Rose Hill (13 page)

“Pitcher for the girls’ softball team,” Scott said. “Wicked right arm and swore like a sailor.”

“That’s her. When Jane Anne graduated from high school and left for college, there must have been fifty kids who applied for the job. Fathers offered me bribes, kids brought me letters of recommendation, and their mothers baked me cookies and cakes. I took a couple weeks to decide, and gained five pounds.”

“Smart move,” Scott said, and smiled at his friend, whom he knew had a sweet tooth.

“Tommy
showed up every morning at 4:30 during those two weeks, and offered to help me out until I made my decision. He wasn’t pushy, he didn’t whine or beg, and no one called, wrote, or baked on his behalf. I took one look at the shabby clothes, the long hair, and the rickety bike, and I was not impressed.”

“He’s not exactly boy scout material,” Scott said.

“That’s an understatement. Goudy, on the other hand, who by that time in his life rarely left his bed over there unless it was time to eat or take a piss, jumped up and greeted Tommy like his long lost friend. So I decided to give him a chance. After the two weeks were up I decided the kid wasn’t too irritating and gave him the job.”

“Goudy always was a good judge of character,” Scott said. “I remember he used to wag whenever he saw Doc Machalvie but would growl at his brother Stuart.”

“He hated Theo too. Theo made all the hair stand up on Goudy’s spine. Not too many people got that reaction. There was one weird exception, though. Goudy really liked Willy Neff. I never could understand that.”

“Dogs do love bad smells, I guess.”

“Well, anyway, when Goudy got so he could no longer jump up into the truck cab, Tommy helped me lift him every morning. The morning Goudy did not wake up, we took him to the end of Possum Holler and buried him on the hill behind Lily Crawford’s barn. That fat old dog once caught a rabbit up there that was as surprised about it as he was.”

“He was a good dog,” Scott said, while Ed wiped his eyes and cleared his throat.

“I’ve been pining over that damn dog for months,” Ed said. “Then Hannah found me this one.”

“He looks like he’s recovered from surgery all right,” Scott said, wincing at the thought of what had been removed.

“He won’t even miss ‘em,” Ed laughed.

Things felt closer to normal between them and Scott was relieved.

“What are you going to do now?” Ed asked. “I know Tommy’s worried Billy will find out he told.”

Scott shook his head, saying, “That won’t be a problem. Phyllis and Billy live in a trailer park surrounded by nosy neighbors. Any one of them could probably tell me the same thing Tommy did. I’ll do a little trailer to trailer inquiry as a cover. You might want to let Tommy know.”

Scott left Ed’s office, turned right, and crossed the alley to look at the new antique store. He could see the people who purchased the building had been renovating the outside in preparation for a late spring opening. It looked as though they were pouring some serious money into it, installing new wrought-iron handrails and sprucing up the facade. The dumpster in the alley was overflowing with their renovation trash. Scott picked up a couple pieces of the old pipe handrail and some broken glass that had fallen out of the dumpster and threw them back in.

Scott walked the length of the alley to Peony Street, and then turned left and crossed Peony diagonally to reach the trailer park.

Built in the fifties, Foxglove Mobile Home Park consisted of a “U” shaped drive around which a dozen or so trailers were situated, with a garden space in the middle. Scott talked to all the trailer park residents who were home. All had heard the fight but were used to hearing Phyllis, Theo, and Billy carry on. This latest fight didn’t seem out of the ordinary to them. No one would admit to seeing anything; they didn’t want to get involved. Scott got the feeling they were all a little afraid of Billy, a bully who was known to break things when he got angry; the kind of frustrated, restless teenager who liked to torture younger kids, set off loud fireworks, or shoot out the streetlights with a BB gun.

‘Kind of like Theo used to be,’ Scott thought, uncharitably.

Billy’s mother Phyllis was a year older than Scott and had been a wild child in high school. A precocious girl who developed a woman’s body before she had the brains to manage it, Phyllis cut a wide swath through the male population of Rose Hill before and after the teenage pregnancy that resulted in Billy. She never named the father, maybe couldn’t have, and Phyllis’s mother Pauline raised her difficult grandchild as best she could. Phyllis and Billy bickered more like siblings than mother and son, and because both worked in the family owned diner, their frequent fights were like a floorshow for the customers.

Scott went to the back door of the diner, where he found Billy was as surly and belligerent as he remembered. Ian and Scott both had warned him on several occasions that he was now an adult and subject to the laws of the adult world, without much good effect. Ian always said it was just a matter of time before he was arrested for something.

Billy came out the back door to the alley with Scott, and immediately lit up a cigarette. He had a generous white apron wrapped around his body, but whether it was to protect the underlying black t-shirt and raggedy jeans or to protect everything else from them, Scott wasn’t sure. Billy was tall and brawny, one of those kids who’s nineteen but looks thirty.

When he asked Billy about the fight, the young man shrugged and said, “Yeah, so?”

“Your neighbors said it got pretty violent.”

Billy communicated what he thought of those neighbors using several profane words.

“Did Theo hit your mother?”

“Yeah, he popped her one,” Billy said. “Bitch deserved it.”

“That’s your mother you’re talking about,” Scott said.

Billy smiled slyly
as he touched a nerve in the grownup, and loving the effect, pushed his luck.

“She’s a huge pain in my ass,” Billy said. “She’s always bitchin’ about something, raggin’ on me all the time. She did the same thing to Theo. When he got tired of it, he’d pop her one. They did it all the time. I think they got off on doing it.”

Scott had an urge to knock the smart-ass look off the boy’s face, but he didn’t give in to it.

“So you weren’t angry with Theo when he left the trailer that night? After the fight?”

Billy flipped his cigarette, and intentionally or not, it came pretty close to Scott as it sailed by.

“Theo was all right,” Billy said, “for an old guy.”

“And you weren’t angry that he hit your mom?” Scott said.

Billy laughed and showed the consequences of a chronic lack of dental hygiene when he smiled.

“No, man, she deserved it. I told ya. She was asking for it.”

“Did Theo ever take a swing at you?” Scott asked, and Billy immediately puffed out his chest.

“He wouldn’t a had the cojones, man! I woulda...” and then he seemed to realize what he was about to say and stopped mid-sentence, his mouth gaping open.

“Woulda bashed his head in with a baseball bat?” Scott completed the sentence for him.

Billy spread his arms wide, saying, “Hey man, don’t try to hang that crap on me. My mom’ll tell you, I was home with her when that shit went down.”

Scott wanted to drop kick the boy into the nearest snow bank but instead he said, “Great, I’ll ask her.”

He went in the back door, through the kitchen, and on into the dining room, where Phyllis was waiting tables.

“You do that,” Billy said from behind him, and Scott heard Billy’s grandfather tell him to shut up and show some respect. Billy was mumbling under his breath as Scott walked back through the kitchen with Phyllis, whose look shot daggers at Billy as she
led Scott out the back door.

“What did you do now?” she hissed at her son in passing.

“Nothin’,” Billy grumbled.

Scott closed the door behind them and gave Phyllis his jacket. She thanked him and wrapped herself up in it. Scott could see the black eye which bloomed underneath the new bangs she had artfully arranged to dip over it; it showed through the heavy makeup she had spackled over it. The white of her eye was blood red at the side, which could not be covered up. In her mid-thirties
, Phyllis was still an attractive woman, although she looked hard, with her hair dyed a little too dark and her makeup applied heavily.

“I heard there was a little trouble outside your trailer
on Saturday night. What can you tell me about that?”

She looked scared, and he could see her hands were shaking as she lit a cigarette.

“Oh, Scott, you know how Theo was,” she tried to laugh it off, but the fear in her eyes gave her away. “When he got few drinks in him he got a jealous notion and went off.”

“Who was he jealous of?”

“Well, you know me and men, Scott. I probably flirt a little more than I should, but like I told Theo, ‘if there’s no ring on this finger don’t try to lead me around by one through the nose.’”

She tried a girlish laugh but it turned into a smoker’s cough. Scott waited for her to catch her breath.

“Did he hit you?”

Phyllis unconsciously reached toward her eye, caught herself, and put her hand back down.

“No, of course not! I misjudged how far I was from the counter in there, bent over to pick up my pen and bam! I decked myself pretty good.”

“I heard Billy and Theo got into it.”

“Some friggin’ nosy neighbors I’ve got, huh?”

“Did they often fight?”

“Well, you’ve talked to Billy,” she said. “Every time that kid opens his mouth I wanna smack the snot out of him.”

Scott almost laughed because he agreed.

“So Theo, Billy, and you had a noisy fight in and outside your trailer the night Theo died.”

“Yeah, I reckon there’s no point in denyin’ it,” she admitted, “when ten outta ten nosy friggin’ senior citizens all agree.”

“Did Billy follow Theo when he left?”

“No,” Phyllis said quickly. “He came right back soon as he saw Theo was gone.”

“What time was it?”

Phyllis pretended to think about it.

“I don’t rightly know,” she said. “I’d had a few myself by that time, and I wasn’t exactly watching the clock. It was after midnight, I guess.”

Scott didn’t doubt Phyllis was too drunk to know what time it had been, which he now knew was between 1:15, when Theo was kicked out of the Thorn, and 2:00, when Tommy’s mother came home.

“Did you see anyone waiting for Theo, or hanging around the trailer park?”

“Nope. Just the usual nosy parkers peeking out the curtains at me. Don’t have any thrills of their own so they gotta have a good look at mine.”

“Tell me about the fight Theo had with Ed in the diner. I heard it got pretty heated.”

She rolled her eyes and waved the notion off like a pesky fly.

“That was just business as usual for Theo,” she said. “That was his normal way of dealing with people who disagreed with him or got in his way.”

“You didn’t think it was serious?”

Phyllis laughed.

“Everybody knows Ed Harrison wouldn’t hurt a fly. He might get a bug up his ass about a damn dog, or politics, or global friggin’ warming, but he wouldn’t lower himself to get physical about it.
No, good ole Ed would write about it in that cat box liner of his.”

She cackled at her own attempt at humor.

“Did you love Theo?” he asked.

“No,” she said, but tears appeared in her eyes as she said it. “It doesn’t pay to love anybody that ornery and mean.”

Scott took his coat and she went back inside, where he could hear her screaming at Billy, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. He took one whiff of the stench of cigarettes and perfume on his coat and carried it back to the station held out in front of him rather than putting it on. He left it hanging outside the back door the rest of the day to air it out.

Skip and Frank had worked out a timeline for Theo’s last day, and they went over it with Scott. Theo had gone around town on Saturday being his usual disagreeable self, picking fights and stirring up trouble, before going home to prepare a dinner for someone who it seemed did not show up. They reported that Gail Godwin, Theo’s housekeeper, said she didn’t know who he had invited to dinner. Theo came into town, fought with Patrick outside the Rose and Thorn, took a drive with Willy Neff out to Hannah’s farm, went back to the Rose and Thorn for another altercation with Patrick, went to Phyllis’s, and then went to the vet’s office and got killed. Nobody saw Willy Neff after Theo left Hannah’s farm with him.

They compared notes and Scott made assignments for the next day. He wanted Frank to talk to some of Theo’s latest dog breeding customers to see if anyone was angry about the experience. Scott then let them go home for some much needed rest, although he could have used some himself. He was used to stretching himself thin so his staff could lead normal lives. He made a fresh pot of coffee, spread out his notes, and had just settled in for the duration when the phone rang.