Choke (21 page)

“Yes,” agreed Hortense, “in jail.”

Immy needed to find out who originally took the money, but how? It would probably have hundreds of fingerprints on it, as the chief had said. With red-rimmed eyes and raised brows, Mother was beckoning her over to the cot. Immy sat beside her again. Hortense lowered her voice to the tiniest whisper, which made it hard to hear her.

“You don’t believe him, do you?” Mother asked.

“Why would I not believe him?”

“No one just finds a sack of money on the ground.”

“I’m sure some people do, Mother.” Surely, in the history of the world, people had found sacks of money on the ground. Why not Baxter?

“I wouldn’t believe anything Baxter tells you. He is not to be trusted.”

Immy remembered the chief telling her to be careful around him, Ralph telling her the same thing, and now her mother telling her not to trust him. Should she persist in believing him in the face of all these negative people? Maybe not, but then again…

“Mother, if Baxter did steal that money, wouldn’t he have thrown the checks away?”

“Unless he was attempting to frame you.”

“But he should know I would tell someone where I got the goods when I got caught red-handed, although I wouldn’t have gotten caught if my purse hadn’t dumped on the floor in the police station.”

“I can hear you, you know,” came from the next cell.

Immy realized their voices had gradually risen. “Sorry, Baxter.”

“But you’re right,” he said. “If we knew who put the money there by my truck, we could shift the blame and get outta here.”

“Was the sack made of paper?” asked Mother.

“Yeah,” said Baxter.

It was weird talking to Baxter but not being able to see him. It was like he was disembodied, a ghost or something.

“Then it might have retained fingerprints,” Hortense said.

“Mother, you’re thinking like a detective.” Immy herself heard the pride ring in her statement. Hortense rolled her eyes.

A loud, whanging noise startled Immy and Hortense. “Damn,” said Baxter. “I threw that fuckin’ bag away, and I think I just broke my fuckin’ hand whackin’ this fuckin’ bar.”

“Language,” said Hortense.

There was probably no possibility of retrieving the bag. Baxter said he’d stuffed it into the dumpster behind the restaurant. Immy knew how full the dumpster had been Thursday when she had fallen into it. Baxter added the sack on Saturday, and the bin wouldn’t be emptied until Tuesday, which was tomorrow.

“I don’t suppose there’s any possibility the sack could be retrieved from the detritus?” said Mother.

Immy jumped off the cot. “Cops are always going through garbage for clues, Mother. Of course they can do it. Ralph!”

* * *

RALPH WAS EAGER TO TRY TO RETRIEVE the sack, and Chief Emersen thought it was worth a try, too.

Later that night, though, when Ralph returned from his mission, his attitude seemed to have changed. He’d been gone for hours, and Immy couldn’t help but notice it had started to pour while he was gone. She pictured him in the dumpster, getting wet. Surely, though, there was a nifty tent or canopy or something the cops erected over dumpsters when they searched them in the rain.

Ralph stormed through the heavy metal door and stood before Immy and Hortense’s cell. Rivulets ran from his clothing onto the concrete floor and dripped from his black hair.

“Do you know what-all is in a dumpster like that?”

Immy had never seen him so mad. Or so wet. Or smelling so bad.

“Do you?”

Immy started to answer his question, as she knew only too well what was there. “There are definitely coffee grounds, and leftovers from people’s plates, and sauce, and…”

“So you do know, and you sent me there anyway.”

Hortense cleared her throat. “I believe your superior officer is the one who dispatched you on that errand.”

Ralph transferred his glare from Immy to her mother. He lifted a shoe, which made a sucking sound. “Some idiot dumped a pile of sugar right outside the station door. I stepped in damn melted sugar coming in.” He shook his shoe, and a scrap of pink paper floated to the floor.

“So,” said Immy, wondering if it was wise to prolong discussion of the dumpster, “y’all don’t have a tent thing to cover you up when you’re dumpster diving?”

“We do not have a tent thing, no. We certainly do not.”

Baxter’s voice rang from the next cell. “Ralphie! Did you find the freakin’ sack?”

The glance Ralph threw in his direction was sharp. So was his answer. “Yes, and since it was so deep, it didn’t get soaked by the rain. Like I did.” He spun and exited through the metal door again.

“That boy needs a shower,” said Hortense.

Immy agreed.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING, TUESDAY, DAWNED clear and bright. And early, since there were no curtains on the cell windows. Immy was beginning to panic about her PI job. She was supposed to show up on Wednesday. What would she say if she couldn’t make it because she was in jail?

Before breakfast could be served, the chief came to their cell and told Immy and Hortense that their lawyer had posted bail for them. She had convinced everyone they weren’t flight risks before the next grand jury sitting, Chief said. Immy would have kissed the little woman if she had been there at the moment.

The snick of the door being unlocked was the sweetest sound Immy had heard since she said goodbye to Drew yesterday. Drew’s voice was always the very sweetest thing in Immy’s life.

“Hey, Chief,” said Baxter from his cell. “What about me? I need to see a doctor. My hand hurts like hell.”

“I haven’t seen your lawyer, Killroy.”

“I ain’t got one. You gonna get me one?”

“We’re working on it, son,” said the chief.

Immy wondered if that was the truth.

“We’ll get someone to look at your hand today.”

To her surprise, her mother threw her arms around Chief Emersen. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Emmett. I couldn’t have borne to eat another ghastly repast in this place. There was nothing prandial about that meal last night.” Hortense fell short of kissing the chief, but her hug went on for a while. Eventually, the chief peeled her arms off him and led them out through the metal door.

Immy looked back on the cell. She was elated to be on this side of the bars. It was without a doubt the worst place she had ever spent a night. Following the chief and her mother down the hall, she realized Mother was probably even riper smelling than she herself was, and she could sure smell herself.

Baxter called out as they exited through the metal door, but Immy couldn’t understand his words, lost in the clanging, just that he was angry. That was probably because they were leaving and he wasn’t, but she couldn’t help that. She hoped she would never see those bars from the inside again.

The tiny lawyer, Sarah Joyce, waited in the lobby. Immy ran to her and threw her arms around the woman’s thin shoulders. To her dismay, tears started to flow. She backed off, embarrassed, and smoothed the green silk of Ms. Joyce’s jacket where she had rumpled it.

“Sorry,” Immy mumbled. “We’re so grateful you got us out of there.”

Hortense, maintaining her dignity, but with a definite tremor in her topmost chin, shook Ms. Joyce’s hand. “Our gratitude knows no bounds, Ms. Joyce. Please accept our humble appreciation and our undying—”

“Do you girls need a ride home?” The lawyer cut Hortense’s effusiveness short, and Immy silently thanked her. Luckily, their release was in time for her job tomorrow. The PI, Mike Mallett, had called it a job interview, but she was pretty sure she would be hired. After all, had the other applicants, assuming there were any, read
The Moron’s Compleat PI Guidebook
cover to cover?

“We’ll need to get my daughter,” said Immy.

“Where is she?” asked Ms. Joyce.

“What time is it?” Immy glanced at the wall clock above Tabitha’s glass fortress. It was just after eight in the morning. “I guess she’ll be at Huey’s Hash with Clem.”

“To Huey’s Hash, then.” The tiny woman scurried through the front door and held it while Hortense lumbered out and Immy followed.

Ms. Joyce opened the two right side doors of her silver Lexus and whisked herself around to the driver’s side. Immy closed the front door after Hortense climbed in. Immy wanted more than anything to see Drew again. It would be something normal, something not related to jail or to Uncle Huey’s murder or to Baxter. She had no desire to examine her feelings about Baxter any time soon. A thought hit her as she bent down to get into the back seat. She straightened.

“Wait a minute,” she said to the women in the front seat. “I have to tell Ralph something.” She returned to the lobby. Ralph had been standing and watching them depart. He brightened when she walked over to him.

“Ralph,” Immy said, “I think I know of another suspect you could finger for Huey’s murder, someone who might have offed him.”

“Besides you and Hortense and Xenia and Frankie and Baxter?”

“Well, yes.”

Ralph waited. Was he using the silence trick to make her spill her guts? No matter, she was going to spill them anyway.

“Yes. I overheard a conversation I wasn’t supposed to in the hospital parking garage when I went there to interrogate Xenia.”

“When did you do that?”

“When she was unconscious.”

“How did that go?”

Immy took a breath. “I didn’t succeed in questioning her that time, but let me tell you what I heard Frankie say to his Uncle Guido in the parking lot.”

Ralph’s brown eyes narrowed. He gave her more of the silent treatment.

“I think Frankie was asking his Uncle Guido to do a hit on Clem. I mean, at first I thought Frankie was asking him to do Uncle Huey, but he was already dead. Then I figured out Frankie thought Clem was responsible for Xenia’s accident. I mean, I had just told Frankie that Huey was dead. So Frankie must have been taking out a contract on Clem with his Uncle Guido.”

“Huh?”

She could kick Ralph in the shins when he said huh like that, not that it would probably hurt him.

“I said, Frankie must have been taking out…”

“I know what you said, but what does that have to do with anything?” Ralph scratched his head, making his coarse, dark hair spike oddly. “Oh, I guess if Clem turns up murdered, we’ll know who to—”

“I suspect Guido murdered Huey, too.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Don’t you see? Guido is a hit man. Hit men kill people. He probably killed Huey. No one else seems to be guilty.”

Ralph looked down and shuffled his large feet. “That’s not true. Everyone seems to be guilty.”

Did he mean she seemed to be guilty? Immy puffed her breath out at the obtuse Ralph. “Are you going to question Guido or not?”

“I’ll run it by Chief. He has to decide.”

Immy thought she knew what Chief would decide. Her shoulders sagged, and she walked outside.

A colorful display caught the corner of her eye on the way to Ms. Joyce’s car. On the wall beside the door, letters were spelled out. Pink saccharin packets, stuck to the wall, spelled out HOR. Beneath that, yellow Splenda packets formed the letters OT. And below them, blue Equal packets wrote GUILTY. They seemed to be glued to the bricks.

She ran back inside the lobby. “Ralph, did you not see that sign outside?”

He followed her out, and she pointed to the message.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“It’s a clue, Ralph.”

“It’s a bunch more sugar packets. The ones last night were all white, real sugar. These are all fake sugar.”

“Read it, Ralph.”

He squinted and read them. “Ho ot guilty.”

“Hor, not Ho.” But Immy looked again. The pink packets that had made a letter R had fallen to the ground since she had first spied the message. Other pink packets lay scattered beneath the message along with a few yellow ones. What had it originally spelled, Immy wondered.

“So, whores are hot and guilty? Is that what it’s saying?”

Immy frowned. “I’m not sure.”

* * *

IMMY SAT IN HER BEDROOM AFTER breakfast and played Barbies with Drew for about half an hour. She had decided not to send Drew to school today. Immy didn’t want to let her out of her sight for a while for a reason she couldn’t explain.

Immy also stewed over what to do about Guido. Maybe she had talk to the chief herself. Maybe when she started her new job tomorrow, she would gain more credibility as an investigator. She wondered if she would carry some sort of a license. Maybe she would have to take a test to become a PI. Then her thoughts stretched to arriving at Mr. Mallett’s office in the morning. She would stride in with purpose in her step so he’d see she was someone who could get the job done. Wait a minute. What would she be wearing?

“I’ll be right back, sweetie.” Immy set Ken on the floor and hurried to the living room. “Mother,” she started.

“Imogene, can I not watch a daytime drama in peace? You are aware that I missed all of my shows yesterday?”

“Yeah, no TV in the hoosegow.”

Drew had followed Immy. “No TV in the hoosegow?” she echoed.

Hortense raised the volume on the set.

“I’m going into Wymee Falls.” Immy raised her voice to match that of the gleeful game show contestant. “I need a suit for my job tomorrow.”

Hortense muted the television, which had switched to a commercial, and eyed her daughter. “I suppose it would be advantageous to make a favorable sartorial impression at your interview.”

“Yes, it would. Drew, want to go for a ride?”

Immy let Drew take two Barbies in the van, and they had a pleasant drive into town.

“Did you have a good time at Uncle Clem’s?” Immy asked, tossing her words to the backseat where Drew sat in her car seat.

She saw Drew shrug in the rearview mirror.

“I thought he bought you new Barbies and played with you.”

“Yeah, he did, but I missed you, Mommy.” Drew’s big green eyes bored into Immy’s heart.

“We won’t do that again, sweetie. We won’t leave you anywhere.”

“What if you go back to the jailhouse?”

Yeah, what if?