Lalla Bains 02 - A Dead Red Heart (18 page)

Oh yeah, that, my other job, the one that prevented me from doing the pre-flight check on my aircraft. I found the maintenance records, then disgusted that I'd let my TBO lapse, I locked up the office and took the farm truck to Roxanne's.

With the remains of our lunch piled up and waiting for a waitress, I sipped from a glass of Roxanne's sweet ice tea and listened while Caleb told me what was new in the case.

"We've had some leads that take us for long rides in the country. Oh, and one anonymous caller reported that Delmar was abducted by aliens back in high school, but the copy they left in his place is actually a much better looking version."

"Yeah, and the tinfoil headgear on Billy Wayne's mom is just a fashion statement. Any of those doomsayers happen to actually confess or tell you where Del has stashed his mom?"

"Don't I wish."

"Nothing gets this town going like a little murder. So, what do we have? Billy Wayne's mother thinks Del is hiding his mom, that is, Miss Cook, and nobody seems to know where either of them can be found."

"Detective Rodney is still asking when you're going to return his calls."

I shuddered at the mention of Rodney. "As annoying as Del is, I'd rather have his mom stay lost than have her tango with that creep." I blinked. "Del must have thought the same thing. Wish I could follow his example."

Roxanne offered a refill on our ice tea. "Just made."

Caleb and I mutely held out our glasses. Roxanne examined our glum expressions. "What're you two talking about?"

We gave her twin blank stares.

She did a sad shake of her head. "Okay then, do you think these Capris make me look fat?"

Caleb glanced at the cow-patterned Capris stretched across the great expanse of Roxanne's very ample hips, pulled in the grin, and instead gazed deeply into his ice tea.

She looked like a walking sofa, but she wasn't going to hear it from me. I asked, "How's Maya doing?"

Roxanne sniffed. "Haven't heard from her in a week." She thought it my fault Maya was in New York instead of in our local college. I thought Maya should be here to advise her mother on the folly of wearing anything bovine patterned.

I quickly changed the subject. "Roxanne, you're a poetry buff. What do you think about, 'The more there is, the less you see'? Does it mean anything to you?"

"Is this a line from a poem? I'm more of a Gwendolyn Brooks and Maya Angelou fan myself," she said, putting the pitcher on the table and motioning for me to move over.

The bench seats had been recently reupholstered in a cheerful floral pattern in anticipation that a new Motel 8 would be building in the empty lot next door. I had my fingers crossed on that, hoping it didn't go through as I wasn't ready to have my favorite café become another Denny's.

"We're stumped," I said. "Or I should say I am." With a nod from Caleb, I recounted what I'd learned so far, that Del and Billy Wayne's mothers were sisters, making the two men first cousins, and that Del's mother was convinced that I should find who killed Billy Wayne, and that Billy Wayne's mother was afraid that Del was dangerous.

Roxanne said, "Uh-huh. Didn't Billy Wayne's mom try to shoot you yesterday?"

"And she apologized, too."

"Makes them all sound like crackpots, don't it?"

"Gee, Roxy, you with a doctorate in psychiatry and that's the best you can come up with?"

Satisfied, she continued, "And here's another one for you; in my learned opinion, none of them are killers."

Caleb and I looked at each other. Roxy pulled the glass out of my hand, took a sip and handed it back. "I do make the best sweet ice tea, don't I? Listen you two, Del's silly, his mom and her sister are frightened and grieving, but none of them should be on a suspect list. What would be the motive?"

Caleb grunted. "If any of them has a motive, we'll find it."

Roxanne said, "Don' go wastin' your time, cowboy. There're other families in this town who'll happily tear each other to pieces, but not these people." She leaned back in her seat, now confident that she had our attention. "The Cook sisters may seem a little odd to you two, being all normal that you are, but I can tell you that in what counts for family those two old girls are tight."

Seeing that we needed a lesson in family psychology, she held up her fingers to count off the reasons. "Merriweather was in and out of rehab for years, but when she asked, Margery took her in, didn't she? Then there were the boys, Del and Billy Wayne. Del came home to see his mom through her last rehab. So, though Del appears to have cornered the market on professional nut case, the reality is that he cared enough to put his family first." She looked at me and then Caleb. "You don't get that Del Potts hid his mother so she won't get whacked?"

I sighed. "You have a point, Roxanne."

"Yeah, and it's no wonder Billy Wayne was a bit off. I mean, sniper duty—good God!"

I frowned. "You think he was misdiagnosed?"

She shrugged. "Not fair of me to quarterback at this late date. No doubt he had PTSD, but the psychotic episodes, well I just don't buy it. I've read about doctors who go and slap the wrong diagnosis on soldiers. I can't speak about what he dosed himself with to keep from going off the deep end, but from the few times I saw him, I'd say that boy was too busy drinking himself to death."

"Then the poem? Does it sound like a line from anything you've heard?"

Roxanne pulled on her ear. "Can you repeat it?"

"'The more there is, the less you see.'"

"Not anything I can recall."

"Maybe he poached it from one of Mr. Kim's fortune cookies," I said, frustrated that no one could come up with a winner for Billy Wayne's puzzling last words.

Roxanne turned her head as if listening to the cadence of silent words. "The Internet might have something. You ought to go through his stuff again. That would help, wouldn't it?"

"It would, except Mrs. Dobson burned all of her son's poetry."

Caleb reached into his pocket and took out some bills for our lunch. "I've got to go, ladies. If you think of anything, give me a call."

When Caleb was gone, Roxanne said, "You two are on again, I see."

"Yeah, I guess."

"Can't find any reason to push him away, huh?"

"I'm finding happiness for the first time in my life with someone who isn't preprogrammed to be a cheat and/or a liar and it's weird."

"The boys here have a pool, betting on when you'll get hitched."

"Not
if
, but
when
, huh?" Move out of the snug cocoon of my parental nest and get married for the third time? I felt the chilly draft of foreboding. "I can't believe I might even be considering it."

"Relax. Enjoy it. Count your blessings, girl. Let yourself be in love with someone who isn't going to fail you."

I looked away, unable to meet her eyes.

"Sweetpea, you said it, not me. I ain't no hypnotist like that new police woman, but you gotta ask yourself, why did you pick those losers?" When she saw the lines of distress on my face, she held up a hand. "I don't need to know what it was, or who it was that caused you to hang onto your bad opinion of yourself. The question for you is, are you gonna take it out and give it a real good look? Make sure it's worth hangin' onto after all these years? `Cause if it ain't, then get rid of it."

"How do you propose I do that?"

"You know us Baptists do our forgiving up front of the whole congregation so's everybody can say 'Amen!' I can see that you're thinking someday, but if you don't do it now before you and Caleb get hitched, you're going to carry it into your marriage, and that ain't good. You got to let go of that grudge you've been holding onto. If that person is already gone," she looked at me meaningfully, and I knew she was thinking of my mother's suicide, "write them a letter, read it again and again, until you believe you've said it enough, then have a little ceremony. Burn it. Burn it, and forgive."

"Like you did for your dad?"

"He showed up at my college graduation, sober too, as far as I could tell. It was the second most important thing he'd done in my life besides give me a name. I had to work up to forgiving his hard drinking and wasted life, and my only regret is that I didn't do that until after he died."

"Then what?"

"I wrote my dead daddy a letter, thanked him for being my parent. Poor job of it and all, he was still my daddy."

Roxy was thinking I was still angry with my mother, but that wasn't it. She might be dead, but she got me out of the burning house didn't she?

No, my mother wasn't the reason I chose duplicitous men. I simply took it for granted that no man was capable of being faithful. That is until Caleb and I became a possibility. Then why was I feeling skittish? Because Caleb had bungled his first attempt at a marriage proposal? It was even sillier of me to be mad at him.

"I'll think about it," I said.

She shrugged at my incomplete answer, giving over to our first subject. "If you're looking for suspects, you might want to ask yourself this question: What would you do if your brother lost his last chance at a heart transplant 'cause it went to a convicted felon instead?"

I drew in a sharp breath then let it out. "I think—I think if something like that happened to my brother, I'd probably want to commit murder. I just don't know if I would go through with it."

"Then you see where it might take someone."

"I'll have to remind Caleb."

"As for his poetry, what were they like—the one's he sent you, that is?"

"Billy Wayne's? After the first three I stopped reading them."

"You still have any of them?"

"I gave all the snowflakes he left on my car to the police. Evidence, they said. Not that Detective Rodney will let me within a mile of that box now." Then I brightened.
 
"But my new best friend, Pippa Roulette, might."

"I never heard you say that." Roxanne held up ten fingers to waggle them in front of her face. "I'm not seeing you pull out that cell phone and making that call," she said as she picked up her pitcher of tea and stood up. "And I'm definitely not hearing you talk some police woman into doing something illegal. As a matter of fact, I was never here."

I got to watch her cow-patterned Capris moo all the way through the swinging doors to the kitchen.

Pippa listened, and then agreed to meet me at the evidence building in a half hour.

Chapter seventeen:

I pulled into a space at the Modesto Police Evidence Building for my meeting with Officer Pippa Roulette, who promised a peek at the box that contained the last known poetry by Billy Wayne Dobson. Looking up at a clear blue sky, I saw none of the telltale clouds that predicted a change in the weather.

From the sycamores overhead, birds sang, hopped from branch to branch, fussed at each other, and generally went about the business of making more birds. In a nearby bush, a bird trilled, coughed, tried again, coughed, and finally gave up. Del Potts, knocking aside a couple of dusty branches, waved at me.

I strolled over to the bush and pulled him out.

"Everybody has been looking for you, Del."

"I know, I know, but I've got to stay incognito."

"How'd you know where to find me? Are you following me?"

"Of course I'm following you. You're my eyes and ears, remember?"

"What're you talking about? We never agreed to any such thing. And what've you done with your mother?"

He grinned, pleased to see that once again he had put a couple of symmetrical lines between my brows. Damnit. If I expected to keep the upper hand with Del, I was going to have to hold onto my temper.

"You figured it out that Miss Cook's my mom, huh? Good for you. Now, why're you going to see the luscious Pippa?"

"So it was you who called the cops, told them there was gun-fire and my red Caddy outside her home? What was that, another one of your 'just for fun' tricks?"

He shrugged, indifferent to the temper I was working on. Me mad at someone who didn't care, was a waste of time and I knew it.

"You still haven't told me how you knew I'd be here."