Hot Enough to Kill (23 page)

The house was little more than a square box with a drooping two-post porch on the front. The weathered gray clapboard siding showed a few hints that it might have been covered in white paint at one time, but that time was probably twenty or thirty years ago. And this was where a prominent arms dealer and homebuilder lived? Not exactly a show home for his talents--or maybe it was.

I took my time wandering up to the crowd, looking for a semi-friendly face to quiz. Unfortunately, a decidedly unfriendly Harper face spotted me first and came waddling through the weeds in pursuit. Larry was not smiling. He was, however, spitting.

"Guess you were right about old Dee-Wayne," he said, shaking his head and working his lump of tobacco around in his mouth.

My heart sank. "What do you mean?"

"Poor bastard hung himself."

That familiar sick feeling swelled up in my stomach. "He did? Are you sure?"

Larry nodded and tucked his thumbs in the top of his pants just like his older brother--an arrogant and unflattering pose. "He's dead and there's a rope around his neck. Good enough for you?"

I'd seen enough old photos of outlaw hangings to have a general idea of the end product, and it was nothing I wanted to see firsthand. Just the imagined image was rocking my already-queasy stomach. I turned away, hoping I didn't embarrass myself by throwing up. This was the very thing I was supposed to have prevented. Aside from all the personal guilt, and there was a staggering amount of that to be dealt with, how was I going to break the news to Susan? She'd blame me for not coming sooner. Hell, I blamed me for not coming sooner, amongst a thousand other things I'd probably done wrong. While I pondered what I should have done, and what I had to do now, my mood got blacker by the second. I had really blown it this time. And I was literally sick about it. I shouldn't have allowed myself to be dragged into this, but no, I'd jumped right on the chance to talk to Dewayne--at any cost. Dammit.

Part-time deputy Larry Harper stood beside me, seemingly oblivious to my inner turmoil as well as the fact that a man had just killed himself. "Yep," he said between spits. Expectorating was apparently his emotional outlet. "It's a good thing Miz Bennett and Miz Fossy overheard you telling Gifford you were headed over to Dee-Wayne's. Of course, it ain't really all that good since he'd already hung himself before we got here. But it was good they called."

I turned back toward him. "Ethel and Velma called you?"

He nodded and spat again. "Called into dispatch. I met them here. They was afraid you'd say something to Dee-Wayne and get him all stirred up. With him being upset and all, well, they figured I ought to check it out."

"And you did--for them."

My dark mood was broiling into a nice bright crimson. He wouldn't listen to me, but one call from the Wicked Witch of the West and her flying monkey and he was falling all over himself to check things out. If I hadn't already been sick, that would have gotten the job done. The words "you stupid, stupid son of a bitch" were begging to be said, but I took a deep breath and tried to speak calmly. "If you would have just gone with me like I asked, Larry," you moronic stooge, "we could have stopped Dewayne and he'd be alive right now." The truth of those words hit m and all attempts at being calm fled. "If you hadn't been so busy being an arrogant jerk on a power trip, you'd have seen the good sense in pulling your tobacco-stuffed head out of your ass for a measly five minutes and driving over to Dewayne's, but nooooo, you wouldn't listen to me."

Larry narrowed his buggy Harper eyes and his jowls quivered. "Ain't no way you're blaming this on me. This ain't my fault. Leroy's on his way over to talk to you."

Lovely, just what I've always dreamed of, being tag-teamed by the Harper brothers. I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms. "I don't have to wait for Leroy and you know it."

Larry wagged a fat finger at me. "You stay right here until Leroy shows up. I've got enough problems without you running off again. No telling who'd show up dead next."

I resented the implications and would have cheerfully slung gravel in his face as I sped away in my car except for two things: curiosity and stupidity. Actually, in my case, those terms tend to be interchangeable, so I selected two more tangible items: Velma and Bony Butt.

I hadn't noticed them when I first arrived, but there they were, front and center in the crowd, kneeling beside the porch of the shack, just outside the single line of yellow police tape Larry had haphazardly strung from post to post. The ladies were praying, I presumed, for Dewayne's recently departed soul.

I have to confess that public religious displays always strike a chord with me, something like one of those pulsing dissonant chords that sound real scary in a haunted house. My gut reaction is usually to turn tail and run, but today I was overcome by either morbid curiosity or, as my old ruler-wielding Sunday school teacher once said, the hand of Satan. It's kind of hard to walk hand in hand with the devil when you don't believe in such things, but I decided to give it my best shot and moseyed on up to the two-body prayer circle. Besides, it beat standing out in the sun feeling guilty about dead Dewayne.

Respectfully waiting until the final duet of amens had been said, I stepped toward them to be the kind and courteous person I really am. I held out an arm to each and said, "Let me give you a hand, ladies."

Bony Butt's head snapped up and her beady eyes locked onto me like a heat-seeking missile. Still on her knees, her hands started waving and slapping, and her lips sputtered unintelligible noises. "You, you, heathen! Get away from us! Git!" she yelled, as if shooing a stray dog. She leaned toward Velma and clutched her hands together. "Lord protect us and keep us safe."

Meaning from me, I had to presume, and it peeved me just a tad. I stepped back a little. "Just trying to be helpful."

Ethel finished her please then grabbed onto Velma and they began trying to stand up. "We don't need your kind of help around here," Bony Butt said, scrambling and weaving with Velma. By the time they were steady on their feet, they both looked like red-faced plums, Bony Butt being the shriveled tough variety. I would have been glad to help them, but no, that would have been a sacrilege or something.

Velma Bennett dusted off the front of her gray dress, and looked at me blandly, no scowling, no nothing, nor did she speak. Bony Butt, on the other hand, had gotten her nice brown slacks all covered with dirt and weeds, but keeping her scathing gaze solely on me was more important than cleaning up.

I sighed rather heavily, having a pretty good idea what was coming next.

"You, you, heathen!" she screeched, right on cue. Her face scrunched in indignation as she shook her fist at said heathen. "We knew you were up to something when you starting quizzing Jimmie Sue and then went right over and told Gifford you were going after poor old Dee-Wayne. And now just look what's happened!"

Trying to make sense of Bony Butt gives me a headache, but best I could tell she was blaming me for "poor old Dee-Wayne's" death, not that I wasn't doing the same thing, but for less dubious reasons. "I don't know what you're trying to imply, Ethel, dear," which, of course, I did.

She apparently doesn't much care for me calling her Ethel, or dear, since her eyes narrowed and blazed the impertinence. But, she would have liked the "narrow-minded, bony-butted bitch" option that was crossing my mind at the moment even less.

Ethel edged closer and wagged her fist again. "Nothing good has happened since you set foot in this town." She looked at Velma, who gave a mechanical nod in confirmation and perhaps encouragement. "I just knew something bad was going to come of this. I just knew it."

I could have asked her exactly how she "knew" these things, and stirred her up about her psychic abilities and/or Satan's charms, but I decided to pass. What I really wanted to know was exactly when Dewayne had done himself in. Or, more specifically, I wanted to know if he'd already killed himself before Susan showed up at my mother's. If so, that would at least lessen my guilt over going to the DQ instead of directly to his house--lessen it a little anyway. "So, you were the first ones here? You found Dewayne?"

"Well, of course. We came right over after we heard you talking," Ethel snapped. "We knew he needed turned to the ways of the Lord and we came to witness to him."

"But we were too late," Velma intoned matter-of-factly. "He was already dead. Nothing to be done for it."

These two were taking this pretty well. If I'd been the one to find a dead guy, I don't think I'd be so nonchalant about it. Shouldn't they at least be a little traumatized by finding Dewayne dangling from a rope? And had even used a rope? Maybe it had been an electric cord, or some kind of construction material. And where did he do it? And did they cut him down or leave him hanging there? I had a ton of questions I wanted answered, none of which would probably lessen the guilt I felt.

Velma clutched her hands and held them to her chest. "Deputy Harper, Larry Harper that is, called Redwater to request the ambulance," she volunteered evenly. "According to what was said, it should be here in twenty minutes, perhaps fifteen now."

That seemed like a long time, even for a jaunt to outlying Kickapoo. Then again, I guess there was no need to rush. But if you aren't going to rush, why send an ambulance? Why a lot of things… From the corner of my eye, I saw Bony Butt start to twitch.

She stepped toward me, waving her arms as if shooing flies. "This is none of your business. You get on out of here! We don't want the likes of you around here stirring up any more trouble. This is just one more awful thing that's happened since you showed up."

I started to mention that the trouble had been stirred long before I arrived, but saw no need to waste my breath. "Okay, you're right, Miz Fossy. I should go back to Colorado and sanity. But since I can't, why don't you tell me what made you two sneak out of the DQ and scurry over here?"

"I heard what you said to Mayor Geller, I knew something awful was bound to happen, and I asked the Lord what I should do. He told me you were up to something and I should get over here right away."

"Followed the call," Velma said blandly.

Bony Butt's face screwed up a little tighter. "And He was right. Just looked what happened."

Velma nodded again, hands clutched.

What an odd pair: Ethel the enraged zealot and Velma the walking sedative. And my mother was right. She was very plain looking, kind of a frumpy Aunt Bea with a really tight perm and zero personality. I was not impressed with either the woman or her choice in friends.

Ethel turned and took Widow Bennett by the arm, her scowl lightening into a concerned frown. "Come on, Velma, honey," she cooed. "You haven't been yourself lately, and this is all just too much for you. Let's get you away from all this, this, commotion."

Meaning me, I presumed, so I smiled.

"You ought to be ashamed," Bony Butt hissed back, dragging Velma away toward their cars.

"Yeah, Jolene," said another familiar and unpleasant voice. "You ought to be ashamed."

I let out a long and weary sigh and turned to face my accuser. "Leroy. How not nice to see you again. How's the head?"

Acting-sheriff Leroy automatically rubbed at the bandage, which was mostly hanging just below the band of his official brown deputy hat. "My brother says you took off from the house to go looking for Dee-Wayne, and the next thing he knows Ethel Fossy's calling saying Dee-Wayne's dead."

There was no point in explaining anything, I'd at least learned that much, but I felt compelled to respond in hopes of circumventing at least one stupid question. "Apparently, Leroy, I was at the Dairy Queen while Dewayne was busy doing himself in, or maybe he'd already done the dirty deed before I left the house. I don't know. But you're not going to listen to a thing I say, so just move along to the next idiotic thought that leaps to your tongue."

He frowned a little harder. "Just what did you say to old Dee-Wayne that made him want to kill his self?"

Yes, I'd asked for an idiotic thought, I realize that. "Even you are smarter than that, Leroy. The pecan tree is smarter than that." I paused for a minute to let him catch up. "Nothing I've ever said has made you jump up and run off to kill yourself, now has it?"

Leroy squinted his eyes real mean-like at me. "Just answer the question, Jolene. This here is yet another official investigation you've got yourself mixed up in and you better start talking or I'll haul you over to Bowman City and let you sit in the jail for awhile."

Yeah right. I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes. "Okay, Leroy, here's the deal. I've never spoken to Dewayne Schuman in my entire life. Not today, not yesterday, not the day before, not a year ago, not forty years ago."

He adjusted his hat against the sun and wiped sweat from his eyes. "I ain't gonna listen to your smart-alecky talk, Jolene, just answer the damn questions like you're supposed to."

I was grateful I had stayed in an errant patch of shade from the house, but I didn't move over and offer to share. "I answered the question, Leroy. I have never spoken with Dewayne Schuman in my whole entire life."

"Then what were you doing coming over here out of the blue?"

I debated how much I should tell, but Larry already knew Susan had been by Mother's so Leroy would also know it--eventually, maybe. "I was coming over here to check on him because his sister asked--"

"Holy damn," he muttered, shaking his head. "She talked you into checking on him, didn't she?"

I was getting just a little tired of these buffoons acting like I was an idiot for trying to be helpful. Furthermore, I didn't appreciate the insinuation that Susan had conned me into doing something I didn't really want to do, which, of course, was sort of true, but totally beside the point. The woman was worried about her brother, for godsakes, and I had tried to help. Not exactly a crime, but if I thought about it very long, I sure felt pretty darned criminal about the whole thing, although not in Leroy's sense of the word. True, I didn't know Dewayne, or Susan, for that matter, but this was a very sad deal no matter how you looked at it. A man was dead because nobody wanted to listen to his sister's concerns.