The Tenor Wore Tapshoes (16 page)

"Aha! I knew that you did it!" Meg crowed. "You are hoisted on your own petard."

"Oh, man..."

Chapter 14

"Okay, Piggy. On your feet." I grabbed Piggy by his lapels and gave a heave. My lapel-yank could get most men up out of their chairs quicker than a floozy carrying loaded mousetraps in her undies, but yanking on Piggy left me with nothing but two fistfuls of lapel-shaped seersucker and a stupid look on my face.

"You ruined my suit," he managed to oink while stuffing an entire apple into his mouth. "I'm gonna fix you good!"

"Hang on, Piggy. It'll take you twenty minutes to peel yourself out of that chair and by then I'll be long gone. Besides, your suit looks pretty good like that. Very contemporary. Nehru-like."

"Yeah? You think?"

"Absolutely." I looked across the table. "Right, boys?" Piggy's henchmen nodded agreeably and put their faces back into their troughs.

"Now listen, Piggy," I said, wiping his mouth with one of his lapels. "I need to find Jimmy Leggs. It's pretty clear that Candy Blather's murder was a warning to you to lay off the hymnal-fix."

"Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't." Piggy hoofed a slab of limburger up to his snout. "I generally don't take no warnings."

"But you'll take it if it was from Jimmy Leggs?"

Piggy grunted in the affirmative and flapped his jowls up and down. "It ain't a good career move to go against Jimmy Leggs."

"Where can I find him, Piggy?"

"You don't find him. He finds you."

"How were you and Candy cooking the hymnal?" I waved a protein-bar under his snout, and he was on it like a piranha on a corndog.

"It was easy money. All we had to do was make sure that people's favorites appeared in the new hymnal. One grand a pop. Candy had the connections. I provided the muscle."

"So, if I wanted to include 'Jesus, Friend Of Thronging Pilgrims? '"

"Cost you a grand."

"'Love Grew Where The Blood Fell?'"

"A grand."

"'Onward Christian Soldiers?'"

"Heh, heh. That one would probably cost you two grand," giggled Piggy. "There's a lot of hostility goin' around about that one." He snorked up a handful of jellybeans. "We could also rig some 'inclusive' language if you wanted," he said in-between chomps. "You know, like 'All Creatures of our God and Pal' and 'Sponge of Ages'".

"'Sponge of Ages?'"

"Yeah. Candy said that some minister thought that 'Rock' was too masculine and aggressive. It sent the wrong message. 'Sponge' is nurturing and more in keeping with today's theology."

"So you changed it?"

Piggy grunted gleefully. "We been doing it for years! Not bad, eh? Any hymn you wanted. Cost you a grand. Me and Candy could work it in."

"What're you going to do now?"

"Guess I'll go back to hustling green grocers."

"There much slop in that?"

"Beats workin'."

* * *

"Not bad. I like Piggy. He's a good character."

"Yeah, thanks."

"And you seem to actually have a plot."

"I think so," I answered. "Although it's hard to tell sometimes."

"Yeah. I used to feel that way, too." He pulled his fedora down over his eyes, adjusted his glasses and lit his pipe. I watched the smoke curl up around his head. "I'd work for two weeks straight on what I thought was a pretty good story and end up tossing the whole lot. How's your murder case coming?"

"Murder case?" I asked.

"The body you found in the church."

"It's not really a case," I said, as I clicked off the light and stacked the one-page chapters to my serial mystery neatly beside the typewriter. "He's been dead for years. The killer's dead by now, too."

"It has been said that nobody cares about the corpse. This is nonsense, of course. You're a writer, aren't you? Writers don't throw away a valuable element to their story. It's like saying that this man means no more to you than the murder of an unknown man in a city you never heard of."

"Hmmm. You're right."

"I could help you with your story. I've got a lot of plots left over. Poodle Springs. I never finished that one."

"I think someone finished it for you," I said.

"Really? Any good?"

"Yeah. Yeah, it was."

* * *

"Hayden," said Father George, taking off his cassock in the sacristy, "that was quite a nice service. Do you have just a second to chat?"

"Absolutely. What's up?"

"Remember when I told you that we were going to be looking for a parish administrator?"

"Sure. Have you found someone? I didn't even know we had advertised the position."

"I was talking with Rob Brannon…have you two met?"

"Yep."

"And he indicated that since he doesn't really have his law practice up and running, he'd be happy to do it until we found a full-time person."

"Uh huh. And when would that full-time person start?"

"Maybe sometime next summer."

"Well, George, I think that would be an extremely bad idea."

Father George bristled. "And why is that?"

I shrugged and decided to hold my peace. "Just a gut reaction, I guess."

"Well, it's my decision and I think that Rob would be fine in the position. He's available, he's helpful, and he really wants to get involved in the life of the church."

"As you said, George, it's your decision," I said.

"Also, have you spoken with Brenda about her 'puppet- moment?' I suggested to her that some music might be nice. She didn't seem too keen on the idea, but I think it might get the Puppet-Moment off to a good start."

"Is this puppet thing something that we're going to do on a regular basis?" I asked, dreading the answer.

"Maybe once a month or so. It depends on how it goes."

* * *

"I hear your son's in town," said Nancy to Noylene as she made her way to our table. Sundays were usually Noylene's day off, but she was filling in for one of the other waitresses. I was sitting glumly at the "after church" table with Meg, Beverly Greene and Georgia Wester. Nancy, dressed in her new black motorcycle leathers, joined us, but apart from our little group, the place was empty.

Noylene was beaming. "He got in last night. He'll be stopping by in a little bit."

"Why so gloomy?" Nancy asked. "I thought I'd come in and show off my new duds, but you guys look pretty much down in the dumps."

"Church business," Bev said. "I do like your outfit, though."

"Rob Brannon has been made 'parish administrator,'" Georgia added.

"I don't trust that guy as far as I could throw him," said Nancy, joining our circle of dejection.

"And you've got a pretty good arm," I said. "I know what you mean. I've got a bad feeling about him, too. Can't put my finger on it though."

"Well, we've been through worse," Meg said. "Just remember back to this time last year."

We all looked at her, trying hard to remember last year's sacramental angst.

"The Wimmyn's Conference?"

We all silently nodded and took a unison sip of our coffees.

"Mother Ryan? And the sex dolls?"

We sipped again.

"So, this too will pass," said Meg, hopefully.

We nodded once more, all of us staring down at the table in a picture of dejection.

"And he might not be bad at all." Meg wasn't convincing any of us.

"Nothing we can do anyway," said Bev. "So let's look on the bright side. Maybe he'll get everything running smoothly."

"Maybe," said Georgia.

"Maybe," said Meg.

"In a pig's eye," I snarled.

* * *

"This here's my son, D'Artagnan," said Noylene, interrupting our melancholy with a happy chirp. "He's studyin' to be a detective."

We all looked up at Noylene who had come up unnoticed. On her arm was one of the strangest looking men I ever hoped to meet. D'Artagnan Fabergé was about six foot, six inches tall and as big around as a medium-sized pencil. His hair style might once have been called a "mullet," but he'd taken it to another level. The top and sides of his coif were cut short, the notable exception being the thick lime-green strip of hair that ran right down the middle of his head and was just long enough to fold over on itself like the comb of a giant Martian rooster. In the back, his hair flowed in pink locks down to his shoulders. He was wearing black horn-rimmed glasses of the sort favored by Buddy Holly and he sported a wispy blonde mustache, a bad complexion and an earring made from a Pepsi bottle cap and a paperclip.

It wasn't terribly cold out, but mid-October generally meant sweater weather in St. Germaine and this Sunday was no exception. D'Artagnan, in contrast with the rest of us, was wearing a thin white t-shirt, faded jeans and orange high-top Converse tennis shoes. The arms sticking out of his t-shirt looked like long, animated twigs.

I heard a gasp, but it wasn't me, although I thought at first that it might have been. It was Bev. I just smiled and gulped, "Hi there."

"Would you like something to eat?" asked Georgia, the first at our table to regain her wits. She pushed a plate of Pete's rejected cinnamon Madonnas across the table. "You look starved. I mean…you look famished. I mean…you must be very hungry."

"Georgia!" Bev whispered through clenched teeth and unmoving lips. "Shhh."

"Nah. He just ate," said Noylene. "I made him a big lunch before I came in."

"I wouldn't mind having one for dessert," said D'Artagnan in a bass voice an octave lower than my own and accentuated with a prominent North Carolina drawl. He took the largest roll, the one that I thought looked a little like a genetic accident involving Yitzhak Rabin and a lobster, pushed the entire bun into his mouth and finished it in two quick bites as we all watched in amazed silence.

"I…" started Megan. I looked over at her. Her mouth was moving, but no sound was coming out. Finally she managed, "I hear you’re a detective."

"Well, ma'am, I just now got my certifyables, but I'm not really a detective, per se," said D'Artagnan, with special emphasis on the
per se.
"I'm a bounty hunter."

"A bounty hunter," said Georgia. "Fascinating. And whom do you hunt?"

"Criminals mostly." D'Artagnan sniffed with an air of authority that Barney Fife would envy. "Bail jumpers." He nodded his head and flipped his mullet off his shoulder with a wave of his skeletal hand.

"And are there many criminals in St. Germaine?" asked Beverly.

"I wouldn't know 'bout that, ma'am. I come to find the missin' artifac'."

"I don't like his hair like this," said Noylene, flipping the bottle cap hanging from the paper-clip with a long red fingernail. "Or that earring. He was such a handsome boy."

"I
tol'
you, Mama," D'Artagnan said as he pushed her hand away and stopped the miniature pendulum banging him in the neck. "I need to blend in with the unsavories. That's my job."

"Do you carry a gun?" I asked, knowing I didn't want to hear the answer. Everyone at the table stopped breathing.

"Not yet," he admitted. The table relaxed. "I applied for my permit though. It'll take three weeks." He brightened. "You know, I'm allowed to shoot folks. If they don't comply, that is."

"Yes. I remember reading that somewhere."