You Can't Get Blood Out of Shag Carpet: A Study Club Cozy Murder Mystery (The Study Club Mysteries Book 1) (2 page)

"Thank you, Lester," D.T. said, affecting an expression of professional solidarity. “I knew as an officer of the court you’d understand. Close the door behind you, please."

Lester started out the door and then stopped and looked back at Clara. “She’s already been arrested, Clara. No matter what, somebody has to pay the bail to get her out.”

Clara waived a dismissive hand in his direction. “Quit your squawking. Go on now.” As the sound of Lester’s boots on the hardwood floor retreated toward the front of the building, Clara asked Wanda Jean, “You want me to go or stay, honey?”

“Oh, Clara, please stay,” Wanda Jean said, tears spilling out of her eyes again.

D.T. Armstrong offered the weeping woman a tissue and then said, “Can you tell us what happened yesterday, Wanda Jean?”

Wanda Jean dabbed at her eyes with the tissue and tried to compose herself. Sniffling loudly, she launched into an account of the previous day. The morning started like any other at the Milton household. Hilton got up early to mix his chemicals for work. As the owner of Hilton Milton’s Pest Service, he was proud of his ad slogan, “Hilton Milton Kilt’em.” He took pains to ensure his pesticides were top-shelf poison, equally effective against all varieties of Texas creepy crawlies.

“We had breakfast together,” Wanda Jean said, “and then I had to go to the grocery store to get hamburger because today is Study Club.”

D.T. frowned, “What does hamburger have to do with Study Club?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, D.T.,” Clara snapped. “We’re at Club until after five. If the husbands want to eat, they fire up the grill. I know you’re an old bachelor, but use your brain.”

“My mistake,” D.T. said, holding his hands up placatingly. “Go on, Wanda Jean.”

“Well, that’s it,” she said. “I went to the store and got the ground round and came home and found Hilton dead in the living room.” She turned to Clara and added earnestly, “Barker’s got a good price on the hamburger, Clara.”

“Darn it,” Clara said, “I don’t have any place to refrigerate it before I head back to the ranch.”

“If Lester will let me go home,” Wanda Jean said, “you can put it in my refrigerator.”

D.T. cleared his throat to steer the conversation back on track. Both women turned toward him. “Wanda Jean, can you tell me what you saw when you walked in the door?”

“Well,” she said, “usually I’d go in through the kitchen, but Hilton had all his sprayer stuff out there on the porch and I don’t really care for the smell of DDT, so I used the front door and there was Milton laying there on my new shag carpet. The stain was just awful,” she finished, her voice breaking.

“And you say it was a carving knife?” D.T. asked. “Was it one of yours?”

“It was my best Old Hickory,” she said. “The one we use at Thanksgiving with the turkey.”

“Now, Wanda Jean,” D.T. said, clearing his throat, “you’ve hired me so we have something called attorney-client privilege. That means you can tell me the truth and I have to keep it just between us. Did you kill Hilton?”

“No, D.T.,” she said, without blinking. “I didn’t.”

“Okay,” he said. “You tell Lester what you told me and nothing else. I’ll be sitting right there with you, but you just tell the same story. Since you’ve already been arrested, we’re gonna have to get you out on bail. Can you afford that?”

Wanda Jean shook her head and whispered, “No.”

“I can afford it,” Clara said, reaching for the phone. “Just let me tell Clint I’m gonna spend the money.”

With purposeful strokes, she dialed the number to the ranch. When Clint Wyler came on the line she said, by way of greeting, “Clint, I need bail money.” Then, after a pause, she added, “No, it’s not for me. Don’t be ridiculous. I need to take the money out of the First National Bank to pay Wanda Jean Milton’s bail.”

Another pause.

“Murdering her husband,” Clara said.

Still another pause, broken by Clara’s exasperated words, “Clint Wyler, if I thought she did it, would I be paying her bail? I have no idea what it’s going to cost. I’ll let you know. We’re trying to take care of this and get to Study Club at 3 o’clock. Don’t forget to stir those beans I left on the stove.”

She returned the receiver to the cradle with a resounding thump and said, “Okay, D.T., we’re good on bail. Now can we please get a move on here? Wanda Jean and I have to get to Club.”

Chapter 2

From the moment Sheriff Lester Harper’s car pulled up in front of the Milton house the day before, talk had surged up and down Main Street. Now, with the added salacious detail of the sheriff putting Wanda Jean Milton in handcuffs, the surge had become a veritable tidal wave of “information.”

The “facts” shared varied in accuracy from “Wanda Jean just found him dead” to “the house was ransacked” and “Hilton fought for his life.” In truth, Hilton Milton looked like he stretched out for a nap on the new shag carpet in the living room — except for the Old Hickory carving knife sticking out of his chest.

In a small Texas ranching community where the best price for an Angora goat at the auction ring constituted “big news,” the untimely demise of the local exterminator set tongues wagging. The event was compared to other historic tragedies and seemed to only pale in comparison to “when the Browning girl got killed in that wreck at Christmas time.”

A nervous vein of concern filtered through the speculation. Did someone have a reason to kill Hilton Milton or was there a crazy person loose in their midst? The idea of purposeful murder was far more palatable to worried townsfolk than a random killing.

The fact that the prime suspect in the crime was also a member of
the
Study Club only fueled the flames of gossip to a hotter level. There was more than one women’s study club in town. But
the
Study Club gained its prominence based on the sheer reputation of the women who were its members and officers. A hint of scandal associated with the Club was almost more delicious than a skewered corpse.

It came as no surprise to anyone who witnessed the event that Clara Wyler had charged out of Sugar’s Style and Spray that morning to come to the aid of Wanda Jean Milton. The Club took care of its own.

Although she was only 29 years old, Clara had already staked what appeared to be a lifetime claim on the presidency of the Club. Recently installed for the 1968 term, she was on her ninth administration after helping to found the club in 1959, the year after she graduated from the local high school and married rancher Clint Wyler.

Tall and imposing with her jet black bouffant, Clara was that odd mix of capable ranch wife and society maven that can only occur in a small West Texas town. Legendary in her ability to pull a calf at 6 o’clock in the afternoon and then appear in an evening dress at a dance two hours later, Clara was a larger-than-life presence. She hid her huge heart under the thunderous tones of her booming voice, and quietly dealt with the greatest tragedy of her own life; she and Clint could not have children.

In 1961, two years after the Club was founded, Clara’s younger sister, Mae Ella, joined its ranks as the newly married Mrs. Cletus Gormley. Short of stature and cranky of nature, Mae Ella struck a sharp contrast to her older sister, but the women were devoted to one another. When Mae Ella decided, in 1963, to run for County Clerk, she did so with the full support, and considerable organizational skills, of the Club women, with Clara in the lead. Mae Ella won by a landslide.

That was the same year Sugar Watson took over Dimple’s Style and Set, which she rechristened Sugar’s Style and Spray in recognition of her signature use of Aqua Net hairspray. “It’s the only spray that works in Texas,” she sagely advised her clientele.

Flamboyant in comparison to the majority of the local women, Sugar sported her own well-teased bouffant, a look accentuated by her rhinestone-studded, cat-eye bifocals and omnipresent Camel cigarette.

Her emporium was not just the spot where the town’s women were permed, teased, and sprayed, it was also sacred ground into which men did not trespass. At most, a husband in need of his wife’s attention, might stick his head in the door, only to be greeted by the disapproving glares of every woman in the establishment. In the private and Aqua Net laced air of the Style and Spray, opinions flowed freely with no worry about wounding the delicate sensibilities of the male ego.

Along with Dr. Walter Kitterell’s indispensable and capable nurse, Wilma Schneider, the only single member of the Club, these four women were a force with which to be reckoned. Wilma, a former Army nurse, was reputed to be carrying on a long-standing affair with Walter that began in Korea where they both served in a MASH unit. But, safely ensconced in the membership of the Club, no one dared impeach her honor or expose the liaison to the detriment of Kitterell’s family, including his mentally retarded son, Jimmy, who idolized his father.

Granted, there were other women in the Club, but Clara, Mae Ella, Sugar, and Wilma were its driving force. Highly selective in their membership invitations, the Club women had dealt with an uncharacteristic division of opinion over asking Wanda Jean Milton to join in 1967. The doubts of the less welcoming members were promptly squelched by Clara, who said, firmly, “None of us are highfalutin enough to be passing judgment on that girl. Now vote again and do it right this time.”

Wanda Jean was the eldest daughter of Lorene and Earl Bodine. Her family’s reputation was no small part of the gossip working its way up and down Main Street the day after the discovery of Hilton’s body. Just six months earlier, Wanda Jean’s sister, Maybelline, found her husband, Blake Trinkle, dead in the bathroom reading
Playboy
,
felled by an apparent heart attack.

Did the Bodine girls just “live under a black cloud” or was being married to one of them a dangerous proposition? Youngest daughter Rolene Bodine’s husband, Cooter Jackson, seemed to be faring well enough, and their liquor store was a thriving business, even if it did have to sit just over the county line since the town was dry. But can you really trust people who sell liquor, asked the pious townsfolk? Never mind if those asking the question kept a “medicinal” fifth in the cupboard.

As for their brother Earl Dean Bodine, he was doing a fine job coaching the high school football team, doing his part to hold up the dream that one day the otherwise hapless Eagles might actually flutter their way to a state playoff. Hope springs eternal in the hearts of Texas high school football fans and you can’t hold a man accountable for what his sisters do, after all.

Although Lorene and Earl Bodine were long since dead, their names were being mentioned that day on Main Street as well. An older matron at the pharmacy leaned over the counter and whispered to Marshall McClean, “When Wanda Jean was born, Lorene and Earl didn’t have a pot to . . . well, you know, they were kinda hard up for money because Earl like to play cards — or so I’m told. And then Maybelline, Rolene, and Earl Dean came along so fast, they all kinda raised themselves. But, you know, they
are
good Baptists, so I guess that counts for something.”

The imprimatur of “good Baptist” was, indeed, all that was saving Wanda Jean Milton from complete public condemnation at the moment. No one could imagine that she had actually put that knife in her husband’s chest, but all agreed that when a man wound up dead, the wife was the most logical suspect. “Sometimes, a woman just gets fed up with them being, well, you know, men,” ran the general line of thinking — at least among the resident female population of the town.

But Hilton Milton was extremely popular in a land where insects large enough to saddle were the norm. “He completely got rid of the water bugs at my house,” a satisfied customer proclaimed loyally in Vera Maye’s dress shop, adding hastily, “You know they drop off the trees and come inside. I certainly don’t have bugs that stay
in
the house.”

And then there was the storied meeting of the now infamous couple. Hilton and Wanda Jean met in 1964 at the annual Welcome the Hunters to the County Ball held at the lumber yard. Hilton, who grew up one town over, was new in town, and Wanda Jean was working in the Name That Varmint booth. He correctly identified all the tracks of the local nuisance wildlife and even caught the organizers trying to substitute domestic cat tracks for a mountain lion by just making the picture bigger. Wanda Jean was impressed, and within just a few months, she became Mrs. Hilton Milton.

“It was just so romantic,” related a woman over the produce at Barker’s Grocery. “When he figured it out about those cat tracks, her eyes were just shining with pride. And she’s a good wife. She just keeps house beautifully.”

Reaching over the green beans, another woman added sympathetically, “It’s just so awful that there’s . . . well, you know, a stain on her new shag carpet. And she’s not ever going to be able to use that good carving knife again after this.”

People around town compared notes. Where had Hilton been working that week? Who had he seen? Could any of his clients be responsible for his death? That was the line of conversation Clara Wyler overheard when she stopped at the bakery to pick up the cookies for Club. Light refreshments with coffee were a must after “the program.” It was a matter of some confusion over what exactly the Club women “studied,” but they dressed to the nines to do it and there were always “refreshments and discussion” after the “official” meeting concluded.

When Clara returned to her 1967 cherry red Ford Fairlane, Wanda Jean Milton was sitting in the front seat trying to look inconspicuous. Clara said, “We’re going to have an executive session of the Club officers after refreshments today and you’re staying for it.”

“But I’m not an officer,” Wanda Jean protested.

“No, but you’re the only murder suspect in the Club,” Clara declared, “and we’re going to figure out who killed Hilton. If we leave it up to that idiot Lester Harper, he’s not going to think any farther than the end of his own nose.”

“What does he see at the end of his nose?” Wanda Jean asked, clearly confused.

“The one thing that scares all men half to death,” Clara said as she put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot, “a woman with a reason to commit murder.”