’s a no-go on the wanted posters?”

  “Just tell the guys to look for it, will you?” I hung up on him.

  Still restless, I went downstairs to finish telling my dad the bad news.

  He slammed his napkin down on the table and glared up at me. “Can’t we go a whole week without you on the front page of the newspaper?”

  “My missing Caddy doesn’t warrant two lines and nobody cares but me, so what’re you all grumpy about?”

  “Not that you would care, but I’m a sick old man, and I’d like to die with what’s left of my reputation intact.”

  “What’s left of your reputation? Are you saying my plane crash or my ongoing tug of war over Ricky’s prized possession is hurting your reputation?”

  He pushed back his chair and stood, the expression on his face somewhere between sadness and disgust. He didn’t have to say anything more. I’d once again disappointed him, because no matter what I did, how hard I tried, I seemed to stumble across trouble. I had to admit he was right. After all, I was the one who’d found my mother’s body, burned her suicide note, and neglected to tell my father or my brother. And I was still paying for that guilty sin.

  “I can’t tolerate infidelity,” I said, hoping to have the last word.

  He turned at the door. “You don’t have to prove it to me.”

  “Believe me, I wasn’t trying to prove anything to you.”

  He tipped his bushy eyebrows at me, the gesture saying words about what I was trying to prove—that I didn’t need New York or modeling or a husband to fulfill my life, that I was good enough to run a crop-dusting business for my old man, that I measured up to the son he lost, and that neither of us was at fault that my mother chose to end her life.

  ~*~

  Ten minutes later, the phone rang.

  “I have good news and bad news,” Caleb said.

  “Hurry up and tell me, I can take it.” I was picturing Ricky hightailing it for Mexico with his latest honey in my Caddy. But that wasn’t what I got.

  “Ricky says he didn’t take your car, and I have to believe him.”

  I took back every kind thought I’d ever had about Caleb. “And that’s the good or the bad news?”

  “Well, I’m afraid that it’s the good news.”

  Oh, God, I hate it when he does this. Typical Caleb, succinct to the point of anguish. I groaned at this latest round of vague innuendo.

  “Ricky doesn’t have your car, because we found it out at Turlock Lake.”

  “Turlock Lake? What—”

  “Wait a minute, and I’ll tell you. The Caddy’s big fins were seen sticking up out of the muck.”

  “In the water? Oh no! She’ll be ruined!”

  “Lalla, are you sitting down? ‘Cause that’s still not the bad news.”

  I held onto the phone by its long curling extension cord and slid down the wall until my butt was settled on the polished oak floor.

  “Lalla? You there?”

  I ran a finger along the groove of the scarred and battered floor that once held up a crowd of thirsty miners. Noah liked to tell visitors he found gold dust in the cracks when he salvaged the boards from a “forty-niner” hotel being torn down to make room for a highway.

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m here.”

  A small portable radio my dad kept tuned to a weather channel on the kitchen counter cheerfully announced the time and temperature. It was seventy-eight degrees and rising. Then the announcer encouraged us all to have a nice day.

  By the time Caleb told me the rest of it, my teeth had started a rumba and my shoulders were quaking as if I were sitting in a blizzard. Caleb’s steady voice brought me back to my feet. “You’ll need to verify that it’s your car and talk to the investigating detective.”

  “Detective? Why a detective?”

  “Can you drive here, or do you want me to come out and pick you up?”

  “Don’t you mean, bring me in?”

  “Either way, you’ve got an appointment. You need to make a statement, and if you’re this feisty, I’ll wait for you outside the county jail downtown and go with you.”

  I hung up, and with palsied hands, grabbed the nearest set of keys and drove our old farm truck into Modesto. I ignored the familiar rattle of the loose drive shaft, the torn vinyl headliner, the missing door handle, and the growing spider web of broken windshield on the passenger side.

  The drive was a no-brainer, one where I could easily divide my attention between the road and work schedules before hitting the outskirts of the nearest mall. But not today. I couldn’t stop thinking about Caleb’s words. Of all the answers to the whereabouts of my car, not in a million years would I have guessed that my Caddy would be found tailfins sticking out of the shallow end of Turlock Lake.

  And behind the wheel, neatly buckled into her safety belt, was none other than the blue ribbon winner in this year’s county fair’s jam-making contest, Patience McBride.

  FOUR

  Modesto’s prosperity has been memorialized in a permanent arch across I and Ninth Streets. Its cryptic message, Water Wealth Contentment Health, means that if you’re a farmer and have water, you are more than likely to be wealthy, if not healthy. Fine with me, except that they rerouted the highway and nobody drives under the arch except those taking this freeway off-ramp to Modesto’s jail or county courthouse, which was where I was going.

  I pulled into a parking space close to where Caleb, his Stetson tipped down over his brow, stood in quiet contemplation under the leafy shadow of sycamores. Caleb’s khakis still held a razor pleat against the rising morning heat. Lucky him. I was already a sweaty mess in jeans and yesterday’s T-shirt.

  I honked, and his face, bronzed by his love of the outdoors, creased into the familiar and endearing smile that he kept for the likes of puppies, lunch, and me.

  He strolled over to lean on the open window of the truck. “Hey. You okay?”

  I tried to keep my voice from cracking. “Can we get on with this, Caleb? Where’s my car?” My day was ruined. My car was certainly ruined. A woman, though not exactly a friend, was found dead in it, very ruined indeed. Then I thought of something and grabbed at his shirt sleeve. “Good God, Caleb, she’s not still in it, is she?”

  “No, of course not,” he said, offering me a hand out of the truck. “I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you. Poor old girl is at the county morgue, waiting her turn with the medical examiner. Come on, the impound lot is just around the corner. I’ll tell you what I know while we walk. A camper saw it sticking tail-end up in the mud at the lake’s edge about six a.m. Homicide will—”

  “What do you mean, Homicide?”

  “If it’s a suspicious death, Homicide gets involved. As of now, it looks like she was driving it when she hit the tree.”

  “What? Patience couldn’t see past the hood ornament! How in God’s name could she have been driving?”

  He nodded. “I told them.”

  “What is it you’re not telling me?”

  “Nothing, honest,” he said, not looking me in the eye. “I’m going to introduce you to the detective and bow out.”

  I gasped and pulled away from the firm clasp he had on my elbow. “I’m a suspect?”

  “Don’t panic, Lalla. It’s only a formality. I have rules to follow too, you know.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and we glumly trudged around the corner of the gri
m cement four-story government building. To say I was pretty shook up was an understatement. I was working my way into a full-grown migraine. It got worse when we walked into the impound yard, and I saw my Caddy. Seven layers of red lacquer were no match for the green slime growing at the edges of the lake during the summer. It clung like a fur coat to the back half of my car; the front end was covered with gray mud where it had come to rest in the shallow end of the lake.

  Detective Gayle Rodney was an out-of-shape, overworked minion of our local police system. He hadn’t quite finished his Sunday breakfast and was still picking at it with a toothpick while he absent-mindedly shook my hand. “Miz Bains.”

  The detective wasn’t any better at making eye contact. I suspected he’d rather be sitting somewhere with his feet up, digesting his bacon and eggs, than interviewing murder suspects. Me too.

  Introductions over, I was warned not to touch anything as we did a slow shuffle around the car. I bit at my trembling lip and commented on the insult of damage. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but then, I imagine, neither was Patience. The fender was crunched up almost to the engine block. The impact to its steel frame alone would have been enough to kill any driver, especially without the requisite shoulder strap seat belt, much less an airbag.

  “Well, it didn’t look anything like this yesterday, that’s for sure.” I pointed to the obvious. “The right front headlight is busted, and, of course, the front right fender is dented, uh, badly.” I gulped and looked across the car at Caleb, who still wouldn’t look me in the eye. I gave up and went back to surveying the damage to my once-beautiful car.

  “When can I get her to a garage, Detective?” I asked, watching weeds drip water off the wheel wells.

  “Well,” drawled the tooth picker, “we need to let her dry out. I don’t hold out much hope for prints, not when she’s been in all that wet silt. When she dries out some, we’ll vacuum her, see if we can pick up anything.” He shrugged. “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore, but with the water, sludge and mud, she sure took a hit.”