Baby Daddy Mystery

by Daisy Pettles

  “Smartass,” said Boots. “You said it was dark. You were out in the barn loft at Barbara Skaggs’s place?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why was that?”

  Veenie piped up. “We was meeting someone for a hot case we’re on.”

  “This have to do with Bromley Apple’s death?”

  I crossed my arms. “That would be confidential.”

  “I see.” Boots leaned back in his roller chair until it squeaked. “Ruby Jane, I can’t file a report if you won’t tell me what all this is about. Gosh darn, woman, why you got to be so difficult?”

  “We don’t need you to file a report.”

  “Why you here then?” Boots eyed me. I could tell he was flustered by the way he rubbed at his lips. He glanced down at the paperwork on his desk, then back up to me. He eyed Veenie.

  Veenie said, “Don’t give me the hairy Hoosier eyeball. She’s your gal.”

  I was about to object to that comment when Devon Hattabaugh, Pawpaw County’s junior deputy, sauntered in from the back room. He was squawking into the little radio he had clipped to his shoulder. “Location?” he asked the squawk box. “Location?”

  A woman, Bitsy Gorbett, whose voice I recognized because she was about my age and had been the county police dispatcher since Richard Nixon got booted from office, said, “Leisure Hills.”

  “Affirmative. Roger that,” said Devon. Devon wore khaki knee-knocker shorts and a crisply ironed matching shirt. Probably his mama did the ironing because he still lived with her, having just recently graduated from community college. He didn’t have an official pointy hat like Boots. His hair, which he was letting grow out, was tightly pulled back in a tiny ponytail. His muttonchop sideburns were bushed out like squirrel tails. He wore a navy beret, which was his usual headgear. “We got a call out to Leisure Hills,” he said to Boots as he drew his aviator sunglasses out of his pocket and slipped them down over his eyes.

  “It serious?” Boots asked.

  “Nah. Don’t think so. Sally Sneed wants to file a complaint.”

  “Again?” said Boots.

  “Yep,” said Devon.

  Veenie was all ears now. “Who she complaining about?”

  “Your pappy,” said Devon.

  “What’d he do?”

  “She claims he bit her.”

  “She got any proof?”

  “She has his dentures. Claims he left them in her right butt cheek. Bit her clean on the ass in the dining hall during breakfast.”

  No surprise there. We all knew Pappy Tuttle could get a little boisterous, especially when it came to the ladies. He’d been barred from most of the nudie bars in the tri-county area back in the day when he was young and running free.

  Knowing Sally Sneed, I imagined whatever had been going on between her and Pappy might have been consensual. Sally was pretty well established as the head jezebel of Leisure Hills. Ever since she had her second stroke, she just loved making whoopee, and she wasn’t all that discrete about when or where, or with what either. She and Pappy had an on-again, off-again kind of romance. Sally liked to go off her mood meds when things got boring out at Leisure Hills. And when she did that, she flew around flirting with everything. The orderlies had to pry her off a sawhorse out in the rec barn more than once.

  Boots rolled his eyes. “If no firearms were discharged, and no one was killed, I don’t see why we need to make an official call.”

  Devon fiddled with his sunglasses. “I was going out that way, anyway. Got a complaint this morning about some out-of-towners from Seymour setting up a fishing camp on state property, down by the covered bridge. Thought I’d drop in at Leisure Hills, check with the oldsters while I was looking into the illegal camping and fishing complaint.”

  Devon looked at us. “You two ladies want to tag along? I was thinking Pappy might settle down if you gave him a good talking to. Was hoping we could nip this thing in the bud without paperwork. Nurse Pruitt said he usually pays attention to Veenie.” Devon peeked over the top of his sunglass frames at Veenie.

  “Reckon we better,” said Veenie. “Pappy enjoys it out there. Hate to see him get kicked out because of some fool thing. We told him to leave the ladies alone, but he don’t always remember our conversations.”

  “Or the year,” I added.

  Boots stood up and waved us toward the door. “Might as well go on out there. You won’t tell me what you were doing down in Hound Holler at that barn, so there’s no use my opening a case file on it.” He eyed me and Veenie like he expected us to object or come clean.

  We did neither. We followed Devon out to his patrol car. I gunned the Impala, and we rode his bumper all the way out Poor Farm Road to Leisure Hills.

  Devon waved at us and honked and hollered out the cruiser window that he was going on to check on the illegals down by the river as we turned into the driveway to Leisure Hills. “You ladies need firepower, give me a call! I’ll be down by the covered bridge all morning,” he yelled as he roared away down the gravel road in a cloud of dust.

  Inside Leisure Hills, Pappy did not seem happy to see us. “Dang it, she begged me to bite her,” he brayed. He slumped in his motorized chair, sulking, his red IU sock cap pulled down to his wiry gray eyebrows.

  The tiny black-and-white TV that set on a shelf in the corner of his room blared Fox News. The announcer was going on about some ninety-year-old politician in Georgia with a neck like a turkey who’d been caught trying to diddle a teenage campaign worker.

  Veenie took hold of the TV twanger and powered down the sound. “Pappy, you can’t bite the ladies. That’s illegal now. Nobody finds that romantic no more, at least not in public.”

  “Humph. She begged me,” said Pappy, sticking to his story, defending his own innocence. “I was being polite.” He took a reach stick out of his lap and fiddled with the handle grip, trying to grab hold of the TV twanger and pull it back over his way. “I can’t hear the TV when it’s that low,” he grumbled. “That old coot on the TV has been getting some serious whoopee. I wanna hear how he does it.”

  Veenie stepped between Pappy and the TV. “Sally Sneed told the cops you bit her on the rump without asking permission first. She filed a complaint.”

  “Sally is a fatso and a big liar,” grumped Pappy. “All them Sneeds lie. Bunch of liars and thieves. You know that. Also,” he leaned over close to Veenie and motioned for her to bend down, which she did. He then whispered to her, “Just between me and you, Sally is cuckoo. Don’t always know what’s going on inside her own head.” He tapped his own noggin by way of emphasis.

  “It don’t matter,” said Veenie. “I told you not to be messing with her. She gets you all riled up. You get that riled up, the doctor says your heart could bust wide open.”

  “I like being riled up,” Pappy snarled. “Besides, I didn’t start nothing. It’s those old ladies. They won’t leave a fella alone. I’m plum exhausted trying to keep them happy.” He sniffled and tried to straighten up in his chair, only to slide back down like a lumpy pile of mashed taters.

  Actually what Pappy said was pretty much true. There were ten women for every man out at Leisure Hills. Things could get pretty competitive. It was worse than junior high, what with everyone dating everyone else, and going steady then breaking up and getting hysterical. TV soap operas had nothing on the Knobby Waters’ senior set at Leisure Hills.

  Nurse Ada Pruitt brought in Pappy’s lunch. She wore her customary peach-colored nursing smock and pants and marshmallow shoes. She flipped up the tray on his motorized chair, so he could eat sitting up, without shifting to the dining table chair. He’d been quarantined to his room until he settled down and apologized. So far, he was refusing to do both.

  Nurse Pruitt fussed in a circle until she got Pappy and his lunch tray settled. “Thanks for coming out, Veenie,” she said. “He was an awful handful this morning. He bit Sally right in the breakfast line. She threw a bottle of maple syrup at him. Then she threw some steak knives, a gallon of grape jelly,
and a basket of boiled eggs. The place was a sticky mess. It’s been crazy as a kindergarten out here all week.”

  “Why so crazy?” I asked.

  “Spring fever, I reckon,” said Nurse Pruitt. “That and we got a new dapper gentleman moved into the Petunia Suite. All the ladies are after him. I think Pappy here is afraid he’ll lose his harem.”

  “I could take that fella if you didn’t keep me strapped in this here chair,” whined Pappy. “I got to defend my territory, or that old rooster will have the whole henhouse waving their tail feathers at him.” His face scrunched up as he sucked in a spoonful of red Jell-O. “Dang blasted Romeo.”

  I was curious. “Who moved in?”

  Nurse Pruitt cut up Pappy’s pork chop for him. “Don’t rightly know much about him. From out of town. Says he has family over in Terre Haute. He’s a looker though. Uses a cane, but he can still strut and drive. He’s in a deluxe suite, so he must be fixed with a dandy pension. Got all the ladies in a swoon.”

  Pappy snorted. “He ain’t so special. He uses black shoe polish to dye his hair and mustache. His hair was running down his face in the rain when he checked in. He don’t fool me. And he’s got real short legs. Looks like a skinny one of them dwarfs on that TV show, Game of Gnomes. He’s nearsighted too. A runt. Nothing special.”

  I asked Nurse Pruitt what the new fellow’s name was.

  “Smith,” she said. “Jack Smith.”

  “Ha!” said Pappy. “An alias if ever I heard one. I’m calling him Pee Wee Ding Dong. Suits him better.”

  “Why would anyone check into a retirement home under an alias?” I asked.

  “Probably hiding from his wife,” snorted Pappy, hooking a finger in the corner of his mouth and adjusting his dentures, hoping to get a better grip on the last of his pork chop. “Came here to get nookie. Stealing my nookie, right out from under my nose. Now you see why I had to bite Sally? Trying to keep the ladies happy.” He leaned toward me and whispered, “They like it wild.”

  Someone ding-donged at Pappy’s door, and Nurse Pruitt pushed the entry button. All the doors had auto-open features so none of the residents had to walk to the door or worry about accessibility. Also, it made it easier for the emergency gurneys to come and go at all hours, without causing so much mess and fuss.

  The door swung open to reveal Sally Sneed sitting in a purple scooter. She wore a red wig and a gauzy fire engine red ensemble with enough bling on her wrists and neck to blind a herd of blackbirds. She was pretty hefty. The skin on her neck hung down in wrinkles, like her neck was made of layers of wet crepe paper. “I was only fooling,” she squawked as she power-rolled into Pappy’s suite, almost running over my foot. “He’s okay. He didn’t do nothing I didn’t ask him to do. I think I might have missed my meds a time or two. Makes me crazy. Didn’t mean to cause no trouble.”

  Pappy wrinkled his nose, folded his hands on his tray, and looked away like he wasn’t quite ready to forgive Sally. “See,” he said to Veenie. “That’s what I been telling you. We was playing.”

  Sally revved her scooter over to Pappy’s side. She gave him a smack up the side of his cheek, leaving behind red lip prints as big as turkey vulture wings.

  Pappy reddened a little.

  Nurse Pruitt eyed them both. “You two keep your clothes on. Don’t be broadcasting your sinful adventures. And don’t come begging to me for meds when you give each other the crotch cooties. We got enough problems out here without you two starting a senior plague.” She took Pappy’s blood pressure and told him it was too high.

  “Course it is,” said Pappy. He looked down at his own crotch. “I’m getting a chubby.”

  I decided it was probably time for us to leave the love birds alone. The door to Pappy’s suite remained open. We were saying our good-byes when I spied a short man with a tall black crop of rooster-like hair sneak past the door. He was practically running, leaning into his cane, using it to catapult himself forward. I think he’d been eavesdropping at Pappy’s door. By the time we got to the door and into the hallway, the man had vanished.

  “Who was that fellow?” I asked Nurse Pruitt as she logged her visit “in” and then “out” on the chart on the wall outside Pappy’s door.

  “What did he look like?” she asked as she erased a mistake on the little whiteboard with the wet tip of her finger before attacking the chart again.

  I described the little black-haired guy with the cane.

  “Must have been Jack Smith. The gals call him Smithy. Pappy’s arch rival. He’s about the only guy in this wing who doesn’t use a chair to get around.”

  Veenie and I headed through the lobby, where a wild game of euchre had a table of women wearing Purdue sun visor hats in an uproar. As soon as we were alone in the foyer, I confessed my suspicions to Veenie. “I think Doogie Duval is hiding out here.”

  Veenie craned her head and scanned the lobby. “Sassy’s husband? Where?”

  “Jack Smith,” I said. “I saw him, just a glimpse, but everything—the way Pappy and Nurse Pruitt described him, right down to the dyed black hair—matches how Pooter described seeing him slinking around at the Moon Glo with Bromley. From what I saw, old Smithy looks a heck of a lot like the photos we have of Doogie Duval from that online booking database.”

  Instead of heading out to the Impala, Veenie and I decided to head back inside Leisure Hills in search of more information about the mysterious, dark-haired Romeo, Smithy. If Smithy were Doogie, I doubted his being at Leisure Hills was a coincidence. And I, for one, was dying to question him about Fussy’s untimely gigging and why he’d been keeping company with Bromley down at the Moon Glo. Whoever had killed Fussy was still at large, and Doogie Duval, retirement home Romeo and jailbird on the fly, was the only darn suspect we had.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Nurse Pruitt seemed surprised to see me and Veenie back on her wing. She was at the charge desk, typing notes into a computer. “Forget something?” she asked. She wore a set of white-and-yellow striped dime store reading glasses. She’d not been wearing them before, so I assumed they were for computer work.

  I asked which suite Smithy was holed up in.

  She slid off her glasses and chewed an earpiece. “Why you asking?”

  “Just curious.”

  She twisted her lips. “We’re not supposed to give out that sort of information. Confidential.”

  Veenie jumped in. “How long you known us?”

  “All my life.”

  “We ain’t identity thieves or nothing peculiar like that,” said Veenie. “You know that.”

  “Reckon I do.” She slipped her glasses back on and punched a few keys on her terminal. “He’s at the end of the hall, suite 125. Can’t miss it. But if anybody asks, we never had this conversation. Never.”

  “Course not,” said Veenie. “This here is a confidential matter, and we never talk about our cases.”

  “A case?” Nurse Pruitt sat up in her chair. She lowered her voice and leaned toward us. “This related to all those questions you asked me earlier this week about Bromley Apple?”

  I remembered Veenie telling me that Nurse Pruitt had told her that Bromley had gone into Doc Scarborough’s office in town for a prescription for gonorrhea, then bribed his way out of filling out the information sheet as required by the state health department. Veenie had said that Nurse Pruitt filed the VD report in her trash can after Bromley had offered her two free porcelain crowns as hush money. Nurse Pruitt’s teeth confirmed that. She had a shiny new white bicuspid and molar on the right side. Seemed to me those two teeth had been dark silver amalgams last time I paid any attention.

  I told Nurse Pruitt that yes, all this was related to Bromley’s death.

  Her eyes slid up and down the hallway. “I might know something. Been meaning to give you a call.”

  Veenie piped up. “You remembered something?”

  “Don’t know if it’s important or not. And I wouldn’t be telling you this, mind you, if you weren’t agents of the
law. You being law officers on a case, I figure it’s my civic duty to report suspicious items.”

  Nurse Pruitt was sitting up high now, busting at the seams to gossip.

  “That’s right,” said Veenie. “Harry has a badge and a diploma and all that stuff. And we’ve been deputized.”

  I decided to let that last comment slide. If Nurse Pruitt knew something about Bromley’s death, I’d take any tidbits she tossed our way. “What did you remember?” I asked.

  “Well, like I told Veenie, Bromley wouldn’t name names, and well, I could sort of understand that. I mean, it is a private thing. Not the kind of thing you want typed up and stored in a government database for all eternity. I mean, that’s why I took his offer for some free dental work. I’d helped him out of a jam, and the way I saw it, he was reciprocating because the nurse’s union here don’t offer any dental coverage. Not a dime. You believe that?”

  I nodded my head in sympathy and Veenie did likewise.

  Nurse Pruitt looked relieved, like she was satisfied that she was doing the right thing, and that anything she blabbed would be safe with us. “Well, Bromley was a real gentleman, not naming names and all, but that same week a lady came in, all itchy, and she had the same thing going on downstairs.”

  “Gonorrhea?”

  The nurse nodded. “Yeah, we see more of that than you might imagine. It’s worse with the oldsters. None of these old farts want to put a glove on it. You know how they can be.”

  Veenie nodded vigorously. “What lady was this?” she asked.

  Nurse Pruitt put her hand to her throat. “Well, this won’t surprise you none, probably. It was Dottie Reynolds.”

  “Shap’s wife?” My voice went up an octave or two. Harry was not going to be happy to hear this about his little springtime lust bunny.

  “One and the same,” said Nurse Pruitt with a knowing nod. “One and the same.”

  A young candy striper rolled a med table over to the central station, and she and Nurse Pruitt had a chat about afternoon meds. The candy striper, a brunette with a ponytail who chewed gum, asked Nurse Pruitt if she wanted to oversee the cardiologist who was making his weekly visit that afternoon. After checking her wristwatch, she said yes. “Nice chatting with you gals, but I got to get back to work now.” She and her young charge took off down a side hall, the med cart squeaking in front of them.