Death in West Wheeling Read online

  “Where else’d she be?”

  “Gone home, maybe?”

  “She’s in the back. Now, get outta the way.”

  I managed not to grin as I went past.

  Angie was sittin’ cross-legged on the cot Nina keeps in the back for naps an’ the few days when she gets snowed in in town. Along with the cot, there’s a table an’ three straight-back chairs, an’ a poster with a poem called Desiderata. Angie was readin’ a paperback romance, which she put down when I come in. She looked at the door behind me—must’ve been hopin’ Nina would come to her rescue. I grabbed one of the chairs an’ turned it around so I could straddle it, an’ crossed my arms on the back—a little strategy I learned for questionin’ skitterish witnesses. Puttin’ the chair between you’s supposed to make you seem less threatenin’.

  Angie did one of those acts—which I’m sure she got from watchin’ TV—where she looked from side to side, like she was tryin’ to find who else I might be starin’ at. When I didn’t say nothin’, she put the book down an’ said, “What?”

  “What do you know about Roger Devon?”

  Whatever she was expectin’, that weren’t it. She put her hands together over her belly like she’d been punched. Then she pulled herself together an’ said, “Nothin’.”

  “You an’ I both know that ain’t true.”

  Her mouth got all hard an’ she tried to stare me down. But I’ve had more experience with face-offs. She said, “He was one of my teachers. He quit.”

  “Why?” I said, though I had a good idea it was related to the state she was in.

  She shrugged. I waited. She outwaited me.

  “Where’d he go?”

  “How would I know?” I waited. “Back to Illinois?”

  “How’d you know he was from there?”

  “Must’a heard talk. What’s this about?”

  “Devon’s missin’. An’ I got a unidentified body on my hands might be him. You know anythin’ about that?”

  She shuddered. “No, an’ I don’t wanna.”

  “I got it on good authority Devon was a friend a yours.”

  “Who tole you that?”

  “I can’t reveal my sources.”

  “Gossip!”

  “Well?”

  “He was nice.”

  “You an’ him kinda left the mission together.”

  That got to her. “No!” She realized how much she was givin’ herself away, ’cause I could see her make a effort to relax. Then she said, “I was thinking of quitting anyway. An’ the sub they got us was real bad, so I quit.”

  “Uh-hunh.”

  “I don’t care if you don’t believe me!”

  “I didn’t say I don’t believe you.”

  She got a pouty look on her face an’ picked up her book, held it like she couldn’t wait for me to leave an’ let her get back to it.

  “Why’d Devon leave?”

  “I don’t know.” I waited. “I heard Ash Jackson run him off.”

  “Where’d you hear?”

  “Around.”

  “What else you hear?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “I think you know more.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ an’ I don’t want to hear no more. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “You have to. I’m the Law.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  Just then, the door opened an’ Nina swarmed in. She pretty much got the lay of the land at a glance, ’cause she said, “Homer, get the hell out!”

  I got up faster’n I’d set down an’ put the chair between us.

  “An’ tell Mars Boone he’s lower’n a rattler’s belly!” Nina added.

  “What’s Mars got to do with anythin’?”

  second body—no teeth

  The crows was the giveaway. I could see ’em hangin’ up in the dead tops of the willows linin’ the drainage ditch long before I spotted Mars Boone’s truck. They was waitin’ for Mars to clear out an’ let ’em go back to feedin’. Mars’s truck was alongside the ditch, an’ he was standin’ with his back to it. He looked a bit green, under his farmer’s tan, ’bout ready to pass out. He pointed past hisself, to what was interestin’ the crows. I got out to take a look.

  Personally, dead bodies don’t bother me ’less it’s someone I know. This one, I couldn’t tell if I knew—somebody’d blowed his head off. Someone didn’t want us to ID the body. I looked long enough to get a idea of what’d happened. Someone’d dumped the body—or maybe brought it live—into the ditch, then blowed off the lower half of its face with a shotgun. Then he—or she, let’s not be sexist—covered up the remains with a old blanket an’ a piece of cardboard, prob’ly to keep the crows from findin’ it ’fore the maggots done their work. The killer hadn’t figured on coyotes, or dogs—whatever—something’d dragged the blanket off to get at the free lunch underneath. The coverings looked pretty much like what some folks carry in their trunks, an’ that pretty much let Mars off the hook. Like most farmers, he carries a shovel to bury roadkill. If he’d done it, he’d have buried the evidence.

  I returned to where he was waitin’ with his back to the scene. If the shovel argument wasn’t enough to clear him, his puke-green color would’ve. I got my hip flask outta the squad an’ shoved it at him.

  “Here, Mars.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “This is medicinal. Don’t want you passin’ out ’fore I get a statement.”

  He took the flask an’ had a swig. I watched his eyes bug as it went down. He wheezed, but his face went a shade closer to livin’ color.

  “Lemme use your phone,” I said.

  He didn’t even ask why, when I had a radio—just give it to me. I called Martha, to give her the news, then the state boys. Sergeant Underhill answered.

  “This is Deputy Sheriff Deters,” I said. “I’m afraid I got another body.”

  “This is getting to be a trend, isn’t it, Deputy?”

  “It ain’t really local. An’ I got no control over interstate commerce.”

  “Which isn’t local, victim or perp?”

  “Neither, I’d say. Looks like yet another case of fly dumpin’.”

  “Not toxic, just wasted?”

  I groaned. He axed for directions an’ said he’d be along directly.

  While we waited, I got a statement from Mars. He confirmed what I suspected. He’d been out drivin’ around his farm, mindin’ his own business, when he spotted the crows. An’ he’d stopped an’ got his shovel out, plannin’ to deprive the varmints of their road pizza.

  Even though it smelled God-awful an’ was crawlin’ with maggots, our second victim didn’t take half as long to collect—not as many pieces. The state cops helped me get it in a body bag an’ lift that into the borrowed hearse.

  Usually I don’t go to autopsies, but for this guy I figured I could make a exception. One of Doc’s grad students helped me unload. Doc was already gowned an’ gloved, an’ ready to go when we got to the lab.

  “You tryin’ to set a speed record for autopsies, Doc?” I axed him.

  “You trying to set some kind of record for number of homicides in Boone County, Homer?”

  “I axed first.”

  “We’re having a graduation open house here in a couple of weeks. I don’t want the place smelling of overripe carrion. That odor is very difficult to get out.”

  “Yeah.”

  Just ’cause Doc is fast, don’t mean he wasn’t thorough. He took samples of the critters, which he sent off to the entomology lab with one of the students who looked ready to pass out. I took pi’tures of the remains, front an’ back, fore Doc an’ the two remainin’ kids undressed the body. Doc had one of ’em hang up the clothes to dry while he went over the corpse for any trace evidence—hairs, fibers, gravel, excetera—he could find. It all went into little numbered paper envelopes for the state crime lab, an’ Doc noted every sample an’ specimen on his tape recorder. When he was pretty well satisfied he’d got everythin’ ther
e was to find, they washed the rest of the wildlife down the sink an’ cleaned up the victim. I took more pi’tures, an’ Doc took a bunch of X-rays before openin’ up.

  He started off with his standard line: “I have before me the body of a well developed, well nourished, white male who appears to be between forty and sixty years of age …”

  That left Roger Devon out.

  “Can’t you narrow it down a decade or so, Doc?”

  “Sorry. It depends on how well he took care of himself. Since we don’t know, I can’t say. I can tell you, that apart from the face and hands, there isn’t too much damage that was caused by the killer. But there’s your cause of death.” He pointed to a couple of stab wounds in the victim’s neck and throat. “He bled to death. The killer probably just used the shotgun to obliterate his identity.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It looked to me like he was killed somewhere else an’ dumped.”

  “Very likely.” He poked around what was left of the head. “I can’t be positive, because there’s so much missing, but my guess is, this guy didn’t have any teeth.”

  “That’d explain why we couldn’t find ’em.”

  The rest of the autopsy was pretty standard. I had to hang around to the end, ’cause I had to take the body back with me—Doc insisted. The victim’s clothes were dry by the time we had their owner back in the hearse. We sorted all the little envelopes by type of evidence, an’ started a chain of custody sheet for the hair an’ fibers, another for trace evidence, an’ one for shotgun pellets, excetera. Doc signed for the tissue samples he was keepin’—for further study—an’ we sent forms up to the entomology department for the maggots. I took charge of the film, promisin’ to send Doc a set of prints.

  By the time I dropped off the clothes an’ envelopes at the state crime lab, dropped the body—”Headless” as I was beginnin’ to call him—at the funeral parlor, an’ got the film developed, it was supper time. It occurred to me I hadn’t had lunch, but I took the pi’tures back to my office an’ locked them in the safe before headin’ for the Truck Stop.

  I had to pass the Boones’s farm on the way to supper. It was botherin’ me so much that the perpetrator had got away with hidin’ Headless’s identity, that I turned off an’ went back to the crime scene. I got out my road-kill shovel an’ started diggin’ through the dirt in the ditch where the body’d been. I was hopin’ we’d missed somethin’ that would identify Headless. We hadn’t. So I walked around the spot in a widenin’ spiral. It was my lucky day or mebbe the angle of the sun was just right. ’Bout sixteen feet from where Mars found the body, right where it must’ve been blowed by the shotgun blast, I spotted a pinkie finger. It was curled an’ dried like a hunk of old beef jerky, but I didn’t care. It had to belong to Headless—his was the only body out here missin’ parts. An’ I was happy as a possum in a pantry to have somethin’ with a fingerprint on it. I planted my shovel where its shadow’d mark the spot, an’ went back for my camera.

  the KKK

  The next day was Saturday. I’d made kind of a late night of it, celebratin’ my big find the previous evenin’, so I wasn’t feelin’ my best. Still, I’d just about finished writin’ up all the reports on Headless, when Nina called me to report “trespassin’ an’ vandalism” at the post office. Normally all that would constitute a major crime wave in West Wheeling, an’ I’d rush over to investigate, but with all that’d gone down in the last week, I wasn’t real enthusiastic. I finished my report an’ locked the files an’ photos in the safe ’fore I left the office.

  I found Nina standin’ on the porch with her hands on her hips, starin’ daggers at a poster stapled to the post office wall. It was one of those things you can have made up from your own negative, an’ showed Rufus “Ruthless” Groggins an’ four of his henchmen standin’ in a line, showin’ off their artillery: M16s, sawed-off shotguns, even a Molotov cocktail. The writin’ at the top said “KKK,” an’ underneath the pi’ture it said, “THE FEW, THE PROUD, THE READY.”

  Contrary to popular belief, most of the black folks in Boone County work three times as hard for half the pay as most whites, so I try to cut ’em some slack in my dealin’s with ’em. An’ I do what I can to keep a lid on the Klan. Ruthless heads up our local chapter, though it ain’t any great shakes. Years back, shortly after Ben Rooney become sheriff, Ruthless tried to head up a big rally. He called on the local press an’ put flyers up all over town, but he didn’t reckon on my ma, who—at the time—was town librarian. She axed everybody who come in for a book, “What if the Klan held a rally and nobody came?” All three of the local ministers picked up on that an’ told their congregations to stay away, an’ the sheriff pretty much suggested to everybody who drifted into town to gawk, that they might find some fine bargains over at the Wal-Mart. Then he called up the Wal-Mart manager an’ dropped the hint that Klan Rally Day’d be a fine day for a sale—even promised to advertise it free.

  I missed the show ’cause Sheriff Rooney sent me to work crowd control at the west end of town an’ divert everybody to the big sale. The sheriff deputized my ma an’ Nina’s to do the same at the east end, so they pretty much missed the action, too. However, the long an’ the short of it was nobody showed up at the rally but the Klan, an’ the sheriff, an’ Abner Davis, our only local reporter. What he reported was a major traffic jam at Wal-Mart. Still, Ruthless never gives up.

  Nina pointed at the poster. “Can’t you do somethin’ about that, Homer? They’re really givin’ our friendly town a bad name.”

  “I don’t know, Nina. Not unless one of them weapons is illegal to possess. Their right to assemble an’ run off at the mouth is protected by the First Amendment.”

  Nina studied the poster. “Would you say a Molotov cocktail is a destructive device?”

  “I guess it wouldn’t be much of a stretch.”

  “Then go get that ATF feller that’s been snoopin’ around an’ tell him we got some business for him.”

  “What’re you talkin’ about?”

  She said, “Come here once.” She ducked inside the post office an’ reached a red paperback book out from under the counter—ARSON: The Complete Investigator’s Manual. She opened it an’ stabbed page six with her pointin’ finger. “It says here. Title II requires that various ‘destructive devices’ be registered with the ATF in order to be legally possessed…..” She hitched her thumb at the offendin’ poster on the porch. “Wanna bet that there’s registered?”

  “Not really. Anyway, they’d just say it was fake, an’ how’d you prove it wasn’t?”

  “Get a search warrant an’ eggsamine it.”

  “You must think I got nothin’ better to do.”

  “I know you got nothin’ better to do, Homer.”

  “Yeah, right. I got two unsolved homicides an’ truants runnin’ rampant, I ain’t located our missin’ missionary yet, but I got time to harass the Klan?”

  “Maybe if you’d go talk to Ruthless, you’ll find he’s mixed up in them other things.”

  “The Klan didn’t kill our Boone farm victim—he weren’t black or Jewish.”

  “How’d you know he weren’t Jewish?”

  “I was at the autopsy.”

  She didn’t get it ’til I gave her a just-think-about-it look. Then she did an’ blushed. Finally she said, “There ain’t nothin’ more you can do about all them other things, so you may as well do somethin’ about Ruthless.”

  Her mind was made up; there was no confusin’ her with facts. I decided to hit her up with one of her own tactics—misdirection. “Where’d you get that book?”

  “It come in the mail.”

  “Yeah? Addressed to who?” It was the same book I’d ordered an’ sent $19.50 for, includin’ shippin’ an’ handlin’. I hadn’t got my book yet, an’ it was too much of a coincidence to believe Nina’d somehow thought to order the same one.

  “Well, all right. It’s yours. The package was ripped an’ I ain’t got round to repackin’ it yet.”

&nbs
p; I thought I had her. “Ain’t there some regulation ’gainst postal employees readin’ people’s mail?”

  But she just handed me her postal regulations book an’ said, “You’re welcome to look.”

  Motel Six

  I prob’ly never would’ve missed ATF agent Arnold if Nina hadn’t been so keen on me turnin’ in the Klan. The folks at Motel Six hadn’t seen him lately, though he hadn’t checked out. I sweet-talked Lucy, the housekeeper, into lettin’ me have a look ’round his room. It ’peared like he’d unpacked half his stuff an’ shaved ’fore leavin’. Lucy said he hadn’t touched nothin’ in three days.

  There wasn’t a whole lot else to do after that but wait. If I called ATF to ask what was up, they’d deny sendin’ a agent or tell me to mind my own damn business. An’ if he was really missin’, they’d send another couple of turkeys—who wouldn’t be the least use in findin’ Arnold—to complicate my life. I decided to put him at the bottom of my folks-to-find list an’ wait ’til I had evidence of foul play ’fore makin’ a federal case of it.

  ’Fore I left the motel, I looked up our visitin’ detective. When he opened his door an’ spotted me, he looked hopeful as a convict who’s just had his sentence reduced to time served. “You find him?” he axed. He kept standin’ in the doorway blockin’ my view of the room ’til I wondered if he had a woman in there, or drugs.

  I said, “’Fraid not.”

  “But you just found another body. The whole town’s talkin’ about it.”

  “Mind if I come in?”

  Peter took a quick look behind him—no doubt checkin’ to be sure there was nothin’ in the room I shouldn’t see. As he stepped away from the door, he grabbed the coat off the chair next to it an’ tossed it on the dresser. It neatly covered the police scanner he had set up there, but not ’fore I spotted it. I didn’t let on I seen it, though it explained how Peter’d managed to show up in the swamp when he did.

  He pointed at the empty chair. “Have a seat and tell me about this latest body.” He sat hisself down on the end of the bed.