Hot Enough to Kill (30 page)

To be fair, I'm not that great of a cook myself, but I had managed to get the fish fried to a nice golden brown, the batter cooperatively staying stuck to the fish, not the pan, and the grease not igniting a household fire. I can come through in a pinch--sometimes.

"This fish does taste pretty good," I said, pulling a bone out from between my teeth.

Lucille reached for another piece and dusted it with salt. "It's better than cheese from a can."

My mother is never free and loose with her compliments. "Thanks."

We ate in silence for a few seconds, which gave me time to get over the processed cheese spray insult. It also gave me time to look around the room.

Last night, I had thought the remodel job to be first rate, but being dark, I couldn't really tell that much for sure. In the daylight, it was obvious that my first impression was correct. The lake cabin didn't look like a cabin at all, but a really nice apartment. "Whoever gave this place a face lift did a great job. He obviously cared about his work."

"Yes, he did, although BigJohn would have rung his neck if the job hadn't been perfect. BigJohn was like that, you know." She patted her hair, the Frivolous Fawn not moving even a little. "He insisted on only the best."

I let the personal reference slide because a realization was dawning on me and I wondered why I hadn't thought of it sooner. "Dewayne Schuman did this, didn't he?"

Lucille nodded. "I don't know for sure, but I suspect so. I never was out here while the work was being done, but I was real pleased to see such a fine job. I've heard rumor that Dee-Wayne's sister does all his plumbing and electrical work on his houses. I guess she did this work too."

"Susan?"

"Yes, I believe that was her name, or is it just that you told me. Hmmm." Lucille clicked her nails on the table. "You know, now that I think about it, I bet she did the tile work, too. I sure can't see either BigJohn or Dee-Wayne picking out those fancy style trim pieces. I don't know why he didn't just tell me she was out here, or Dee-Wayne, for that matter."

I frowned. It was perfectly acceptable to know everybody's business in a small town, to know who did what with whom and how all those stories tied back into one another sooner or later. "Seems strange. BigJohn and Dewayne pretending to be at odds, but working together. And Susan working with them, yet everybody in town seems to have nothing but disdain for her."

"That would have included BigJohn as well, I'll tell you for sure. Wonder why he let her work out here." Lucille tipped her head and toyed with the silk flowers in the leaded glass vase. She'd gleefully abandoned her sling yesterday in order to shoot out the window at Leroy and seemed to be doing just fine without it. The bandage over the stitches was still in place though. "Amy's friend does work in town at the lumberyard, like I told you before, so maybe this is just a part-time thing. Maybe BigJohn didn't know. Hmmm."

I didn't have a thing to add on the subject of Dewayne's sister--or the sister's girlfriend who left her husband, and thinking of Jerry only made me worry. Since I had yet to think of any way to find out about either Jerry's condition or his whereabouts, I decided, a la Scarlet, to think about it later, and moved on to the more recent development. "I found an envelope full of papers stuck under the seat in the crappie house. I haven't looked at any of the stuff closely, but I think it has to do with BigJohn. Know anything about it?"

Lucille raised a well-drawn eyebrow. "No, I surely don't. What on earth would his papers be doing in the crappie house? BigJohn wasn't a fisherman at all. As far as I know, he didn't even own a rod and reel. I can't imagine him sneaking off to hide papers. He never even wanted to walk down to the lake just to look."

I'd already deduced that moonlit walks on the pier weren't a part of their routine, and I politely did not ask her for any lurid details of what actually had constituted their sort-of affair. It wasn't any of my business, but I have to admit I was a little curious. BigJohn had dumped a bundle into a love nest, presumably with high hopes of something. Since, according to Lucille, he wasn't ever going to hit pay dirt in the bedroom, you'd think he'd have at least indulged himself in some fishing.

"So let's see these mysterious papers, Jolene." Lucille clucked her tongue. "This could be very important. Why on earth didn't you rush right in and tell me about this first thing?"

"Because I was hungry" didn't sound very nice, and saying I was fed up with the goings-on around here and just wanted to ignore it all wasn't much better. Besides, I knew it was time to dig in, draw conclusions and piece together some very slimy pieces of a very crooked puzzle in order to get me, myself and my mother out of this mess.

I stood and retrieved the manila envelope from the kitchen where I'd put it next to what remained of the crappie (that's pronounced crop-pee, not...well, you get the idea). I needed to get rid of the fish guts and various leftover pieces sooner rather than later, but moving on to the current gore, I wandered back to the table. I dumped out the envelope contents--including the key. "This is it."

Lucille picked up the key. "Oh, my, isn't this interesting? I wonder what this goes to."

"Safety deposit box would be my guess."

"Well, it wouldn't be mine," she said, rather snottily. "My goodness, Jolene, everybody knows what a safety deposit box key looks like. They're flat. This is a regular key like you can have made anywhere."

Well, yes, I knew that, too. But this was Kickapoo, Texas, after all, and I figured that bank keys might be different here--God knows everything else is. "So maybe the key goes to a diary, or a briefcase, or a fireproof box or something."

"We could guess all day about that, now couldn't we?" she said, with a grandiose air. "And we still wouldn't know if we were right or not. Let's look at these," Lucille said, grabbing the papers and digging into her task with the eagerness of a kid hunting Easter eggs. She rummaged through the pile and came up with a stack of legal-looking documents. "This looks like the divorce settlement." She flipped to the last page. "Just like I suspected. He never even filed this mess, the lying ass."

While Lucille muttered and huffed about who was supposed to get the muffin tins and the toilet brush, I took on the rest of the stash. I selected a thick business-type envelope and opened the flap. Inside were real estate deeds--three of them. The town of record was, of course, Kickapoo, and the addresses to the properties were in sequence. "Where's Myrtle Street?"

Lucille looked up from her papers. "East edge of town. Why?"

"By the water treatment plant?"

She nodded then frowned, getting the idea where I was headed. "BigJohn's lots?"

"Not exactly," I said. "These deeds are in Velma's name."

Lucille's eyes widened and nostrils flared. "He bought them for her! That deceitful, conniving…"

"Bastard," I said, helpfully.

She glared, but spared me a sermon on my foul mouth. "Lies, lies, lies," she muttered.

"Maybe, but maybe not. It's possible he put them in her name as a pre-divorce agreement or something."

Lucille snatched up the divorce papers. "There's not a word about it in this that I can tell, besides, these papers were drawn up back in January. He bought those lots after he met me."

"I'm sorry," I said, sincerely and not knowing what else to say. "I don't know what it means, but it probably means something."

"It means something, all right. It means BigJohn Bennett couldn't tell the truth if his life depended on it. And I guess it did," she spat. "Just serves him right."

"Well, let's keep going through the papers and see what else we can come up with."

"Yes, like what else he lied to me about," Lucille said, flinging the divorce papers aside and grabbing another stack. "This just makes me sick. There's no telling what all he was up to."

Finally realizing that I wasn't going to make things any better by talking, I kept my mouth shut and grabbed an eye-catching canary yellow receipt from the stack. Printed in block letters across the top was D Bar S Construction. Dewayne Schuman? Had to be. I scanned the invoice--several things snagging my attention, the first being that it was neatly typed and there were no misspellings. Dewayne had someone doing his invoices for him. The second point of interest was that I was holding the bill for the cabin remodel--and it was for fifty-one thousand dollars.

Fifty-one thousand dollars?

Even if Bud from the Beer and Bait Shop had been setting prices, you could have built a whole new cabin--twice as big and twice as nice than the original--for that amount.

I tried to recall exactly what the relationship was between Dewayne and BigJohn--or at least what I thought it had been. There was the carport-garage thing, and suspicions of BigJohn blackmailing Dewayne, neither of which explained why the blackmailer was paying the blackmailee more than double for a remodel job on a lake cabin. And if they were enemies--as they'd publicly appeared--why were they doing business together?

The web of shenanigans was wide and tangled, and somehow, Mother and I were in the center of it. I had a lot of questions but none of them were making much sense so I certainly couldn't articulate them. I set the yellow sheet aside and took what was next in the stack: a newspaper clipping.

I scanned the nice big photo that had run in the
Redwater Falls Times
, trying to see if I recognized anyone. I did--several someones. Besides BigJohn, grinning like a fool, and a variety of official officials, I saw Dewayne Schuman and Gifford Geller--along with my mother. The caption told me the photo was taken after the mayor's swearing-in ceremony. It was a unanimously smiling group. I wasn't even surprised to see the name of the man standing right next to BigJohn--County Commissioner Calhoon Fletcher. Imagine that.

After reading the article, which was mercifully short, I didn't know much more than I did, except that these same people kept showing up over and over. They all had to be connected one way or another. This, of course, included my mother. How I figured into the equation, was anybody's guess. I was grasping at very thin straws and trying to make a basket when a knock on the door made me jump very nearly out of my skin. My theory-making was replaced with panic in a matter of milliseconds.

"Get in the bedroom," I said to mother, who looked white as a sheet. She didn't argue, and grabbed her purse as she went. I eased over to the window beside the stupidly unlocked door, the knob of which was jiggling this way and that.

"Miz Jackson," said a low voice that would have no doubt been big and booming in a normal tone. "It's me, Dee-Wayne Schuman. I need to talk to you."

Dewayne? How did he know we were here? And why did he need to talk to Lucille? Was Fletch or Gifford our there too? And what about Leroy? The questions played free and loose with my fear, revving my heartbeat into the red zone, and making it difficult to take a good breath. Schuman was not here to see how the new toilet was working. He was here for us.

With the mush for brains I had left, I wondered if I could lunge for the door, lock the deadbolt and be on the carpet below average firing level before he noticed. Ditto to grabbing the fillet knife.

"What is it you want, Dee-Wayne?" my mother said, scaring the living daylights out of me since I had very forcefully told her to get to the other room. But there she stood, right behind me, directly in front of the door, holding her pistol, the little red laser dot wiggling, but only a little. "I'm sure you can appreciate me being wary, Dee-Wayne, what with considering all that's happened lately."

"Oh, yes, ma'am, Miz Jackson, I surely can," Dewayne said, rather cordially. "Truth is, Miz Jackson, ma'am, I'm in a bigger mess than you are, and I think we might can help one another."

"How do I know that idiot Leroy Harper's not out there with you, putting you up to this so we'll come out and he can kill us?"

I peeped out the window and didn't see a vehicle of any kind. That wasn't necessarily a good thing since Dewayne had to have gotten here somehow. I whispered my observations to Mother, who frowned in response, but didn't have any more clue than I did what significance it held. Either he'd parked his truck a ways off and walked, or somebody dropped him off and was out buying more bullets since Dewayne's supply had dried up. I rubbed my hands over my eyes. My brain was whizzing thoughts by at an alarming rate and none of them were making any sense.

"I'm all alone, Miz Jackson," he said, a hint of confusion in his voice. "About the last person I want to see right now is Leroy Harper. Why, I can't show my face anywhere any more than you and your daughter can. But I'm not guilty of nothing except trusting the wrong folks. I figure you better know who those folks are. We're kind of in this together, you and me."

Lucille didn't look ready to huddle up for a big "go team" with Dewayne. "You listen here, Dee-Wayne, I've got my nine mm Glock pointed right square at the door. You come in and try anything, or I see another living soul with you, I'm firing off ten rounds just as fast as I can pull the trigger. And then I'm popping in my clip of hollow points."

"Yes, ma'am," Dewayne said, a definite quiver in his voice. Apparently he knew my mother better than I did. "May I come in?"

I stood there for a few seconds, looking at my mother, the 72-year-old female Dirty Harry. She hadn't said the words, but I could see it in her eyes. She'd be just pleased as punch if Dewayne tried to make her day.

And that was certainly a distinct possibility. There was nothing keeping Dewayne from just barging in the door, in which case Mother would shoot him. Besides being messy, we'd get no information at all, assuming he had any to give, and I assumed he did. If he stayed outside, Lucille might shoot him anyway, and I knew it was best to have the bloodletting done on the interior of the house instead of the exterior, for self-defense purposes anyway.