When Will the Dead Lady Sing? (15 page)

The women were so enjoying their evening with celebrities—and their rare invitation to Gusta’s—that nobody made a move to leave before eleven. When the clock chimed, Georgia gasped. “We may be locked out! Annie Dale locks the door at eleven and goes to bed, and she gave Burlin the front-door key for all of us. Unless he’s already home and waiting in the hall, we’ll have the dickens of a time getting in. I guess we’ll see how good we are at tossing pebbles at a window.” She laughed, but I could see she was anxious.

“Lance will be up,” Renée assured her.

“And I’ll call Annie Dale.” Gusta went to do so immediately. She returned to assure them, “She’ll wait up for another half hour.”

“Can you find your way back that fast?” somebody asked. The others laughed, comfortable enough to tease the Bullocks by then.

Renée gave us a wink. “I’ll drive this time.”

I left in the middle of that hilarity. Georgia struck me as the kind of Southerner who might have to talk awhile at the door after she’d said she was leaving. Only when I got outside did I remember that my car—Joe Riddley’s car—was blocked. I didn’t want to have to go back and organize several women to back down the drive to let me out, so I walked home. I figured that Joe Riddley would either be out hunting Tad in one of our business trucks, or be engrossed in the eleven o’clock news when I got home, and I’d get up before him, so with any luck, I could get the car back in our garage before he missed it.

As it turned out, only Lulu, Bo, and the pups were there to greet me. The pups snored softly in their basket. Bo opened one eye on the back porch and asked in a sleepy voice, “You and who else?” Lulu danced around my feet with great joy, having already given me up for dead. That’s how beagles always welcome you, being the most fatalistic creatures God ever made.

I gave her a treat and let her curl up beside me on the couch while I watched the tail end of the news. Then I went to bed. By the time Joe Riddley started banging around just after midnight, getting ready for bed, I was fast asleep.

At least, that’s my story. I’m sticking to it.

10

Tuesday, Lulu started barking on the back porch before sunrise. At the old house, I’d have simply let her out. Here, she’d need a leash, so I might as well get dressed and take her for a walk. Joe Riddley was burrowed under the sheet, good for another hour. I figured Lulu and I could walk over to Gusta’s and bring his car back. I took the keys and my cell phone, in the unlikely case some deputy needed me before I got home. Crime is slow around here at dawn.

It was a gray pearl morning, with no color in the sky yet except a smudge of peach to the east. The air lay on my shoulders like a damp blanket—it was, after all, Georgia in September—but there was none of the scorching heat of a month before. The birds were having a fine old convention before humans got up. Up on Oglethorpe, a few cars were carrying folks to work in distant towns. A couple of buzzards circled lazily, high in the sky.

I couldn’t remember walking around town that early before, and was happy to live in a town so small that I could smell country even in the heart of it. I headed up Oglethorpe to fetch Joe Riddley’s car, but got distracted by our new window display. Bethany and Hollis were working for us after school and had filled the window with gift baskets of garden implements for women. They’d done a real good job. I might want one of those myself.

Our store was a block west of the courthouse and Gusta and Pooh lived a block east. As Lulu and I moseyed through the square, I noted that the buzzards must have found something. Six now floated in wide spirals overhead. I got so busy wondering how exactly it is that they spot a small dead animal from that height and send out invitations to their friends, I scarcely noticed when Lulu steered me down a side street toward the tracks.

The area by the railroad tracks is not a part of town I frequent. Years ago, when the train passed through Hopemore and stopped twice a day, we had a station, several warehouses, and a cotton gin down there. Now, the tracks were overgrown with weeds and the buildings deserted, except for a cotton warehouse Meriwether DuBose had recently refurbished for her new catalogue business. The Chamber of Commerce talked about revitalizing the area, but nobody else had caught the vision yet.

Still, I wasn’t nervous. Lulu is a fierce bodyguard, and every criminal and drunk in town knows who I am—and that if he or she harms a hair of my head, they’ll have Joe Riddley to deal with. Besides, with the whole town asleep, that area looked no more deserted than the rest. I could easily imagine that in a couple of hours the cotton gin would crank up, laborers would stack merchandise for shipping, and old men would start to congregate on the station porch.

“We’ll go to the water tank and turn around,” I told Lulu. The tank sat at the end of the buildings lining the tracks, in the middle of a large parking lot. Some towns, of course, surround their tanks with a chain-link fence, three strands of barbed wire, and a padlocked gate. Hopemore had simply planted a privet hedge around the base. After all, the ladder was too high to reach without another ladder and nobody had designs on our water. For years the tank had performed its invaluable function without anybody giving it a thought unless some intrepid high schooler scaled the ladder to blazon a message above the town.

What people neglect, however, nature takes back. The tank had originally been painted to blend with the sky. Now, as the sun rose and changed the sky to a light, clear blue, I was appalled at how faded and tired the poor tank looked. I couldn’t remember the last time it had been painted. Recent crops of teenagers must have been too busy with video games and television to mess it up.

The once-trim hedge around its base had sent up shoots that sprawled high and unkempt. Outside the hedge, the asphalt was pitted with holes where the pavement had cracked and broken, and the whole lot was littered with flattened cans and the glint of broken bottles, dotted with clumps of high grass and small bushes.

Where I saw desolation, though, Lulu saw ecstasy. She took one whiff and strained on her leash. “You want to run?” I bent and released her. “Watch out for broken glass.”

She dashed here and there, sniffing bushes and grass, then headed for the tank itself. “Five more minutes,” I called as she wriggled under the hedge.

She raised a storm of what I thought was protest. I let her bark for a minute, then called, “Okay, come!”

She continued to bark.

“Lulu! Come!” That tone generally gets instant obedience, but she kept barking. I looked up and saw that the buzzards were directly overhead and descending. I didn’t want them to mistake her—or me—for breakfast. I waved my arms. “Lulu, do I have to come get you?”

She set up a howl they could hear in Augusta.

I picked my way gingerly across the lot, watching for potholes, snakes, and buzzards. “You’re fixing to get a switching,” I warned, although I had never hit that dog in my life. Lulu shoved her way through a gap in the hedge and danced, still yapping. When I stopped, she bounded out of reach, awkward but still agile on her three legs. “What have you found?” I demanded. “I’ll come, because you don’t usually get into fidgets over nothing, but I don’t like the looks of that hedge.” She turned and wriggled back under.

I looked for the best place to push through. Because they had been planted to deter kids from the tower, the bushes were real close together, their branches as sharp as the switches Mama used on our legs when my brother, Jake, and I were little.

“If you’ve just waked up a snake,” I warned, shoving through the only hole I saw, “or are making all this racket over a dead possum, we’re gonna both be sorry.”

I cut both arms and got several rips in my shirt, and my hair didn’t bear thinking about. I hoped Phyllis could work me in as soon as she got to the beauty parlor. “When I get to work,” I informed Lulu, who was sticking so close to my feet, I was in danger of tripping over her, “I’m going to call the city and tell them to send somebody down to clip these bushes.” She whined her disagreement.

It wasn’t a snake or a possum she had found. It was the man in the gray suit.

He lay sprawled on his face beside one leg of the tank. His gray ponytail was slung across one shoulder. A knapsack lay several feet away, spilling clothing and a hairbrush onto the ground. A battered guitar lay as if it had been tossed aside.

He wouldn’t be needing it anymore. Not with that hole in the back of his head.

11

I have no idea how long I stood there. Long enough to think that nobody born of woman through labor and pain should wind up dead on a deserted asphalt lot. Long enough to say a prayer for whoever he was, confident that a God mindful of sparrows would know his name. Long enough to notice a lot of things I’d rather not have seen.

Flies crawled around his gray hair, feasting on dark dried blood. The stench that always accompanies death polluted the soft fall air. His hat lay beyond his head. A length of rusted galvanized pipe lay beyond it, with ominous stains at one end. A soft muddy spot several yards from the body, where the pavement had sunk and gradually filled with dirt, showed the clear print of a woman’s shoe. A man’s print lay in a similar depression—but he had worn pointed shoes, not the unexpectedly small sneakers with round toes worn by the victim.

Why was I looking at the dead man’s shoes instead of calling the police? Because I didn’t want to think about a red matchbook from Spence’s Appliances that lay three feet from the victim’s hand. It was too clean and fresh to have lain there long.

Hubert had a temper when riled, and he’d been threatening this man in public for several days. Even though he had promised to blast him with a shotgun, might he have been willing to use a handier weapon if it presented itself?

Lulu pressed against my calf and whimpered, to remind me we had a problem here. I reached for my cell phone.

Royce Wharton was on duty again, at the end of his shift. As soon as he heard my voice, he chuckled. “Calling the police station early is getting to be a habit, isn’t it, Judge? You got another buffalo?”

Royce wasn’t a bad officer, just a mischievous one. When I said, “No, I’ve got a body,” he sobered immediately.

After he’d taken the particulars about where I was and who I’d found, he said, “I’ll send somebody right away. Go back to the street and find someplace to sit down until we get there.”

“Seats are in short supply in this part of town,” I informed him, “and I’ve got six hungry buzzards circling above. I’ll just prop myself against the tank.”

“Don’t topple it,” he warned. “We don’t want you destroying evidence.”

“If you see a deluge coming down Second Street, don’t bother to come.”

I’d scarcely hung up when Lulu started whining. I looked where she was looking and saw that one buzzard now perched on a support halfway up the tank, watching me with a calculating eye. “Shoo!” I called. “Shoo!” He didn’t budge, just crooked his head this way and that to see if the bigger predator would steal his meal.

“Scat!” I yelled, waving my arms to assure him I was alive. “Scat!”

Lulu added her voice to mine, a long mournful howl that sent chills up my spine.

The disappointed scavenger stayed just long enough to let us know he was leaving of his own free will, not because he’d been coerced. As he flapped away, the others—who had been circling lower and lower—followed. I watched them go, thinking that buzzards may be ugly close up, but they are beautiful in flight. Again I wondered how they find their prey.

Thinking about buzzards isn’t my favorite way to spend an early morning, but it sure beats looking at a dead body and wondering who hit it over the head.

“Over here,” I called to Lulu, who was sniffing toward the man. I snapped on her leash and kept her near me. “We don’t want to mess up any more evidence,” I explained. “Chief Muggins is coming. Hear his siren?” Not that a siren is necessary, going to a crime scene where the victim isn’t going anywhere, but the chief had a new cruiser with a lot of fancy equipment, and he took every opportunity to share its glories with the taxpayers who bought it.

Charlie Muggins is in a class of his own in my book, at the top of a page headed “People I couldn’t like if I tried.” He struts around crime scenes like God’s gift to detection, although his dignity is somewhat impaired by a constant need to hitch up his pants to keep from losing them to the weight of his belt. I don’t dislike him for swaggering, or even because he treats women like we all secretly hope he’ll make advances. I dislike him because he has never learned to shut his mouth or open his mind. The chief is bad about jumping to conclusions, then shaping facts to suit them. Only once, to my knowledge, has he picked the right murderer, and that was a lucky guess.

That morning, I heard his car stop and the door slam; then I heard nothing. The base of each leg of the water tank was set into a concrete support two feet high, so I managed to climb up on one, clung to the leg for support, and called over the hedge, “Chief? Over here. By the tank.” Joe Riddley established a precedent I have continued. No matter how well we know officers of the law, we refer to them by their titles in public. They do the same.

“That you, Judge?” He shaded his eyes, since he had to look directly into the rising sun. “I was heading in when Royce called that you’d found a body.” He still stood on the curb.

“Right here,” I shouted back, “through the hedge. I came in about there”—I pointed to the spot—“and he’s lying down here.” I pointed again.

Another cruiser pulled to the curb behind his. As the officers got out, the chief hitched up his pants and started strolling my way. “What are you doing in there?” he yelled. It didn’t bother me that he sounded like he was accusing me of murder. Ever since Chief Muggins moved to Hopemore, he has lived in daily anticipation of catching me committing a felony. I’m not on the Favorite People page in his book, either.