Baby Daddy Mystery

by Daisy Pettles

  When we got to the funeral parlor the front door was locked tight. There was no sign of a hearse or any another vehicle in the parking lot. The lawn sign confirmed that Bromley’s service was at one o’clock, with burial to follow in the White River Cemetery. My wristwatch said it was ten in the morning.

  “Bet the back door is open,” said Veenie. “That’s where they roll in the bodies. They got to keep that door open 24-7. People die all hours. They can’t be leaving them out on the front porch. Coyote might get to them. They got to refrigerate them right away.”

  Veenie bounced around back to the striped green awning that shaded the service door, and I followed. She pushed with both hands at the big silver button at the side of the doorway, and the two doors swung open slowly. Bodies were delivered through this entrance, so they’d installed a hands-free feature for people wheeling gurneys and caskets in and out.

  It was cold and quiet inside the funeral parlor. The air conditioning sent a soothing hum through the place. We were in the hallway in the back, the hall that led to the body prep lab. “I bet Bromley is already laid out nice for his viewing party. Twinkles does that, and he’s real efficient,” said Veenie.

  I heard a rustle, and another door popped opened at the far end of the hallway. Twinkles poked his head out the door. His hair was tossed up in a bun. He had a blue hair net stretched over the bun and a pair of plastic splatter glasses on his face. He wore a stained blue work smock over what looked to be a pink sweater with a white pearl design across the chest. “Oh, hi there, gals,” he said. “You’re early. Funeral isn’t until one. I’m working on Juanita Gomez right now, trying to get her eyebrows drawn on right.”

  “Juanita died?” I asked. Juanita had been the clerk at the water department for as long as I could remember. I’d seen her Wednesday when I’d paid our water bill. She’d been grumpy, per usual, but she’d looked healthy enough.

  “Honey, I hope she’s dead, or else she’s gonna be real mad she wakes up and finds me messing around with her makeup.” Twinkles giggled.

  Veenie explained why we’d come.

  Twinkles listened and shook his head. “That’s real creative of you, coming up with that idea. He’s still got his fingers, sure enough. They’re a little stiff, but I don’t see why we can’t limber them up. Put them to work. We’d not be breaking any laws or anything like that. I mean, his widow gave you the cell phone, and she’s his legal next of kin. We’ll be respectful and all. Let me strip off my gloves,” he held up his hands, clad in blue plastic, “and I’ll be right with you gals.”

  Bromley was laid out in his Sunday best suit, a baby-blue linen ensemble. He had prime billing in the Eternal Slumber Chamber, the largest and fanciest viewing room at the Reddy Funeral Parlor. A mess of flowers had already been delivered. His casket was heaped so high with flowers that he looked like he was taking a nap on a float on his way to the Rose Bowl Parade. Twinkles had artfully arranged the flowers, per usual.

  “Lookie there,” said Veenie, tapping at the wooden casket. “Avonelle sprang for the Supreme Slumber Rest Walnut 3000. That’s top of the line.”

  Like I said, Veenie had booked her funeral with Beryl Reddy last spring on the layaway plan, so she was up to date on the most fashionable caskets and accessories. “That model,” she continued, “has extra eggcrate foam in the mattress so you get a nice extra-comfy send away. You know I got a cranky lower back, so I ordered from the three thousand line for my send away.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say about that. Getting a kink in my back from a poorly padded casket had never been a prime concern of mine. I reckoned if I ever woke up in a casket I’d have a heap of other worries to keep me occupied.

  Veenie peered into the casket. “Gotta hand it to you, Twinkles. He looks a whole heap better dead than he ever did living.”

  “Thanks,” said Twinkles. “Those new face paints from Louisville have a little more color and sparkle to them than the old line. You know when your time comes, we have to turn you upside down, drain all the blood out the wrists, so the body stays fresh. It’s mighty hard to get color into a body when it’s got nothing in the veins but formaldehyde.”

  Veenie nodded. “That’s a dandy suit too.”

  “Smart as a whistle. Nice and cool for a spring layout. Avonelle brought it on over. This whole party is on her dime, and I gotta say she didn’t scrimp, not one cent. She even ordered the full French manicure. Look at how his nails shine.”

  Veenie nodded. “Wish I could get mine to shine up like that. Got nails like a raccoon, all split and dry.” She held her hands next to Bromley’s and spread her fingers wide for emphasis. They were a bit cracked.

  After snorting at her nails, Veenie pulled Bromley’s cell phone out of her pocket and flicked it on. “You lift his hands,” she said, nudging me in the ribs, “I’ll smash his fingers to the phone until we find one that works.”

  I was considering this when Twinkles, probably sensing my hesitation, said he’d get the fingers up and moving. “Fingers don’t move so well after they sit for a spell. And his have some makeup on them. I’ll brush that off a bit, so you can get a good print going.” Twinkles pulled a hankie out of his pocket and rubbed gently at Bromley’s hand. I could see the makeup crumble off his hairy knuckles. “There,” he said. “I’ll work his fingers back into shape when you all get done. Won’t take me but a minute or two.”

  Veenie slid the phone around under Bromley’s manicured fingertips while Twinkles pressed the fingers into the screen. They tried every finger, but the cell phone didn’t spring to life. “What the dickens,” mumbled Veenie, frustrated. “Mash them fingers harder.”

  Twinkles tried, but the phone, like Bromley, was dead to the world.

  Meanwhile, I’d been googling. “Gosh darn it,” I said. “Says here cell phones have a heat sensing thingamabob on the fingerprint lock. If the thingamabob don’t feel the heat of a body, it won’t register a fingerprint. Says here if the body has been dead more than an hour or two, the unlock command won’t work.”

  Veenie twisted her lips. “You reckon we could heat up his fingers? Like on a hot plate, like they was hot dogs.”

  Twinkles shook his head no. “That would be disrespectful. Also might burn his fingers.”

  Veenie grabbed Bromley’s hand. “He feels all cold and rubbery.”

  “That’s pretty much normal,” said Twinkles.

  “Can’t you warm him up from the inside?”

  “Don’t think so,” said Twinkles. “Not without messing him up.”

  Something clacked over by the front door, and a man wearing a blue chef’s hat came into the front foyer wheeling a serving cart.

  “Caterer,” said Twinkles. “Avonelle ordered the full spread. Twinkles nodded to the man and pointed at a serving table that was set up in the reception room, which fed into the Eternal Slumber Chamber. “Set it up there,” he instructed the caterer. The man got busy transferring silver serving dishes off his cart onto the table.

  Twinkles consulted his watch. “You gals gotta go now. Folks will be arriving soon—the organist, the singer, the preacher too. And Avonelle. Don’t want her throwing a hissy fit because we messed up Bromley’s big to-do.”

  Veenie didn’t look happy as we sauntered toward the front door, but she brightened a bit when she saw giant shrimp and a whooper-sized Velveeta cheeseball on the serving table. She popped a few shrimp into her mouth and poked at the cheeseball. “I bet they used a whole loaf of Velveeta on that cheese ball. And lookie, they rolled it in some fancy nuts.” I had to shoo Veenie’s little hand away to keep her from picking all the nuts off the outside of the cheeseball. Thanking Twinkles for his help, I steered Veenie on out to the Impala before we ended up in some sort of funeral parlor cheeseball fiasco.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  While Veenie had been busy stealing party shrimp from the dearly departed, my daughter Joyce had flooded my phone with hieroglyphics. I’d gotten so sucked in by our morning meeting with Avonelle and the
possibility of cracking Bromley’s cell phone, that I’d forgotten that Joyce had sent me a string of distress texts at the crack of dawn. Her messages to me were growing more frantic. “He came home at 3 AM. 3 AM!!!” Dagger hearts. Cracked hearts. A whole row of crying faces. “You tracking him??? Where was he???”

  I showed the phone screen to Veenie while I gunned the Impala to get it going. It didn’t like to run after it had set cold for more than half an hour, and it was clear now we needed to race up to Bloomington to check in on Joyce and her hanky-panky pants husband, Rusty.

  I asked Veenie to check the online dashboard for the GPS doohickey we’d stuck on the bumper of Rusty’s BMW. “Thing ought to tell us where he was last night and where he’s headed now.”

  Veenie flipped off her glasses and stuck her nose to the phone screen as we rolled up Highway 50 toward the cutoff to Lake Monroe and over to Bloomington. She punched and grunted at her cell phone.

  We were flying along the edge of Lake Monroe by the time Veenie had Rusty’s whereabouts pinpointed. “Uh-oh,” she murmured.

  “What?” I asked as I swerved to miss a pair of gray squirrels who scurried across the asphalt in front of us. “That don’t sound good to me. What’s up with that uh-oh?”

  “This doohickey says Rusty was over at Kayleigh Burton’s house last night until the wee hours.” Veenie turned the screen my way, and I got an eyeful of an address that didn’t mean much to me. “That Kayleigh’s address?”

  “Yep. That’s the address Joyce gave us for Kayleigh. Some apartments on the south side of Bloomington.”

  “What time he leave there?”

  “This here says he left at 2:46 a.m.”

  “He drive straight home from there?”

  “Yep.”

  I gnawed my lower lip. This was not good news for Joyce’s marriage. Kayleigh was young and a real looker. No way Joyce, who was pushing fifty and had a body like a busted can of biscuits, could compete with that. “Where is Rusty now?”

  “His office.”

  I checked my Timex. “Bromley’s daughter, Kimmy Apple, lives up in Bloomington. Goes to college there, right?”

  “That’s what she told us.”

  “See if you can find her using that that phone whatchamacallit Harry got us a subscription to.”

  Veenie fiddled around with her cell for a bit and pulled up the phone bank. It only took a couple of minutes for her to locate a cell number and street address in Bloomington for Kimmy. “What you want with this?” she asked.

  “Figure maybe Kimmy knows the password to her dad’s cell. Her cell phone is probably on his account. I reckon maybe she can get in, unlock his phone from inside the account, maybe take the fingerprint lock off the phone. Give us an account code to crack open his cell.”

  Veenie’s eyes brightened. “Smart thinking. You want me to give her a call?”

  I nodded as I prepared to shoot off the back roads and onto the connecting highway into Bloomington. “Call her,” I said as I swung the Impala into the thick stream of traffic and headed toward Rusty’s downtown office. Bloomington had a lot of one-way streets and a mess of spring pothole repair underway, so driving took both my hands and all my wits. Thick traffic always made me a little nervous, and the dang blasted college kids that attended IU were forever weaving in and out recklessly. I felt like I was playing bumper cars with kindergartners at the county fair.

  I could hear Veenie’s phone trying to ring up Kimmy. She had it on speakerphone so I could hear, and so she’d not have to repeat the whole dang conversation once she got Kimmy on the line. But Kimmy didn’t pick up. An answering system picked up, and a woman’s robo voice said to leave a message for Kimmy. Veenie squawked into the phone, explained what we wanted, and left her own cell phone number for a text or callback.

  I found a parking space around the corner from the Krotch Insurance Agency and pulled in. The meter for the space was on empty, its red flag flipped up. Veenie and I dug through the ashtray in the Impala until we had enough loose change to feed the meter. I popped quarters into the meter while Veenie checked the online doohickey to make sure Rusty was still parked at the agency.

  “Rusty’s still at the office,” she announced as we hit the sidewalk and ambled toward his building. I could see his black BMW coming into view, parked in a reserved spot in the agency lot. I reckoned we’d mosey on in, pretend we’d come to town shopping for the day, ask if we could use the restroom, see if we could catch him off guard, get him talking. I could feel my blood boiling at the thought of him hurting Joyce. It didn’t help that Kayleigh greeted us at the door as we entered and asked if she could be of assistance. She was flipping her hair and acting sassy.

  “Rusty here?” I asked.

  “Mr. Krotch is very busy with a client. Might I help you ladies?”

  Veenie was sniffing around Kayleigh like she was an unwelcome stray.

  Kayleigh stepped back and asked me if Veenie was all right.

  I looked at Veenie. “Right as she ever was. I’m Rusty’s mother-in-law, Ruby Jane Waskom. She’s my friend, Veenie Goens.”

  “Oh,” said Kayleigh. She backed up and slid behind her desk, where she took a seat and folded her hands in front of her on the desk, like grade school kids are taught to do when it’s quiet time. She wore a mint green suit ensemble with a beige silk shirt that left nothing much to the imagination in regards to her bosom. “Oh,” she said again. “Is Mr. Krotch expecting you?”

  “No,” I said, telling the truth. “We were in town shopping. Thought we’d drop in and say hello. Maybe use the restroom.”

  Kayleigh’s face relaxed a bit. “Oh sure, bathroom’s in the back.” She pointed down a narrow hallway, past the glass office where we’d seen her and Rusty arguing a few nights before. The green venetian blinds were rolled down on Rusty’s office window, so I couldn’t see who was with him in the office, if anyone.

  Veenie shot down the hallway like a Super Ball.

  “She’s got a fussy bladder,” I explained to Kayleigh.

  “I can see that,” she said, her lips tight. “Well, have a seat. I don’t want to interrupt Mr. Krotch while he’s in with a client, but if you’ll wait a few minutes, he ought to be done soon.” She checked her fancy wrist watch. “He has another appointment, a phone call that’s supposed to come in any minute.”

  I thanked her and took a seat outside Rusty’s office. A stack of beauty and health magazines were piled high on the reception table, so I busied myself catching up on how to keep my lips moist. I was barely through the first article (magazines are mostly pictures these days), when Rusty popped out of his office. An elderly man in tennis whites was with him. He wore thick glasses and had a neatly trimmed silver goatee, probably a college professor. Rusty was shaking his hand, congratulating him on how tidy a sum he could draw now in retirement because of that annuity he’d bought a few years back.

  Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought Rusty’s face fell into a panic when he caught sight of me. I smiled and shot him a little wave. He lifted a pair of fingers my way as a sort of halfhearted acknowledgment as he walked past me. He kept chatting with the goatee man, escorting him all the way to the door. He took his time walking back to greet me. “Ruby Jane, what a delight to see you.” He smiled, but I could tell it was fake. His eyes didn’t crinkle, and his lips were as stiff as Bromley’s.

  Kayleigh spoke up. “They were in town shopping, so they stopped to borrow the bathroom, say hello.”

  “They?” Rusty asked. His eyes darted all around the room.

  “Veenie’s with me,” I said. “She’s in the little girl’s room.”

  His face relaxed. “Well, come on in. Always glad to see you. Did you stop by the house? Say hello to Joyce?”

  “Don’t have time today,” I said as I followed Rusty into his office. “We got to be back in Knobby Waters by nine tonight.”

  “Oh? Your bedtime?” He closed the office door and slid into the seat behind his desk.

  “No,
we’re on a blackmail case, and we got to meet someone.”

  “Exciting,” Rusty said, punctuating it with another fake smile. He was playing with a pencil holder now, twirling it around in his hands. His little chicken hawk face was drawn up in an unpleasant way, like maybe he was constipated. He loosened his tie a tad.

  I was fixing to ask him right out if he was cheating on Joyce when Veenie burst through the door.

  Rusty’s face fell when Veenie swooped in and took a seat next to me. “Lavinia, nice to see you again,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Can’t really say the same,” grunted Veenie.

  Ignoring that comment, Rusty offered Veenie some mints from a candy dish on his desk.

  She declined. “Mints make me toot.” She pinned Rusty to his seat with her tiny blue, dagger eyes.

  Oh boy, I had a feeling I knew what was coming next.

  “Why you cheating on Joyce?” she blurted out.

  And there it was.

  Rusty blushed. “I … well … I am not cheating on Joyce. Jesus, who told you that?”

  “Joyce.”

  “She did not!” Rusty looked like he’d been kicked in the head. His little mouth drew up in a pout. “She didn’t say that about me, did she?”

  Oh geez, now he looked like he might cry.

  “Afraid she did,” I said.

  “Why would she say something silly like that?”

  Veenie hitched a thumb toward the office door. “That little jezebel you got riding reception might have something to do with it.”

  “Kayleigh?” Rusty’s eyes widened. “My wife thinks I’m cheating on her with a woman young enough to be our daughter?”

  “She’s pretty much convinced of it,” I said.

  Rusty bent down and flipped on his intercom. “Kayleigh?”

  “Yes, Mr. Krotch.”

  “Could you come in here for a moment, please?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  Kayleigh came into the office carrying a pen and her notebook, like she expected to take dictation.