Brownie and the Dame (5 page)

“I don’t know about that,” Tee said. “He told me he was wearing purple underwear that gives him special powers.” The large man looked around to see if anyone else was listening. “
Women’s
underwear.”

“It’s because he can’t get men’s underwear in purple,” Janie said gravely. “Anyone else suspicious?”

Tee straightened and thought about it. He had to stop to scratch the top of his head. “Foot Johnson was singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ but he said it was because he cain’t get it out of his head. He was doing all the voices in it, high and low.”

Janie considered that. Her cute little face screwed up in concentration. Brownie thought about it. Foot Johnson was the janitor of the county buildings. Other than having the description of a bodily part for his first name, he seemed fairly benign.

Brownie straightway added Foot Johnson to his suspect list.
Fairly benign is how they talk about serial killers,
he thought.
“When I lived next door to him, he was a right nice fella. Took out his garbage once a week, and I dint smell nothing dead no how.” Jack the Ripper. Benign. Vlad the Impaler. Benign. George W. Bush. Really benign.

“Ruby Mercer mentioned to Poppiann that Bill Clinton is acting up lately,” Tee said.

“Ruby Mercer is…?” Janie prompted.

“Just a lady who lives in town. She lives with her sister, that’s Alice, by the way. Them gals are retired and don’t do much ‘cepting meet with the Pegramville Women’s Club on Thursday nights. So does Poppiann when I’m free to sit with Junior.” Tee glanced down at the photos in his hand. He put them away with a smile. “Not that I mind sitting with Junior. Boy’s already walking. He’s gonna be an athlete, I swear.”

“Bill Clinton,” Jane prompted. “Acting up?”

“Oh, Bill Clinton is Ruby and Alice’s dog. They love that dog like the earth loves the rain. Take him to be groomed once a month. Paint his claws different colors, and he’s a boy dog. Must hurt his feelings something fierce.”

“Did the Mercer sisters say why Bill Clinton was acting up?” Janie asked, and Brownie could almost see the police uniform on her.

“No. I don’t reckon they knew. Fella’s just acting all riled up and all. Ruby done said that dog was smiling like a goat in a briar patch.”

Janie stared at Tee. “A goat in a briar patch? Is that good or bad?”

“Good. I think,” Brownie interjected, feeling somewhat left out in the detecting aspect.

“But then those gals once left out a jar of salsa and Bill Clinton ate the whole thing and the poor dog had the backdoor trots for days. Think Alice ended up taking Bill Clinton to Doc Goodjoint on account that the vet was down to Houston for a training. And that’s a damn shame because Doc Goodjoint is a Republican.” Tee trailed off as if he realized he was speaking to elementary school-aged children. “And you’re here to see the jail.” He rattled his keys.

As Tee walked away, he said, “Follow me.”

“Cover me,” Brownie muttered to Janie.

Janie said, “What?”

“Cover me,” he said again. “We’ve got to talk to the sheriff about the spatula. Or your auntie. Or some other po-liceman who will know who might be the culprit.”

“Hmm,” Janie murmured. “I’ll go. I can speak police talk. They’ll listen to me. They’ll look at your fedora and giggle.”

Brownie touched the brim of the hat. “What? It looks just like Sam Spade’s in that movie I watched last night. And partners support each other. You back me up.”

“If we’re partners either one of us should go,” Janie said. “Rock, paper, scissors.”

Brownie nodded and glanced at Tee. Tee was rattling keys vigorously and saying, “This here is the main entrance, but we got a rear entrance, too. Just in case we need to get out quick-like. Once there was a time where Newt Durley stopped up the sh-I mean, potty, and we all had to get out the back in a rapid course of time. That poor cell hasn’t been the same since.”

Brownie and Janie both made fists and thumped them into the palms of their other hands. “One, two, three, shoot,” he said in time with the thumping.

Janie stared at his hand as it stopped in its final shape. “What’s that?”

“A laser gun,” Brownie clarified. “It beats everything. Especially your rock.”

Janie glared at him. “You like to make up rules, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Brownie admitted readily. “Otherwise you have to do everything adults say. Don’t you do that, too?”

“Well, I wouldn’t admit it in a court of law,” Janie said. “Especially if a judge was around.”

“The doors are stainless steel, and the entire frame is made of the same,” Tee was saying. “That’s in case someone gets the mind to go through the walls and disregards the door altogether, like that fella did back in 2001. He found the sheetrock and just crawled right through and then punched out the brick façade. But we caught him at the Red Door Inn the same day.”

Brownie saluted Janie, and she rolled her eyes. Then he snuck away while Tee was saying, “I don’t think that fella was staying at the B&B, doncha know? But that’s neither here nor there, and well, I don’t think Miz Demetrice would care ifin I talked about it to you children.”

Brownie was out the door before Tee finished rattling keys. He slipped into the sheriff’s department door and cast Mary Lou Treadwell a measured look. “The bathroom is broken over there, and Mr. Gearheart don’t want us using the cells,” he said.

Mary Lou blinked and pointed to the door. Like most adults she wouldn’t dream about arguing with a child on the matter of using the bathroom. She pushed a button that opened the door. “First left, then two doors down,” she instructed.

Brownie did not go to the bathroom. Instead he wandered around the building until he found Sheriff John Headrick’s office. It was listed boldly on the door. In fact, the letters on his door were larger than anyone else’s. Furthermore, the door was open, and the sheriff was in residence. He had his back to the door while he talked on the phone to someone. His booted feet were propped on a filing cabinet.

Brownie knew that Sheriff John was the tallest man around if one disregarded the infamous Daniel Gollihugh, who was allegedly seven feet tall and who had once torn the Piggly Wiggly sign down right off of the store and stomped on it and who was presently incarcerated in the state prison. Sheriff John was taller than Bubba and his daddy.

“Uh-huh?” Sheriff John said. “Really? Red? Dark red or orangey red, because I reckon I like the dark red one better. Well, shore, I hate to pick, but a man is right particular about these sorts of things.” He paused to listen and then he did something that Brownie never thought he’d ever hear. The sheriff giggled, and it didn’t sound proper coming from that particular man.

Sidling forward, Brownie sat in the high-backed chair to one side of the sheriff’s desk. He looked around as the sheriff continued to speak. There were framed news clippings on the walls. One about the woman who’d tried to frame Bubba. There were some about the Christmas Killer. Brownie perked up. Then he leaned forward to see if his name was in those articles.

“Tee-hee-hee,” Sheriff John said, “you know all about that don’t you, honey-sweetie-pie?”

Brownie brought his notepad out. He dug in a pocket for his pencil and finally located it next to a half-eaten package of Smarties and a green button he’d found somewhere. He perched himself on the edge of the seat and waited. He wasn’t exactly impatient, but he had a mental vision of Tee Gearheart trolling through the sheriff’s department on the lookout for a missing ten-year-old would-be gumshoe.
But hey, Janie probably told him some story. Dames are good for stories. She could con a copper in the caboose.

“Really?” Sheriff John’s gravelly voice sounded amused. “No, you first. You know what I like? I like it really rare, with the liquid just drippin’ down the sides.”

Staring at Sheriff John’s steel gray hair, Brownie wondered just what the heck the law enforcement official was discussing and with whom.

“And maybe that porterhouse cut…” he turned the chair around just as he was finishing and jumped as he saw Brownie. “CRAP!” he said. “I mean carp,” he added subdued. “Darla honey, just get whatever cut looks good. You get the coals going, and I’ll take care of the cooking in an hour or so. I gotta go. I gotta some
thing
, er, I mean, someone in the office.”

The sheriff pushed the end button on the phone and put the unit back into the receiver. Then his steel gray eyes, which exactly matched his hair, observed Brownie. Brownie was well used to that sort of look. His father, mother, principal, Boy Scout troop leader, pastor, and teacher all practiced that precise look upon Brownie on a daily basis. Depending on the individual, it might be an hourly basis. Some of them were even good at it. Brownie supposed the sheriff was up there, but he got to frequently practice the look on common, and some uncommon, criminals.

“Brownie Snoddy,” Sheriff John said, “what brings you into my lair?”

“On approximately— ” Brownie checked his notebook and abruptly remembered that he hadn’t asked Miz Adelia when the spatula was nicked from the Snoddy mansion, “— last week, a MWF Spatula from Williams-Sonoma was stolen from Miz Adelia Cedarbloom. It was a special spatula, see, sweetheart.”

Sheriff John’s eyebrows arched at the word “sweetheart.”

“It was also stainless steel, slotted, and dishwasher safe,” Brownie went on.

“Why didn’t Miz Adelia file a report?” Sheriff John enquired.

“She hired me to find the item in question.” Brownie arched his eyebrows, but he didn’t think he could get them as high as Sheriff John’s. There was also the niggling question of whether Miz Adelia had actually agreed for Brownie to do the investigation, because he couldn’t quite recall if she had. “And she don’t trust no flatfoots.”

“Flatfoots,” Sheriff John repeated. He swallowed, then waved at Brownie, “Oh, go on.”

“Of course, John C. Law knows all about the local thugs and such, so I came to make a deal with you,” Brownie said. “Ifin you tell me what you know, then when I collar the palooka, I’ll drop a dime on him, I’ll hand him over to you buttons. I’ll make sure the coppers get the byline on the press.”

“By some horrid twist of fate, you don’t— ,” Sheriff John paused to look at the ceiling, “— have your stun gun, do you, Brownie?”

“No,” Brownie mumbled. “Auntie D. took that away about a minute after I stepped in the door.”

“I see,” Sheriff John said. “And ifin I tell you what I know, you’ll catch the perpetrator.”

“The bindle stiffs,” Brownie elaborated, “punks, Johnson brothers, hoods. They’ll be crying for their mamas to call them a lip.”

“A lip,” Sheriff John said.

“A lawyer,” Brownie said.

“And you’ll credit the police for the collar?”

“That’s the deal, shmoe, take it or leave it,” Brownie said as he squared his shoulders.

Sheriff John’s lips began to tremble. Brownie thought it looked very bizarre, as if the much older man was about to cry.

“There have been some funny things going on about the town,” Sheriff John admitted slowly.

“I knew it,” Brownie said. “Ain’t no one steal a spatula just for the fun of it. Something perplexing going on. It’s a Chinese angle, that’s what it is. Something really strange.”

Chapter 4

Brownie and the Shady Suspect

Tuesday, April 3
^rd

Before Sheriff John could drop the low-down, put Brownie wise, or spill, Tee Gearheart came rumbling through and reacquired his wayward charge. Tee didn’t actually lock Brownie or Janie in the cells, but he kept a vigilant eye on them so that Brownie had no further opportunities for mayhem. Later that day, Miz Demetrice came back to collect Brownie and Janie and took them back to the Snoddy Mansion where they ate dinner. (Fried chicken and it wasn’t the kind from the Colonel’s and Brownie didn’t mean Colonel Nathanial Snoddy who had perpetrated the whole Civil War gold incident in spades. No, it was Miz Adelia’s grandmother’s secret fried chicken recipe that cooks all over Pegram County had been attempting to steal for decades on account of its mouth-watering characteristics.) There was also corn on the cob, potatoes au gratin, and pecan pie. He went to bed that night full and dreaming not of sugar plums, but of absent spatulas and funny-goings-on that perplexed his brain in wonderful spine-tingling ways.

The next morning, Brownie returned to the gumshoe persona with great glee. There was a single hiccough when he bounded into the bathroom and bounced off the clear plastic wrap that had been spread over the bathroom door. Someone had taken the time to neatly frame the door in plastic where Brownie wouldn’t see it before he went in. He fell on the floor and looked stupid for a minute until he comprehended the problem. “Haha,” he said, but on the inside he thought,
Dang, good trick. I’ll have to remember that
.
 

He looked around for a giggling offender, but no one was about. He wondered if Janie was already front and present. When he was finished brushing his teeth and dressing, he went downstairs and found that Willodean had already dropped Janie off at the mansion. Janie yanked Brownie aside without ado.

“I got suspects and also another missing item,” Janie told him. “We’ve got to follow up. That’s what it says in all the good police manuals.”