Totally Buzzed (A Miller Sisters Mystery) (2 page)

Much to my dismay, I noticed I had overlooked one minor detail about the lamp down in the crawlspace. The cowboy boot base, which normally would have been attached to a rattlesnake on a pole, was instead connected to a blue-jean covered leg. By Fred's shriek and the gagging noises coming from behind me, I guessed she saw it too.

"Damn, I hate dead bodies," I said lifting the rest of the flap. I pinched my nose and stared at the bloated and decomposing body of a woman.

2

Dead bodies really piss me off. Twenty-three years of wading through blood, guts, and bad guys, too much booze and a bleeding ulcer later, retirement never felt so good. I have had about enough of staring at dead bodies in my lifetime, and I wished this one would have found its way somewhere else. What made my stomach churn about this particularly odoriferous cadaver however, (aside from being really,
really
smelly) was the fact that something struck me as familiar about it.

I let the flap fall back in place and stepped back. I turned and sucked in a lung-full of clean air, then pulled my tee shirt over my nose–like that was going to help. "Well, at least we know one thing, Fred. We don't have to go back under the house to look for a dead raccoon."

Fred stared at me with those saucer-like eyes of hers, then turned and puked in Mom's Knockout Roses–what a pansy.

Swallowing the bile rising in my throat, I saw my chance for revenge.

"
Hmmm
, was it something I said, Fred?" I slapped her on the butt. "Come on, Spider Girl, buck up."

Fred wiped her mouth and took in great gulps of air. Her hands flapped wildly and she began by hyperventilating. "Who is he, Buzz? Where'd he come from? Is it a man or a woman? What's he doing under Mom's house? Oh man! What are we telling Mom? We gotta call Mag! We gotta tell Dad; we gotta call the cops!"

I could see she was about to lose it, so I reached over and rapped her on the back of the head.

"Good Lord, Fred. Take a 'lude and slow down for a minute. Let me call J.J. and let's keep this quiet. We don't want those little old ladies hearing this over their police scanners, and we definitely don't want to give Mom a heart attack."

I took her by the shoulders and squeezed until her glazed stare focused on me. "So here is what we're going to do…."

Under my arm, I could feel the hysteria bubble to the surface though I tried to calm Fred down by rambling on about my plan of action. She tore herself out of my hands and flew to her car, hands still flapping. She grabbed her phone and dialed 911 at lightning speed.

I rolled my eyes. What did I expect from a woman whose highlight of the day was cleaning the poopy papers out of a puppy cage? I grumbled as I resigned myself to setting up a crime scene. I halted in mid-stride when the thought hit me I still had to tell my mother.

"Crap. This ain't going to be pretty. Drag the dead woman out of the crawlspace, puke all over, and leave Buzz to break the bad news to Mom. Good job, Fred, you're smarter than you look"

I scuffed my way toward the back door, rehearsing how I was going to break the news to Mom, and break the neck of my younger sister.

I had my hand on the screen door when I realized I probably got the better end of the deal. Mom would be more concerned with having enough coffee and snacks for the Sheriff's deputies than how a dead woman came to be in her crawlspace. Fred, on the other hand, had to deal with a lazy, incompetent town constable until the real cops arrived on scene. I probably didn't even have to tell Mom now; the bad news might send her into a tizzy. Or, I could tell Dad and make
him
tell Mom! Hah! Sometimes my own genius surprised even me. I took a seat on the swing and waited for the chaos to begin.

Sure enough, in less than five minutes a dust cloud formed at the end of the long gravel driveway. The engine roar of the township's new squad announced that the little weasel wearing a badge was on his way in. If the noise wasn't enough to raise the dead, he laid on the equally new siren. At the same time, the squad skid sideways and almost went through Dad's new fence.

Animals scattered and the local pigeons had heart attacks as our bungling, inept excuse for an elected official with a gun raced up the long drive. Dad poked his head out of the barn when he heard the commotion, shook his head when he realized it was Ted.

Telling Constable Ted Puetz (correctly pronounced 'Pets', but most folks just call him Putz) that the victim was already dead and there was no hurry to mow over the local flower and fauna obviously had fallen on deaf ears.

"We'll be lucky if that little piece of shit zipped his pants and dropped off his latest bimbo before making ruts in my driveway," Dad shouted as he stomped toward me.

"Dad!"

"What the hell would Dead Butts be wanting way out here, I wonder? There ain't a donut shop for miles."

Dead Butts, as Dad called him, was not about to be left out of any headline if he could help it, I thought.

Topping the final rise, Ted hit the brakes of the speeding squad, slid sideways and sprayed gravel in a tidal wave over the front quarter panel of Dad's new truck. In that second, I almost felt sorry for Ted. Almost.

My father despised Ted to begin with and that new truck cost him more than what he originally paid for the farm. A smart person would not even breathe hard in the direction of Dad's new truck, but no one would ever accuse Ted of having a brain.

By the time he made it over to his new truck, Dad had called Ted every name in the book. In a loud voice, my father told Ted he hadn't voted for him last election, and he would run himself if it meant Ted wouldn't win in the next one.

Ted, blissfully ignorant of the insults hurled his way, turned off the squad. He smiled and waved as Dad passed the squad. Dad flipped him the bird.

Ted wrestled his considerable bulk from behind the wheel of the squad chuckling at Dad's ravings. While Dad checked out the damage to his truck, Ted brushed the white donut powder from his potbelly. That belly of his is quite a wonder in itself. It always made it around a corner a split second before the rest of Ted's five-foot-three frame did. He continued to flick the residual doughnut crumbles from his tie as he lumbered toward my dad. Ted was mostly deaf in one ear, and he made an art form out of 'turn a deaf ear' when he wanted to.

Speaking of deaf, I yelled, "Hey Ted! Turn off the siren!"

Ted looked at me, and looked at the squad. I took a deep breath.
"Turn off the siren!"

He raised his hands and used sign language to tell me he couldn't hear me. I stomped over to the squad, leaned through the window, and turned off the siren. I walked up to Ted and yelled in his good ear. "I said, TURN OFF THE SIREN!"

Ted rubbed his ear. "Oh, uh, okay." He hitched his pants in true Barney Fife form. "Well now Bill, what do we have here?"

Not bothering to turn around, Dad ran his fingers over the dings the flying gravel had made in the door of his new truck. "You mean, of course, besides an auto body shop estimate for the damages you caused to my new truck? Nothing is going on, Putz. Nothing that would interest you, like say, work. Why don't you waddle back to the taxpayer's new squad and go wreck someone else's $40,000.00 vehicle?"

"Uh, well now take it easy there, Bill. I'm an officer of the law, you know…"

Dad spun around and gave Ted an evil scowl. Ted had the sense to back away a couple steps.

I jumped right in. "Hey Dead–uh, Ted, I think Mom has some of those fudge brownies you like and a new pot of coffee going in the kitchen. Why don't you go on in and check it out? I'll be sure to call you if anyone wants you."

The sarcasm took wing over Ted's head, and he scuttled off toward the kitchen door. "I guess you'd be right, Buzz, I could use a good cup of joe right about now. Can I get you anything while I'm there, Bill?"

Dad's temper boiled over. Through gritted teeth, he seethed, "You mean like maybe some rubbing compound and a new Town Constable, you damn maniac?" Dad fumed as he watched Ted hitch his pants again and stroll through the kitchen door.

"
Humph
!" Dad looked at me and grinned. "That idiot is deaf as a doornail and twice as dumb. Ha-ha, wait until he gets a belly full of Ger's coffee. That stuff has been known to melt the enamel off your teeth, but at least it keeps me regular." He patted his belly. "Ger will keep Dead Butts eating and talking local gossip so he won't mess up anything. Now what the hell is that smell, Buzz?"

Sharp as a tack, my dad. "Well, Dad, to make a long story short, I was looking for Mom's nasty cowboy lamp under the house, and I found a dead body instead." At his raised brows, I gestured. "There it is, over in that box. Fred panicked and called 911 and Edie over at Dispatch must have called Ted."

"At least now I know why that idiot came screaming up the drive like a bat out of Hell, wrecking my new truck. Speaking of old bats, don't tell your mother about this yet, okay?" He looked beyond me to his truck. "Say, do you think I can buff this scratch out?" He bent over again, running his fingers lovingly over the truck door.

"Uh, Dad, did you just tell me to not to tell Mom about the dead body?"

"No, go ahead and tell her about that, just don't tell her that the new truck is all scratched up–she'll have a fit!"

My head spun trying to keep up and to focus my father on the more important situation at hand. "Dad, listen to me, you have a dead person in your back yard. The cops are going to want to know how it came to be under your house! What are you going to tell them?"

"Hell, I don't know. Isn't it the cop's job to find out who he is? I didn't put him there and your mother sure as hell didn't, so what am I going to do about it now? Besides, that's more up your alley anyway, Buzz. I figure you'll look into it–that
is
what you do, isn't it?"

"No, that is what I
did.
I'm retired, Dad. I don't do that anymore."

"You won't be able to stay away Buzzi, and it will make your mother feel better about having a corpse under the house."

"I suppose it would be kind of traumatic if she was the one to find it. Good thing Fred cheezed me into looking for that snake lamp, I guess."

"I think I'd rather have a dead guy I don't know under the house than that damn snake lamp next to my chair. You didn't find the lamp, did you?" He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Geeez, every time I turned the lamp on that damn snake stared me right in the eye." He shook his head, thinking back. "That damn lamp always did give me the willies. Do you think we could accidentally drag it behind the manure spreader or bury it in the garden? I hate that damn thing." He rolled his shoulders and resumed his search for dings across the rear fender of his truck.

Just when I was about to scream, my third sister Mag strolled around the side of the house. "Yo, what-up Buzz? Mom called and said I'd better come over. Sounded like a royal summons–" She stopped dead in her tracks and fanned the air with her hand. "Man-o-man, what is that smell? You eat some bad burritos, girl, or were you letting that Bulldog of yours eat sauerkraut again?"

She turned to Fred and laughed at her own joke.

Fred burped. She still looked rather green. "Shut up, Maggot, Buzz and I found a dead body under the house." She fish-eyed me and amended, "I mean,
Buzz
found the body; she thought it was that cowboy lamp of Mom's."

Mag looked at me. "Hah! Great detective work from the Sherlock Holmes of our generation–Buzz Miller. What kind of a moron mistakes a dead guy for a snake? Whew! The smell alone would knock a buzzard off a manure wagon! Let me give you a hint big sis. With very few exceptions, most people do not look like snakes." She bent to get a closer look at the box. "You know, I think you might be losing it old girl, you might as well call old Dead Butts to investigate or someone equally stupid…wait, ha, ha, there isn't anyone more stupid!"