Crazy, VA

by Hill, Shannon

  The door to the office jingled open. Aunt Marge swooped to me, placing a large sports bottle on the desk. “There’s your lunch, dear.”

  I sniffed the bottle. Aunt Marge had gotten into a soup and juice kick lately, not that I minded, and I could smell celery, cucumber, a bit of onion, cilantro, lime. I swigged down the puree. Aunt Marge grows her own produce, and loves to see me eat it. She swears it’s why she’s so healthy at her age, and I gotta admit she looks 40. Not bad for a woman past menopause.

  “Good,” I told her, studying the board. “See that photo?”

  Tom had gotten them to me that morning. I might have suspected he had romantic intentions, if not for the wariness with which he always regards me.

  “Oh dear,” sighed Aunt Marge. “She resembles your mother a little. She has the Littlepage nose. So do you, for that matter.”

  I hadn’t noticed, snapped, “Aunt Marge! Less family history. Unless her family killed her.”

  Aunt Marge gasped, drew herself up indignantly. “No Littlepage… or Eller… would ever…”

  “I need a woman’s opinion, and Kim’s useless for this. You know she thinks floral dresses with lace collars are haute couture.”

  This was true. Kim was a victim of what I call the Baptist conspiracy. Let other people worry about the mafia, or gang-related organized crime. I live in the South. We’ve got Baptists. Their church-women whisper campaigns make J. Edgar Hoover look like an amateur. And anything found in Vogue or, in some cases, Charlottesville, was the lure of the devil and Satan’s snare.

  “True,” said Aunt Marge sympathetically, and peered at the photograph over her reading glasses. Through them. Over them. Back again. “Hmm. I don’t see anything unusual. That red is all wrong for her complexion, of course, but….”

  And that was what had been bugging me. I shouted, “Yes!” and disturbed poor Boris into retreating to the top of the mini-fridge. I ignored his glare, got to my feet. “That’s it. Red’s all wrong for her.”

  “Not a cooler red,” corrected Aunt Marge, who’d done a stint in finishing school learning about these things, and taught them to me with erratic success. “It’s the Littlepage complexion, it’s best with cool colors. You’re the same.”

  I ignored that, too. “When’s the last time you saw a Littlepage dressed less than perfectly?”

  I’d scored a point. I saw it in the inward-turned gaze, the sudden thoughtful scowl. She looked a thousand times better than Mary Littlepage, who was about ten years her junior. “I think… and I have to say I can’t be precise… The elder Mr. Littlepage’s funeral. Mary wore an atrocious ash gray to a viewing. She never did have much color sense, if I may be forgiven the remark. Her secretary generally shops with her to prevent such mistakes, or so I was told many years ago.” Aunt Marge’s expression grew peculiarly pinched. “They do not socialize with me since I attended your parents’ wedding.”

  “She knew,” I said abruptly. “It didn’t surprise her. She didn’t have that‌…‌whatever it is. That reaction. I could tell. She knew Lisa was dead before I said it.”

  I had flummoxed Aunt Marge. “Well, how on earth would she know?”

  The question to which I’d have to get an answer. But only after I’d scooted up to Charlottesville, to find out more about the party Lisa had attended.

  ***^***

  It’s a rule of thumb that a spouse or lover, past or present, is always on the short list of suspects in any assault or homicide. It’s an odd characteristic of the species, but outside the military, humans have a real problem killing strangers. They prefer to kill people they know. It’s a corollary to the rule that you’re never as rude to a stranger as you are to your friends and family.

  Nelson Hunter proved both rules. “Sheriff,” he oozed, “thank you so much for coming all the way here to discuss this unfortunate circumstance. Please, here, have a seat, it’s a very hot day, you must need a cold drink.”

  In short order, I was in a leather armchair with a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade in hand. If he’d offered to provide a pedicure, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  “Now,” he said, sitting across from me in another armchair he’d pulled around, “how can I help?”

  I thought of saying give me back my interview, opted for a chilly, “Your whereabouts Friday night for a start, and a list of people who can confirm it, with current telephone numbers, please.”

  “Of course,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve provided one to your Chief Rucker…”

  “I know,” I lied, fuming at the stupidity of politicking that made Rucker leave me out of the loop. “But I’m the sheriff and I’m running a different aspect of the investigation.”

  There, I told the truth. That’s a nice change in my job. All those don’t worry it’ll work outs come back to haunt a person.

  “Oh, I see,” he said, plainly not seeing, and turned on the laptop. As he waited for the software to boot up, he inquired delicately, “Is there any chance she suffered?”

  Odd way to put it. “After the third or fourth stab wound? No.”

  “Good,” he said blandly, and I nearly groaned aloud. Did he think I was that dumb?

  Yes.

  I gave a quick look around the study. Like the rest of the house I’d seen, sleekly modern, in a retro sort of way. But this room had an extra touch: the I Love Me wall. I took in the diplomas and photographs at a glance, decided to be subtle. “I see you have your MBA from Wharton. It must have been difficult to get in coming out of VCU.”

  Virginia Commonwealth University. Not the worst school, but not exactly the best.

  Nelson Hunter’s eyebrows knotted. “I didn’t have any trouble.”

  “You must know Tim Schindler.”

  “Only in passing,” said Nelson Hunter, clicking on the printer. “He was part of a different crowd.”

  “Yes, Tim always was ahead of the rest,” I replied cheerfully, for the pleasure of seeing him twitch. “He’s a genius with money. A pity he works for the FBI. He’d be worth twice as much if he played the market full-time.”

  Okay, that was plain nasty snobbish bitchiness. Worth it, too, to see Nelson Hunter lose a little of his oily poise.

  “Here,” he clipped out, “is your list.”

  He thrust it at me, the ink still fresh enough to smear. I took it carefully, treasuring that inadvertent fingerprint he’d given me. Right index, too. Sweet.

  “Is there anything else, Sheriff?”

  I paused, pretending to consider, then smiled sunnily. “One quick question. It’s an easy one. How happy are you she’s dead?”

  The mask slipped. He became, briefly, a reflection of truth. “I thanked God and opened a bottle of champagne. That bitch wanted a million a year in alimony, and I got better things to do with my money.” His composure clicked back into place, as immaculate now as his white shirt and the crease in his trousers. “Fortunately, I prefer character assassination to physical violence.”

  The question popped out without permission. “What do you know about physical violence?”

  His accent slipped again, from genial neutrality to mountain twang, the only sign of his distress. “I don’t like it,” he said, dark eyes glittering. “I don’t like it one damn bit.”

  I said good-bye, jotted down a note to check Nelson Hunter’s background, and got into the cruiser to find Boris staring at me intently. Obediently, I opened the pack of smoked salmon and gave him his afternoon snack.

  CHAPTER 4

  Murders don’t happen in Crazy too often, so I leave you to imagine how nuts people went about it. The Gazetteer, the town weekly, devoted two extra pages to its Monday issue. The county paper, the Herald, also gave it heavy coverage in its weekly edition. We even earned a two-inch mention in the Charlottesville Daily Progress. Yet there wasn’t much to print. Lisa Littlepage Hunter was dead. Someone killed her. She was dumped in the park. She’d be buried Wednesday in the Littlepage family plot, after a private service at First Baptist. Yes, that First Baptist. A
Littlepage built First Baptist, therefore Littlepages attend First Baptist. Pretty much the same thing for the Ellers, who attend St. Mark’s Episcopal more out of respect for Ellers past than any creed.

  Chief Rucker got all bombastic at WCZY, the local radio station. Country and talk on your FM dial. He made a lot of hot promises to catch the killer, talked importantly of leads, and rattled off a few mentions of forensic evidence and eyewitnesses. If it wasn’t for the state police, who courteously made sure I got a copy of the medical examiner’s report, I wouldn’t have known any of it. As for eyewitnesses, well, that was the usual smoke ‘em out BS.

  I spent my evenings with the medical examiner’s report. I’ll give Richmond credit, they did a great job. They looked at everything. Three items jumped out at me. I shared them with Boris as I lay in bed, and gave him tidbits of popcorn along with information.

  “She had sex within a couple of hours of her death. Now that,” I said, “is interesting. We know it wasn’t Hunter.”

  Boris butted my hand, causing me to drop popcorn. He has a love for popcorn that passeth all understanding.

  “And then there’s the blood alcohol. That girl was sloshed.”

  Boris roweled at me, finally hooking popcorn out of the bowl with his paw. Aunt Marge would’ve had a fit. Do you know where those paws have been! A litterbox! I didn’t care. It was worth a few germs to have Boris.

  I looked at the blood alcohol level, .12. A woman her size‌—‌Littlepages aren’t as tall as Ellers, and she was maybe 125 pounds soaking wet‌—‌would be pretty hard put to drive in that condition. Tom Hutchins let slip that she hadn’t driven herself to and from Charlottesville, at least according to Mrs. Littlepage. I made a note to check with her friends and fellow party-goers. She hung out with the beautiful people up in Charlottesville, which made it unlikely she was on anyone’s way home.

  Boris shoved my hand. The report, perched precariously on my knees, fell. “Damn it, cat,” I snarled, and snatched at the papers. Boris promptly sprawled atop them, eyes half-closed, mocking me.

  Friggin’ cat.

  “Move it, fleabag.”

  Boris yawned and set about sucking on a toe with long, happy slurps. I grimaced, tried to slide papers out from under him. He wouldn’t allow it. In fact, he put his claws neatly into one paper, and would not let it go. I tapped his paw hard with a fingertip, and he drew back, rebuked me with his eyes. Ferals are very different than human-raised cats. Humans are vocal. Cats, in the feral state, aren’t. I’d learned that pretty quick with Boris, who spoke with his body and his eyes, and saved his mouth for the important stuff, like eating. Or, in this case, catching my finger and lightly pressing his teeth around it. The tip of his tail switched twice. From Boris, a loving warning that he was losing his patience.

  So was I. I grabbed the paper he’d clawed, fretting about the damage, and saw he’d speared the page detailing stomach contents. I swore under my breath. Pinholes all over. Damn cat.

  Then I really read the page. Really read it, not just skimmed over it in a glaze-eyed state of exhaustion.

  Stomach contents were not entirely the dainty hors d’oeuvres I’d expected. Oh, there was evidence of caviar on bits of toast, paté on same, basil and tomato in tiny quantities, along with those cheeses that anyone sane would throw out on the principle that mold doesn’t enhance flavor. But a short time after this, Lisa had imbibed some beer, and at least part of a burrito.

  My stomach turned. I don’t do alcohol, or tobacco, because Aunt Marge taught me at a young age what they do to the body. I also don’t do burritos, or anything fried or greasy, since Aunt Marge also taught me what that does to the body. My idea of living large is a ginger ale over crushed fruit, or some chocolate. I eat steamed or grilled fish, and I’ll drink milk, but that’s as far as I go when it comes to animal-based foods. A burrito? Ugh.

  I made a note of that on my list of Interesting Items. Beer and burrito. Not the standard issue country-club party fare. Maybe she got the munchies on the way home. That was reasonable, given the distance, but she was strict about her diet. And why hadn’t anyone thought to ask why Lisa Littlepage Hunter, who ostensibly despised alcohol, had been smashed, blotto, blitzed, at the time of her death? On beer, no less. The woman didn’t even touch wine. Beer? Not likely.

  The medical examiner had made a brief note about the beer. He guessed it was not a specialty beer, probably the standard pale swill (his word, by the way) to be found in forty-ounce cans in convenience stores across the country.

  Lisa Littlepage down a fo’tie of cheap beer?

  There are mental images the human psyche can’t cope with. One is parents having sex. The other is a Littlepage even pronouncing the word beer, let alone drinking any. If they touched beer, it would be called ale or lager.

  Boris rumbled at me, a sort of croon that meant he felt happy. I rubbed his chest between the forelegs, and he flopped onto his side to purr in slit-eyed ecstasy. “Good catch,” I told him, and put away the file to play with my cat.

  ***^***

  I wanted to spend all my time investigating Lisa’s murder, but I still had to catch speeders, DUIs, and litterbugs. I still had to deal with fender benders, bumper thumpers, and illegal parking. I still had to deal with domestic disputes, public nuisances (Eddie again) and shoplifting. The day of Lisa’s funeral, I had to play traffic cop and guide the procession from the family home to the church and back again. I didn’t have time to worry about how she died. I was too busy making sure no one else did.

  I went to the mayor after the funeral. I found him in town hall at his office, in his shirt sleeves, swatting irritably at ladybugs on his window. He looked like he was in a worse mood than I was. Let me tell you, that took some doing.

  “What?” he bellowed. He had eyes like a bloodhound’s, all droopy-sad, and when he wasn’t being mayor, he ran the waste disposal service, Morse Sanitation and Disposal. His first name was Morris. People called him Maury. He usually joked no one had more remorse than he did. That day he didn’t look like he’d be joking. His eyes had bags clear down to his chin, and the lean angles of his face stood out as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks. Even his beer belly had shrunk.

  “Oh,” he said when he saw me. “Lil. Siddown.”

  I sat, after squashing some ladybugs. “Got ‘em bad.”

  He flicked a dead one to the floor. “Fuckin’ things, pardon my French.”

  I shrugged. I’ve said worse. “How bad is it?”

  “Delbert wants to take the town off sewer and put us all back on septic tanks.”

  You ever smell a hundred septic tank drain fields on a hot summer day? I shuddered. “Delbert’s an idiot.”

  “He’s an idiot with a backhoe,” said Maury grimly, and sat down with a total lack of his usual lanky loose-jointed grace. “Fuckin’ sonuvabitch. He just wants us to build a new treatment plant back behind his place off Sixth.”

  “That’d kill every trout in the creek,” I remarked. “Listen, do you…”

  Maury wasn’t done with Delbert yet. “You know what? I’d like to take Delbert out some day, show him just where it is we live. We got National Forest right over the creek, and Elk Hill and Turner Mountain right here,” his finger stabbed the usual stunning view out his window, “and that asshole wants to build a sewage treatment plant in town. I swear to Christ Almighty I wish my brother’d never been born.”

  I understood his outrage. Three hundred people generate some serious sewage, so we all liked having our little treatment plant safely downwind, so to speak. Put one in town, and the whole damn valley will smell like sewage every warm day. And the creek, which we’ve manage to keep pretty damn clean overall, will go brown and slimy and sludgy with the muck, because Delbert never does something right if he can make more money by having to do it over.

  I waited out the rest of Maury’s sputters. I didn’t seriously think Delbert would get anyone to revert to septic, or build a new treatment plant in town. Delbert’s tough, yeah, but Maury’
s twice as tough and ten times as stubborn.

  Once Maury finished ranting, I said, “I need a deputy.”

  “Lil, if I could find you one, I would. I’d do it myself if Delbert had an ounce of common sense. I’ve got money set aside for it for the next five years even, got the Littlepages and Ellers to chip in, but damn if I can find anyone to take the job.”

  “Can’t we advertise outside the county?”

  He put on his sympathy mask. “Lil, you know what these folks are like. They want someone they’ve known since birth. They don’t trust outsiders. Hell, they barely trust half the county cops.”

  That was true.

  “Find me a willing warm body with a brain,” said Maury, “and I’ll cut his check myself. In the meantime, why don’t you let county take care of us a few days? You look like you ain’t slept in weeks, girl.”

  “I sleep,” I told him dourly as I got up, and squished more ladybugs. “It’s all I do when I’m not working.”

  ***^***

  We have a mini-plaza out the Piedmont Road. At least it counts as one around here. There’s Junior’s Lawn & Garden, set off a bit and overhung with ivy and Virginia creeper in artistic festoons. Then a four-store blot on the landscape. Food Mart, Green’s Pharmacy, the video store, and Bobbi’s Salon for hair, nails and tanning. I flopped into a chair while Bobbi exclaimed, “Honey! Your hair!”

  It was meant as compliment. I’ve got the Eller hair, lots of dark, fine, silky hair, so straight you could use it for a ruler. I’ve also got it grown down to my hips. “Time for the cut,” I told her, though I’d hoped to get a couple more inches. “Locks for Love is gonna love this.”

  “Oh, you know they will,” she breathed, lifting my hair with something like reverence. “They can make three-four wigs outta this.”

  I’d never done this before, though I’d heard of it often enough. Locks for Love takes donated hair to make wigs for cancer patients, and I’d set myself a goal to get at least 18 months of growth before I got it snipped. I only had 16, but I needed information, and Bobbi is my best source. We’ve been friends since we went to Littlepage Elementary together, and got each other through some rough moments. She knows all the gossip, never repeats any of it except to me, and never fabricates any of it.