A Bad Day for Pretty

by Sophie Littlefield

“Listen, Stella—I told you what happened. He was there that night, at the track. He was the one put that woman in the ground and poured concrete over her.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe there was two of them. Like he was working with a partner or something. Maybe he accidentally stumbled on someone else doing the job, and—”

  “It was him, Stella—I know, ’cause of the shoes.”

  “Huh?”

  “The shoes. Wil called me just as soon as the tornado went through, ’cause he heard on the radio that the snack shack got pulled right out of the ground. He figured it was just a matter of time until they found the body. He told me I had to get the shoes off of it. Said she had on black patent shoes—skimmers, you know, like them little ballerina flats everybody was wearin’ a few years back?—and his prints was all over them.”

  “What—how the hell was he thinkin’ you’d get the shoes? I mean, that’s like evidence, ” Stella said.

  Brandy sighed theatrically. “Stella,” she said, enunciating slowly and clearly, “you got to remember I got a little extra that most females don’t. And Wil knows that, he knows exactly what kind of effect I have on men. I mean, I can’t even help it.”

  Stella caught Chrissy rolling her eyes heavenward, but the girl kept her mouth shut.

  “Do tell,” Stella said dryly.

  “So Wil says to me, go on back to that ex-husband of yours—he never could stand it that I used to be married to the law—why, I think that’s half the reason he got so dang intent on breakin’ it all the time—anyway he says go and do whatever it takes to get them shoes.”

  “You’re saying this man of yours was willing to let you get in another man’s pants?” Stella said dubiously.

  “Of course not, Stella—Wil knows I got all kinds a different techniques and whatnot. Why, I could have a man turned to putty in my hands without even lifting my skirt. I got ethics, you know.”

  Stella snorted. “Right. This hardened criminal boyfriend of yours figured the sheriff would hand over evidence if you just batted them fake eyelashes at him a few times—”

  “It don’t matter what he thought, anyway, Stella, ’cause he said if I didn’t get the shoes and keep my mouth shut about it, he was going to kill me.”

  “He said he’d kill you. In those exact words.”

  “Yes, Stella, that’s what he said. Well, he said he’d make me very, very sorry. What do you think that means? I mean, how much sorrier could I get than dead?”

  “Mmm.” Stella wasn’t convinced. “Why would Wil of left the shoes on that body in the first place, if he knew his fingerprints were on them?”

  “Well, ’cause he didn’t think the body would ever get dug up. I mean, who could of foresaw a act of God like that twister?”

  Chrissy sniffed. “Sloppy, if you ask me.”

  “And this whole time he’s ordering you around, telling you to dig through the evidence locker for him, did he ever bother to explain why he killed that woman in the first place?”

  At this, Brandy’s composure threatened to give way for the first time. She bit her lip and glanced away. “He just said he didn’t do it.”

  “Huh. Did he say, maybe, who did do it? Seein’ as he didn’t and all?”

  “Well, now, Stella,—I didn’t ask a whole bunch of questions. I was scared out of my mind. But what Wil said was he hadn’t ever met her before and he was just burying her for a friend.”

  Stella snorted. “I’ve heard of watering plants for a friend when they go on vacation,” she said. “I’ve heard of picking friends up at the airport and driving them to the doctor and loaning them yard tools. I ain’t much heard of burying bodies they accidentally killed, though. That seems to go above and beyond, you ask me.”

  “Well, fuck you, Stella,” Brandy said. “I’d like to seen you do any better, with some crazy man threatening to kill you. I don’t guess you would have got him to confess much either!”

  “She ain’t afraid of crazy men,” Chrissy offered. “I mean, look at her face. She got herself all cut to pieces by a crazy man and didn’t never back down.”

  Stella touched her face automatically, fingertips going to the fading ridges and lines of scars. Nice as it was for Chrissy to defend her, it was a painful reminder of her ongoing beauty challenges.

  “Look, no matter what Wil was telling you, letting him order you around was about the dumbest thing you could have done,” she said crossly. “Seems like if you’d had any sense, you would of just told Goat what was going on and asked to be put in protective custody or whatever.”

  Or witness protection—that might not have been a bad idea; Stella didn’t imagine Sawyer County would be much worse off if Brandy had been shipped off to, say, Wyoming to start a new life.

  Brandy blinked as some green slime dripped into her eye. “Well, that was my plan B.”

  “Plan B? So when you showed up that night, when Goat and I were having a perfectly good dinner—”

  “I saw he made you his mama’s chicken,” Brandy said. “He made that for me, too—first time he cooked for me. Guess I better let you know, he ain’t got much of a repertoire.”

  “Maybe for you he didn’t. Could be he’s learned a few new tricks,” Stella shot back, and then regretted it—she’d been bluffing, and Brandy arched her thin brows skeptically.

  “Mmm-hmm. Yeah, I guess, seein’ as what you two got is so special and all. Anyway, I knew if I could just, ah … look, I don’t want to hurt your feelings here, Stella, but if I could just get Goat where I wanted him, why, he’d just be ready to do anything for me, like always. He never could refuse me anything once he quit thinkin’ with his head and got to thinkin’ with—”

  “I get the picture,” Stella snapped. Though it wasn’t a picture she much fancied lingering over. “But if you’re so damn irresistible in the sack, how is it that I had to come spring you from a bedroom he locked you into?”

  Brandy’s scowl was evident even under all that goo. “All’s I needed was a little time. I was wearin’ Goat down, but then Wil got tired of waiting and blew up my car and that’s when I knew the jig was up.”

  “The jig?” Chrissy interrupted. “What the hell kind of talk is that? You been watching too many old movies. Like the one you based your whole stupid come-get-me act on. Anyway, way I hear it, you were so trashed, you didn’t even know it was your car got blown up. I heard you was tryin’ to roast weenies out there.”

  Brandy glared hard first at Chrissy and then at Stella.

  “Hey, don’t look at me, sister,” Stella said. “I only told it like it was. And you ain’t exactly done a whole lot to get on my good side.”

  “I told you you can have Goat, okay? All I want now is for you to get rid of Wil.”

  “You still haven’t explained exactly how you’re gonna convince me you’re telling the truth.”

  “What? I laid it all out for you. I ain’t got no reason to lie—”

  “You mean, other than all the lies you’ve already told, that’s got the entire sheriff’s department out searchin’ for you? What if there was some kind of real emergency and you got Goat and all them off beatin’ the bushes all over the county?”

  “What, this ain’t a real emergency? You want to wait until I truly am dead?” Brandy’s voice had gone shrill. “You want a big old knife poking out of my chest? Maybe a couple of bullets in my forehead?”

  At the moment, Stella thought those options didn’t sound too bad. But the truth was that she really couldn’t come up with much of a reason for Brandy to be lying. “Okay,” she said, sighing heavily. “Give me what you got, and Chrissy and I’ll go find him.”

  “And then you’ll kill him.”

  “And then we’ll turn him in. Let me explain how this works. I got a client who’s gonna pay me to make sure her husband, who just happens to be innocent, doesn’t fry for sticking a gal into a concrete grave. All I got to do is get the proof that somebody else did it, and then I collect my nice big fat paycheck and let the law take it
from there.”

  “When you say ‘the law,’ what you really mean is Goat, right? Goat’s gonna hunt him down like the mongrel dog he is?”

  Stella drew a breath, giving herself a second to steady her nerves. “There’s a team,” she said. “A law enforcement team with support from up in Fayette. They’ll book Wil in there, but I bet we’re talking all kinds of federal laws here, so I imagine he’ll end up doing time in Springfield. Though I don’t know why it matters to you. Gone is gone. I know you want him dead and all, but he won’t be getting out of prison any time soon, not after he makes a full confession.”

  “Well, he ain’t gonna do that, Stella. What do you take him for, some kind a idiot?”

  Stella was getting a little tired of arguing with this woman. Her sassy mouth was bad enough, but the fact that she looked better covered with green mud than Stella did after a full-tilt beauty assault—and she’d shared carnal knowledge, and plenty of it, with the man Stella had in her sights—was just about too much.

  “What do you take me for, Brandy, some kind of amateur? Believe me, I’ve made plenty of men do things they didn’t plan on doing. The ones come in with the most confidence—why, after we go a few rounds, they’re generally the ones that end up whimpering like kicked puppies. Trust me, when I’m done with your boyfriend, he’ll be begging to confess to selling swampland and rigging elections on top of doing that gal at the track.”

  “I gotta tell you, Brandy, it’s just painful to look at you,” Chrissy cut in, rubbing circles on Tucker’s back as she held him. “With all that nasty shit on your face. How about you go wash it off and put on something decent? ’Fore I lose my breakfast.”

  Brandy gave Chrissy a withering glance as she slid her way off the bed. She walked carefully past Stella, clutching the robe tight around her, and pulled a small, slinky pink garment out of a drawer, along with a few matching silky underpinnings. She minced to the bathroom with her chin in the air and slammed the door behind her.

  “Man, she just don’t give up anything, huh?” Chrissy asked. “Acts like her farts don’t stink.”

  “Just a cover-up. She’s nervous. And she oughtta be. I’m not leaving until I get everything she knows about Wil Vines, right down to the birthmarks on his hairy ass.”

  “You know, Stella,” Chrissy said thoughtfully. “I’m not sure she’s really all that afraid of him. I mean she’s kinda nervous right now, yeah, seein’ as he blew up her car and all, but I think what she really is is mad at him. And hurt.”

  “Huh? Chrissy, they been broke up for six months. And she’s trying to get back with Goat.”

  “No, see, you ain’t thinkin’ it through. She came here to Prosper ’cause she wanted something from the sheriff. That’s different from hopin’ to get down his drawers. I mean, I guess a gal can go after both, kinda like with me and Larry, but just think how quick she was to give him up. What was it she said to you on the phone?”

  I guess you can have him now. The words came back with a delicious little thrill. “Well, but that’s ’cause she thought she’d be dead.”

  “She wasn’t in no hole. She was in the Holiday Fucking Inn here, eatin’ bonbons.”

  “Only ’cause she was afraid Wil would find her.”

  “Maybe, a little.”

  The door to the bathroom opened and Brandy came out. With the towel unturbaned from the woman’s head, Stella was startled to see that her hair, unsprayed and unteased and unpouffed, was as flat and dull as a mutt’s fur after a dip in the lake, plastered over her ears in a style that didn’t do a whole lot for her face, which on careful examination was a trifle too round with a bit too much room between her small eyes and her hairline.

  There were purple smudges under her eyes, and her lips were nearly colorless. Even her hoochie little body looked a bit forlorn stuffed hurriedly into the pink top and shorts, unaccessorized, as it was, without the benefit of bangles and platform shoes to draw the eye away from a poochy midsection and a set of round hips that had seen just about as much middle age as Stella’s own.

  “Well, go ahead, take a good look,” Brandy grumbled. “’Cause you ain’t never gonna see this again. I don’t ever go out without my face on.”

  Stella did, enjoying the sight plenty. As a matter of fact, it just might be that Brandy’s hips were lumpier than her own. And that butt—flat. Decidedly flat. Like, you could iron on it.

  And, really, what man likes a flat butt?

  “So how about we get going on the information sharing, Truax?” Stella said with considerably more cheer than she was feeling just a few minutes ago.

  “Now, look here,” Brandy said, perching on the edge of the other bed. “I don’t know that you have to go messing the man up, all right? I mean, no need to go overboard.”

  “What’s your problem, Brandy?” Chrissy demanded. “Here we are, ready to take this problem permanently off your hands, so you can go back to whatever pathetic little life you were leadin’ in Versailles, and all of a sudden you want us to play nice with the guy who’s been trying to kill you?”

  “I didn’t say be nice, exactly, I just don’t know if it’s necessary—”

  “You still love him!” All of a sudden Chrissy snapped her fingers. “Stella, that’s it—Brandy here still loves that no-good man of hers. Don’t you?”

  “I never said—”

  “You didn’t have to. I mean, look at you. You’re all twitchy like, worried we’re gonna mark up his pretty face. What did that neighbor lady tell you, Stella?”

  “She said he was charming,” Stella said doubtfully. “And easy on the eyes, though that’s the kind of thing that has a fair bit to do with the beholder—”

  “Aw, come on, Stella. I been married to a no-good man, and you have, too. We don’t neither of us need to go pretending we don’t know what it’s like to fall for a fella that’d just as soon bust your lip as kiss you.”

  “Wil ain’t never hit me,” Brandy said hotly. “He was always gentle.”

  “Holy Christ, Brandy, he tried to blow you up, and he killed some poor woman—hell, he was probably screwin’ her, too. Just how much punishment do you need to take from a man, anyway?”

  “He ain’t never messed around on me, neither.” Brandy set her lips in a thin line and crossed her arms and fumed at the two of them. “And if he did kill that gal, there had to be some good reason.”

  “There’s never a good reason to kill a woman!” Call it a hot button—Stella felt her blood surge in her veins.

  “Trust me, I’ve messed around on a lot a guys and a whole bunch of them probably think the same thing, sister,” Chrissy said. “Just ’cause you don’t want to know it, don’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  “Shut up. You don’t know him. Not like I do.”

  “And yet you’re willing to let me kill him,” Stella said. “You’re one confusing, crazy, mixed-up kind of sister.”

  “Well, yeah—if you kill him quick. Hell, that’d be better than locking him up. He’s a—a wild spirit. You can’t fence that in.” A little hiccupping sob followed this declaration and Brandy dotted her eyes with a tissue.

  “Oh Lord, as I live and breathe, now I think I’ve heard it all,” Chrissy said. She picked up a TV channel guide from the nightstand and fanned herself and Tucker with it. “I think you may be just about the dumbest person I ever met. And trust me, I know all about dumb—I’ve dated it, married it, and had its baby. Difference between you and me is, I learn from my mistakes.”

  “Well, maybe I just won’t tell you anything, you think you’re so smart. You go ahead and figure it out yourself,” Brandy said petulantly. “I don’t have to tell you his cell phone number or nothing else besides either. Why, go ahead and shoot me, Stella, if you want to. Only I don’t think you got it in you.”

  It wasn’t the smartest thing to say, but at least Brandy got one thing right: Stella couldn’t shoot a woman, at least one as pathetic and self-destructive as Brandy.

  But after Stella handed the gu
n over to Chrissy and excused herself and went and got her portable intimidation kit from the Jeep, and got Brandy strapped down with a couple of custom-made, chamois-lined restraints, and explained just how she planned to shave her head bald with a wicked-sharp razor, Brandy turned out to be a lot more cooperative than any of them expected.

  NINETEEN

  The new plan was simple enough: First, call off the search so the law enforcement staff could get back to looking out for the welfare of the citizens, in addition to locking up innocent civic employees like Neb Donovan. Next, find Wil Vines and ask him why he killed poor Laura Cassel. Then suggest he turn himself in … and pound his ass into a pulp if he wasn’t feeling cooperative. And then have a nice celebration dinner with the Donovans, and work out a payment plan that would help keep Stella afloat for the next few months.

  Only … Stella and Chrissy hit a snag right about step two.

  The visit to the sheriff’s department went as well as it could, considering the sheriff himself wasn’t there. Since he’d led a search team around the county’s backwaters all through the night and into the morning, Detective Simmons had finally sent Goat home to get some sleep. Simmons, on the other hand, had caught a few hours of shut-eye back at the motel, and when Stella and Chrissy dragged a much-subdued Brandy through the doors with them, she was sitting in Goat’s office, looking rested—if no more friendly than on Stella’s prior visits. Tucker, bright-eyed after the nap that started in the motel room and continued on the ride over, wiggled to be put down and then scampered over to Irene’s desk and helped himself to the bowl of Tootsie Rolls she kept there, holding just one of Stella’s clogs pressed to his chest.

  “Well, hi, girls. That Tucker’s getting more precious every day,” Irene said. Then she lowered her voice and leaned over her counter. Apparently Simmons still hadn’t learned to play nice with the help, because Irene shot a significant look in the direction of the detective. “Now they got me babysitting the Wicked Witch of the North. Who you got there?”

  “This here’s the murder victim,” Stella said. “Brandy Truax. Only she never really was in any old hole. Ain’t that right, girlfriend.”