“My upbringing was right common. Didn’t give me a desire to go around gigging people.”
It was true. Lavinia, like me, had been born with a plastic spoon in her mouth.
My cell started jumping. I clicked it on to hear a voice mail from Avonelle. She asked if we could drop by the bank that afternoon to talk to her about Bromley and a few other issues that had come up.
It was already afternoon, so I printed out a heap of articles about Doogie and shut down the computer. “We got a summons from Her Majesty, Avonelle,” I said to Veenie. “Let’s roll on over to the bank and wrap up that case before we head toward Bloomington to check on Rusty.”
“Oh boy,” said Veenie. “Good thing the Lord Almighty gave men ding-a-lings, or we’d not have a gosh darn thing to do all day long.”
And we were off.
Chapter Seventeen
Avonelle was sitting behind her desk signing a mountain of papers when we arrived at the bank. Her great-great grandpappy in-law, Silas Apple, had founded the bank at the turn of the century—the twentieth century—1901, to be exact. A portrait of him hung on the wall behind Avonelle. He had a shriveled-up face like a crab apple and a set of gray side whiskers that looked like sweep-up brooms. Old Silas was so tight he could squeeze a buffalo nickel until the buffalo pooped, or so said Titsy, my Grammy Waskom. Avonelle was much the same. She was older and richer than me or Veenie but still enjoyed mashing nickels together to make ends meet.
Avonelle didn’t look up when we were shown into her office. Veenie and I plopped down in a pair of red-velvet padded chairs and waited for her to get to the end of her paperwork. Veenie started fidgeting almost instantly. She was clicking her teeth, getting ready to bite. She hated being made to wait. I shot her a look. She pursed her lips at me and made a noise like a motorboat before busying herself playing Farmville on her phone.
Avonelle looked up after a while. She was, per usual, dressed to meet her maker. She wore a navy-blue suit with white piping and one of her giant, white Buster Brown silk bows. A good choice, I thought. The color scheme went well with her apricot hair and hand-drawn eyebrows. Ignoring Veenie, she asked me if I’d heard from the coroner about Bromley’s cause of death.
I said we had. Assuming she was going to close the case, I’d brought with me a detailed invoice of our hours, with a balance figured on the account. Avonelle only owed us a couple of hundred. Since we were always short on cash, I found it best to hand deliver our bills on check out. On our way over, I’d received a text from the genetics company we used informing me that William Apple was indeed the father of Billy Skaggs. Avonelle could use us to settle up with Barbara, or call on her herself. I’d already forwarded the genetic test results to Avonelle.
Avonelle shook her head at the bill. “What’s this?”
“Assuming you want to close out the case on William and Bromley.”
She slid the bill back across the desk. “Well, I don’t.” She stood up, yanked her jacket down over her bowling-pin hips, and strolled over to the window. She looked out through a nice cluster of maples, over across Main Street. “Something else has come to my attention.”
Veenie stopped thumb wrestling her phone and looked up.
I asked Avonelle if she doubted the results of the autopsy.
“No,” she said. She was holding her lips so tightly they started to quiver. “I had an aunt who probably died of the same thing. They didn’t have tests back then. Just glad they know what it is. Hoping Bert and the grandkids didn’t inherit it.”
“You got my text about Billy Skaggs?”
Avonelle returned to her desk and sat down in her chair. She folded her hands on the desk blotter in front of her. “I did.”
“You want us to arrange some sort of payment plan for child support with Barbara?”
She heaved a sigh. “I suppose that’s the only decent thing. I’ve talked to my lawyer. He’ll set up a small trust for the children. I don’t want Barbara wasting my hard-earned money buying press-on nails and cheap liquor. The lawyer will keep a tight hold on the purse strings. That’s what William would have wanted.”
I was mystified why Avonelle would still need our services, and I said so.
“This,” she said. She drew a piece of lined yellow paper out of a drawer on her desk and slid it across to me.
I plucked up the paper and read it.
Veenie craned her neck over my way to get a good gander.
The message on the paper was spelled out in letters cut from magazines and newspapers, like in one of those 1950s detective movies. It read, “We know your secrets. Buy silence. $20,000. Will contact soon.”
That raised my eyebrows. “Any idea what this message means or who sent it?”
“Of course not. Probably some kin of that Skaggs woman hoping to suck cigarette money out of me.” She straightened her bow. “I want you to stay on the case. Find out who sent this. What they want.”
Veenie pointed at the note. “Says there they want twenty thousand dollars.”
“I can read, Lavinia. I meant what they really want. If they want to embarrass my family, this won’t stop here, and I’m not paying hush money. Furthermore I won’t be humiliated by some hill jack because the men in my family scattered a few wild seeds. Men are like that. Sleeping around. It’s the way they’re made. It’s been happening since God hung the sun in the sky. My goal is to put a stop to this. Make sure whoever’s doing this gets his rightful due.”
I eyed Avonelle. “You sure you want to know? You could just ignore this.”
That suggestion made her squirm. “I am an Apple. We don’t run and hide. We face our troubles.” Her nose flared. The little tendons in her neck tightened up, pushing out her Buster Brown bow. She stood up and handed the invoice and blackmail note back to me. “Find out who sent this note.” She sat down, bowed her apricot head, and started in on a second set of paperwork.
Realizing we’d been dismissed, I rose and motioned for Veenie to follow me out of the office.
Veenie was chattering like a rattlebrained chipmunk by the time we reached the Impala. “I tell you, them Apples are hiding big piles of poo-doo. Didn’t I tell you Bert was skulking behind the curtains, acting odd? And here Avonelle is, wanting to spend more money. Avonelle spending more money on us, with no questions asked. That alone ought to tell you we’ve stumbled into something. Somebody knows something about them Apples all righty, and Avonelle aims to hush them up for good.”
“Lavinia, maybe being blackmailed don’t sit right with her. You know how people are. Everybody’s got a skeleton or two in the family closet. And she’s right, if you pay blackmail, it’s like handing a boozer a bottle. They’ll be back for more. Suck you dry. Avonelle is trying to make the best of a bad situation. What would you do if someone was blackmailing you?”
“Wish them luck. I ain’t got nothing.”
“Oh for Pete’s sake, it would make you madder than a wet hen. You’d scratch their eyes out. This is Avonelle’s way of scratching back.”
“We got two other cases now. We got to find out who sent Fussy to see Saint Peter, and we got to get Sassy out of jail. Also, Joyce is expecting us over at her place in Bloomington.”
“Maybe Harry could pitch in.”
We both laughed at that.
As if on cue, my cell phone exploded. Joyce. She wanted to know where we were. When would we be at her place? Were we on the way? Her texts were loaded with tiny pictures of life savers, SOS signals, and cracked hearts.
I used my words and texted back, “On our way.” On our way out of town, we whizzed past Shap Reynolds driving fast down Main Street with a pickup load of seed corn. He had a new gun rack mounted in the back window of the pickup. It was sagging with shotguns.
Veenie tossed Shap a big wave.
He waved back.
“Boy, oh boy, too bad we got to leave town.” Veenie craned her neck around as Shap braked and pulled his pickup onto the sidewalk in front of Pokey’s Tavern and Pool Hall. �
�I wouldn’t mind seeing Harry pick buckshot out of his ass just one time.”
I kind of agreed with her, but reckoned the way Harry was going, we’d get to witness that and a whole lot more before spring fever tuckered everybody out.
Chapter Eighteen
Joyce greeted us at the front door. She ushered us into her fancy house like we were poor relations she didn’t want anyone to see visiting her in broad daylight, probably because we were.
She looked a lot better than she had the night before. She’d had her hair blown-out. Her makeup was perfectly smooth, like vanilla pudding. She was wearing sparkly heels that looked to be new and a flowing flowered blouse with a scoop neck. Her skirt was full and fit her nicely. A purple paisley silk scarf drew attention away from her little double chin.
Joyce was a good kid, but she’d always been uppity. She’d gone off to college at IU and married an educated man. She had a whole new backstory that conveniently left her real kin out of the picture. Last I heard the story from a college friend of hers at a casual county meet up, Joyce’s daddy was a doctor who’d died working to save the poor in Africa. I was a singer who’d been killed in a plane crash on the way to his funeral. Eddie, her little brother, didn’t even exist. I reckoned he was such an embarrassment she decided there was no use trying to salvage him for public consumption. I kind of knew where she was going with that one. I supposed Joyce’s fibbing was my fault. Veenie let on like it might be. I let Joyce watch Dynasty and all that trash TV in the seventies because I couldn’t afford a babysitter. Her upbringing hadn’t been all that glamorous. Couldn’t blame the kid for fairy-dusting up a better backstory for herself.
Veenie strolled around the three-stories-high entryway. A white staircase swirled down from the upper stories like a cork screw. It looked a lot like the entryway in The Beverly Hillbillies.
“Boy, oh boy, this place ought to have come with its own Rhett Butler,” Veenie said.
Joyce beamed. She figured that was a compliment. I wasn’t so sure. “This whole development has a theme of Tara, like in Gone with the Wind. It shows, doesn’t it?”
“Uh huh,” I said. Joyce’s husband, Russell Krotch, the polecat we were there to spy on, was from Atlanta. He shared Joyce’s love of glitz. He loved dressing up in costumes and doing local TV commercials for his insurance business. The two of them together sparkled like a pair of cheap pasties once they got going.
Veenie plopped down on a red-and-gray silk divan. “Where’s old Rusty Krotch?”
Joyce cringed. Her shoulders pulled back a bit like a pigeon. “Lavinia, you know he wants to be called Russell. Russell, not Rusty.”
“Rusty Krotch makes him a whole lot more memorable. I bet he’d sell a heck of a lot more insurance. Ain’t nobody going to forget a name like that.”
“I’m not sure his clientele would appreciate that. They’re educated people, for the most part.” Joyce looked at me for assistance reigning in Veenie.
I walked around the room pretending not to see the pleading in her eyes. “Rusty at work?”
“Said he was going there this morning. He doesn’t normally get home until after six. Lately, it’s been more like nine o’clock. That’s part of what’s got me worried.”
“He give any reason why he’s coming home so late?”
“Says it’s the busy time of year, but we’ve been together twenty years. He’s never come home late every night like this before.” Joyce played nervously with a diamond tennis bracelet on her wrist.
“You know the passwords to his home computer? His cell phone?”
“He never uses the computer in the den. He has a laptop. Takes it with him everywhere. Uses it to write up policies. I never use it, so I never asked him for passwords. We’ve always trusted each other.”
Veenie piped up. “That there is your first mistake. You got to assume a man is vulnerable when it comes to his giggle stick. He’s got all these shiny things.” Veenie tossed her hand around the room. “Bimbos love shiny things. At his age, with all this stuff, he’s big time skank bait.” Veenie snooped around in a glass box on the mantle. She yanked out a cigar. “Didn’t know Rusty smoked.”
“He don’t. I mean, he doesn’t. Those are from Cuba. They’re just for looks, meant to impress people.” Joyce took the glass box from Veenie and set it carefully back on the marble mantle.
While her back was turned, Veenie pocketed the cigar. I could hear Rusty, who’d never been a big fan of our family, bellyaching now. “Why’d you let them in? Now we have to count the silverware.”
In Rusty’s defense, there had been that one incident with my older brother, Basil Lee. The Christmas Joyce and Rusty first bought Tara, they invited the whole dang family over, hoping to wow us. Well, we were wowed, Basil Lee more than anybody. She knew Basil liked to take a few mementos from the places he visited. Heck, we all knew that. We all put the shiny things away when he visited. And, in Basil’s defense, those living room lamps had been real sparkly.
The whole thing would have blown over, but Rusty made things worse by confronting my brother. He stomped out to Basil’s pickup and lugged the lamps back in. Everybody knew you waited a day or two, then went over to see Basil’s wife, Nancy Jane. She’d have the things ready for you to tote back home. No one in the family ever spoke about Basil’s sticky fingers, certainly not out loud. That would have been downright rude.
Veenie asked Joyce if she could write down all the places Rusty might go during the day, constructing a kind of time table of how his daily routine went. Joyce pulled a paper out of her skirt pocket. “Did that this the morning. He goes out sometimes to see clients in their homes. The big ones. He always works the big accounts himself. He has some corporate clients. That’s where the gold is, in corporate insurance.”
Veenie and I studied the paper. It listed a thorough breakdown of Rusty’s favorite lunch and dinner hangouts, along with a detailed list of his largest insurance clients. I was impressed at how well-organized and thorough Joyce had been. But then she always had been a cracker-jack student. It was her nerves that were jumpy, not her mind.
Veenie asked if Joyce had a list of possible suspects in terms of who Rusty might be stepping out with.
Joyce nodded and handed us another piece of paper. This one had photos and write-ups on three women. It also listed the women’s addresses, car models, license plate numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, and Facebook pages. Joyce was clearly serious about getting to the bottom of her husband’s peculiar behavior.
“All three of these women are skanks, near as I can tell. They all gush over Russell like he’s was the Lord All Mighty.” She fiddled with her tennis bracelet again. “You going to follow him? I think you should follow him. Tonight, when he gets off work. That’s only an hour from now.” Joyce was pacing now, her heels clicking on the stone floor.
“Stop fussing and fretting,” I said. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Veenie piped up. “We’ll get it done, all righty. If some skank’s yanking Rusty’s wonder worm me and your mama will nail her in no time.”
I might have put that differently, but hey, the sentiment was dead on.
Chapter Nineteen
Half an hour later, Veenie and I were parked across the street from the Krotch Insurance Agency. Veenie was munching on a family-sized bag of Cheetos. Her mouth was ringed in orange, and her fingertips were stained orange too. She was slurping on a striped straw that bobbed around in a NASCAR emblazoned plastic Big Gulp cup of Big Red pop.
Veenie stared at the lighted sign that dominated the front of the office building that Rusty owned. “Boy I don’t envy ol’ Rusty Krotch. If he’s cheating on Joyce, he better hope his crotch is fully insured. Hate to think what that girl might do to him once she gets going.”
Veenie had a point. Once Joyce got knocked off center, it was like watching a tornado slam a trailer park. Everything splintered. Once, she got mad at her little brother, Eddie, for calling her a “fatso” on the school bus. I c
ame home to find him stuffed in the clothes dryer with his mouth duct taped shut. Joyce was up on her tiptoes on a stool ready to flip on the dryer. She aimed to send her brother for an hour-long, seventy degree tumble. She’d had this glazed look in her eyes, like she might have been possessed by a demon.
Eddie never teased Joyce after that. He always got one of his friends to do the dirty work. Joyce didn’t get just a little bit mad. She went full demon. All her screws popped. It didn’t last long, but Lord, when it hit, that girl destroyed everything in her path.
I was watching the Krotch Insurance Agency with a pair of binoculars. Luckily, it was in an old two-story limestone building with a glass front, just around the corner from the Bloomington courthouse square. I could see all the employees scurrying around like ants, answering phones, printing out paperwork, and guzzling coffee from one of those fancy Italian coffee machines.
Joyce had been right. Rusty worked in a sea of young women. He was about the only man in the place. His desk was in the back, in a separate office with a huge glass window. I could see most, but not all, of what went on inside his office. It was closing time. People were starting to put on their jackets, grab their purses, and spill out the door. Rusty didn’t move though. He was hunched over a pile of papers on his desk. He was dressed in a blue pin-striped dress shirt and a right nice maroon tie with his sleeves neatly rolled up. A navy jacket hung on a coat rack behind him. He wasn’t the world’s most handsome man, pretty darn average when it came to looks, but Veenie was right: women didn’t marry men for their looks so much as for their ability to provide, and he’d done right by Joyce in that regard.
Veenie complained. “My calves are cramping. I think I might be getting one of those deep vein blood balls that kill people. I got a heart condition, you know.” She made a show of kicking out her stubby little legs. “He still in there?” She had her nose pressed to the Impala’s window now. “That him in the back office?”
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