Murder Talks Turkey (9 page)

“Okay,” Mary said. “We’ll have a little party together. Then Gertie will drive Grandma back and I’ll drive you home, dear.”

“Gertie doesn’t have a driver’s license,” Grandma said, tattling on me. “I wouldn’t let her drive my lawn mower.”

“Well,” Mary said. “We’ll figure something out.”

While Mary and I waited in line, I kept a watchful eye on Blaze’s car. Our turn came. While we were ordering, right there under our very noses, Blaze backed out of the parking space and tooled away.

Mary and I had to abandon our already ordered ice cream and race to the truck.

“They’re headed for the lake,” Mary yelled, not at all as peaceful as she was on her arrival at my house.

We drove past the Gladstone Motel and sped around the curve onto Lake Shore Drive. “I don’t see them yet,” I said. We sailed past the yacht harbor and the lagoon. “There.” I pointed. “By the Beach House.”

“I don’t know what it takes to ditch you two,” Grandma crabbed when we forced them out of the car. I thought about slapping handcuffs on the old witch. “You sure can’t take a hint. I want to spend time alone with my grandson.”

Which was a blantant lie. Grandma’s idea of quality time tended to highlight the wonders of discipline. Blaze’s ears were lodged forward on his head more than they should be after all the ear twists he had to endure over the years. She’d still get a grip on them when he made her mad.

“I’m going to Kids’ Kingdom,” Blaze said, looking off to the right toward a playground with an enormous wooden fort. To our left, tall grasses waved in the breeze and a walkway led down to the waters of Little Bay de Noc.

“I’ll go with you,” Mary said to her husband.

Blaze took off with Mary in tow. I heard him say, “Grandma said my money’s hidden in the fort.”

“You don’t have any hidden money,” Mary said. “You’re still having delusions from the meningitis.”

“Spoil sport,” Grandma said under her breath. “Let’s go look at the waves.” She headed for a boardwalk.

The wind had picked up. Whitecaps the size of freighters formed in the open water, rolled toward us, then broke and slammed against the fine white sand of the beach. My hair blew this way and that, covering my eyes until I held it away with one hand on my forehead. Grandma shuffled through the sand, then stopped. She cast a complaint my way, but the wind picked it up and carried it off in another direction.

A man and woman sat with their backs to us, wrapped in a blanket. Several other people walked along the beach. A dog loped near the water with no owner in sight.

My eyes latched on two women with rolled-up jeans, wading out in the lake. One of them kicked her bare feet through the waves with angry thrusts.

April’s air temperature, in spite of the wind, was fairly comfortable because of the sun’s warmth. But stepping into Lake Michigan at this time of year had to be as cold as treading over ice cubes.

The great lake’s water never quite warmed up enough for an enjoyable swim. I’ve been in it when the water was so cold my ankles ached from wading for only a few seconds. And that was in July!

I pulled the binoculars out of my fishing vest and focused in. The tall one had hair almost to her waist. The sun caught it just right, giving her head a halo effect. She said something before they turned around and headed for shore. She must have stepped in a little too deep because her jeans were wet. The other turned and I recognized her.

“I’ll be right back,” I said to Grandma. “I have to say hello to someone.”

Angie Gates didn’t see me approaching until I was almost beside her. When she did notice me, her eyes opened wide in surprise and she backed up into the waves.

The credit union teller’s face was blotchy, her eyes red from crying. Her hair whirled as the wind picked up, creating an effect which was the exact opposite of the halo I’d imagined moments before – more like something out of a horror flick.

I could see her mind working over the situation.

She took off running down the shoreline, pulling the other woman along, shouting at her to hurry. I knew better than to chase Angie. She was years younger and stronger than me, and whatever was happening to her to make her run away had given her added forward momentum.

The tall woman was beautiful, the kind that made me wish for one more go around in her body instead of mine. I never looked like that, even in my best year.

I glanced down at the waves near my feet.

Anyone who lives near the Great Lakes would know simple physics. Most things tossed into the waves wash back up on shore. Unless the object filled with water and disappeared under the lake’s sand carpet. Angie must have thought they would sink.

One did. I saw a flash of color before it vanished under the weight of water and sand. The other rolled toward me. With each new wave, it tumbled closer.

I kicked off my shoes, braced myself for the shock of cold water, waded in, and picked it up.

I held an orange sneaker in my hand.

Chapter 12

THERE’S A GANG UNDER THE bridge,” Kitty said from the front porch of her dilapidated house. Kitty’s yard still looked like a junkyard, even after official town warning number three. But since she wanted to be a lawyer, I wasn’t about to interfere. “They call themselves the Orange Gang.”

Cora Mae guffawed. She had bobby pins stuck in her mouth while she wrapped Kitty’s wet head in pin curls. One of them flew out when she laughed. “The Orange Gang, what a name,” she said, talking out of the side of her mouth.

I sat down beside Kitty. It was the safest place to hide from the view up her house dress. I thought about the bridge Kitty had referred to, the Mackinac Bridge that connected the lower and upper peninsulas. “Tell me more.”

“All we got from Dickey was a name,” she said. “The dead guy behind your truck was Bob Goodyear.”

“Goodyear? Spelled like the Goodyear blimp?” I scribbled in a notebook, listing names and drawing arrows between possible connections. All the lines looped and crossed until my effort looked like toddler scribbling.

Kitty nodded.

“Quite moving your head,” Cora Mae complained. “Now I have to start that one over.”

“I got most of my information from an Internet search,” Kitty said. “In the 1920s , the Purples ran the rackets in lower Michigan. They were tough. Tough enough to stand up to Capone and Scarface. Goodyear’s gang comes from Grand Rapids and they’re trying to emulate the Purples—graffiti, symbols, tough talk, and a color all their own. Orange.”

“They probably picked orange because purple is its complementary color,” Cora Mae said.

“Blue is,” Kitty corrected her.

“Close enough,” Cora Mae said, smashing a strand of curled hair against Kitty’s head and anchoring it with two bobby pins.

“A gang,” I said, in awe. In the U.P. we know about gangs. As in “let’s take a picture of the whole gang in front of that wood pile.” Or “Let’s invite the whole gang over and polish off a case of Bud.”

One time, a motorcycle gang stopped at Ruthie’s on their way through Stonely. That scared a lot of residents that day, before moving on. Otis from the train is another gang member, the railroad gang.

But this was different. This was the real, mean, and ugly, inside and out.

“Why did Bob Goodyear extirpate Kent Miller in the first place?” I wondered out loud, getting a kick out of my word for the day. “They both wore orange shoes, so they were on the same team.”

Kitty shrugged, earning her a gentle slap on the top of the head from Cora Mae, the beautician.

I waited breathlessly for Kitty to use her word for the day again. I longed to watch her mouth form higgledy-piggledy.

“Just because they’re in the same gang,” she said, “doesn’t necessarily mean they were best buddies. After all, they came from a lumpen society, which is probably rife with internal problems.

Lumpen? Rife? Where was higgledy-piggledy?

I didn’t know what to say. Lumpen wasn’t on my radar.

“They’re riff-raff for sure,” Cora Mae said through the bobby pins.

“Besides,” Kitty said, “Dickey talked to Kent Miller’s mother. His whole family lives in the Soo. The mother said he’d just started going down to Grand Rapids recently. She didn’t know anything about orange shoes.”

“That’s a mother for you,” Cora Mae said. She glanced at me. “What have you been up to?”

“Chasing my family across the county,” I replied, giving them a short overview of my quest for the escapees. They laughed until tears ran down their faces. I guess you had to be there to appreciate the seriousness of the matter.

Then I got to the meat of the story. “Angie from the credit union was walking the Gladstone beach. When she saw us, she ran away.”

“If Grandma Johnson was anywhere nearby, I can see why,” Kitty said. “Don’t take it personally.”

“An orange sneaker washed up on shore,” I said.

“I’ll be dang,” Cora Mae said, while chewing a wad of gum. Her favorite exclamation is cripes, but recently she’s added dang to her developing vocabulary. “Where’s the shoe?”

“In my truck.”

“We have to tell Dickey,” Kitty said. I could hear the reluctance in her voice. Including the law in our operation was a last resort.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” I agreed, my feelings about involving the acting sheriff running along the same vein as Kitty’s. “I’m going to heat up pea soup for the family, since we didn’t have lunch. Unless you count the ice cream that I didn’t get any of, thanks to Blaze. Then the three of us should go find Dickey and tell him about Angie.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to scope out her place first,” Kitty said.

“After dark,” I agreed, starting to feel night’s chill crowding out the late afternoon air.

“What about Tony?” Kitty asked. “Ouch, Cora Mae, watch those pins. You’re digging into my scalp.”

“Lyla fired us,” I said, telling them about the phone call from Lyla and the cozy couple’s re-alliance. “We’re officially unemployed.”

“You did the right thing by keeping quiet about the other woman,” Cora Mae said. “You can’t get involved in their marriage.”

“Lyla hired us to get involved. I feel like I’m letting her down.”

“I hope she’s going to pay us for the work we did,” Kitty said.

Now was as good a time as any to break it to my partners. “We had a trade agreement. She’s giving us manicures.” I slung it out there, and it hovered in mid-air.

After a period of dead silence, Kitty exploded. “What! I don’t have any other job but this one! I was counting on cold cash in my hand.” She stood up, hands on hips, and stomped a foot.

“Oh goody,” Cora Mae said, holding one hand up for a quick assessment. “I want some of those acrylic nails, the French ones.”

Kitty held her hands in my face so I could see her nails. I never noticed before, but they were chewed down into the quick worse than I remembered. “Do I look like a woman who cares about her nails? Do I? I have to pay for my online legal course. How am I going to do that?”

I’d never seen Kitty so mad before. She must really be desperate for money.

“We could have another rummage sale,” I suggested, looking around Kitty’s private junkyard. “And Herb’s bar needs a part-time bartender. Since my grandsons own it, I can get you in.” I crossed my fingers and hoped that Red and Ed wouldn’t mind that I was doing a little hiring for them.

“How soon?” Her voice was still angry.

“Anytime. Want to work tonight?”

“Saturday night will be too busy at the bar for a training lesson. All I know how to do is pour beer.”

“That’s great, because that’s all anybody ever orders.”

“Not tonight. We have a surveillance run. And you know how I like those.”

__________

Had Angie Gates killed Bob Goodyear behind the Trouble Buster truck with my Glock? Was she the third partner? Did she turn against the men, planning to keep all the money for herself? I thought about that while heating up pea soup.

It smelled delicious, and I realized how hungry I was. Pea soup is a traditional Swedish dish that I learned to make from Grandma Johnson, with a few minor revisions. She uses pig’s feet or pig knuckles in hers. Mine is made with ham hocks. I gave the soup a final stir and processed some more information about Angie.

I’d seen her at the dance. She looked a little fidgety. I thought she was waiting for someone who was running late. The only thing I knew for a fact was she hadn’t killed the credit union robber because she’d been on the floor behind the counter klonked out. And I’d seen the whole thing happen. Did the orange shoes she was throwing in the water belong to Bob? Or was she a member of the same gang and hiding the evidence?

“It’s ready,” I called out to the Bobbsey Twins, who were napping in the living room. Blaze’s large body covered the couch and Grandma slept upright in a side chair. Mary, who was watching the TV6 news, had to shake them awake.

Fred ate with us, only his meal was in a dish on the floor. Kibble and a crumbled piece of his favorite—bacon.

“Pea soup’s lots better made with pig’s feet,” Grandma said, before she even had the spoon to her mouth to taste it.

I sat down and ignored her while I ate.

Blaze hummed, carrying on our family tradition of humming when the grub was good. I smiled.

“Thanks for having us over,” Mary said.

“You shouldn’t have to come home from a trip and start cooking right away,” I said.

Grandma humpfed. “You women don’t know how good you have it.”

“Sure we do,” Mary answered, sweetly. That’s Mary, always smoothing ruffled feathers.

“Don’t patronize me,” said Grandma.