Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 04 (6 page)

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I knocked on Billy Dick's front door and waited impatiently as a curtain twitched in the window. He opened the door part way and regarded me without expression.

"I'm glad I caught you," I said. "I wanted to ask you a few more questions about the fire the other night."

He came out to the porch and pulled the door closed. "Ma's taking a nap in the living room. She's still on the l-late shift at the truck stop, so she doesn't get home till dawn." He hitched up his baggy pants and gave me a mildly curious look. "What do you want to know, Arly? I already told you and the sheriff everything I saw."

I studied him, wondering why he sounded so casual when his forehead was damp with sweat and his eyes retreating into their sockets. "Just a few things, Billy Dick. What's your girlfriend's name and address?"

"Why do you want to know that?"

"I need it for my report." I took a notebook and pencil from my back pocket. "We can do this here, or we can do this at the sheriffs office. I'm going over there anyway, so it doesn't really matter to me."

"Her name's Trudi Yarrow, and she lives across from the gas station. Blue house, with a plastic birdbath out front. Her pa drives a red truck."

"Okay." I made a note. "You said she called you a little before nine, right?"

"Yeah, as soon as her parents left. Ma was at work, so I went on out to the truck and started for her house. I saw the fire, like I said, and stopped at the first house with lights on to use their telephone."

"To call the fire department in Emmet," I said with an encouraging smile. "Then what did you do, Billy Dick? Did you stay at this house, or did you go back to the fire immediately to wait there?"

"What d-difference does it make?" His eyes were barely visible in the fleshy sockets, but they weren't so much as blinking. His face reminded me of a scoop of vanilla ice cream beginning to melt.

"Probably none at all. I'm just trying to get a clear picture in my mind of the sequence of events."

To my surprise, he put his hands in his pockets and sauntered to the end of the porch. "I drove back to the fire and waited," he said without turning around. "I didn't see anybody until the volunteers came roaring down the road and tumbled out of their trucks. You'd have thought the White House was on fire, instead of some p-pile of rotted wood out in the middle of nowhere.

"Did you see any of the other fires?"

He looked over his shoulder at me. "I went out to have a look at that one last week. I was at the Dee-Lishus when some of the boys told me about it."

His voice was different, as was his entire posture, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was going on behind those colorless eyes. I finally put the notebook in my pocket and told him I'd be back if I had any further questions. As I drove away from the house, I glanced in the rearview mirror. He was watching me, and for some inexplicable reason, I felt as if he'd done so before.

-- ==+== --

"They're here," Eula Lemoy told Millicent McIlhaney, who was holding the receiver with her shoulder while she rolled out pie crust.

"They're here," Elsie McMay told Joyce Lambertino's niece, since Joyce was hanging over the toilet bowl and unavailable to take the call. Saralee grasped the implications of the terse message, and when the retching noises stopped, relayed it through the bathroom door.

"Gwenneth D'Amourre has hair like a burst of sunshine," Kevin began, then stopped when he caught the full wattage of his beloved's glare. "But it's kinda messy," he added hastily.

"One of them's an absolute hunk!" Tracy told Heather, using the pay telephone at the Suds of Fun Launderette. "If he so much as spoke to me, I'd fall over dead."

Jim Bob didn't tell anybody anything. He stood in the doorway of Jim Bob's SuperSaver Buy 4 Less across the road from the Flamingo Motel, his arms crossed and his tongue flicking faster than a grass snake's. He didn't notice the sweat dribbling down his back as he watched Gwenneth carry some little fool suitcase into one of the motel rooms. He wasn't sure, but he thought she'd gone inside #3.

"They're here," Mrs. Jim Bob told Brother Verber on the telephone. "I was planning to take some cookies to Lottie Estes, but I think I'd better stay home in case they drop by to see the house."

"They're here?" Estelle shrieked. She banged down the telephone without so much as a thank-you-for-calling and met Darla Jean McIlhaney's startled gaze in the mirror. "I do believe your hair's dry enough, especially in this heat, so you can run along now. That'll be five-fifty, including tax."

"They're here," Raz commented to Marjorie as they drove along the dotted line in front of Ruby Bee's Bar & Grill. Marjorie grunted unenthusiastically.

"Are they really here?" Larry Joe Lambertino asked the breathless student who'd burst into the shop room. "Or were you outside sneaking a smoke and now trying to slip into class without a tardy slip?"

"They're here," the student said, praying Mr. Lambertino couldn't smell the smoke on his breath.

"They're here," the dispatcher at the sheriffs department told somebody or other. Before the end of her shift, she'd lost track of whom all she'd told, and had called her cousin twice by mistake.

-- ==+== --

I drove out the county road, checking both sides for overgrown logging trails that led into the tangled brush and scrubby oak trees. I stopped a few times to examine promising openings, but they either went only a few yards or had no tire tracks in the dust.

I passed the remains of the barn and continued on until I came to a house several miles farther down the road. Billy Dick had said the first house with lights on, I reminded myself as I went to the door and knocked.

An elderly woman opened the door an inch and stared at me with the malevolence of a crow. "You selling something?"

I showed her my badge and asked if she'd been home the night of the fire. She curtly assured me she hadn't and slammed the door in my face. I drove to the next house, where no one was home. The only other house had a blankness that suggested it was uninhabited, and a quick look through the window confirmed it.

Making a note to stop at the middle house on my way back to Maggody, I drove into Hasty and found the blue house across from the gas station. The birdbath was there; the truck was not. I knocked on the door several times, and was about to leave when I heard rock music from the backyard of the house.

I tracked it down to a transistor radio next to a stack of magazines and a beach towel. The girl on the towel was prone, her bottom covered by a skimpy patch of material and her back bared and shining like a well-oiled lettuce leaf.

"Trudi?" I said as I approached.

She lifted her head. "Who are you?"

"Arly Hanks, the police chief in Maggody. I came by to ask you a few questions about the night of the fire."

"I don't know why." She fumbled with the top of the bikini until it was hooked, sat up, and put on sunglasses. Her face was basically flat, and her mouth sagged above a chin that seemed to slide into her neck. Sullenness had already created permanent lines between her eyes, and the discernible protrudence of her forehead hinted at an alliance with the Buchanon clan.

I moved to the shade under a persimmon tree and took out my notebook. "You called Billy Dick MacNamara at nine o'clock?"

"I did what? You'd better stay out of the sun, lady, or get yourself a hat."

I repeated my question and waited as she took a cigarette from a pack concealed by the towel. "You've got it about as wrong as it gets," she said, blowing smoke at me. "I wouldn't call creepy Billy Dick if he paid me, and neither would any other girl in the county. Talk to my brother, Willard the Weirdo. He and Billy Dick are real big on some stupid game where they sit around and pretend they're dwarfs. It makes me want to puke."

She stubbed out the cigarette and flopped down on the towel. Confused, I stood there for a moment, then went to the back door and knocked.

The boy who appeared was as unattractive as his sister. I estimated his age at thirteen or fourteen. As I took in his slight build and faintly crafty features, it occurred to me he might do the role of dwarf quite well. Not the rollicky, rolypoly kind that belts out, "Heigh-ho, heigh-ho," but the gnarly kind that lives underground and creeps out at night to create trouble. Then again, it wasn't Willard's fault that someone in the lineage had cohabited with a Buchanon. I tried to take a more charitable attitude as I asked him if he was Willard.

"I'm Willard. What do you want?" he said, attempting to sound belligerent.

"I need to ask you some questions. Did you talk to Billy Dick MacNamara the night of the fire?"

"Yeah," he muttered. "I called him about the map at nine o'clock, and he came over to help me get it fixed." He caught my blank look and added, "It's a map of the tunnels leading out of the dungeon of Balthazar Castle. We take turns being the dungeonmaster in a role-playing game, okay?"

"Were your parents here?"

"They left to see if my great-aunt was gonna die from some fall." He glanced at his sister, then lowered his voice. "My pa made me promise to stop playing the game. I'm not supposed to call Billy Dick, so it was the first time all week I had a chance to talk to him. Somewhere in the tunnel there's a dragon capable of burning up everything in sight. If that happens, this game's over, and we've been in it for more than a month." He gave me a tight smile. "Then we'll switch being dungeonmaster. Billy Dick's still pissed over an earlier game, when he was attacked by an army of trolls after he'd lost his cloak of invisibility. They had him for supper and sucked his bones for breakfast."

I had to remind myself that I was at the back door of an ordinary house in Hasty, a goodly distance from the dungeon beneath Balthazar Castle. The sun was shining, and rather than the gnashing of trolls' teeth, rock music was drifting from a transistor radio. "That's fine, Willard," I said. "All I need to do is confirm that Billy Dick was on his way to your house when he saw the fire."

"Well, he was. He got here after ten and stayed for a couple of hours, working on the map. I can show it to you if you want."

"No, I'll take your word for it. Why did your father make you promise to stop the game?"

"He says it's foolishness to pretend you've got magical power and can defeat monsters. I say it beats the hell out of living in Hasty, surrounded by pea-brained jocks and fat sluts like my sister."

"Are your parents here now?"

"No, and you got no reason to talk to them." He went inside and closed the door.

Trudi did not move as I went past her. A robin perched on the edge of the birdbath watched me as I maneuvered around a truck, pulled out onto the empty road, and headed back to Maggody, rehashing Trudi's condemnation of Billy Dick and her brother's of her. The occupants of the middle house on the road had not returned, and the wizened crow was not in her yard.

Traffic seemed heavier than usual as I parked in front of the PD, but I wrote it off as a hot sale at the supermarket and went inside to check for messages. The dispatcher at the sheriffs office sounded irritated as she told me to hold my horses while she sorted through the unholy mess LaBelle had left at the end of the shift.

"Here's one," she said at last. "Somebody name of Wade Elkins wants you to call him. Oh, and some sergeant from the state police, but I can't rightly make out the name." Papers rustled for a minute. "Well, ain't this something?"

"Ain't what something?" I said, allowing a little irritation of my own to taint the line. As I listened to her relate some garbled message about someone being here, I realized I could smell a minute trace of smoke. I hung up the receiver and walked (okay, crept) to the doorway that led to the back room.

The back room was smaller than the front, and its only redeeming feature was that I didn't have to go in there very often. There was a scarred wooden table that was covered with all the idiotic paperwork that came at me on a regular basis. On the wall, the county survey map was curling at the corners. The lone chair was laden with manuals and ancient newspapers.

I made sure that the coffee pot was turned off. The metal cabinet that housed the radar gun, the .38 Special, and other toys of the trade, such as my box with three real bullets, was as I'd last seen it.

Wrinkling my nose, I told myself that I was imagining the smell, that I'd had arson on the brain too long. However, as I started back, I glanced into the metal trashcan. In the bottom was a small pile of feathery white ashes. I bent down and poked my finger into one; it immediately disintegrated into drifting flakes. A dozen blackened matches ringed the ashes, as if someone had struck them methodically, one by one, and dropped them into the trashcan.

I asked myself why someone had burned a piece of paper and a bunch of matches in my trashcan, but nothing much came to mind. I was back at my desk before it occurred to me that this mysterious someone had come into the PD while I was gone, started a fire, and left without leaving a courteous note explaining the purpose of the visit.

Neither door had been locked, naturally. I'd been gone most of the afternoon, but I hadn't kept anyone informed of my plans. Most days I'm in and out, depending on my mood. I have visitors on occasion, Raz Buchanon being the most frequent, but he was hardly the type to leave such a peculiar calling card. I was shaking my head and making all sorts of unattractive faces when the front door opened. I looked up into the eyes of a Greek god. A middle-aged Greek god, but that was perfectly all right with me. Dark hair with a touch of silver, milk chocolate brown eyes, a nose carefully sculpted, a friendly smile exposing teeth as evenly aligned as markers in a military cemetery. The rest of him wasn't bad, either, particularly in an Italian silk suit that had been tailored down to the last stitch.

"Well, hello," he said in a deep voice that did nothing to mar the package.

"Hi," I squeaked. Sad, but true.

"Is the chief in?"

I couldn't tell him the truth -- that the only thing the chief was in was the throes of a torrid pubescent fantasy. I managed a nod.

His smile broadened as he approached the desk. "And might I see him, if it's not too much trouble?"

"You can't see him because he's a she."

"Is he, now? That's intriguing." He sat down in the chair across from me and silently studied me as if I were a unfamiliar tidbit on a dinner plate. He wasn't appalled by what he was seeing, but he wasn't prepared to take a bite until he knew what it was.

"I'm the chief," I said at last. "Arly Hanks."

"I don't think I've ever heard the name Arly before," he said. "Is that a local tradition?"

"It's Ariel." Gawd, I love it when I'm articulate and witty, each phrase exquisitely turned, each inflection and gesture meritious of an Oscar award.

He put his hand on his chest and cocked his head. " 'Go make thyself like a nymph o' the sea; be subject to no sight but thine and mine.' That kind of Ariel?"

He got my Oscar, "Yes," I lied, seeing no reason to admit that I'd been named after a photograph taken from an airplane. It now hung over Ruby Bee's bed, the contour of the bar and grill outlined in ink. Although her spelling was faulty, she'd thought the word had a nice ring; her mother had held similar thoughts about an outbreak of measles fifty-odd years ago. Spots and shots -- a family heritage.

"Then I'm delighted to meet you, Chief Hanks," he said, standing up and extending a manicured hand.

I was getting up my nerve to extend my own when the door banged open.

"They're here," Plover said. He stopped as if he'd run into an electric fence. "But I guess you know that, don't you?