Cadillac, Oklahoma

by Louise Farmer Smith

  Her husband yanked on her arm. “Judianne! Sit down,” he hissed, but the woman tugged her arm out of her husband’s grasp and said, “We need to think of the children.”

  “You don’t even have any children!” Wynona shot back. It looked like that shut up the red-head, who slid away from her husband the lawyer. “All I’m saying,” the little gal said softly, “is that the town should go ahead and authorize the testing of a soil sample.” Then she did sit down, but not next to her handsome husband.

  “If I could just return everybody’s attention to the work to be done tonight,” Wynona said. “No other town in Oklahoma has a dump in its business district. This is 2013. We are well into the 21st century and need to create something Cadillac can be proud of.” She had everyone’s attention now. She sensed her gold jewelry glittering in the fluorescent lights and felt the full power as the banker’s widow, leading the way to beautiful, gracious living.

  But suddenly, from the other end of the conference table, Peanuts Murphy, the crotchety owner of the property, croaked, “Let’s get down to brass tacks here, folks. I own the property. Period.”

  “Which should have been condemned years ago,” Wynona murmured so all could hear. Ever since a visit to New England when she was a young English teacher, Wynona had held a sense of romance for the villages she and a girlfriend had driven through—the pristine white churches on hillsides, the welcoming inns where open fires took the chill off late August nights. Returning to a 90-degree classroom in Cadillac, she vowed her days in Oklahoma were numbered, but at the end of that year Floyd Blosser, Sr., who was 43 and owned the bank, asked for her hand. She was so impressed with herself, landing this big fish, that she had floated right into marriage.

  No one disagreed that the town should buy Peanuts’ land and develop it. Least of all Peanuts, who had grown old watching his two favorite enterprises dwindle and finally become embarrassments. Wynona and everyone else knew his original motivation for the pool hall in the 60s was to draw the buddies that his personality had failed to attract. But over time he began to smell rank disrespect. He tossed out young jerks and finally threw a lock on the door to show them who was boss. The bowling alley, built to attract an older crowd, was extinguished in 1988 by the twelve-lane Bowl-a-Rama out at the mall.

  Peanuts owned other buildings in Cadillac, the ones that housed the Laundra-mat, the Copy Shop, the Busy Bee Café, and Laces and Things, but these offered no love. He’d had two wives; the first left after three years of orthodontia achieved for her a smile that convinced her she could do better than Peanuts Murphy. The second wife, a dancer he’d wooed for forty-eight hours in Las Vegas, refused to leave town with him. No one in Cadillac would have had to know about his bride’s reluctance to make a home in Cadillac, but the best man at the wedding, Chub Widmer, told all. And the town laughed and laughed until a sewer line broke, flooding the streets of a new housing addition, and the resulting scandal took the heat off Peanuts.

  When neither party to the Las Vegas marriage contacted the other, Peanuts became comfortable with his ambiguous marital status and enjoyed the freedom of a bachelor who could whip out a glitzy, dog-eared marriage license whenever the kind of woman who would not improve his status in Cadillac tried to get serious. As the decades passed, Peanuts forgot his wedding-day humiliation and began to speak affectionately of his Las Vegas bride.

  “I’d be thinking about a will,” his friend R.J. had once said. “I mean, is she gonna inherit your money?”

  Peanuts’ eyes had lit up. “I’d sure like to see Wynona Blosser’s face when she gets a load of my little Vegas whore reviving the pool hall.” But he forgot the will. He had plans.

  Tonight, Peanuts knew he was going to get top dollar from the city and what was more important, his ideas and his name were going to be all over this project from the get-go. That ice cream place was going to be the first of a franchise. He could see it plain as day, swanky architecture on the line of Denny’s, and not just ice cream—a big menu with pictures so you could see what you were getting, and pretty waitresses, no fat girls. And there was plenty of room for a spacious parking lot. The place would glow in the night with blue neon along the roof-line and a revolving sign on top, PEANUTS’ PLACE.

  The report of the city engineer finally droned to a halt.

  “Now listen here!” Peanuts exploded from his end of the table, his aging spine curved further, an armadillo ready for battle. “That was just a lot of What-ifs from a guy who hasn’t got any evidence what-so-ever. Right?” Peanuts glared at the city engineer who stared at the table.

  Mayor Mashburn called on the manager of the utilities company to say what concessions Oklahoma Gas and Electric would make for this new city project.

  “Sounds nice,” the OGE manager said, “especially the idea of all those shade trees, which would keep energy use low in summer. And if the ice cream parlor is to be an all-electric building, the company will provide the first complement of light bulbs. Of course, we’ll give—”

  “Look here!” Peanuts pounded on the table. “We’ve been at this almost two hours. Toxic waste! Light bulbs! Criminy! And not one word has been said about price. Price! Price for prime commercial property. Let’s talk turkey. You’re not going to have any ice cream at all, if you don’t purchase the land. Now stop pussy-footin’!” He stared straight at Mayor Mashburn, who said the city manager should address that.

  “But before Fred speaks,” the mayor said, looking sheepish, “I need to share what’s in my heart. My mind is absolutely for the town green, no question, but my heart fears that if it fails, Cadillac could lose all the prestige it’s gained by having the Cougars be the regional champs. We could become the laughing stock of the state.”

  “Mr. Mayor,” Wynona cooed. “We are all Cougars fans.”

  Having unburdened himself, Mashburn nodded at the city manager. “Fred, are you ready?”

  Fred Miller knocked the edges of a stack of pages on the table and cleared his throat. “I have consulted three commercial realtors, one in Cadillac, one in Woodward, and one in Clinton, cities of corresponding size and growth potential, and this property which amounts to 1.765 acres is worth, when you take the average of comparable sites, $1.3 million.”

  “Oh, no you don’t!” shouted Peanuts rising to his feet. “I’m not going to let you rob me. We’re talking two full city blocks here. If I’d sell this for townhouses around the perimeter, I could easily make over eleven million.”

  “Not zoned residential.” Fred Miller answered tersely.

  “Maybe not yet, you idiot.”

  “No market for townhouses in Cadillac,” Miller said without passion. “Everyone wants a yard. Plenty of land away from downtown.”

  Peanuts sputtered. “You all—You all have your boy primed to steal my land, and it’s not going to happen.”

  “This is fair market value,” said the city manager.

  “I will never sell for any piddling $1.3 million.”

  “That’s our offer,” said the manager.

  “To hell with you!” shouted Peanuts and pushed back his chair and headed for the door. His hand on the doorknob, he turned to yell at Wynona. “And don’t try to condemn my buildings. If you demolish them I will just store more toilets, or maybe let that guy with the Porta-potties drain them right there on Main Street. You have ganged up on me, and you will be sorry!” He opened the door.

  “Wait, Mr. Murphy!” Wynona Blosser called. “We need you to make this work.”

  Peanuts acted upon a lifelong urge by throwing Wynona Blosser the finger and was gone.

  Interviews in The Courier revealed that the town had quickly splintered. Wynona’s vision had captured the garden club, Rose Rock Country Club, the socially ambitious who looked to her as the gatekeeper, and many others who cared about the way Cadillac looked to visiting relatives and friends.

  The words toxic waste had lit up the brains of those with pretensions to environmental concerns and those sincerely concerned about th
e purity of ground water. Lit up in equal numbers were the brains of those who resented the judgmental, busybody voices of the tree-huggers.

  Also quite vocal were those who resented the lawyers, bankers, managers, engineers, and especially the hoity-toity members of the garden club who had the leisure to tell others what their true esthetic needs were.

  Also in the local paper was evidence of a majority who did not know or care what the latest fuss was about. They get home from work tired and struggle to put a meal on the table while pushing their children to do homework.

  But of all the citizens of Cadillac not one, with the possible exception of R.J. Bagby, gave any sympathy to Peanuts Murphy. And Peanuts felt this. While he drank and collected his rents, he nursed a growing hatred for the town on whose high school football team he had played valiantly, his hometown in every sense of the word, the town which now was trying to rob him. And he talked endlessly of this to any person who had the misfortune to pause in his vicinity. But he refused to speak to anyone attempting to reopen a discussion about a price for his property. “They will never get that land! No matter how much they offer,” he told everyone in town.

  The word pariah was whispered in city government circles, but still everyone was shocked when, less than a month after the meeting at the Chamber of Commerce Building, Peanuts’ body was found at the bottom of a ravine.

  That night, as the news of Peanuts Murphy’s grisly death swirled through the town, Wynona’s mind fled to the town green in Concord, Massachusetts. Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne had lived in Concord. Wynona herself had been an English teacher. She belonged there where everything was leafy and literary, moist and mossy. She had visited the authors’ graves and identified in herself a feeling of kinship.

  Though she never got back East, through the years she fed her visions of a town green for Cadillac, and after seeing the movie, The Music Man, she added a bandstand to the picture. Her bank was going to provide the financing, and more important, it was her good taste that would guide the whole project. She had already found the little marble-top tables and the twisted wrought iron “ice cream” chairs in a catalog.

  But now things could not have turned out worse, and she couldn’t sleep. That tranquil green would have allowed her to be a better, more beautiful person, a woman who read more books and recalled what she’d learned in college and contemplated all this sitting under shade trees. That vision had been making her desperate for this project to succeed, but now, what happened to Peanuts was keeping her awake at night.

  Mr. Murphy’s body had been found near dusk by a hiker. In the light of morning the deputy found above the ravine tire tracks from what was later determined to be Peanuts’ car, but the car, its nose severely dented and its side scraped, was found in Peanuts’ driveway at home.

  The Courier reporter, Hillary O’Brian, a hard-working divorced mother, camped out at the sheriff’s office and tried to wheedle information. Sheriff Jake Hale, a serious, reticent man, told the reporter, “The body bore many scrapes and bruises typical of a man who had rolled down into a fifty-foot gorge. I’ve sent the body to the M.E. for the forensics.” He said nothing else although he himself had been waylaid last week by Peanuts, who wanted the sheriff to look into a conspiracy against him.

  Just in case Forensics reported evidence of a crime, Jake began quietly to interview each of the people who had been at that meeting in the Chamber of Commerce building, all of whom reported being insulted by Peanuts. The mayor reported a ferocious battle—“blood on the floor.” But since neither a note-taker nor a recording device had been present at the meeting, Hale could put little faith in any of these reports.

  His immediate plan was to find the next-of-kin, and on an anonymous tip from a female voice on the phone, he searched Peanuts’ house and found a marriage certificate. Chub Widmer, the witness at the wedding, was dead, but the name of the bride on the somewhat tattered document was still clear: Victoria St. Buckingham. Seeing that the wedding had taken place in the Nightingale Chapel in Las Vegas, Hale was afraid this might be the made-up name of a stripper or some other person who frequently changed her name. But with the help of Las Vegas police, he was able to reach Victoria at home.

  “I’d like to help you, Sheriff, but I’m probably the last person who could I.D. that guy. My sister told me I got married on the night you mentioned, but the guy ran off with the license, so I don’t even know his name. I was only 17 and drunk as a skunk. That was over thirty years ago. I don’t suppose he left me anything.”

  “Mr. Murphy didn’t have a will as far as we’ve been able to find out.”

  “I was just joking. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”

  “I’ve made inquiries, and there aren’t any kin I’ve been able to find. Are you married to someone else?”

  “No. I’ve dodged that bullet lots of times thanks to that one weird night. Every time a guy started to talk about moving in with me, I’d tell him I was married to a big businessman from Oklahoma. You meet so many jerks out here. I’m a grandmother. I’ve been working steadily at the Cheesecake House for years.”

  “Could you come and sign the papers? I’ll get someone here to identify the body. It’s in pretty bad shape.”

  “I’d like to help you, but a plane ticket—”

  Never one to make promises casually, Hale said, “Can I call you back?”

  The sheriff asked R.J., Peanuts’ only pal, to identify the body. “Sure, I’ll do it.” They rode together in the hearse to Oklahoma City to retrieve the corpse.

  The coroner’s report was inconclusive. Multiple bruises and a compound skull fracture.

  “Was he pushed? Did someone beat him to death?” Jake asked.

  The coroner squinted through thick, smeared glasses. “Hard to tell,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “We didn’t find a bullet, if that’s what you’re after. This isn’t television. If a guy gets pushed, he gets pushed. There aren’t going to be any marks from that.”

  “Well, could you tell me if he just rolled over the side of the ravine or if he dropped off the railroad trestle? Fifty feet.”

  “No. He wasn’t dropped fifty feet. His skeleton is pretty much intact. It’s just his hide that’s ripped up. What killed him was landing on his head right off. There’s no dirt under his fingernails like he tried to stop himself. He probably hit his head and broke his neck at the same time. If anyone cares, tell them he didn’t suffer. Sign here,” the coroner said, “and pick him up at the loading dock.”

  After buying some burgers and slushies, Jake and R.J. got on the road. “So, what do you think?” Jake asked casually as they ate in the car.

  “Peanuts was always a crazy guy,” R.J. said, chewing slowly. “I used to tell him he was a case of arrested development. But he got real obnoxious there at the end.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’d call me all times of the night and jaw on.”

  “Yeah?” Jake stuck with his usual monosyllabic interviewing technique.

  “He told me that Blosser woman was plotting against him, maybe going to get him declared incompetent then grab his money. He said the whole sale and development thing would have gone his way if it weren’t for her. Although other times he said she was for it, and it was the mayor who queered the deal. Sometimes he blamed the city manager.”

  “Oh?”

  “He thought someone was following him. Maybe shooting video trying to catch him drunk. He said he had a witness who saw a guy with a camera.”

  “Who?”

  “He didn’t say. Said he felt like blowing up the bank, and asked me if I wanted to help him.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I didn’t have to say anything ’cause he just went right on raving about how he was going to sell all his other property and put all the money into gold. After he bought the dynamite for the bank, that is.” R.J. took another bite.

  “You believe any of that about the Blosser woman?�
�

  “Nope. I just wanted to get off the phone.”

  At home, alone, in his house between the parking lots of the Krispy Kreme and K-Mart, Jake sat down and turned on the local ten o’clock news in time to see the mayor saying, “This murderer must be caught before he strikes again.” Jake stood and stretched. What evidence did he have? From R.J.’s report it sounded like Peanuts was having delusions. But there still could have been a crime. Paranoids had enemies too.

  In the Busy Bee Café the collection for the plane ticket took about three minutes. Everyone wanted to get in on helping the widow from Las Vegas, including Sloane Willard who dropped in a twenty. The deputy, Fred, had gotten on the internet and found a good deal on a flight. Jake felt better knowing that a person connected to a legal document, albeit a Vegas marriage license, was on her way. She would be able to get some money out of the bank to bury Peanuts and take care of any other arrangements.

  “This is weird,” Victoria said on the drive back from the airport. “I don’t even know the guy, and here I am playing his wife.”

  “You are his wife. His widow actually,” Jake said. He was relieved to see that Victoria St. Buckingham was an ordinary-looking woman. She was tall and carried her middle-age weight well. He could tell she was still proud of her body, but he could also imagine her as a lean 17-year-old bent on adventure. Had she bluffed her way into casinos where she met bumpkins like Peanuts? Had he flashed a lot of cash, maybe bought her a diamond ring or a fur coat or whatever the greedy-all-night merchants on the strip had to offer people drunk on the belief that no one at home would ever know.

  “Have any trouble getting here?” Jake asked.

  “No. My sister helped me, loaned me clothes and took me to the airport.”

  Besides some colorful boots, she was dressed in slacks and a nice V-neck sweater, clothes like the average Cadillac housewife wore to church. Her long auburn hair was pulled back with a horseshoe-shaped barrette. She had a throaty voice, and he wondered if she’d ever been a singer.

  “So, you’ve lived in Las Vegas all your life?”