Murder Bites the Bullet: A Gertie Johnson Murder Mystery (3 page)

*

We kicked up dust as the truck bounced down a long gravel driveway leading to Chet Hanson’s place. The weather had been comfortably warm for a change. Cora Mae rode shotgun and Fred sat tall between us, keeping his eyes focused ahead. Sometimes I wonder what goes through his mind. And what he thinks of his life with me. Before we hooked up, when he was a police dog, he had to work much harder. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s pretty content helping us bust trouble.

“You need new shocks,” Cora Mae mentioned after one particularly bouncy bump. The driveway didn’t seem that rough, so she was probably right.

“That’s a good idea.” I considered which one in her extensive collection might suit me best. I also wondered how long before I had hair again.

Chet Hanson has four forties, which means he owns 160 acres of prime wooded real estate. He came out of his house before I had even thrown the truck into park. Chet, like most Swedes, is a big man with a friendly smile. He also has a lazy eye. One eye looks one place, the other looks someplace else. Right now one of them was focused on Cora Mae’s cleavage.

His attention didn’t go unnoticed by her, either. She grinned and posed while I got down to business. “The case is wrapped up,” I said. “Not exactly how I imagined it would end, but it’s over.”

Chet nodded. “You can keep the deposit I gave you,” he said, casting one of his eyeballs toward the ground and shaking his head in dismay. “I wanted to stop Harry, but not this way.”

“What about his sons? Any chance they’ll keep the range open?” From what I knew of Harry’s kids, they wouldn’t put in a day’s work if they didn’t have to.

“Those two?” Chet snorted. “No chance.”

“Did you hear any details of what actually happened to Harry?” I asked, wanting to kick Blaze next time I saw him for not sharing more information with his own mother.

“He took a bullet to the head while sitting at his kitchen table,” Chet said, that same eye focusing on Cora Mae again. Those two knew each other and had been flirting for the last year, every since Chet’s second wife left him. I could almost see the sex appeal zapping back and forth. “Somebody shot him right in his own home in broad daylight.”

Chet should have used a different verb to describe his guy’s action. “Scoping?” I repeated, thinking of the scopes we all had on our weapons.

“You know what I mean. That was a bad choice of words, I guess. He was just looking around.” Chet turned his head to take in Cora Mae from the other eye’s angle.

“You hired me to “scope” things out,” I said, a little put out. “Why did you send someone else to do our job?”

“I didn’t. He took it upon himself.”

“Want to get together?” Cora Mae said to Chet. I rolled my eyeballs. Over the years, my friend has gone through almost every single available guy in Stonely and now she’s expanded her territory to include all of Tamarack County.

And that’s how I left Cora Mae behind. But before I took off, I said to Chet, “What’s your man’s name, the one who was at Harry’s when he died?”

Fred and I hit the road. He’s the only partner I’ve ever had who never lets me down. Through thick and thin, he’s always been there to keep me company and to watch my back.

I dug out a dog biscuit to show my appreciation.

He accepted.

*

“We want to hire you,” Harry Aho’s son Gus said to me from across their kitchen table, the same one where Harry had taken a fatal bullet earlier in the day. I checked around for leftover blood, but if there had been any, someone had wiped it clean. Harry’s wife, Diane, was at the stove, looking haggard and worn out, but still able to function in a mechanical sort of way, going through the motions of feeding what was left of her family.

A window over the sink had clear plastic taped across it. The shot must have come right through that window, not more than six feet from where I sat.

Fred appeared at the screen door and stuck his nose against it, making sure I was still within sight and sound. Reassured, he plopped down against the door and lowered his head for a nice snooze.

I took a bite and chewed it while I thought. The Ahos weren’t hurting for money unlike a lot of the locals. Harry had dabbled in just about anything that provided income, and rumor had it Diane came into some kind of inheritance a while back, so I guessed she could foot the bill.

“That’s all you expect?” I said, both boys’ eyes on me, waiting for my response. “Just prove he did it?”

Harry’s sons nodded in unison. Gus and Martin were Finnish through and through. They had gray eyes set in broad faces with high cheek bones and ash blond hair. And they were strong, which made up for their mediocre IQs. Much more brawn than brain, but now that the head of the family was gone, maybe they’d step up and expend a few brain cells. His boys weren’t known for being ambitious.

“And how am I supposed to prove Chet murdered your dad?” I asked, stalling for time. Up until this morning, I’d been working for Chet Hanson, spying on the very family I was now sharing a meal with. Something about this didn’t feel quite right.

“Isn’t that your business? Solving cases?” Martin said, glancing out at my truck where Fred, all rested from his catnap, was marking each of the tires as his own.

“What makes you so sure Chet did it?” I asked, readjusting my attitude. Business was business. I didn’t owe Chet Hanson anything more than what I’d given him. Besides, he might actually be the killer.

Diane sat down without taking off her apron and sighed like the world was on her shoulders.

“Tell her the rest, Martin,” Gus said.

“Chet Hanson threatened to kill Dad when he found out about the shooting range,” Martin said. “He said he’d wipe him off the face of the earth if he went through with the range.”

Her face scrunched up like she was going to start crying, but being a true-blooded, tough Finn who disliked public displays of emotion, she pulled herself together. “I found him. When I got home, he was sitting right where you are now, with his head on the table and his eyes wide open.”

“I’ll look into it,” I said, standing up. I was still a little uncomfortable switching sides so quickly, but I was running a business. “But I can’t make any promises.”

“We’ll need a written report on all his activity,” Martin said.

“No problem,” I said.

Fred and I drove home. Fred was unwilling to leave the truck with the guinea hens circling it. I left the big baby right where he was with the door cracked slightly open in case he rounded up enough nerve to vacate.

“A deputy sheriff’s badge,” I said into the phone after deciding not to replace the detective badge Blaze had confiscated. Just in case he eventually returned it to me. Fat chance, but I didn’t need duplicates, and two different kinds of badges might come in handy sometime.

“And a beanbag gun,” I added, reading the gun’s description and liking what I saw. Ammo for the weapon consisted of square beanbags filled with buckshot that flattened out when they hit a target, covering a whole lot of surface area. A direct hit could stop a moose, stunning him silly without doing any serious damage. Although in the case of the moose, I’d have to run for my life, because once the animal recovered, it would turn nasty. Those things are mean!

I gave the required identification number and security password that I had “borrowed” from Blaze. Then I hung up.

Grandma Johnson came out of her room, dressed for an outing. She wore her favorite pillbox hats, the exact same one she’d worn to infiltrate my home, and she had her purse hooked over her forearm.

“Pearl is picking me up,” she announced. “We’re going to play bingo, even though I almost had to cancel because of indigestion.” She grimaced and rubbed her stomach. “Tell Kitty not to bring any more sinkers into this house.”

“Sinkers?”

“Her doughnuts musta had a pound of grease in them. The one I took sank right down to the bottom of my coffee cup. Which shoulda been a warning to me. Then after I ate it, it hit the bottom of my stomach like a boat anchor and caused all kinds of upset.”

Pearl pulled into the driveway and pretty soon she and Grandma were out of my hair. Or at least out of one side of my hair. The truck was empty, so Fred had made a run for it. Or else he’d out-waited the hens. Either way, he probably was making his nightly rounds, sniffing out raccoons and opossums.

Since I had a few hours to kill until dark, I called George and before I knew it he and I were in the sauna with the coals fired up red hot.

“Is this your way of telling me Cora Mae screwed up your hair?” George said after studying me. I’d dug up another scarf. This time I’d tied it at the back of my head, gypsy style, which wasn’t nearly so old ladyish.

“Harry Aho’s family thinks Chet Hanson killed Harry,” I said, taking time to appreciate George’s lean muscular body. We still wore towels when we got together to sweat, but we liked to tease each other by dropping a corner here and there. I gave him a sneak peek and watched the grin spread across his face.

It had taken me a while to get to this stage in our relationship. At sixty-six, not everything on my body is exactly where it should be. But George seems to like me just the way I am. “They want me to prove Chet did it,” I said.

George shook his head. “Those two families have been feuding since the beginning of time. But I never thought they’d start killing each other.”

“What do you know about Chet’s second cousin, Frank? He was at the range when Harry was killed.”

“He’d steal from his own mother. He’s a bad apple.” Then George cocked his head and grinned at me. “Blaze is going to have a fit when he finds out you’ve been hired by the Aho family to investigate.”

*

Being an investigator is a whole lot harder than it looks to the casual observer. First, we need to have the proper equipment, some of it very high tech with pages and pages of hard-to-understand instructions. And if we’re lucky, some of those instructions might actually be in English. And we have to know how to use the equipment in creative ways based on each individual case. Then we have to work with people we trust to help us carry out our missions. Finding trustworthy contacts isn’t easy, either. We also have to have well-developed intuition and a rock-solid understanding of human nature.