Baby Daddy Mystery

by Daisy Pettles

  Veenie eyed me. “Don’t surprise me none. Dottie’s been with everybody and everything. I think she’s one of them nimrod maniacs.”

  “You mean nymphomaniacs?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Whatever one called it, Bromley and Dottie neither one could keep their clothes on. They were sort of made for each other.

  “Think we ought to tell Harry?” Veenie asked.

  “I suspect his crotch will be telling him soon enough.”

  I shrugged, and we headed down the hall toward the suite where Nurse Pruitt had told us Doogie—aka Smithy—was hold up. His exterior door was decorated with a lot of hand-scribbled notes from ladies wanting to know if he was coming to dance class, the Hawaiian luau, or the rose gardening class on Saturday. Several ladies had scribbled hearts after their messages.

  “He sure is popular,” I said.

  Veenie mashed his doorbell.

  We heard it ring, but after several minutes of button mashing, no one came to the door.

  Veenie tried to tiptoe up to see in the peep hole. “I bet he’s in there, hiding.”

  “We can’t make him answer the door,” I said.

  “We could bust the door in.” Veenie eyed the door.

  “No,” I said. “We’ve had enough excitement for one day. I think we ought to drop by later, see if Pappy has calmed down. Maybe we can catch Doogie at one of his social events.”

  Veenie moped. I could tell she wanted to have a go at the door, but those doors were steel reinforced. Her leg would splinter up like peanut brittle if she kicked that door.

  Veenie’s cell rang, dragging her out of her mope. She answered and flipped it on speakerphone as we walked down the hall toward the front exit. It was Kimmy Apple, calling to tell us she had received Veenie’s voice mail and had access to her dad’s cell phone account. She’d turned off the fingerprint lock on his phone. “His new access code is 111111,” she said. “That ought to get you into all his contacts and phone records.”

  Kimmy was right. As soon as we got to the Impala, Veenie successfully unlocked the phone. Bromley’s personal life tumbled out across the screen. It was easy to see based on his texts, videos, and voicemails, why a whole heap of people might have wished him dead.

  Chapter Thirty

  Having struck gold with Bromley’s cell phone, Veenie and I scooted back to the office to make sense of the mess of information and figure out our next course of action. Harry was in the office, on the phone. He appeared to be working, trying to collect a past due bill from a client in Oolitic who’d skipped out on his bill after hiring Harry to get the goods on his partner, who’d been bilking him on a stone quarry deal. He was talking tough on the phone, trying to shake a credit card number out of the ne’er-do-well. I had to hand it to Harry. He was darn good at collections.

  Dottie Reynolds was still in the office. She was busy filing paperwork for Harry. “Howdy gals,” she said. She wore a pair of bedazzled denim hot pants and a midriff top with short ruffled puffy sleeves and a generous display of cleavage. She had one yellow pencil clenched between her teeth, another stuck in her hair bun.

  Veenie admired the trim on her blouse.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Got it at Goodies. Thought the little daisies were darn cute.” She fingered the bottom band of the sleeves, which were dotted with tiny embroidered daisies.

  “You moved in here?” Veenie asked.

  “Heck no,” she said. “Shap’s mad at me again. Thought I’d hang out here a bit until his temper fizzles out and he calms down.”

  “Don’t think your being here is going to calm him down much,” said Veenie.

  “Yeah, well, if he wasn’t so darn mean, I might stay home more often.” She sat down in an office chair and chomped on the rubber end of her pencil. She had a row of files stuck in an alphabetizer on Harry’s desk.

  I’m old enough to know people have all sorts of marriages. I don’t understand being married and running around like you aren’t hitched all at the same time. When I was married, I’d been too tuckered out to get juiced up over some other fellow. But nowadays everybody seemed to think there was something wrong with you if you didn’t have a special friend or two on the side. Dottie and Shap didn’t have kids, so I reckoned maybe they had extra energy to spread around. And as Veenie and I now knew, extra energy wasn’t the only thing Dottie had been spreading around Pawpaw County.

  Harry put his hand over the phone receiver and motioned wildly for us to be quiet. “Trying to scare up your next paycheck,” he barked. “Zip it, okay?”

  I picked up the outgoing mail and asked Veenie if she wanted to tag along to mail the bills and grab a bite of late lunch at the Roadkill Café. I didn’t have to ask twice. I asked Dottie if she wanted to tag along too. She said, “Oh, heck, why not?”

  I figured this was as good a time as any to get Dottie alone, ask her about her affair with Bromley. I didn’t want to bring it up in front of Harry and have him go all mopey on us. Seemed it might be better to have a girl chat in private about the whole thing. As unfaithful a hound dog as Harry was, he always took it hard when a woman cheated on him.

  We were in luck at the Roadkill Café. They had a late lunch special on double-decker BLT’s. I ordered one on toast, and Veenie ordered one on toast, hold the lettuce and the tomato. Dottie ordered an extra-large iced tea, lemon, no sugar. “Watching my figure,” she said as she patted her waist.

  Veenie eyed her cleavage. “You and most of the rest of the county.”

  Dottie shrugged. “Guess you don’t approve of me?”

  “Marriage is marriage,” she said. “Why you run around on Shap like that?”

  Dottie picked up a straw and blew off the paper wrapping. “Bored, I reckon.”

  Veenie suggested a divorce.

  “Nah,” said Dottie. “I’d have to move into a trailer. All I can afford. I hate trailers. Like living inside a pop can. Besides, I love old Shap.” She got a dreamy look in her eyes like that might be true.

  The BLTs arrived, so Veenie and I hushed up while we devoured our lunch. While we ate, Dottie chatted on. She asked us if we were still working on Bromley’s case.

  I found that an interesting question. “You know him?” I asked, washing down a bite of my sandwich with a gulp of Mountain Dew.

  She rolled her eyes. “Sort of. He was my dentist and all.”

  Veenie piped up. “We heard you and him were an item.”

  “Who told you that?” Dottie sucked at her iced tea, her eyes cast downward.

  Veenie held up Bromley’s cell phone. “You did, in your sexy messages to him.”

  Dottie paled. She bit her bottom lip. “Hey, things like that are private. He know you have that?”

  Veenie shrugged. “He don’t know much of anything these days. His wife gave us his phone. Told us to dial up his girlfriends if we had questions about his death.”

  Dottie’s eyes darted back and forth, taking us both in. She seemed to be trying to decide how much we knew before yapping.

  Veenie spared her the pondering. “This here phone pretty much says you and him were a hot item.”

  Having drained her ice tea, Dottie sucked up an ice cube and crunched on that. When she was done, she looked Veenie dead in the eye. “So?”

  “So,” said Veenie, “according to this phone, you were the last person to send him a text message.”

  “Less than half an hour before he was found dead on Barbara Skaggs’s porch glider,” I added.

  Dottie straightened in her seat. “Now wait just a gosh darn minute. I don’t like the sound of that. I sure as heck didn’t kill him.”

  I said, “But you were in Hound Holler in that barn with him, right before he died?”

  “You got no proof of that,” she said, folding her arms across her bosom and locking them there.

  Veenie clicked on the phone and read aloud the last text message in Bromley’s cell register. “Dorothy will be right there, you horny little scarecrow.” The messa
ge had been sent in response to a selfie photo Bromley had sent to Dottie of himself grinning ear to ear. He was dressed in Barbara Skaggs’s scarecrow attire.

  One mystery solved.

  Dottie squirmed in her seat. She flagged down the waitress, who was making the rounds with the water and tea pitchers, and asked for a refill. Once her glass was filled, and the waitress was out of earshot, she snarled at Veenie. “Okay, so maybe he texted me. Said he wanted me to meet him out at that barn. Have a little fun. My legal name is Dorothy. He thought it would be cute if we did this Wizard of Oz thing. What? Don’t look at me like that. It was his idea, not mine. He had a huge crush on that Dorothy girl when he was younger. He thought I kind of looked like her. A blonde version of her.” She patted her bun a little.

  I didn’t see the resemblance, but then again, I wasn’t a fifty-year-old horn toad of a dentist. And after reading Bromley’s sexts, I was beginning to see that my sex life had been pretty darn dull—get-it-done-in-the-dark procreation, pretty much like the Lord Almighty meant it to be. Apparently a lot of other people in Knobby Waters were writing their own scripts and letting the cameras roll. The video bank on Bromley’s cell phone pretty much attested to that.

  Dottie gulped at her tea. Then she stuck the straw in and had another go at the glass. “That’s it,” she said. “Nothing more to tell.”

  “You had sex with Bromley?”

  “Course I did. I mean, we weren’t in love or anything. It was all good fun. He said his wife didn’t care. He was my dentist. Knew I wasn’t rich. Never charged me a cent. He even whitened my teeth for free.” She smiled widely. I had to admit she had a nice set of teeth for a woman her age. I was beginning to think maybe every woman in Knobby Waters but me had been getting free dental work all these years. I felt a little cheated.

  Veenie picked up the questioning. “Who killed Bromley?”

  “I dunno,” she shrugged, “certainly not me. I mean, we did the dirty. Then I left him there, happy as a puppy with two peckers. I swear on the baby Jesus’s halo that man was alive and feeling mighty good when I left him. Besides, the paper said he died of a natural heart thing. Maybe I got him riled up and he couldn’t take it. All I know is that when I left him, he was breathing. Pretty hard, in fact.” That last sentence made her pause and think a bit.

  Veenie looked suspicious. “Why was he out at Barbara Skaggs’s?”

  Dottie shrugged again. “Said he had business with her. Said his dad had kids by her and she was about to embarrass the whole family. I wasn’t all that interested in his personal life. He’d been whining lately about money problems, bad investments. I didn’t pay him much mind. I mean, who don’t have money problems?” She sucked her tea dry again. “Anyway, he wasn’t like Harry. Harry and I share something special.”

  Veenie asked Dottie if Bromley gave her the clap. “Well, honestly, Lavinia Goens, don’t you think that’s a rude thing to ask a lady?”

  Dottie checked the clock on the wall and gathered up her purse. She laid a quarter on the table for the tip and said she had to run. She said one last thing as she rose. “Don’t be telling Harry I got the clap,” she said. “That was cleared up before we took up. Don’t want word getting around town that I’m a loose woman.”

  “You might be a couple of decades too late there,” Veenie called after Dottie.

  “We don’t talk about our cases,” I promised Dottie, who looked relieved as she exited the café.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Before Veenie and I left the café, we checked our cells. Avonelle had left both of us voicemails and texts. She demanded we report to her at the bank as soon as we got her messages. She’d starting sending them late last night, asking about our botched meeting at the barn with her blackmailer. Veenie and I were still puzzling how to handle that situation. We compared Avonelle’s string of messages.

  “Reckon we ought to mosey on over and update her,” Veenie said as she laid down the money to cover her half of the lunch check.

  I matched Veenie’s payment. “I still think Avonelle knows darn good and well who’s blackmailing her.”

  Veenie nodded. “I bet it’s that Money Boy. He sounded like a no good hound dog.”

  Money Boy was the most frequent texter on Bromley’s phone the last week before his death, even more frequent than Dottie. Veenie and I had scrolled through his messages enough to know that whoever he was, he’d been pressing Bromley to wire large cash payments. We’d tried to trace down his cell number to get an ID, but all the cell numbers associated with his texts proved to be dead ends. He’d used disposable burner phones. Whoever Money Boy was, he didn’t want his identity revealed, and he’d been milking Bromley for hefty cash payments.

  “Maybe we can rattle ol’ Avonelle enough to get the truth,” I said as I shouldered my messenger bag. Full of bacon sandwiches and senior sass, we ambled to our meeting with Avonelle, two blocks down the street at the First National Bank.

  Despite all her frantic texts and messages, Avonelle was in a meeting when we arrived at the bank. We took a seat on a waiting bench and enjoyed the air conditioning. Veenie busied herself poking at the lobby ATM. She checked the cash slot in case anyone had accidently left money behind. Then she poked at the machine some more. “That’s not a slot machine,” I said.

  “I know that, but I found a twenty dollar bill stuck in this one once. I figure it’s always worth a finger poke or two. Our cookie jar fund is getting low. We need us some more fun money.”

  While Veenie was fiddling with the machine, Dode Schneider ambled in. He wore his customary bibbed overalls, long-sleeved flannel shirt, and clodhopper work boots. He had a few spots of white tissue paper stuck to his chin where he’d nicked himself shaving. “Howdy, missy,” he said as he scrambled over my way. “Bank been cheating you too?”

  “Not that I noticed,” I said. “You get that missing three cents credited back to your account?”

  “Sure enough did. They’d been cheating me for darn near a year.”

  “Computer error?”

  “Don’t rightly know.” Dode sniffled. “But I was over at Pokey’s last night, and him and his mama, Dolly, had the same sort of peculiar thing going on with their accounts.”

  “Three cents missing?”

  “A bit more than that.”

  “What did Avonelle say about all this?”

  “Said it was the dang blasted computers. Anyway, I came in to thank her. She fixed me right up.”

  “We’re waiting for her now,” I said, “but she’s in a meeting.”

  “Guess I’ll wait here with you then.”

  Veenie, tired of poking at the ATM and checking for loose change around the deposit table, came to sit next to me. She nodded at Dode. “Everything all right out at the farm?” she asked.

  “Oh, sure. Yeah, boy, putting in watermelons this year. Got a sunny patch cleared. My pappy used to grow them in the exact same spot.”

  Veenie nodded. “I remember them watermelons. Juicy. Best I ever had.”

  “Oh sure, they was. Pappy was a dandy melon farmer. Grew cantaloupes in the Sand Lane river bottoms, over by Vallonia, near the old Shelton homestead, but I rent all that acreage out now. Don’t have the get-up-and-go I used to for big crops. A couple of young fellas, the Daulton brothers, big strapping boys, farm most of my bottomland.”

  I asked if those boys were related to Bull Daulton, who’d been a year ahead of me in school and had a physique worthy of his nickname.

  “Oh sure. Grandsons. Good boys. Hard workers.”

  I heard Avonelle’s voice as she strolled down the hall toward the lobby. She was walking alongside the fellow with the expensive briefcase and blue banker’s suit who had rough bumped Veenie in the hallway last time we’d visited. They were talking, but not loud enough so that I could make out the words. In fact, they seemed to be speaking in deliberately hushed tones. I could only decipher the last few words. The blue-suited fellow said something about letting the men in Chicago know and clearin
g out the banking system. When they reached the end of the hallway, the fellow slid his hat onto his head and shook Avonelle’s hand. “We’ll be in touch,” he said as he strode toward the front exit.

  Veenie, who’d seen him and apparently recognized him, bounced in front of him at the revolving doorway.

  He tried to slide around her, but her being round as a beach ball and a fast bouncer, she slid over and successfully blocked his exit.

  He stopped in his tracks and eyed her suspiciously. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  “Last time we met you was awful rude.”

  “We’ve met?” The man, who clutched his briefcase, sounded perplexed.

  Avonelle entered the conversation. “Veenie, don’t be pestering Mr. Peesley. He’s from Chicago. He certainly doesn’t have time for you.”

  “Chicago?” Veenie eyed him. “Why you here? You lost?”

  The man did not look amused. “Bank business,” he said.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Peesley,” Avonelle said, taking Veenie gently by the shoulders and guiding her out of the man’s way. “Come back to my office,” she barked at Veenie. She turned on her heels and headed that way with authority.

  Veenie and I fell into step, eager to hear what she had to say.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I was surprised, when we got inside Avonelle’s office, to find Bert sitting in a black leather captain’s chair next to his mother’s seat.

  She scooted around him and motioned his way. “My son, Bert, you know, of course.”

  We nodded.

  “You may speak freely in front of him,” she said.

  Bert threw us a weak smile. He looked a little peaked, but his hair was immaculately combed down. He wore his dentist’s jacket over a nice pale-blue striped shirt. I wasn’t sure why he was there but figured Avonelle was paying us, so she had the right to invite the whole darn town to her briefings if it so pleased her.