Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (18 page)

This is a terrible place, she thought. A hell on earth where men of God meet untimely ends, and I don’t even get to be the one to break the news about it at Coffee Klatch.

The avian whistles chittered and trilled in her bathroom. What a waste of time, she thought. None of those birds live around here, anyway. Only thing we have living around here are drunk skunks and polecats, and those are the same thing, anyway, aren’t they, skunks and polecats.

She slammed a carton of eggs down on the counter, breaking two. “I refuse to think about that,” she said aloud. I won’t write a gossip column, she thought. I’m above all that. I’m better than that, low gossip and wagging tongues. I’ll write a column about being a proper woman, with beauty hints and fashion tips.

My first fashion tip will be, always wear clothing in public.

A RINGING PHONE
is not a welcome sound to an older man who has had no sleep. Memphis stretched out a long arm across his desk and picked up the receiver. “Memphis here.”

“Memphis, I’ve been through the trailer pretty thoroughly. There’s no evidence of a struggle in his home. And I’m going to wager that the prints are all his or Gator’s.” Phineas sounded as tired as Memphis felt. “Nothing shows a struggle up at the Blue Moon Tap Room. The trouble is, people tear in and out of that lot all night long, and that gravel’s good-sized. There’s also no evidence of the assault where the body turned up. The Reverend was pretty leaky, and there just wasn’t that much of a mess.”

Memphis had seen that within moments of his arrival, of course. No puddle to speak of. No, wherever the Reverend met his end, it wasn’t on Sweetly Dreaming Lane. “How about fibers?”

“He had a little dirt on him, especially at the knee, but not much.”

“What kind of dirt?”

“It’s the dirt that’s all over this county, that yellow dust that blows into your teeth if you drive with the window open. We’ll analyze it more, but so far, nothing extraordinary. Other than that, he was so clean that he might as well have been vacuumed off.”

“How about the nails?”

“That’s the funny thing. He had kind of long nails for a man. It looks like he had them professionally done. With the length of them, there’d be skin under the nails if he was in a fight. But he doesn’t seem to have fought at all. No bruises on his knuckles, no one’s blood but his own on his clothes.”

“Was there anything caught in the Reverend’s rings?”

“What rings? He didn’t have any rings on.”

Memphis slammed the phone down in a most unmannerly way. How had he neglected to notice it? The moonlight, the headlights, the flashlight. He should have noticed.

The Reverend’s rings were missing.

OH, MEMPHIS FELT
sick as he got himself one more cup of coffee, paced the halls of the small office. He had checked over the body, seen that the Reverend’s wristwatch and wallet were there, the wallet with almost three hundred dollars cash in it, so he had mentally ruled out robbery as a motive. He was getting old, or maybe whatever was happening to his brother Tender was happening to him.

Hiram sat at his desk him with his big, happy, eager face. “How’s that coffee, Sheriff?” The coffee, made by Hiram, could have been used to de-grease engine blocks.

“Why, it’s just as wonderful as usual, Hiram. Is our guest still in there?”

“Yes sir. I still got Gator in the interrogation room.” Hiram was eager to have done well.

“I’m glad he’s still there.” Somehow Gator might have slipped away, he thought, turned into slime and oozed under a door. Memphis looked in the business-side of a two-way mirror at Gator, sitting there in the interrogation room in a hard wooden chair. About six feet tall, average weight, brown hair, brown eyes, glasses. He was what, fifty? Fifty-five? He looked like an average white man. Memphis stared at the almost blank neutrality of the man before him. No, thought Memphis, there’s not a thing in the world to distinguish Gator Rollins from the rest of humanity.

Except his lack of it.

“Gator.”

“Sheriff.” They sat for a moment, regarding each other. Memphis wished he had some reason to put Gator in a line-up. He liked to stand him up there whenever he could. Once, Gator stood up against the wall-sized ruler with five tall black men in their twenties. Another time he stood up there with two nervous Japanese tourists, a Hmong tribesman, and Cambodian twins.

“So, what brings you to the park, Gator? You’re based somewhere in Arizona, aren’t you?”

“Well. Sometimes a man wants to check out other opportunities.”

“And you feel that the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park is a land of opportunity.”

“We have to make our own opportunities.”

“Is that why you’re living with the Reverend?”

“We’ve known each other for years, Sheriff. We grew up together in Arizona. I’m just staying here temporarily.”

“And why is the Reverend letting you stay here?”

“Out of Christian charity, I think you could say.”

“You’re getting ready for the talent show.” Memphis frowned. “I wonder if you’ll be in the talent show after all.”

“I better be. I paid the entry fee and I have a fine group backing me up. The Reverend introduced me to some men from Bone Pile.”

Memphis nodded. “Whoever they back usually wins. Then they don’t go to Nashville, because they’re never part of the deal, and then it all goes nowhere because those boys are the real talent.”

“The Reverend has an in with that community. He’s planning to be our personal manager. And now, I’d appreciate it if I could see a lawyer.”

“Are you paying for a lawyer?”

“No. The court will appoint one for me.”

“Well, that’s right. But first, you’ve got to get to court.”

“I’ve been to court before. I’ve never been charged with a thing.”

Memphis stared at him. “If I had my way, you’d be dead right now.”

Gator’s eyes narrowed. “If I was scared of you, I might worry about that.”

Memphis reminded himself that he’d yet to discharge his gun in the line of duty and perhaps this room might be a poor place to start.

This scene in the interrogation room was a sham. Gator had no reason to kill the Reverend. Exploit him, steal from him, maybe, but killing him would be too obvious, and not Gator’s style. Nope. However this one shook down, Memphis doubted that Gator Rollins would be the murderer. “We’d like a look at your clothes.”

“My clothes? What for?”

“The Reverend is dead, Gator.”

Finally, the man’s eyes widened. “Dead?”

“Dead. Looks like foul play.”

Gator sat for a moment, calculating, absorbing, deciding. Then he stood up and unsnapped his satin western shirt, slipped it off, pulled a white undershirt over his head, exposing his womanly chest. He folded both shirts and placed them on the table. He took off his snakeskin boots and set those next to the shirt. He removed his long black nylon socks, rolled them neatly and tucked them into a boot. He undid the belt, a handsome piece of tooled leatherwork with successively stretched holes that told the tale of his spreading gut. He folded his Wrangler Pro Rodeos along the crease and set them on the table, tucked his undershorts in the empty boot. He removed a clean white hanky embroidered with “GR” in the corner from one of the back pockets of his jeans and spread it out on the chair. Then he sat his bare behind down on it. “I have absolutely nothing to hide, Sheriff. My life is an open book.”

Memphis carried the clothing out past a baffled Hiram. “Take him a jumpsuit and some shower shoes,” he barked as he put the clothing into a plastic evidence bag. “And get somebody at the county lab to look at these, would you? Immediately.”

Hiram stopped shooting rubber bands and looked vaguely guilty. “Yes Sir, Sheriff LaCour.”

Memphis was angry, and Memphis was so very rarely angry. He sat down to a desk full of reports to write. Why am I doing this? he thought. I know there’s nothing on his clothes. There is nothing on those boots.

He thought of his brother’s bare feet. He knew he had to ask some more questions. But the thought of who needed to answer just made him feel tired and hopeless.

AND SO, HE’D
decided to spend as much time as he had to with the one person he could think of who would know every detail of the what led up to the murder. Rhondalee.

She sat across from him at her desk. Every time he had to face her, he felt like he was being scrutinized, weighed up and measured. Of course, that’s exactly what had happened all those years back. And he gave thanks to God she’d chosen as she did. He faced those fierce little eyes. “Just anything you can tell me about yesterday, Rhondalee. No detail is too small.”

Did he have any idea what he was in for?

She settled a bit, in a manner that reminded Tender of a small biddy hen preparing to squeeze out an egg. Perched on the very edge of a chair, her bony knees crossed, she said nothing for a moment, gathering her thoughts, her nerve, and an arsenal of cliché. Rhondalee poured it out.

This was the long version.

When it was finally over, he breathed deeply and looked out the window. The sun had set while Rhondalee had told him the tale of the community meeting. It was night, and the waning moon would soon be rising.

“That’s it, Memphis. That’s all I can remember.”

“So Tender left the house, and you didn’t see him again until I came to the door and woke you both?”

“He was asleep in bed. I was in my recliner.” She blushed a bit at this admission. “Memphis? Are you telling me that he’s a suspect?”

“Of course not, Rhondalee. But if he was out and about, he might be able to tell me something about what happened.”

“Not in his condition, Memphis. He was pickled up like a California relish mix.”

Memphis got the idea, if he didn’t quite follow the metaphor. But his brother had never had a drink in his life.

So far, as far as usable leads that might go somewhere, he had exactly squat.

ANNIE LEIGH WAS
put to bed early after an afternoon with her mother. They’d walked around a little, but everywhere they went, someone had wanted to talk about the murder. Yes, she’d been right. That red spot in the road had leaked out of none other than that Right Reverend Henry Heaven, a man she’d looked at once and known she should avoid. And it was all anybody was talking about.