Mother Finds a Body

by Gypsy Rose Lee

  She jumped up and ran into the trailer.

  Mother hadn’t moved during the tirade. When the door slammed she lifted her head.

  “That’s gratitude for you,” she said. “After all we’ve done for that girl.”

  Mamie poured more powder on the burning mound. She picked up Gee Gee’s cup and dropped it into the dishpan. Mandy grabbed the dish towel and dried the cups and saucers as Mamie washed them. The uncomfortable silence was shattered by Dimples’s voice.

  “Will somebody fix me a bromo?” she yelled from the trailer. “So help me, I think they tried to poison me last night.”

  Mamie filled a glass with water, picked up another clean one, and went into the trailer. It was going to take more than one Bromo Seltzer to cure Dimples, I thought. She had made enough the night before at a nickel a drink to retire with a hotdog stand. If she had been trying to win the crown from Joyce, it looked as if she had it in the bag.

  Her voice rose petulantly from the trailer.

  “Dammit all, you don’t have to look at me like that. So I got a hangover, so what? Just because you got a hollow leg is no sign I have.”

  I wondered if she meant Gee Gee or Mamie. Thinking about what she had said the night before, I settled for Mamie.

  “I’ll go dig up Corny,” Biff said. He went to the bedroom. In a few moments he had Corny up and out. It was the sheriff’s fault that Corny was still sponging on us. The comic wore Biff’s bathrobe. Mandy’s slippers were on his feet. He sank into a chair and sulked.

  “So the long arm of the law wants our little party together eh?” he said sarcastically. “Well, he’s got us. So what’s he going to do for an encore?”

  I poured him a cup of coffee and pushed the can of milk and the sugar bowl toward him.

  “I’m sure I can’t tell you that,” I said pleasantly. “I know what he’s doing for an opening, though.”

  Corny looked up from his cup of steaming coffee. I had tried to put a note of mystery in my voice. It must have been a good performance. He knew I had something on my mind, and I let him wonder for a second. I poured a cup of coffee for Biff and one for myself. I took my time adding the sugar and milk.

  “I think he’s going to ask you how your handkerchief happened to be buried with the body,” I said.

  “My what!” Corny jumped to his feet. “Where is he?” he screamed. “I gotta talk to him. I gotta tell him I don’t know anything about it. Somebody’s trying to frame me, that’s what it is. Somebody’s trying to pin this thing on me.”

  “You’ll get your chance to talk to him,” Biff said. “I wouldn’t lean too heavy on that framing gag, though. I tried to give it to him last night, and he won’t sit still. All of a sudden he don’t like actors.”

  Corny sank back into his chair. He reached for the coffee cup. Then he pushed it away.

  “Gimme a drink, will ya?” he asked.

  If he had asked me I would have refused him. Biff is a softie, though. He got out the bottle and poured a double hooker in a water glass. Corny downed it in one gulp. Biff poured him another.

  A voice from behind made me jump. It was one of the sheriff’s men.

  “The sheriff wants to talk to Miss Graham,” he said. “In the office.” He tossed a thumb toward the small building near the shower house. It was the same building from which I had telephoned the doctor.

  “She’s inside,” I said. “I’ll get her.”

  Gee Gee sat on the foot of the daybed. She had been crying. When I spoke to her I saw how bloodshot her eyes were.

  “They want to talk to you first,” I said. The desperation in her quick glance toward the door made me soften my voice. “Just tell them the truth, honey. Do you want a nip first?”

  She shook her head. Without speaking she left the trailer. From the window I saw her leave with the man. They walked toward the office.

  Dimples pulled herself from the bed. She reached for the leftovers of the Bromo Seltzer and drained the class.

  “Of all the times for me to have a headache,” she said. “I hope to Gawd they don’t expect me to make sense when they start askin’ me questions. Hell’s bells, I don’t know a thing about it. Never even knew there was a body until I heard Corny and your mother talking about it.”

  She hadn’t washed off her body paint and in the morning light it looked pale green. Where she had perspired under her arms and between her full breasts the paint had runned off and her pink flesh showed through. She still wore her stage face makeup. The lip rouge had run down the corners of her mouth and her eye shadow was streaked across her forehead.

  I handed her the can of cleansing cream and a box of Kleenex.

  “They might ask for you next,” I said. “If they ever see you looking like this they’ll probably throw you in the clink on general principles.”

  She rubbed the cream on her face listlessly.

  “What kind of questions do they ask?” she said a moment later.

  “I dunno,” I said. I was thinking about Gee Gee. I wondered if she would tell them about Mother thinking the gun was mine. I hoped not. It sounded flimsy. Even if it were true, it didn’t sound right. Why would Mother try to conceal the gun because it had belonged to me? Unless she thought it was the murder weapon. But then, I reasoned, she would have to think I was the murderer.

  “Will they ask me, ‘Where were you on the night of—’ Say when was he killed?” Dimples turned her greasy face toward me. She sat up straight and pulled herself up in the corner of the bed, her back leaning against the wall.

  “I oughta know a few things about this,” she said. “I’ll look like a dope saying, ‘I dunno, I dunno’ all the time.”

  “I’m afraid we’ll all look like dopes,” I replied. “You know as much right now as I do. There was a corpse in our bathtub. Period.”

  Dimples was silent for a few minutes. I walked over and looked out the window. The door to the office was closed.

  “They’re talking an awfully long time,” I said.

  “It just don’t make sense,” Dimples exclaimed suddenly. “Who in the hell would put a dead body in our trailer? Of all the good places to hide it, they pick on a bathtub. Any damned fool would know we’d find it sometime.”

  “Maybe they wanted us to find it,” I said. I spoke without thinking.

  The office door had opened, and Gee Gee had walked out into the sunlight. She stood on the top step with her hands in her kimono sleeves. She looked around as though she couldn’t decide which direction to take. Suddenly, with long strides, she began walking toward our trailer.

  “Wanted us to find it?” Dimples said stupidly. “I don’t get that, either. Wanted us to . . .”

  “They probably just wanted to get rid of the body,” I said. “They maybe thought we were traveling on, like we were, and that it was a good chance to put a lot of distance between them and their damn corpse. Instead of the murderer leaving town, he just sent the body out of town.”

  “I’ll tell ’em when he comes in,” Dimples said ironically. “I still don’t get it. It’s screwy. A guy kills a guy. He looks around for a place to dump the body. He sees us living in a trailer, minding our own business, and he says, ‘That’s for me.’ He dumps the body in our bathtub and calls it a day. Why, all we gotta do is think back a little and think of who could dump a corpse in our trailer. When were we out of it long enough? Who had a key to unlock the door? Who’d be around a trailer camp in the first place? It’s too easy.”

  “Too easy,” I said slowly. “Well, let’s start from A. We’re in and out of the trailer all the time. How could we figure out which time the murderer decided to drop his load of sunshine? B is easier. We only leave the trailer for hours at a time. We only leave it alone until four, five in the morning when we go nipping. He’d only have hours to do it. C stands for cinch. What key for what lock? We haven’t locked the trailer since we lost the keys in Los Angeles. As for asking who could dump the body in the tub, anyone in any town we’ve stopped in could have done
it.”

  Dimples threw her legs over the side of the bed. She groped around on the floor for her pink mules. When she found them she pushed them on her feet with an indifferent movement. Then she threw her robe over her shoulders and picked up a Turkish towel.

  “I’m gonna take a shower,” she said. “You make my head ache with your alphabets. The way I feel now, I’ll settle for Corny being the murderer. All I want is to get the damned thing cleared up. Who did it or why they did it is none of my business, and when the sheriff asks me where I was on the night of so-and-so, I’ll tell him to go fuddle his duddle.”

  As she left the trailer, Mamie came in. She turned down the bedcovers and began tidying up the room. She was unconcerned, as though a corpse in the bathtub went with the plumbing fixtures. She put the cleansing cream and the Kleenex back in the drawer and dusted off the furniture carefully. She hung up the clothes that Dimples had left strewn about.

  “I don’t know how your poor mother can stand all this,” she said as she rolled up a pair of nylons. “All the drinking and swearing and excitement. No wonder she has asthma.”

  “Well, things aren’t always as upset as this,” I said. “Sometimes we go for a whole week without finding one single corpse.”

  I might just as well have been talking to myself. Mamie was not interested in what we found in our bathtub. She was house cleaning, and that was all that mattered to her at the moment. Before she actually swept me out, I left.

  Corny was leaving with the sheriff’s man. They were halfway to the office, and I could still hear Corny’s voice. It was shrill and piercing.

  “It couldn’t have been my handkerchief,” he said almost hysterically.

  Gee Gee and Mandy had started a pinochle game. She was dealing the cards as though nothing had happened. An empty whisky glass was at her elbow.

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  She put down the deck of cards and picked up her hand. Before she answered me she sorted her cards.

  “Nothing to it,” she said casually.

  A nine of hearts was face up on the table. Mandy showed a nine from his hand and wrote down ten points under his name on the score card. He played a jack of clubs. Gee Gee took his trick with a king. She had no meld.

  I suddenly dreaded more than ever my meeting with the sheriff. When Gee Gee plays a king on the first trick without a meld in her hand she isn’t as composed as she is pretending to be. Gee Gee usually plays a good game of pinochle.

  15IT WAS ALMOST TWO HOURS BEFORE THE SHERIFF sent for me. Two hours of watching one after the other walk across the field to the office, two hours of waiting for the door to open and watching one more of our troupe walk slowly back to the trailer.

  When Mandy was called I took his pinochle hand. Biff joined us later, and we played four handed. I’m sure the game was the only thing that kept me from going raving mad.

  If anyone had been able to tell me what was going on, if all of their remarks weren’t so much alike, I wouldn’t have minded the wait as I did. They were all as evasive as Gee Gee had been. They had all been asked if they recognized the corpse. They were expected to read a carefully written description, a full page in long hand, and to base their recognition on that. They had been asked how long they knew Biff and me, how long they had known Mother, how long they had known each other, how much they contributed toward the upkeep for the trailer.

  That question in particular I thought was stupid. Aside from an occasional bottle, no one had contributed anything.

  They were shown the gun and asked if they had seen it before, if they knew a man named Gus, if they had lost any articles of wearing apparel or laundry. They were asked if they had heard anyone or seen anyone prowling around the trailer.

  It all sounded very silly to me. Even Biff could contribute a little more. I didn’t like the way he smiled at me when it was my turn. I didn’t like the way he said, “Just tell ’em the truth, honey.”

  I didn’t like the silence of the sheriff’s man as we walked toward the office, either. He was dripping wet with perspiration. It was close to noon, and the thermometer had been passing the one-hundred mark since morning. However, the heat was the least of my worries. With the heat you know that sooner or later it’s going to cool off. It’s like having a hangover; you know you won’t suffer forever. The past two hours had seemed an eternity to me. I couldn’t believe that the ordeal would ever end.

  The shades were partly drawn in the small, hot room. The sheriff sat directly in front of an electric fan. A bent blade kept up a steady offkey clinking sound as it hit the wire guard.

  The sheriff motioned for me to sit across the table from him.

  “Would you like the fan turned in your direction?” he asked when I wiped my face with a limp handkerchief.

  I shook my head.

  “It only churns up the same old hot air,” I said. “No offense meant with that hot-air crack.” I added.

  The sheriff fumbled with a piece of wrinkled paper.

  “Look,” I said, “if that’s the description of Gus or that other dead man, I don’t know anything about it. I told you all I know about Gus and I never knew the second one.”

  The sheriff let the paper fall from his hand. He reached for the cardboard box. It looked rather the worse for wear now.

  “And,” I said, “if that’s the gun, don’t wear yourself out with opening up the box. First time I saw the gun in my life was when Joyce Janice handed it to Mother at The Happy Hour saloon. I told you that before.”

  I leaned back in my chair, feeling quite pleased with myself. I was beginning to understand why Gee Gee and the others had said there was nothing to it.

  The sheriff poured himself a cup of water. As an afterthought, he offered it to me. I refused. Effectively, too, I thought. With a half smile, I merely shook my head. The sheriff looked at me. I had a fleeting thought that I had done something that amused him. I had an idea that he was laughing to himself. I didn’t like that, either.

  “Here’s something that might interest you,” I said. “Last night when Biff and I left your charming office, we walked back toward the saloon section. When we passed the doctor’s house we heard a car start up. It was a big, light-colored car and it left from the doctor’s driveway. Cullucio was driving it. He was in a hurry, too, and he had been calling on the doctor.”

  “And how do you know that?” the sheriff said slowly. “He could have been calling next door, couldn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I agreed ungraciously. I didn’t like the interruption and, most of all, I didn’t like the smile on the sheriff’s face. “Only at the moment he left, the doctor’s lights went out and Biff and I heard him lock his door. Cullucio isn’t the type to pay a social call at almost one in the morning. He couldn’t look healthier, so what’s he doing visiting a doctor? A doctor who’s a close friend, obviously of the local law? Of course, you probably know all about it, but The Happy Hour is certainly not a very choice spot. The boss is hardly the sort to get chummy with the law, if you know what I mean.”

  I took a cigarette from the package in my pocket and lit it slowly. I was feeling more and more pleased with myself. I liked the look of astonishment on Hank’s face, too. After one or two puffs on my cigarette, I let my eyes go big.

  “I should have asked permission first,” I said, glancing down at the cigarette. “Maybe smoking isn’t allowed during the third degree.”

  “It’s quite alright,” the sheriff replied stiffly.

  “Is there anything else you want to know?” I asked.

  “Noooo. I thought you might like to have me explain one or two points, though,” the sheriff said.

  I most certainly did but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that. I smoked quickly. The cigarette burned too fast and, as I inhaled, the hot smoke burned my throat. I wanted a cup of water desperately but, after my big head-shaking, slow-smiling scene a moment before, I didn’t have the nerve to mention it.

  “We’re right on the border h
ere in Ysleta,” the sheriff said. “A few years back they used to allow gambling on the other side. That brought in a bad element and, even though we’ve worked hand in glove with the Mexican government, it seems we can’t get rid of the element. Tourists flock here during the season to see these places. Nothing for ’em to see but a bunch of saloons like they can see any place else, but as long as they keep coming there’ll always be guys around to clip ’em. During the last few months a new menace has cropped up. It’s a dope racket. The difficult part of all of it is that the dope is grown right here in Texas. It’s known as a weed, of course, it’s cultivated here. Loco weed, the natives call it. The proper name is marijuana.”

  “Reefers!” I said. As I spoke I could almost see Gee Gee’s face when she was telling me about Gus.

  “Yes,” the sheriff replied. “It’s sent out of this state in bales, fifty- and hundred-pound bales. We got one of the trucks but we couldn’t hold the driver. He said it was given to him. His instructions were to carry it as far as Galveston, then it was to be picked up. If it were just marijuana, it wouldn’t be so bad. People say marijuana isn’t habit forming. I have my own ideas on that score, but most folks say the danger in smoking these cigarettes is that, after a while, people become immune to its influence. They take up cocaine, and from there it’s only a step to heroin. Sometimes these dealers spike the cigarettes with hashish or the scrapings of opium bowls. That’s done to get customers in the habit.”

  “You oughta write a book about it,” I said.

  “I have,” the sheriff replied.

  I was sorry I mentioned it. The gleam in the sheriff’s eye told me he was on his favorite subject. I still wanted a cup of water, and my cigarette had smoked down to a short butt that was burning my fingers. It seemed disrespectful to drop it on the floor, but I did. Then I ground out the glow with the toe of my shoe.

  “The head of the narcotic division in Austin traced the source of supply to my section,” the sheriff said. His bushy eyebrows drew together in a frown. “I followed a lead as far as The Happy Hour. Then I lost it. We found a small tin of heroin in one of the employees’ possession. The man was completely under the influence of drugs, and we couldn’t get a thing out of him. That’s as far as I got with my lead. I’ve watched the mail; I’ve watched every employee. Nothing incriminating about any of ’em. Nothing but that tin of dope. Yet I know for a fact that someone at The Happy Hour is responsible for part of this dope peddling.”