Bubba and the Mysterious Murder Note

by C. L. Bevill

  “It was the broken jaw that was the bigger problem. Steak does not taste proper when it’s pureed.” He shuddered briefly.

  Willodean continued with the sad smile. Bubba knew it was because she felt responsible for the last time he was in the hospital. After all, she had brained him with a set of manacles.

  Bubba took her tiny hand in his. He looked at the small, well-formed fingers that lay in his palm. “Ifin it had been the other fella, and you hadn’t done what you did, you would be dead.”

  “I know,” she said. Those bottle green eyes glittered. She suddenly set her shoulders in a movement that made him think of his mother. Bubba didn’t want to think of his mother, so he looked at her luscious lips instead.

  “Lunch?”

  “If I can get away,” Willodean said. She waved her hand at the crowd. “I don’t think the mayor and the town council anticipated the success of the festival. They need all the hands they can get until the murders stop around 7 p.m.”

  “Meet me at the cannons at noon,” Bubba said. “I’ll bring a couple of po’boys from Cajun Dick’s.”

  “I can do that,” she said. Willodean leaned close to him, and Bubba sighed with anticipation. The hand that had been in his loosened and reached up to tug at the shirt collar around his neck, so that he would bend toward her.

  At the very moment that she was about to lay her ruby-colored lips upon his, someone yelled, “No bombing Lithuania!” and Willodean turned her head to look.

  Bubba kissed her cheek. It was almost as good. Almost.

  Willodean looked at him regretfully and waded into the crowd. He wasn’t really worried about her. It turned out she was really handy with the nightstick.

  Unfortunately he hadn’t had the opportunity to speak with Willodean about the note. He would at lunch. Until then, he had a few hours to kill. So to speak.

  Bubba decided to cogitate about the mysterious note for a bit while watching the crowds meander. Then he would wander to Cajun Dick’s and get those po’boys. He would have to buy an extra one to give to Precious because the hound had not been happy to have been left at the mansion by herself … again.

  Having found a spot in the shade of a line of huge oleander bushes that bordered the eastern edge of city hall, Bubba sat down in the grass. He considered what most folks would do with such a note. It was as the sheriff said. They would consider it a joke or nearly unsolvable and disregard it.

  But they weren’t Bubba.

  Bubba took the baggie-encased note out of his pocket and studied it. It had been inside a part, but what did the writing say to him.

  The thick line of oleanders rattled as someone else came rustling through. Bubba didn’t look up as he stared at the writing. He turned it this way and that. True, he wasn’t a forensic scientist, but he had some brains. He had looked at old papers before. He had spent most of his senior year looking at antique documents in the back rooms of a museum, several museums, and he had spent two weeks in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress. Examining nuances and deciphering the chicken scratches of historical papers had been the mainstay of his bachelor’s degree.

  The single piece of paper was old. It was yellowed. There were stains on the edges that were consistent with the oils inside the air cleaner. The writing was a mix of cursive and block writing. Someone had been in a hurry. The lines were rushed and slanted to the right. If he had to guess, and he had to, then he would guess it was written with a simple ballpoint pen.

  That didn’t mean anything in itself. Bubba knew that ballpoint pens had been around since the middle of the 20th century. It wasn’t the ink from an old-style ink quill. There were no drips from where the individual would have gone back and forth from the ink pot.

  There was a moan from the copious line of oleanders. It was nearly washed out by the sound of the crowd on the oversized lawn of city hall. Bubba heard the moan between the man who was yelling about not bombing the Liechtenstein castle (apparently the man was into L named locales) and the announcement of the third round of the day at the Murder Mystery Festival.

  Bubba looked to his left. Vaguely he recalled someone passing by and hurrying into the crowd. They may or may not have noticed him sitting there. But there was another moan.

  Bubba stuck the baggie back into his pocket. He lumbered to his feet and went looking, hoping he wasn’t going to run into an amorous couple. Honestly, it hadn’t sounded like that kind of moan.

  The moan guided him through the brush, and he found a man lying down with his hands covering the redness sopping through his shirt.

  It took Bubba a moment to recognize the man. His name was Justin, Justin Thyme, and he’d lived in Pegramville as long as Bubba could remember. Justin was in his late forties and did whatever job he had at the time. Sometimes he worked construction. Other times he tended bar at the Dew Drop Inn. Occasionally he knocked on doors asking for odd jobs. When he was sober, he could be Lloyd Goshorn’s primary competitor.

  Guess Justin found another summer gig, just like Lloyd.

  “Justin,” Bubba said, “I ain’t playing this dang game, so you’ll have to wait for someone else.”

  Justin’s eyes fluttered at Bubba. “M-m-mare,” he said.

  Bubba sighed loudly. “Tole you. Ifin I had known about this festival, I would have taken a trip to Nome, Alaska. Hear tell it’s right perty up there at this time of the year. All a fella has to worry about is bears and moose.”

  Justin’s hand came up for a moment. The “blood” shone brightly in the sun as his fingers twitched. “M-m-mare,” he said again.

  “Whatever they used, it looks better than the ketchup Lloyd used yesterday,” Bubba remarked sincerely. “I tell you what. I’ll go out and yell, ‘murder,’ and I’m sure a bunch of them down there will come a-running. You’ll be up to your elbows in Miss Marple’s and Hercule Poirot’s. It’ll be like Christie-palooza.”

  “M-m-m-murdered,” Justin managed to say. Suddenly, the hand fell over as if the strings guiding it had been cut, and it lay on the grass as still as a moonless night. A wheeze came out of Justin’s lungs and then stopped with an unexpectedness that alarmed Bubba. All was quiet for a long, stretched-out moment.

  Bubba was frozen in place for another long moment. Cautiously, he stepped closer and nudged Justin with his boot.

  Of course the man was dead.

  Really dead.

  Really, really dead.

  Really.

  At least Bubba was sure about that for about ten minutes.

  Chapter Five

  Bubba and Another Dead Body

  Saturday, August 18th

  “Bubba, cain’t you go five minutes without finding someone what’s dead?” Big Joe Kimple asked with comprehensive disgust. Big Joe was the police chief of Pegramville. He wore his khaki uniform like he had been poured into it, and his big badge sparkled like a tin can in a field of cotton.

  Big Joe’s face twisted with combined elements of annoyance and anger as he looked at Bubba. He did not like Bubba Snoddy. But then Bubba had earned some of that dislike with a recent show of utter impatience. Infamously, Bubba’s fist had familiarized itself to Big Joe’s jaw. Some of the nerve endings in Big Joe’s jaw were still complaining about the introduction. Certainly, Big Joe hadn’t forgotten the incident or the fact that he hadn’t been able to throw Bubba in the pokey for it.

  “It was seventeen hours,” Bubba said. “And Lloyd Goshorn ain’t really dead.”

  There was a crowd about the oleanders. Their low murmurings were the backdrop of the conversation. Bubba had grabbed someone’s cell phone and called the Pegram County Sheriff’s Department, which had informed the Pegramville Police Department, which had informed Big Joe, who had shown up not three minutes after the initial call. Sheriff John had followed closely after and then two more city officers, who backed the crowd off and put out the yellow caution tape. Then some other people popped under the tape as if it didn’t really exist, much to the dismay of the chief of police.

&n
bsp; Big Joe let out an explosive breath and turned to look at the area where the dead body was concealed. The body couldn’t be seen through the heavy oleanders, but Bubba had indicated the direction. “Did one of the numbnutted dingwas use a real knife by mistake?”

  “Justin Thyme, wasn’t it? He isn’t one of the murder actors,” Sheriff John said. “I gotta list. Justin ain’t on it. In fact, he ain’t part of the festival at all.”

  “Dint I tell your daggoned committee that this was goin’ to turn out badly?” Big Joe asked.

  “No, you said that you ‘weren’t going to supply us with any officers and God help us if the newspeople took the festival in the wrong way,’” Miz Demetrice said helpfully. She stepped beside Bubba. “Bubba, cain’t you go five minutes without finding someone who’s dead?”

  Bubba snorted. “It’s bin months. Months, Ma. And as I recollect, you found the last dead body.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose there’s that,” Miz Demetrice allowed. “So obviously this murder has nothing to do with the Pegramville Murder Mystery Festival,” she added hopefully.

  “Obviously you don’t want it to have anything to do with it,” Sheriff John said. “We’re goin’ to have to consider that we might need to shut it down.”

  “Dead man, right there,” Bubba pointed out. He also pointed with his finger at the thickness of the oleanders. “Dead man murdered, right there. Maybe ya’ll should be thinking about who done kilt him.”

  “Justin’s common-law wife, Penny, stabbed him a few months ago,” Willodean said as she stepped up on the other side of Bubba. “It may be as simple as that, although she did use a fork.” She looked at the dense oleanders and added, “Not that you could mistake knife wounds for salad fork wounds.” She looked sideways at Bubba and murmured, “Bubba, again? Really? You’ve the worst luck, fella.”

  “Okay then,” Big Joe said. “I’ll get your statement later, Bubba, but did you see anyone before you found Thyme?”

  “Someone came past,” Bubba said, “but I wasn’t really paying attention. Why ain’t you accusing me? It feels a might strange without handcuffs on.” His wrists felt a tad naked. He brought them up to make sure something wasn’t wrong.

  “Boy, you’d be covered in blood, and I kin see you aren’t by the looks of that snow white shirt. So how did you find the victim?”

  “He was moaning and not in a good way,” Bubba said. “Sounded like someone mighta needed some help. Then I saw him and I saw the blood and I thought it was one of them festival ‘victims’ like Lloyd Goshorn.” Bubba glanced over his shoulder toward where the oleanders concealed the corpse. Then he glanced back at the crowd, watching all of the people watching them. Many were craning their necks to get a better look. A few enterprising individuals had crawled onto the shoulders of others. Big Joe had cordoned off the area, but it hadn’t done a lot of good. News cameras were rolling. People had smart phones out and were both taking photos and shooting digital footage. There wasn’t anything left to the imagination.

  “Okay then who did you see go past? Did they have blood stains on them?” Big Joe insisted. “Did Thyme say anything before he died?”

  “I weren’t paying no attention to them,” Bubba said. “And I did not notice blood stains or lack thereof. And Justin dint say nothing. Except he moaned. I imagine being stabbed in the chest would make a fella moan. Having never been stabbed in my chest, I would not know.”

  Big Joe gave Bubba an explicit look that said, “Then what good are you, boy?” and turned away. He called his favorite officers over. “Haynes. Smithson. We gotta find the vic’s common-law spouse. What was her name, Gray?”

  “Penny,” Willodean said and reluctantly added, “Sillen.”

  “Penny…Sillen,” Big Joe repeated. He glared at Willodean. “It is not.”

  Sheriff John nodded. “Penny Sillen. She was married to Jim Sillen, and they got divorced about ten years ago. They got two kids, Jimmy Jr. and Gage.”

  “Haynes and Smithson, go track down this Sillen woman and see does she have anything to say about Thyme’s unfortunate demise,” Big Joe said. Haynes stepped away to make a call on his shoulder mike.

  “It was un-Thyme-ly,” Miz Demetrice said. She covered her mouth and looked upward. “Dear Lord, forgive me.”

  “Ma!” Bubba protested.

  “You got this all covered, Big Joe?” Sheriff John asked. “Or you want the real detectives to take over?”

  “As I recall, the last killer got caught by Bubba, and the one before that got caught by a ten-year-old with a science project,” Big Joe said specifically.

  “Semantics,” Sheriff John said with his gravelly voice. “Come on, Gray. We got to get these folks back away from this.” He glanced at Miz Demetrice. “Don’t you need to be chopping someone’s head off?”

  “Oh dear me, yes,” Miz Demetrice said and hurried off.

  Bubba watched for a moment and muttered, “It seems like everyone’s getting too used to folks being murdered around here.” Big Joe pushed into the heavy oleanders.

  A thought occurred to him, and he swiftly scanned the enthralled audience. There weren’t too many people with snowy white shirts on. Mostly they were Murder Mystery Festival shirts. The prominent color was blue, although there were also red and yellow ones. Bubba’s eyes stopped as he found someone with bloodstains down the front. The woman was chatting next to another woman with bloodstains on her shirt. Three people down from that was another one with a bloodstained shirt. Then there was another one and another one and another one.

  It finally dawned on Bubba that the t-shirts were being sold by the city and came pre-bloodstained with a very all-inclusive splatter pattern. Although Bubba kept from saying a dirty word out loud, he thought it several times.

  “Bubba SNODDY!” Big Joe bellowed. He charged out of the oleanders and parked his officialness in front of Bubba. “This ain’t funny.”

  “I would never laugh at someone being murdered,” Bubba said.

  “Where’s the body?” Big Joe said in a lower voice.

  Bubba craned his neck to see around Big Joe because Big Joe was, in fact, big. Not as tall as Bubba, nevertheless, he was a collard green-eating individual. Big Joe had managed to make a gap through the oleanders by virtue of broken branches and bent leaves. There wasn’t anything or anyone there in the place where Justin Thyme had been lying on the ground bleeding copiously. Big Joe turned to Haynes and Smithson. “Dint you check the body when you got here, dumbasses?”

  “You were here before us, chief,” Smithson said.

  Big Joe glared at Smithson.

  Sometime during the last fifteen minutes, the corpse of one Justin Thyme had either gotten up and walked away or simply vanished. One or the other.

  •

  An hour later, Bubba went to Cajun Dick’s and got three po’boys. One was a shrimp shorty. Another one was a crab shorty. The third was a catfish full. He also tucked two bottles of water under his arm as he couldn’t help but listen to people talk.

  From the increasing amount of gossip, the murder (?) of Justin Thyme was considered to be part of the festival, an urban legend in the making. In fact, highly motivated by all the murder excitement, people were gleefully trading stories about the best and worst ways to meet their makers.

  “…drowned in a septic tank,” one man said as Bubba paid for the meal. The clerk put the po’boys in a bag for him as another man said, “My wife’s cat trips me as I’m walking down the stairs, so I think the cat is after the insurance money. Either that, or my wife trained the cat. I suspect the cat. He’s a Siamese. He’s inscrutable.”

  Bubba glowered as he got his change.

  “I favor starving the chickens and shoving the victim in the coop. Death by pecking. Tragic accident covered up by hungry cluckers.” He laughed. “Peckacide.”

  “They accidentally fell on the knife thirteen times. It could happen.”

  “Swallowing your own tongue has got to suck.”

  Bubba groaned and lef
t Cajun Dick’s as soon as he could.

  He discovered that the entire town had been energized by the murder (?). The massive consensus was that it had been “accidental” and that someone had stabbed the poor man by mistake. By the time Bubba reached the grounds of city hall again, he found that the crowd had doubled, seeking to gain knowledge or notoriety. He met Willodean by one of the cannons, and they sat in the shade of the Civil War weapon and ate their po’boys. She had the shrimp shorty. He had the catfish full.

  It was to Bubba’s immense relief that Willodean did not bring up the subject of missing dead bodies. They simply ate in relative silence.

  After Bubba was done, he wiped his mouth with a napkin and took a drink of water.

  Willodean finished only half of hers and wrapped the rest up. She said, “Sheriff said you found some note and you showed him.”

  Bubba produced the note from his pocket and handed it to Willodean. She examined it carefully. “This was in a Chevy part’s box.” There was a little pause. “Where’s the sammy?”

  “An air cleaner. And I et the sammy. Yes, it was an original part in the original box. An air cleaner from the ‘50s still in the box.”

  “You can buy an air cleaner from the ‘50s still in the box?” Willodean marveled.

  “It’s rare,” Bubba agreed. “Parts for Ol’ Green are getting as rare as a bucktoothed rooster.”

  “I remember you having to make room for a different sized battery,” Willodean said. “I’ve never seen a battery compartment in the floor board of a truck.”

  “I expect I’ll have to put some newer parts in it now and again,” Bubba said grudgingly.

  “But you don’t want to,” Willodean said as she examined the note.

  “Meant to be original even ifin it’s from 1954,” Bubba said.

  “I had a 1975 Datsun 280Z once,” she said. “Ran like a top. My father got a book on Datsuns. He spent half a summer working on the schematics of that car, but once he got everything straightened out, it was a killer car. Drove up to 120 mph without a shimmy. Don’t tell Sheriff John.”