Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped (10 page)

“Two cokes and a beer,” I answer.

She pours three glasses of what looks like strawberry Kool-Aid from a pitcher. “Next,” she says. There’s nobody behind me, but still, she’s whooshing me away. I gather up the drinks. I give the Kool-Aids to George and his parents. William makes a face and puts his down. Joe comes up carrying a tray of shrimp.

“Help yourself,” he says putting it down on the picnic table. There’s a whole spread.

“Can I help you?” I ask.

“All done,” he says. “Early birds,” he winks at me.

“Who’s the bartender?” I ask.

“Ah, Miss Tilney. She knows everything. You can’t keep the news of a party away from her. She sniffs it out of the air somehow. She plants herself behind the bar with that punch of hers.… Watch out for that stuff.”

“Spiked?” I say glancing over at Mean Muumuu. She’s halfway through her drink. I wince.

“When Miss Tilney goes to the bathroom,” Joe adds, “you can get yourself a glass of wine or something.”

“I think I’ll try the punch,” I say bravely.

There’s an old man hovering by the punch area, very bent, carrying an onion dip plastic tub on a paper platter with celery sticks neatly radiating out from the dip. His button down shirt is buttoned up to his neck and his shorts are plaid polyester. “Gene Swan,” Joe says, “let me introduce you to Lola.”

Gene puts down his dip platter and shakes my hand limply. “Pleased to meet you,” he says.

The bags under his eyes are more droops than bags and he’s got a silver crew cut.

“Gene doesn’t usually come out to parties. He lives way over by the gates in one of the older homes,” Joe says.

“I live a quiet life,” Gene Swan says.

“He writes books,” Joe explains.

“I’m a fungi expert,” Gene says.

“Really?” I say. “I never met a fungi expert.”

“Yes, well,” he says, “it’s a specialized field. And what do you do for a living?”

“She’s a private investigator,” Joe says. “She’s looking into Ernie’s death.”

“Well,” I say. I raise my eyebrows at Joe.

He smiles. “Gene hired Ernie to look after his house,” Joe says.

“Once or twice,” Gene says.

“Everybody hired him, but nobody liked him,” Joe says.

Gene pops a whole hotdog into his cheek and chomps on it. Then he says, “I’m going to rustle myself up a drink.” He turns to the bar.

Joe leans over and tells me, “I told everyone that you were investigating this murder.”

“You what?”

“In mysteries,” he tells me, “you have to stir the pot.”

“Stir?” I say. “I don’t want to stir the pot. It might be dangerous.”

“That’s all right then, I’ll do it,” Joe says. “You can be like the spoon rest or something, off to the side.”

“I don’t want to be the spoon rest.”

A couple waltzes up to us, and they introduce themselves as Fred and Feather. Feather is fidgety and tight lipped. They are a tall thin pair wearing matching beige shorts and red polo shirts. “Hello.” He nods at me. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

Fred has a face like a cauliflower, all wrinkles and crevasses with a bulby nose. He’s got a camcorder strapped into his right hand, and he aims it at me. “Say hello to the camera,” he says.

“Hello to the camera,” I say and wave at the lens.

“So, tell us a little about yourself,” Fred says like he’s interviewing me. I can see his jowls flapping.

“She’s a real life P.I.” Joe says into the camera. “Investigating a murder right here in Alligator Estates.”

Fred gets very still. Then he lowers the camera.

Feather tells me, “He’s always with the camera…” Feather was once a beauty, you can see it in her bone structure.

Fred doesn’t look at her. “Shame about Ernie,” Fred tells me. “Damn shame.”

“Did you know him?”

“Well…,” Feather says primly. She has a little pink mustache where the Kool-Aid has stained her upper lip.

“He was in our employ.” Fred takes over. “Good man,” he says.

“I heard he was a blackmailer,” Joe says.

Fred says, “I heard that. Hard to believe.”

Feather is staring straight ahead. Her cheeks are gaunt.

“You play any golf, Laura?” Fred says.

“Lola,” I say.

“Here, let me get you ladies a drink,” Fred says. Feather’s glass is empty, and I haven’t even gotten one yet. Miss Tilney pours us a couple. She hands us our drinks.

“Wait for the kick,” she says to me and grins. She’s got blue eyeliner defining her thin blonde eyebrows and it’s hard to look away from that. She wipes her hands on her flowered apron and smirks. Her eyebrows rise up like little blue spaceships hovering on her face.

“Ernie worked for her once, too,” Joe says, nudging me and indicating Miss Tilney. “I think it lasted about an hour and then she fired him. She’s too smart for her own good. You should talk to her.”

Fred says, “We’re going to get some food. Nice to meet you, Lulu,” he says, and steers Feather away toward a bench near the picnic table.

“I think Feather was a little tight,” I tell Joe.

“Feather is always tight.”

“I thought she was going to drop her drink, her hand was so trembly.”

“He makes her nervous. He’s always on her.”

“She drinks with her right hand,” I say. “So does he.” I look around. Everyone is drinking with their right hand except Joe.

“Did you learn any interrogation techniques in your P.I. training?” Joe asks me.

“I’m only on Lesson Two,” I say.

“See if you can get any of them to talk to you,” he says as if he doesn’t hear a word I’m saying.

“How am I going to get anyone to talk to me? They’re all just going to lie.”

“You’ll think of something,” he tells me.

“I’ll just have to make it up as I go along,” I say shaking my head.

Two guys walk up to us. “Lola, this is Richard Mayberry and Richard Jones,” Joe says.

“You can call me Dick,” Richard Mayberry, the bigger one, says. He’s wearing a black cowboy hat and a black button down shirt with black jeans and cowboy boots. He looks like Johnny Cash. I should talk. I’ve got my black capris on and a white tee. My black and white wardrobe choices, I find, limit me to either looking like a waitress, a vampire or a zombie. Tonight, waitress.

“Richie,” the littler one says and shakes my hand. He’s about 5’7” and chubby. He’s got pale beige dress pants on and a beige and mauve striped golf shirt. His skin is kind of mauve also.

“Where are you from?” Dick asks.

“New Jersey,” I say.

“Jersey,” Dick smiles. “We’re from Pennsylvania. We went to grade school together. We were friends back in third grade. Then we lost touch. We ended up two trailers away from each other. How ’bout that?”

Little mauve Richie smiles but doesn’t look so amused.

I ask them what they did back in Pennsylvania for a living. “Investment banking,” Dick says.

“I’m a CPA,” Richie says. “We run our own investment company down here. In fact, some of these people have their vacation funds with us. They call it vacation funds, but it isn’t really. It’s just that they make such a good return, a lot of them take cruises.

“Really?” I ask, “What’s a good return for you?”

“Well, Richie,” Dick says, “what was it the last time we looked? Twenty, twenty-one percent?” His voice is kind of drawly. He growls out the word “twenty.”

“If you’d like to invest, Richie here could tell you all about it or give you a prospectus,” Dick says.

“Maybe,” I say. “How do you do so well?”

“We do mostly high yield investments, offshore investments, hedge futures trading…,” Richie says.

I just nod. “I don’t really understand that kind of stuff,” I say. This is an understatement.

“Nobody does,” Richie says. “Don’t feel bad. Just ask around though. We’ve been doing this for two years now and we have a lot of satisfied customers.”

Two ladies come up with four glasses of punch. “Here’s your two beers and here are our two wines,” one says and hands around the drinks. They all chuckle. Joe introduces their wives, “Gladys Mayberry and Susie Jones.” They are both petite with pixie haircuts and white tennis outfits. But both look athletic. Capable of maybe a murderous golf swing?

They look like they just came off the tennis courts, very active and perky. As they stand next to Dick, they look like the good girl back-up singers to his bad boy Johnny Cash look. The Cash-ettes. In their skorts.

Gladys says, “Here’s to Happy Hour!” We all drink up. This stuff is a killer. I can feel it already.

I ask Susie and Gladys what they did for a living. Gladys tells me she was a secretary at the same firm as her husband. Susie was a secretary, too, at an insurance firm.

Gladys pipes up, “But Susie was an LPGA golfer once.”

“LPGA?” I say, “Wow.”

Susie says, “Well, it was only for two years. I was good around the greens but I couldn’t drive it long enough to really compete.”

“Still,” I say, “you must have had good club speed…”

“Decent,” Susie admits.

Then Gladys asks me, “What do you do for a living, Lola?”

I look at Joe. “I’m a Private Investigator,” I say.

“Give them your business card,” Joe nudges me.

They stand there quietly, with their hands out like students getting back their test results, as I give out my Curious George cards.

“Interesting,” Dick says examining the card.

“So, is that insurance fraud, that kind of thing?” Richie asks.

“Everything from infidelity, to blackmail, to murder,” Joe answers. “The whole ball of wax.”

“They say Ernie was a blackmailer.” I toss the phrase into the conversation like a little grenade to see if it’ll blow up.

“I don’t believe that,” Gladys says.

“You know how these rumors fly,” Dick says. “We have a lot of those gang members down in the city of Ft. Palms. A lot of those drug crimes. This was somebody all drugged up on that methamphetamine stuff who killed Ernie.”

“I don’t think that’s what the police think,” I say.

“That’s what I think,” Dick concludes.

“Me, too,” Richie agrees.

Joe turns to the ladies. They are both in their late 60’s I would guess. Both outline their eyes with deep black liner. Their eyes look huge. “They say he took thousands of dollars from people,” Joe says.

I don’t know who “they” is, but it sounds good.

“They say he was blackmailing some people right here in Alligator Estates,” Joe says. His voice suddenly seems loud. The music pauses, then Rosemary Clooney starts singing another song. The two couples look stunned.

George comes over to get another drink. I walk back with him to his mother and William. I get a couple mini-hotdogs. Mean Muumuu pipes up, “Who would give him money?” she asks me as I reach for a napkin. I didn’t think she was listening to our conversation. And I somehow didn’t expect her to have a voice, she seems so deeply buried within herself and her clothes.

“Why would anyone pay him for his lies?” she asks me. “He SAID he knew things. But he didn’t. He just liked to hear himself talk. Thought he was a big man.” Her face is red and she is vehement.

William puts both hands on her shoulders, “He didn’t deal in truths. We don’t believe in associating with people like that.”

“But you hired him,” Joe says.

“Only once,” William asserts.

“That was enough,” Mean Muumuu says.

“So you don’t think he was blackmailing anybody?” I ask.

“I said he didn’t KNOW anything!” Mean Muumuu shouts.

“Yes he did,” Joe says, “He knew a lot.”

Chapter 18

“He listened and saw things. And he had a camera,” Joe says. That got everyone’s attention. It’s dead quiet except for Rosemary Clooney crooning. “He took pictures, and sometimes they were worth money.”

What? I think. Pictures?

“Ernie tried to sell a picture to me, but he picked the wrong man. Other people might have more to lose than me,” Joe says looking around.

Everyone is stunned. Even Mean Muumuu. “God knows he was a liar,” she says to Joe. She waves a shrimp around. “God punished him for his lies.”

“God killed him?” Joe asks her.

“God’s will was done,” she says making the sign of the cross with the shrimp. A little blob of cocktail sauce drips onto her muumuu, but she doesn’t notice.

“Amen,” William says.

Miss Tilney yells, “That’s it for drinks!” Then she takes her empty pitcher and walks away through the backyard. Her skinny legs are bowed beneath her shorts.

“Is she going to the bathroom now?” I ask Joe.

“I think she’s going to bed,” he says. “Sometimes she gets worn out.”

I feel worn out too.

Everyone is leaving, it seems. When they say Happy Hour in Florida, they mean hour.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whisper to Joe as people start piling up their plates to take home as doggie bags. Joe is handing out zip-lock baggies to everyone.

“I was good, wasn’t I” Joe says.

“You were lying? There’s no camera?” I ask.

Joe shrugs, “Oh, there’s a camera. Ernie showed me a picture of my back as I was going into Millie’s trailer.”

I look at him.

“I was borrowing her grow light. I was starting some seedlings. I figured I’d just improvise about the camera. I’m sure he took other pictures.” He looks at me, “You said to just make it up as you go along…”

“I didn’t say YOU should do that.”

Sal pulls up to the party in his Cadillac. Joe and George and his family are the only ones left besides me and Dreamer. Mean Muumuu is still busy making a big doggie bag for her family.

Sal says, “So I go with the water guy into the sanitation area, out beyond the putting green, you know…. He was doing his bi-yearly sample. And there are all those damn whirligigs broke up into a bunch of pieces, near where the branches are piled to go into the chipper. You know, where you bring your branches?”

I don’t know, but I nod along with everybody else.

“I had to call the cops, say I found ‘em. They suspect whoever finds stuff,” he says.

“Somebody brought them out there and broke them up looking for something?” I ask Sal.

“How should I know?” Sal says.

George is standing next to us listening. Sal turns to George, “If you still want that job, you got it. I can’t be finding nothin’ else around here.”