A Bad Day for Pretty

by Sophie Littlefield

  Suddenly a full-screen image of a hard-muscled, deep-tanned, dew-dotted male torso, the nether regions tucked into a rather tiny thong that was by no means adequate for the job, flashed onto the Mac.

  “Oh, dear,” Chrissy said. “That darn Brody Jenner. Stella, you would not b’lieve what-all you can find on that TMZ website. It’s positively distracting.”

  “Hmm,” Stella murmured.

  A sprinkling of icons blipped into place, and Chrissy clicked on one that looked like a button inscribed with a gold W.

  “Check this, ” she said proudly. The World of Warcraft portal popped up on-screen, an impressive stone arch guarded by cloaked red-eyed giants. In short order, there were a variety of trolls and thugs whacking each other with broadaxes and clubs.

  “Neat-o,” Stella said. “Look, you want to really make yourself useful around here, why don’t you see if you can hack into the Show Me Five Paydown and transfer some of the cash from those state lottery crooks over into my account.”

  Her finances, she suspected, were a little dire, since she hadn’t brought in any extra sideline money in recent months, and Hardesty Sewing Machine Shop & Repair had been closed while she and Chrissy recuperated. Stella was paying the most urgent bills as they came in, but she’d been afraid to check the balances in her accounts.

  She owned a book by Suze Orman. That was a start, anyway. In the one chapter Stella’d read, Suze had made the point that it was kind of dumb for women to bury their heads in the sand and let money issues get the upper hand. Well, that Suze was a smart one, all right, and just as soon as Stella got an evening free … or hell froze over … she intended to see what else the woman had to say.

  “You sayin’ the lottery folks is crooks?” Chrissy demanded, so incredulous she let a hairy dude with hooves and horns club her character into a bloody pulp.

  “Well, if you believe that taking money from poor folks and handing it over to bloated government agencies makes a person a crook, then, yeah, I guess I do,” Stella said.

  “Stella Hardesty,” Chrissy breathed, her voice nearly quaking with conviction. “It is the God-given right of every citizen of our nation to gamble. You take away a person’s gambling rights—why, it’s gonna be our right to bear arms comin’ close behind.”

  “Chrissy—,” Stella started. Political discussions with the girl, she’d learned, were the sort of activity that required an erasure of all the basic tenets she’d long assumed right-thinking people shared. Growing up in a family of six children on hardscrabble acreage without enough resources to support all those folks comfortably—Chrissy’s early training focused on a special family blend of ingenuity and bootstrap opportunism that reflected nearly unplumbable depths of skepticism and idealism. She wasn’t dumb—far from it—and she wasn’t always wrong, either, but adjusting to Chrissy’s world in preparation for a serious discussion required a nearly Zen-like realignment of her preconceptions that Stella simply did not, at the moment, have time for.

  “Honey. Let’s table this particular discussion, okay? I just wanted to see if you were all set for the day before I headed out.”

  “Well, all right.” Chrissy turned her attention back to the screen. Her character, a horned, tusked creature in a leather bikini, picked up a spiked throwing disk and let it fly. “Nailed you, you speckle-assed little yammer.”

  “I hope the customers don’t cut in on your playtime too much.”

  “Aw, hush, Stella, I just got this set up for Todd.”

  The boy biked over to the shop a few days a week, when he couldn’t find anything better to do; Stella figured that playing on a computer in her shop probably beat smoking weed with the deadbeats down behind the Arco while he waited for his mom to come home from work.

  Recently, though—as Todd approached his fourteenth birthday—she suspected the boy had another reason to be visiting the shop: a bit of a crush on Chrissy.

  “Now, you watch his tender little heart,” she warned. “Won’t do to go breakin’ it before he’s even had a chance to kiss a girl.”

  “Oh, now,” Chrissy said. “Boys used to fall in love with me all the time, and it ain’t never killed any of ’em.”

  Stella resisted pointing out that one, at least—her ex, Roy Dean—lay dead in the town cemetery. After all, it wasn’t really accurate to say that a broken heart had led to the man’s death sentence at the hands of the Mafia.

  “Anything you want me to look up for you while you’re gone?” Chrissy continued, shutting down the game.

  “Thought you weren’t interested in my side business,” Stella retorted. “You know, you wanted to keep your knickers pristine and all.”

  “Yeah? Well, not to complain or anything, but I’ve just about sucked all the joy outta stocking thread as I think I possibly can. I need a challenge.”

  “A challenge,” Stella repeated. “Okay.”

  She took a pen and a note from the cube on the counter—it read she who dies with the most fabric wins—and scribbled out a note:

  Cory Layfield

  Background

  Priors—associations, juvenile records, ???

  “Here,” she said, handing it over. “See if you can, I don’t know, Google all this or whatever. I got a recent address and I imagine I’ll just work from there unless you come up with something better.”

  “Boy howdy,” Chrissy said, taking the note and slipping it under the keyboard. “That ain’t much of a challenge.”

  “Well, don’t get too excited, you’re not going to find anything but junk.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing, it’s just that if you want to get anything besides a zillion pointless hits, you have to know what you’re doing.”

  Too late Stella realized her error: Without meaning to, she’d implied that Chrissy did not, in fact, know what she was doing; and if there was one thing she’d learned in their young partnership, it was that Chrissy Shaw had had about as much being dismissed, marginalized, ignored, put down and left for stupid as she was planning to take. Stella began edging away from the counter, toward the door, taking her purse with her—a quick retreat was always the best option when Chrissy was provoked.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Fuck that!” Chrissy exclaimed, her cornflower-blue eyes snapping, her generous gloss-sticky lips thinning to a hard line. “I know what I’m doing, all right. I’m workin’ for shit wages for a woman with no more education than I got. And if any provin’ needs done, I reckon you’ll be eatin’ those words for dinner, so I wouldn’t go around callin’ me no kinda—”

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Stella called hurriedly as she backed out the door. As she practically ran for the Jeep, she remembered a truth she’d picked up in recent years, something she really ought to have put on a sign and hung up out front:

  The less a woman has to lose, the quicker you better get out of her way.

  Stella Knocked sharply on Goat’s office door for the second time. His office had a very large window—on account of the sheriff’s offices being housed in what was once a Hardee’s restaurant, with the kitchen now converted to records storage and a supply closet and a conference room, and the staff offices carved from what used to be the dining room.

  A spanking-new Hardee’s had been built out State Road Nine in the mid-’90s, where traffic from the interstate was more likely to find it, but Stella had eaten in the old one often enough in her younger days that she still got a flashback every time she opened the double glass doors from the parking lot, one of the building’s features that had gone unmodified. She could almost smell the char on the charbroiled burgers.

  The big windows had been covered with mini-blinds in a pinkish shade of mauve to match the industrial carpeting and wallpaper from the remodel, but Stella had learned that crouching down at the right angle from a vantage point in the shrubbery gave a person a pretty clear view of the goings-on inside, so she knew that Goat was at his desk. Besides, Irene Dorsey, the departmental recep
tionist and records officer, stage-whispered, “He’s hiding,” with a theatrical nod in the direction of the sheriff’s office.

  Stella could feel Irene’s curious gaze on her as she waited impatiently for Goat to give up the ruse. Irene was a holdover from Sheriff Burt Knoll’s administration, but she’d made the transition to the new sheriff with ease. It wasn’t hard to do—her working style of listening attentively and then doing things exactly as she damn well pleased went equally unchallenged by both administrations.

  Goat was no dummy. Sheriff Knoll hadn’t been either. Both knew better than to go trying to fix something that wasn’t broke, and Irene—with her sharp memory undiminished by age, her unyielding loyalty to the long arm of the law, and her matronly scent of rose water and Jean Naté dusting powder—worked plenty well just the way she was.

  “He’s been hiding since that crew took the body and hightailed it back up to Fayette yesterday,” Irene clarified in a slightly louder whisper. “That Detective Simmons says she’s coming on back in her own car this afternoon, and Goat don’t want nothing to do with her.”

  Stella turned away from the sheriff’s door and considered Irene thoughtfully. Seventy if she was a day, Irene seemed to think she had the entire town fooled about her age due to her zealous if not entirely professional home hair coloring. Her thin strands were dyed a relentless black, and not only did she keep up with the roots, but she often ended up dyeing the skin that encroached on her hairline, too, giving her a special-effects horror movie effect—as though she was wearing a gray latex skullcap with a wig attached.

  Irene was holding a copy of In Touch out as far as her arms extended in front of her, peering over the tops of a pair of coral pink–framed reading glasses. She licked her thumb, then her forefinger, before turning a page.

  “So … what do you think of those folks from up in Fayette, anyway?” Stella asked Irene.

  “Well, now, they been here before. Once in 2000, once a few years before that.” If Irene had an opinion on the subject, it wasn’t forthcoming.

  “Murders?” Stella asked. While her own interest in deadly crime hadn’t really gotten jump-started that far back, she thought she’d remember the violent spilling of blood of one of her fellow citizens.

  “Hmm, not so much,” Irene said. “In 2000, remember that coot fell off his dingy and drowned in the strip pits, and then the next week them kids were ditching for senior week and one a them got fished out—”

  “Tragic,” Stella murmured, because she did remember that one, a skinny kid who’d been something of a local sensation on the track team.

  “Yes, but remember Sheriff Knoll got it in his head it was a serial killer at work. Drowndin folks.” She shook her head incredulously. “I coulda told Burt it wasn’t nothin’ of the sort, but you remember how he got. Them crazy theories of his. Anyway, they sent that bunch down from Fayette back then and they poked around a little and come up with the bodies’ blood alcohol levels and whatnot and finally everyone was satisfied it wasn’t nothing but stupid at work.”

  “Well, what about the other time? Before that one?”

  “You remember that whole Trusty Carmichael thing.…”

  “Oh, that.” Trusty Carmichael went a little nuts one summer after his wife of thirty years left him to go up to Saint Louis and enter a convent. He grew convinced that God was performing blood sacrifices on the picnic table in his backyard, but it turned out that the blood came from his own chickens, which he killed off over the course of a few weeks, chopping one up every time he got too despondent over Mrs. Carmichael’s defection to the holy side. “Least that probably didn’t take them a whole long time to figure out.”

  “Not with the feathers and all, no.”

  “Guess we just don’t have a whole lot of mayhem around here,” Stella mused, reflecting on the locations where she’d done some of her messier work. Generally it took just a bucket of rags and some Windex or Soft Scrub to clean up after even the most spirited discussion with one of her parolees, as she wasn’t spilling murderous amounts of blood—just enough to do the trick, that was the rule.

  Not for the first time, she flashed a quick prayerful thank-you up to the Big Guy for helping keep hid what she’d hid in the first place—the not-so-accidental nature of the string of accidents that had befallen the worst offenders of devil-baiting hatefulness against their women.

  “No, ma’am,” Irene said serenely. “And that’s how we like it.”

  “So what’s Goat got against Simmons?”

  Irene laid down her magazine and beckoned Stella conspiratorially. “Now, you didn’t hear this from me,” she said, “but I believe that woman has designs on him. I heard her asking him to have dinner with her today when she was getting ready to leave last night. Seein’ as how she’d be all by her little lonesome out at the Heritage House Motel and didn’t have any idea where to get a decent meal. It was quite a sight to see, Stella, that woman carrying on. She don’t have, you know, the equipment for it.”

  To Stella’s startled amusement, Irene slipped her hands under her bosom and gave herself a brief little lift-and-display.

  “Irene!” Stella said, blushing. “Not every man’s a tit man, you know.”

  “Well, now, honey—it ain’t just that. She’s got that nasty smoker voice and she bites her nails and she don’t have hardly any tush on her at all. And she’s not particularly friendly … to me, anyway. Called me ‘Miz Percy’ twice, even though I corrected her the first time, and it’s spelt out right here, D-o-r-s-e-y, plain as day.” Irene tapped her engraved gold nameplate for emphasis.

  “Why, that’s terrible,” Stella murmured. She didn’t have any particular ill feelings for Simmons, but it was clear that the woman wasn’t all that smart if she’d missed out on the number one rule of getting on in the workplace: Make friends from the bottom up.

  It wasn’t such a difficult lesson as far as Stella could see—why folks ever figured to get anywhere if they couldn’t be bothered to spare a kind word for the people who did all the work. If you woke up with the flu and wanted to be squeezed in with the doctor, why, you’d better darn well be sweet to the scheduler. If your cable TV went on the fritz, hollerin’ at the customer service gal wasn’t going to get you anything but transferred to the wrong department.

  And if you wanted to make time with the sheriff, you had darn well better play nice with Irene.

  “I just call it like I see it,” Irene said primly, returning to her In Touch.

  “Well … I do hate to miss him,” Stella sighed, turning as if to go. “Seein’ as I was going to go pick up some Pokey Pot sandwiches and I know how fond of them he is.”

  In truth, it was Irene who favored the barbecue joint on the other end of town, a place that simmered its pork shoulder Carolina style until it was reduced to tender, vinegary shreds and tucked it into soft white rolls baked fresh every morning. Irene, who had to man the desk through the lunch hour, usually had to make do with whatever she brought from home.

  “Oh, I’d hate for Goat to miss out,” Irene said, snatching up the phone hastily. “Plus I wouldn’t mind one a them myself.”

  Stella tried to keep from smirking as Irene stabbed at the button on the intercom. “I know you’re in there, Goat Jones,” she said, “and if you don’t haul your ass out here this instant, I’m gonna shred up your This Old House magazine what just come in with the mail.”

  She replaced the receiver with a satisfied little smile, adding “He sure does love that magazine,” just as Goat’s door burst open and he stood there, six feet four lanky inches in a tan polyester uniform, glowering at the pair of them.

  “Women,” he said with venom. “God’s sent me a plague of women, when all I’m trying to do is mind my own business. And every one of y’all bent on causing me pain.”

  “Nothin’ you ain’t got comin, I’m sure,” Irene murmured, focusing on her celebrity gossip while Stella tried to look innocent, a trick she’d been polishing for quite some time.


  EIGHT

  Stella nibbled at a french fry, watching Goat try to eat his fast-falling-apart sandwich. Between the dripping sauce and the overstuffing that had gone into his Pokey Pot Junior, more of the sandwich was landing on the plate than was making it to his mouth.

  Stella, who had a couple decades of Pokey Pot experience, had long ago developed a two-pronged approach to their sandwiches: Eat enough of the middle with a fork to ensure that when you picked up the remainder, the innards would stay put.

  The other key was to order the Pokey Pot Baby. It was a rare person who could polish off a Junior at lunch—and Stella knew only a handful of people who’d ever made their way through a Big Pig. Nonetheless, a greasy paper sack holding a Big Pig, its top folded down several times and stapled, sat next to her on the table, a reward for Irene, who had come through for Stella in the clutch.

  “I hear you have a date tonight,” Stella couldn’t resist saying.

  Goat swallowed hard and dabbed at his mouth with a paper napkin, then took a long drink of sweet tea. “Ain’t a date,” he managed to get out.

  Stella shrugged. “Oh … a professional thing, then.”

  Goat didn’t say anything. He frowned and glowered at the table. Stella couldn’t help noticing that frowning lined up all the hard planes in his face in a breathtaking display of masculinity.

  “Uh, probably having to do with that dead gal,” she went on. “You all figure out who she is yet?”

  Goat flicked a glance at her, just long enough for Stella to read the blip of intrigue there. “You know I ain’t gonna talk to you ’bout that, Stella.”

  “Oh,” Stella said, keeping her expression neutral. “Only reason I ask, is, maybe it would give us something to help convince you Neb didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Goat snorted. “That’s not my concern. Way we see it, Neb’s sitting on a whole lot of trouble right now. Your boy wasn’t exactly an altar boy back in the day. Fact is, he got him a taste for that hillbilly heroin. We know all about it, Stella, and that Oxy’s one expensive damn habit, the kind that might inspire a man to take what ain’t his in order to pay for it. I’ll tell you what, once we confirm who that woman is, it’s only gonna look worse for Neb.”