Murder Talks Turkey (18 page)

“What would you do with that information?” he hissed, no longer smiling. “I bet you’d call up Sheriff Snell and lay it all out for him.”

“That would be a good start.” And, I thought, I’d make a citizen’s arrest, slap handcuffs on you right this minute. My purse contents are wonderful. Talk about prepared. Now if Blaze would show up and hold Tony while I cuffed him, we’d be in business.

“Let’s see,” he snarled, showing me the side of him that he hid from the public, the side Lyla had mentioned a few minutes ago. “It would be my word against yours. Who would our good sheriff believe? You? I coach baseball every summer, make donations to all the local events, and go to church every Sunday. You’re nothing but a crackpot with an addled son and a dysfunctional family.”

I kept my face impassive and hard, but his words had shocked me. Just wait, I thought, Lyla’s throwing you a curve ball. We’ll see whose family is more dysfunctional. I envisioned hauling him in, throwing him in a cell, tossing away the key.

Dickey wouldn’t listen to me if I brought in Tony. He’d add new charges to my growing list of crimes. He’d book me for assaulting Tony.

Our truck turned toward me, two blocks down. I had to get away from this slime bucket before he saw our mode of transportation. Walter’s truck was the only reason we were still on the road working the case.

“I’ll get you eventually,” I said.

Tony laughed. “You don’t have a single piece of concrete evidence.”

He continued laughing like he’d just heard a world-class joke. I trotted toward the truck, making small, stealthy motions, which Blaze picked up on. He turned away from Delta Avenue, parked, and waited for me to get in the truck a few minutes later.

“Tony’s our man,” I said to Blaze, trying to dodge a torrent of kisses from Fred. “He confessed.”

I told Blaze about my conversations with Lyla and Tony. “He’s right, you know,” Blaze said. “What you think you know isn’t worth much if you can’t back it up.”

Snow continued to fall while we drove to Escanaba to our motel hole-in-the-wall. I had learned a lot from living life on the wrong side of the law. The latest truth worried me the most.

Once I acquired outlaw status, my word became about as good as a roll of toilet paper.

Chapter 26

I HAVEN’T SEEN YOUR STORY in the paper yet,” I said first thing Tuesday morning to Laura DeLand over the motel phone.

“My boss killed it,” she said, with genuine regret in her voice. “I tried hard. Sorry.”

“Did he say why?”

“I have to substantiate the information you gave me before we can print it.”

“In other words, they don’t believe me.”

“That’s one way of putting it. I haven’t given up. I’ll keep working it.”

“How’s your houseguest?”

“She’s okay.”

“I’d like to come by and visit sometime soon.”

“Anytime. That’s the beauty of my job. I have the power to protect my sources.”

Laura DeLand was smart and sweet, but she was young and still had fantasy-land visions of how the world was supposed to work. She’d learn soon enough that no one was safe from suspicion or prosecution. Not even a news reporter. Not even a life-long sheriff like Blaze. Not even an innocent widow like me.

We still didn’t have a new update on Kitty, but we had one on Cora Mae.

“I have a date with Kitty’s doctor,” she said from the center of my bed, fluffing the pillow and grinning. “A doctor. Can you believe it?”

“Sure,” I said. “You’re hot. Why wouldn’t a doc want to go out with you?”

“We’re going to have dinner in Marquette, then David is taking me to the Ojibwa casino to teach me roulette.”

She bounced to a sitting position and rummaged through a tote bag. “I brought you more disguises.” Cora Mae held up one of her man-hunting stretch outfits. Spandex stuff looks great on her, but makes me feel like a stuffed sausage. “And heels.” She hauled out little strappy things.

I shot her a look.

“You have to play the part,” she advised. “What good is changing your hair color if you still look like Gertie Johnson from the neck down? I’ll paint your toenails for you.”

Fred chose that moment to leap on the bed and settle next to her. Blaze came out of the bathroom and plopped in a chair in front of the TV

“Glamorous life we’re leading,” I said, watching Cora Mae layer red polish on my toes. “Actually, it’s the pits. We have to sneak around. And we worry all the time about someone identifying us. We aren’t accomplishing a thing besides racking up more charges against us. It’s only a matter of time before we’re caught.”

“Quit whining,” Cora Mae said. “It could be worse. We could be lying in the hospital with Kitty, riddled with bullets.”

“Or in the morgue,” Blaze added.

In the bathroom, I changed into the clothes that were supposed to make me into someone new. Then Cora Mae and I drove to the grocery store. She went inside and purchased food from a list I had given her. After that, we went to the hospital to visit Kitty.

No question about it, I was taking a risk by going in, but I couldn’t stay away. The last image I had of my friend wasn’t a pleasant one. I needed to replace it with one of her on the way to a full recovery.

Cora Mae had been by her side through the entire tragedy, so the intensive care nurses didn’t pay any attention when we walked past the nurse’s station.

“She’s on a respirator,” I gasped when I saw Kitty. Tears were welling in my eyes. “No one told me that. Can’t she breathe on her own? You should have warned me.”

“I thought I had.” Screens were flashing numbers and squiggly lines, monitoring her life. We sat for awhile without any movement from Kitty, no sign that she was alive, the respirator wheezing away. Murderous thoughts replaced my sadness.

I had to stay free until the person who did this was brought to justice. I wanted to shoot his eyes out. “What kind of slime would do something like this?” I said. But it was just a rhetorical question. Cora Mae didn’t have an answer.

George came in a little later, grinning widely when he saw the new me. He opened his mouth, closed it, shook his head.

“Well, say it,” I said.

“I don’t know quite what to say.”

“Tell her she’s beautiful,” Cora Mae said. “A woman likes to hear that when she’s changed her style.”

“Almost didn’t recognize her. That’s for sure.”

“This isn’t permanent,” I said.

George gave me a hug. We stayed a little longer without detecting any changes in Kitty’s condition. Then we went our separate ways.

__________

Blaze was pacing the floor like a madman when I got back from the hospital. His hair was standing on end and he really looked like he’d lost it. He reminded me of the threat some of the local parent’s used with their children when they were naughty. “Knock it off,” they’d warn them, “or I’ll send you to Newberry” Everyone knew what that meant. Until 1990, Newberry, the moose capital of Michigan, also was home to the U.P’s famous Newberry psychiatric hospital. Now it was a prison. Now that I thought about it, Blaze and I might end up in Newberry after all.

“They found the vehicle,” Blaze said. “It was on the news.”

I bit my lip. How did Dickey manage to find his truck so fast? We should have had months, maybe even years before anyone discovered it at the bottom of the lake. “It was bound to happen sooner or later,” I said.

He stared at me. “What are you talking about?”

That brought me up. I never told Blaze about the sheriff’s truck’s final resting place. “What are
you
taking about?” I shot back at him.

“Tony Lento’s car. They pulled it out of the Escanaba River right over where Pa died.”

“How do you know that?”

“The news.” Blaze jerked his head toward the television set and resumed pacing. “He went off the road. The car fell at least thirty-five feet.”

I cut the sound on the T.V. with the remote. “Did they find his body?”

“Not yet, but you know how the river is. They’re bringing in divers.”

The upper Escanaba River was wide and rocky. The current, especially now in the spring, was swift and strong. Tony’s body could have been carried downstream in the rapids.

I fell onto the sagging motel bed next to Fred, face first. I laid there motionless. My Barney used to fish for trout along that section of the river, hauling out browns, brooks, and rainbows. Everyone other than Blaze and me thought he’d died in his waders of a heart attack, because that’s what we told them. The truth was he’d stepped into a hole, his waders filled up, and he drowned. Barney was a proud man and would have been horrified if all of Tamarack County knew the truth.

I could hardly bear to think of Barney’s last moments under the high water or the terror he must have experienced when he realized he wouldn’t escape the death trap. I didn’t have quite the same compassionate thoughts for Two-Time Tony, but I still was shocked by the news.

Envisioning the bridge above the river was easy. I’d been back to the site several times, reliving the horror, talking to Barney.

Then I had another thought. What if Tony had faked his own death? Maybe he had the money and he wanted to make a clean start someplace warm with his little chickadee? He could have pushed the car over the top of the bridge and made his escape in a get-away car.

I rubbed Fred’s ears while I thought. Where did that leave Blaze and me? Up the creek without a paddle, so to speak. Tony was the sneakiest, snakiest man I’d ever had to deal with. What a way to throw the whole town into stunned mourning when all along they should have been building a hanging scaffold and tying a noose.

And what about Lyla? She was fed up, but she must still have feelings for him. How could he leave her like that, thinking he was dead? I had a repertoire of nasty names to call him. If only he was right in front of me.

I considered appealing to Dickey’s common sense, groveling at his feet, and hoping he’d listen. By the time I went to sleep, I decided it was the right thing to do. It was a good thing I waited until the next day to turn myself in. By then I’d changed my mind.

Chapter 27

BLAZE HAD A BAD NIGHT. His old suspicions came back and it took all my persuasive reasoning to keep him in the motel room. Our family spent months helplessly watching him fight the infection in his brain. We still didn’t know how it had developed. Was it something that came out of the ground? Was it airborne? A wood tick? We’d probably never know the answer.

We were lucky to have him back. Lots of people die from meningitis.

I gave him a few dollars to count and stack and that kept him happy for a while. But the night was long and hard. Enemies came at him from all sides. They were at the windows, at the door, behind the shower curtain. I didn’t tell him how close to the truth he really was.

I started to suspect that he had most of his paranoid symptoms when he grew tired. All the drama was wearing on him. So Wednesday morning, Cora Mae knocked quietly on our motel door and tiptoed in to watch over him. She looked tired from her hot doctor date, but happy as she snuggled under my bed covers. I left Blaze snoring away, dead to the world.

Fred opened an eye, but seemed content where he was, curled on the floor.

Then I went over the edge after Tony.

__________

According to TV6 news, the search for Tony’s body had followed the Escanaba River toward the river’s mouth in Escanaba where it ended at Lake Michigan. Nightfall had hampered their efforts, so they were at it again today working their way downstream.

The investigation on the upper end was complete. No body yet.

I parked the car a ways beyond the broken rail where the car had left the road. I changed from Cora Mae’s heels to sneakers, combed through the black bob with my fingers, and started down to the river. The view from the top used to be breathtakingly beautiful. After Barney’s death, I couldn’t see its beauty anymore.

The trip down is steep and rocky without any visible path. I had to clutch at brush to keep from falling, but finally I stood at the bottom, scanning out over the river for signs of Tony’s car. Dickey must have had it removed yesterday, but I could still focus on the angle of projection and make a guess as to where it landed - smack in the middle.

The current rode high and mighty, swirling and slapping against the rocky shore at my feet. If Tony had been inside the car, he was dead. If he hadn’t been inside, I wondered how he could have pulled it off. The car had to be traveling at more than an idle to break through the barrier above. How do you get a car up to speed on the road, jerk it to the proper angle for impact, and get out of the way before it goes over?

Quite a trick. He had to be a desperate man to even attempt it.

I poked around, keeping one eye on the road above in case company joined me. Nothing worthwhile surfaced. I walked along the riverbank, studying the ground for clues, anything out of the ordinary. Nothing.

That’s when I drove over to the jail to turn myself in and take my chances with the legal system, the one I’ve been in conflict with all my life. Anything to do with the government sits poorly with most of our community and that includes me. Having Blaze as sheriff was tolerable because he bent the rules once in awhile, looked the other way if he felt it was right. Blaze really cared about the community. But Dickey Snell? He reminded me of why we dislike government.

No one was there. So I took off the wig and went to Ruthie’s for a piece of pie.

Otis was the only other customer in the Deer Horn. He flung his hands over his head in a gesture of surrender. “Don’t draw on me, Gertie,” he said. “I’ll admit to anything you want me to, just don’t shoot.” Otis had a grin on his face to let me know he was kidding around.

“There must be something illegal about parking a train someplace other that in a train station,” I quipped back. “I’ll have to shoot you twice for that infraction. Ruthie, I need a pot of coffee and a piece of cherry pie. That last one was delicious.”