She took out an embroidered clutch wallet and retracted the exact amount in crisp one hundred dollar bills.
I handwrote a receipt. “Give us a week,” I said, handing over the receipt.
Avonelle hesitated. “You will be discreet?”
I nodded.
Satisfied, she headed toward the door but hesitated as her hand touched the brass knob. She turned on her heel and said, her voice a little shaky, “You can tell Veenie she can come out from behind that file cabinet now.” Without waiting for Veenie to show herself, Avonelle strutted out, head held high. She marched across the street toward the bank.
Veenie waited a few seconds before popping out from her hidey-hole. She strolled over and studied the photo of Barbara Skaggs’s kids. “Not very experienced, eh? Well that don’t look like the work of an amateur to me.”
“Think those are his kids?”
Veenie slid off her glasses. She pushed the photo closer to her nose. “Hard to say, but this one,” she pointed to the oldest, a towheaded boy who looked to be about ten years old, “has the Apple ears.” The boy’s ears flared out like teacup handles. “This one too,” said Veenie of the youngest, a girl of maybe four. “A shame. Girls with big ears don’t outgrow them. She’ll have to wear a shag all her life. That’s what I’d do.”
I had to agree about the ears. Most families had a defining feature. William’s twin dentist sons, Bert and Bromley, were born with ears so generous they reminded one of wings. Avonelle, always mindful of looks, pinned her son’s ears under hats on school picture days when they were younger. Things took an ugly turn when she found out the other kids had nicknamed her sons Dumbo One and Dumbo Two. In high school, she drove the boys to Indianapolis one weekend for some sort of secret surgery that tacked back their ears.
Veenie tapped the photo. “You ever hear of this Barbara Skaggs?”
“Knew some Skaggs over in Washington County. Hard to tell. Might be related.” People in Pawpaw County weren’t all that energetic. Most mated in county. It was like Genesis out in corn country. Everybody begat everybody else. Made it harder to solve crimes because everybody’s DNA was pretty much the same.
Veenie twitched her nose. “Wasn’t there a Skaggs worked the acid ponds at the plastics factory with us?”
“Yep. Think his name was Lennie. But he died a few years back. Worked nights at Kelly’s Paper Mill up in Brownstown. Got wasted long about 1989 on a Christmas bottle of Jim Beam. A one-ton roll of newsprint fell on him. He was nothing but a big grease spot in the end.”
“If it’s the Lennie Skaggs I’m thinking of, he didn’t amount to much more than that when he was alive.”
“Same Skaggs,” I said.
I sat down at my desk, adjusted my glasses, and fired up the old computer. “Let’s snoop on Barbara.” I was born to power-drive a computer across the World Wide Web in search of facts. I would have made a humdinger of a Russian spy. It didn’t take me but half an hour to gather a dossier on Ms. Barbara Skaggs. First off, Ms. Skaggs had never been married. Second, she seemed to live alone with the kids. All the bills—utilities, Internet, phone—were in her name. Last of all, she was employed as the head hostess at the Pancake Palace on Highway 50.
Veenie read the pages on Barbara Skaggs as the printer spat them out. “Working at the Pancake Palace. Dealing with trade off Highway 50. That would make her more worldly than most. Probably where she met Doc Apple.”
Everybody ate at the Pancake Palace. Sunday morning after church if you were a Baptist. Wednesday nights after Bible study if you were a Lutheran. Just about any time if you were drunk or down in the dumps. Pancakes cheered everybody up.
“The Pancake Palace never closes,” I said. “People go there all hours for comfort food and the biscuits and gravy.”
I eyed the photo of the Skaggs kids. It appeared Barbara Skaggs’s womb might have been on the same 24/7/365 schedule as the Pancake Palace. It wasn’t inconceivable that Doc Apple had enjoyed more than biscuits and gravy in his late-night quests for consolation. I reckoned anyone married to Avonelle might have needed a good bit of consoling over the years.
“Got a photo of Barbara?” Veenie asked.
I hit the print button. A photo slipped out of the printer. We studied the photo together.
Barbara wore square gunmetal glasses and squinted into the camera. Her forehead was creased in three places. Her hair was dark and dyed, with a wild flip above each ear. Her throat was long and skinny. It might also be described as scaly. She was wearing plastic daisy earrings, clip-ons from the looks of them. In the photo, she was wearing a flowered blouse with a rounded lace collar and a cardigan. She looked nothing like a jezebel, more like a runaway Pentecost in need of a fashion intervention.
“Maybe she can cook?” suggested Veenie.
I shrugged. Not much of life in the country looked like it did on TV. People loved to be big fish in small ponds. Knobby Waters was so small it was more like a mud puddle with all the minnows fighting for the crown. There was a real shortage of beauty queens, and Doc Apple had been more Don Knotts than Burt Reynolds. Still, I had no trouble seeing Barbara Skaggs and Will Apple lip-locked in a wanton embrace.
I glanced at my Timex. It was after five on Friday. Quitting time. I bundled up the paperwork on Barbara and stuck it in a file folder. I stuck the folder under my armpit, turned out the lights, and locked up.
Veenie and I ambled down the sidewalk to the Roadkill Café to see what was on the specials board for supper. Fridays, we always treated ourselves to a meal out. Halfway there I stopped thinking about Doc Apple and his biscuits and gravy ta-ta girl and began to wonder if the café would have any of Ma Horton’s coconut cream pie. I hoped so, because I was planning on eating two pieces. All that talk about wanton sex had made me extra hungry.
Chapter Three
It was Saturday morning, and we assumed Barbara Skaggs would be home, so we gassed up the 1960 Impala and hot-footed it toward Hound Holler. The holler was a twenty-minute drive up the knobs, then down a gravel road that dropped into a butt-like crevice between two knobby hills.
In Knobby Waters, there were two kinds of people: town people and holler people. Everyone knew which they were, which they aspired to be, and which they hoped to God never to become. Barbara Skaggs was not among the fortunate. She lived smack on Hound Holler Road. One look at her rented house and you knew she’d given up all hope, along with a good bit of her self-respect, about a decade ago.
The plan was to stake out Barbara’s place, see if anything untoward might be going on that would lead her to engage in unscrupulous acts to earn a little egg money on the side. Barbara lived in To-Jo Scott’s old farmhouse, which had been nice enough back in the day, meaning the Depression. These days, the house looked more like something out of Mother Goose. The roof was a mossy carpet. Foot-tall maple saplings sprouted from the gutters. The front porch, which was missing most of its spindle posts, sagged. A sway-backed barn struggled to remain erect in the backyard. A scarecrow made of moldy corn stalks, wearing a tattered, brown-felt hat and a large overall jacket with patches, stood watch over rows of corn stubble and what may have once been tomato vines.
I had a pair of binoculars resting on the bridge of my nose. My glasses were off, laid on the seat of the Impala between me and Veenie. A family-sized bag of pork rinds we’d picked up at the Go Go Gas rested on the seat between us. It was almost noon. We were on stakeout behind a tall stand of weeds in a tractor pulloff on the soft shoulder of Hound Holler Creek. We were just across from Barbara’s place.
Barbara’s oldest boy, the one with the pitcher ears, was playing with a rusty-yellow dump truck along a line of mud puddles in the front yard. He was chasing a rooster back and forth. The rooster, all wings, was squawking, occasionally trying to peck the dump truck to death. Every now and then, another boy, dressed only in ragged denim shorts, the nipples of his bare chest blue as raisins, would burst around the corner of the house trying to lasso a chicken. He was wearing a red cowb
oy hat and shooting a cap gun.
Veenie asked, “You gonna eat them pork rinds?”
“Nah. Have at ’em.”
For the next ten minutes, while I watched the boys trying to lasso chickens, Veenie crunched pig skin. Stakeouts had never been portrayed like this back when I was watching Magnum, PI. I tried to shut my ears as Veenie crunched pig skins, washing them down with a quart of chocolate milk. She topped off the skins with a fistful of fruit-flavored Tums. Why that woman suffered from perpetual heartburn was no mystery to me.
It had rained all night. It was getting steamy in the Impala. I punched out the wing on the window to let more air circulate and motioned for Veenie to do the same.
Veenie had been fidgety all morning. She wore stretch capri pants. The white leather seats on the Impala were heating up, and her plump little calves were sticking to the leather. She licked the last of the pork rind salt from her fingertips and belched.
“Dr. Duhaney,” that was Veenie’s cardiologist, “wouldn’t approve of you eating all that salt and fat,” I said.
“Dr. Doohickey can go suck an egg.”
Veenie made a show of fanning herself with a fluorescent sales circular for chicken parts from the Hoosier Feedbag. She was growing impatient. “Let’s bust on in.”
I drew the binoculars away from my eyes and slipped on my glasses. “You want to do the questioning?”
“Nah. I want to be the muscle.”
We never carried firearms—left that to Harry, who ran the collections department—but Veenie’s BB pistol was in the glove compartment. The toy pistol looked real. It was the expensive model, with a solid wood handle and brass trimming. It shot BB pellets. Men tended to wet themselves when they saw two nearsighted old ladies packing a piece. The criminals we dealt with were the world’s biggest pantywaists. Most surrendered as soon as Veenie waved the pistol. They fell to their knees and blubbered like babies. Veenie enjoyed cuffing them. The Shades Agency used those newfangled, plastic twist tie cuffs. Bringing a perp down was a lot like bagging the kitchen trash: very satisfying to any woman who’d wasted her youth as a frustrated housewife.
Bored with waiting, we scrambled out of the Impala and walked across the muddy road to the farmhouse. The oldest boy stared us down. “You Holy Rollers?”
I tried to look sweet. “We’re looking for your mama, Barbara Skaggs? She home?”
The boy hiked up his shorts and circled me, then Veenie. He brushed a flap of dirty blond hair out of his eyes. His ears were big enough to catch and hold rainwater. “You bill collectors?”
Veenie eyed the boy. “We look like bill collectors?”
The boy wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “Nah, you look like old ladies.”
We were standing at the porch now. The boy asked Veenie, “That a real gun?”
“Sure.” She pointed the pistol at his head.
The boy screamed, “Mama!” and ran into the house. The torn screen door banged after him.
A squinting woman wearing gunmetal glasses appeared in the doorway. A girl child with big ears appeared in the doorway and clung to the leg of her mother’s baggy shorts. One blue eye peeked out, trying to get a good look at us without exposing herself.
“Don’t want any,” Barbara said.
I slid my big foot into the doorway. “Mrs. William Apple sent us.”
Barbara opened the door wide and stepped back. She bent and picked up the little girl, lifting her up until she could ride on her hip. “Well, come on in, then. Been expecting someone.”
Once we were inside, Barbara seemed more welcoming, and not at all unreasonable. She sat the girl child aside. “I want what’s due the children. Child support, you know.”
I nodded sympathetically. “You have proof? Mrs. Apple would need proof before money could change hands.”
Barbara pressed her knuckles to her lips and mulled over the question. “What would I need?”
“DNA. Tests cost a hundred dollars each. You’d have to deposit that with us.”
Barbara looked at her two younger children. They were tumbling over each other like dung beetles on the braided rug in front of the TV. The TV was on, but Barbara had clicked down the sound when we took our seats in the living room.
“Can’t we just test one of them? Assume the others would be the same? I work at the Pancake Palace. Don’t make a heap of money. I mean, if I had money to throw around, I wouldn’t be writing to Mrs. Apple now, would I? But William up and died. He used to give me an allowance. And that was fine. But now Billy Junior there,” she pointed to the oldest boy, “needs braces. William’s cousin was supposed to take care of that. Wasn’t supposed to cost me a dime. Show the nice ladies, Billy.”
Billy Junior pulled back his gums, revealing a gap between his two front teeth. It was identical to the gap Avonelle’s boys had sported at about the same age before their cousin the orthodontist had intervened.
I considered the options. “Maybe we could test the oldest boy. Make a good faith gesture. You could save up. Do the others one at a time.”
“You mean like layaway?” The creases eased in Barbara’s forehead. “I don’t mean her no harm.” She bit her lip. She gathered the collar of her cardigan closer to her throat. “I knew William was married, but he seemed sweet. And he was lonely. Guess I was too.”
I could tell Barbara wanted to talk about it, but I didn’t want to hear the Jerry Springer version of the whole sordid affair. Every time people talked about sex, I got hungry. My butt couldn’t afford the extra pounds.
Veenie came to my rescue. “I can run out. Get a spit kit from the Chevy.”
“Won’t take but a minute,” I promised. “If Billy Junior would oblige us, we could be on our way. Takes a week to get the test results back. We could discuss confidential payment possibilities and arrangements with Avonelle in the meantime.”
Barbara stood and smoothed the front of her shorts. She eyed Billy Junior, who was rolling around on the rug on his back with all fours in the air panting like a dying dog. “All he has to do is spit? No written tests?”
“Yep, just spit in a tube.”
“Well, I reckon he can do that all right.”
Veenie was out the door. But almost as soon as the screen door slammed, she was screeching at me. “Ruby Jane? Uh, can you come out here for a second? We got us a little, uh, problem.”
I ambled toward the door and peered out onto the porch. A man was slumped in the metal porch glider. He was wearing the tattered brown hat and denim overcoat that the barn scarecrow had been wearing when we had first arrived. At first I thought someone had dragged the scarecrow onto the porch. But on closer inspection, I could see that it wasn’t a scarecrow but one of Avonelle’s sons—one of the Apple twins, Bert or Bromley. I couldn’t tell which. They weren’t identical twins, but they were close.
His mouth was open. He could have been snoring. But from the cool white of his face—it looked like a peeled egg—and the way his body slumped, not a tense muscle in him, I could tell he was toast. A speckled chicken was perched on the glider rest next to him, pecking at his lifeless hand.
I looked at Veenie.
She shrugged. “Don’t look at me. He wasn’t sitting there when we went in.”
Barbara stepped out on the porch and stood next to Veenie. She looked a little green, like a thinly sliced zucchini. She hugged herself. “I don’t know a darn thing about that,” she said, sounding defensive.
Chapter Four
I was happy to see Sheriff Boots Gibson inching down into Hound Holler in the police cruiser, red cherry spinning. I didn’t want to have to explain the dead Apple on the porch glider to the new junior officer, Devon Hattabaugh. Devon was a skinny kid, fresh out of community college. He wore a ponytail and aviator glasses. Off hours he sported a beret. He also sported muttonchop sideburns, which seemed all the rage with the Millennials. His teeth were impossibly white, and he talked a lot. He chattered like a rabid squirrel, which some old ladies found sweet and endearin
g. I was not among them.
Boots stood on the porch. He had his hat off. He was balding on top, and the hat left a red band around his head. “Looks dead,” he said as he mopped the sweat off the top of his head with a red kerchief. “Looks mighty dead.”
Boots looked a good deal like Santa Claus in jeans and scruffy cowboy boots. He wore a closely cropped white beard. He had been in my class in school and had once kissed me in the cloak room in second grade, on Valentine’s Day. That same year he had sent me a valentine that featured a policeman with a billy club dragging a girl, imprisoned in a giant red heart, to the jailhouse. The card had read, “Be my prisoner of love.” People claimed Boots was sweet on me still, said they could tell by the way the tips of his ears blushed when I was around. I had yet to be won over.
I nodded toward the body on the glider. “Didn’t touch him. Didn’t want to contaminate a possible crime scene.”
Veenie spoke. “I poked him with a stick. He’s dead alrighty. Also, that chicken has been pecking at his hand. If he were alive, he would have hollered by now.”
Boots ran his fingers around the wide rim of his hat, which he held in his hands. “You gals out here on a case?”
“Yes,” I confessed. “But we can’t talk about that. Not without the client’s permission.”
“No sign of foul play. No bullet holes. No visible strangulation. You shoot him?” Boots inspected Veenie, who had a tight, two-handed grip on her air pistol.
“Course not. You know this here is just for looks. Shoots BBs. Veenie held up her pistol. She shook it until the BBs rattled.
“You shouldn’t carry that thing. Looks too real.”
Billy Junior popped up in the screen door. “That old lady tried to shoot me.”
Veenie stuck out her dentures at Billy Junior. He ran away crying, back into the darkness of the house. She popped her dentures back in and turned to face Boots. “Don’t know what got into that kid. Seeing a dead body spooked him, I reckon.”
Boots eyed us. “You ladies didn’t hear a shot? Any untoward noises?”
Baby Daddy Mystery Page 2
