I skipped the easy comeback on the nuts, rubbed my temples and tried to get back to the point. "So, you were walking around the track and just happened to stray across the back lot, past the tennis courts and down about ten blocks to the mayor's residence. Is that about it?"
"I was home by nine," she said, as displeased with my attitude as I was with hers. "And I did watch
Lucy
."
Okay, if she'd been out walking it had to still be fairly light out. That meant she hadn't been at the house when BigJohn had been shot because that happened around ten thirty p.m. or so. But she had been there at some point--and so had the mayor's wife.
The questions were piling up like June bugs on a porch light, but I opted for the simplest first. "Why did you go to BigJohn's?"
Lucille sipped her diet soda and clicked her nails on the butcher block Formica. "I'd just had enough of his shenanigans. I will not be made the laughingstock of this town for anybody. He was going around pretending he didn't even know me just because she showed up back in town. I went over there to keep him honest, or at least make him spin some new lies right in front of her. She's not stupid. She knows what he's been doing."
"And just exactly what has he been doing?"
Lucille's mouth tightened into a purple pucker. "Not a damn thing, if you must know."
I wasn't exactly sure what she was referring to, but I had a hunch things weren't quite as peachy with the mayor as she'd made them out to be. Perhaps BigJohn wasn't quite the hot catch everyone had thought. "Exactly what are you saying, Mother?"
"I'm saying he couldn't get it up if he propped a two-by-four under it."
My eyes very nearly popped out of my head and my mouth hung open--wide. I couldn't help it. This was my mother. I rubbed my hands over my face to try to erase my shock, but there were no words working their way up my frozen throat.
"Oh, don't be such a prude, Jolene. We're all big girls now. I just say it like it is. And frankly, it wasn't ever that great. Oh, for a while it was nice having everybody wishing they'd been the ones to snag him, and it was kind of fun to watch their faces as their dirty little minds thought about us in all sorts of ways. But that's about all there was to it, the thinking about it. I want more than that and it was darned clear I wouldn't be getting it from him. I'll tell you one thing, though. I will have sex again before I die."
I just kept my hands over my face and shook my head. What else could I do? This was nothing I ever needed or wanted to know about. My own mother out cruising for sex. I suppressed a shudder, and reached for my drink, finishing it in one swig. I'd seen a bottle of red wine in her fridge and I was sorely tempted to upend it as well--and I don't even like red wine.
"Okay, I think I get the general idea. You went over to his house to tell his wife there hadn't been any hanky-panky."
"No, ma'am, I did not. I went over there to tell her she was welcome to the lying, self-righteous bastard. I just wanted her to know what all he'd been up to since she'd been gone. I figured it was only fair."
"Maybe she didn't care."
"She didn't. I think all she cared about was keeping her name the same as his so she could get his retirement and all the joint property, which I guess she's got now, not that I care. I've got my own house and it's a darn sight better than that tin can trailer house he lived in."
Ignoring the comparative housing issue, I said, "I thought you saw papers from an attorney."
"He was probably just lying to me. Lying like he did about everything, including the fact that he was still virile."
Oh, no, I'd heard way more than I ever wanted to know about my mother's sex life--or lack thereof. All I wanted to know was what had happened just before the mayor had been murdered. Simple really, unless you had to extract the details from Lucille Jackson. "The wife, what's her name?"
"Velma."
"So how did she take your appearance at her husband's door?"
Lucille inspected her acrylic nails. "She was really quite polite about it, considering the awkward situation. I don't have anything against her. Felt sorry for her really. And as I suspected, she already knew all about me and BigJohn, not that there was anything to know. Everybody in town knew about us going out, yet once Velma showed up back in town, they all pretended ignorance of the whole thing. I guess that's what set me off the most, everybody going along with his games."
"So you didn't get in a fight with these two or anything?"
"A lady does not fight, Jolene," she said, looking at me as if I were a complete idiot. "I just told them they deserved one another and I hoped they had a happy, boring life together. Velma just smiled and BigJohn stood behind her bobbing his head like the big old oaf he is, or was."
"You really don't care that he's dead, do you?"
Lucille patted her hair, then twirled a dangly rhinestone earring. "No, honey, I really don't. He wasn't a nice man. He put on a good front, but underneath the good looks and brown-nosing, he was about as crooked as a dog's hind leg. Folks were just starting to figure that out, but I was way ahead of them."
"I have to call Jerry and tell him about your little visit."
"I know. I'd have told him myself if his goons hadn't been so belligerent in front of my friends at the Dairy Queen."
I didn't argue with her or ask her what her excuse was for not coming clean about an hour ago. I figured I wouldn't like it anyway. "You need to know the approximate times you parked at the school, arrived at the mayor's house, came back to the school and then arrived home. Also, if anyone happened to see you during these times."
Lucille nodded and sipped her soda, running her nails along the sides of the glass to wipe off the beads of condensation. "I'll tell him everything this time, where I parked, where I walked, when I left, even the ugly shade of lipstick that woman was wearing. Everything."
I gave her a look that said "you better," and made the call to Jerry.
Jerry wasn't smiling even a little when he arrived back at the house, and I didn't attempt to explain or excuse anything. We both knew where the source of the trouble was.
While he grilled Mother--yet again--I supervised Earl, King of Locksmiths, who was quite friendly and chatted nonstop as he swapped out the locks and added new slide bolts on all the doors. He made a great pitch for a burglary alarm system that dialed right into a security company that would then dispatch the appropriate personnel or police and fire services to the scene. I tried to sound appropriately impressed, then terribly disappointed that I had to decline his fine offer. I didn't bother mentioning that by the time his big city security types arrived, the burglar could be in Oklahoma with the loot, never mind the fact that the local pulse dialing telephones would most likely send the high-tech burglary system into electronic spasms.
As Earl chatted away, I mumbled "Oh, really" and "wow" at various intervals, but kept my ears tuned to the conversation in the kitchen. As best I could tell, Mother was finally telling Jerry the whole story, which I presumed was also the whole truth.
Earl finished the last lock with a big, hearty chuckle and grin. I figured out just why he was laughing when I looked at the bill. I wrote out a check and Earl scuttled off with enough money to make the payments on his bass boat for at least three months.
I checked my watch: 7:30 p.m. There was still time for a nice dinner with Jerry. I walked into the kitchen and leaned against the door frame. "How's it going?"
Jerry looked up, the strain of interviewing Lucille graphed across his face. "I think we're about finished."
He tactfully didn't mention that they would have been finished eons ago if my mother had told the truth the first time around, or even the second. Jerry really is a nice guy--and incredibly patient. A trait I sorely lack.
I was sincerely hoping that my mother's statement hadn't triggered some official business for Jerry because I had really been looking forward to going out to dinner with him. Okay, I'd been looking forward to going anywhere with him, but dinner sounded good, too. Before I could say a word, however, Lucille stood and walked to the refrigerator.
"Jolene," she said, pulling a pitcher of tea from the fridge. "Why don't you run on and take a shower. I know you've been driving all night, but a nice cool shower will perk you right up. I'll keep Jerry Don company until you get dressed, then you two can go out for that nice quiet dinner you talked about. Do you both good. I'll just have a sandwich here. Would you like a glass of iced tea while you wait, Sheriff?"
Jerry nodded to Lucille. "Yes, ma'am, I believe I would."
For some reason I felt like I'd been set up, even though we'd already planned to go to dinner. I glanced at my mother and then at Jerry, feeling like I should give him a chance to get off my mother's hook. "Listen, Jerry, if you need to work or you're tired, we can have dinner another time."
"Hurry up, Jolene," he said, that soft Texas drawl rolling across the kitchen like an electric-charged thunderstorm. "I can't even remember the last time I had a bite to eat."
We laughed and talked all through dinner, chatted about old times, old spouses, kids, football games and steamy rides home after the games. We didn't talk about the specific details of those nights, but it was pretty clear we were both thinking about them.
The food was fabulous, the filet mignon so tender I'd cut it with a butter knife. And I'd had a beer, which is one beer too many for me. One little bottle of Coors Light and I was having way too good of a time. It was all the beer's fault, too. It had nothing at all to do with Jerry. Nothing at all to do with the fact that I thought Jerry Don Parker looked better than any man I'd ever seen, including Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise and any male on the cover of a romance novel. "The first time wasn't so great, you know."
He chuckled then took a sip of his beer. "I think I got the hang of it pretty quickly."
I laughed. "Yes, you certainly did."
Silence reigned for too long and I let my tongue start wagging before my brain started paying attention. "I guess you were a pro by the time Rhonda came around." Well, now, I hadn't really meant for that to slip out. Admitting that your bitter little twenty-five-year-old grudges were alive and well wasn't real great dinner conversation. I was trying to think of a tactful way to unsay what I'd just said, but it wasn't coming.
Jerry cocked his head a little, curved one corner of his lip up in a sad grin and shook his head. "I never slept with Rhonda, Jolene. I told you that about a hundred times. You just didn't want to believe it."
Even through the beer haze, I couldn't deny that. He'd told me nothing had happened between them, but I hadn't believed him. All I could hear was Rhonda's blow-by-blow of their so-called date, running over and over in my head. I'd thrown up--literally. And then I'd done the worst possible thing I could have. I pushed Jerry away and accepted a journalism scholarship to UT to get away from it all, none of which I really wanted to do.
Within a day, for reasons that mental health professionals would no doubt tie somehow to my mother, I'd completely changed the course of my life. And I'd never allowed myself to talk about it ever again. Until now. And oddly, I probably knew that it hadn't really been about Rhonda even back then, not that it still didn't infuriate me. "She lied to me, didn't she? God, why didn't I realize what a lying little--"
"We were seventeen, Jo. We all made mistakes."
Some of us made a few more mistakes than others of us. "I came out to find you, and that little twit she ran around with told me that you and Rhonda had gone to get a Coke and then were going parking. I should have just smacked her."
He shook his head. "Rhonda needed a ride home after the game and you were busy doing something, I don't even remember what, but I figured I had time to run her to her house and get back to the school before you were ready to leave. But you were gone when I came back. I didn't see you for two days, and well...."
"By that time, I had ruined both our lives," I said, rather morosely. This was not exactly how I'd envisioned our romp down memory lane.
"Look, Jo, I don't blame you for any of that. We were kids. And frankly, what was between us was so intense that it scared me. Sometimes it seemed so overwhelming I didn't know if I could handle it. Maybe that was why I didn't really argue all that much about you going to Austin. I think I wanted some space to see what it was between us, if it was between every guy and girl, or just us."
"Just us," I muttered, but I didn't want to get all maudlin about it so went back to safer ground: anger. "So Rhonda and her little friend set you up?"
"I think Rhonda wanted to get back at you more than she wanted to be with me, although she was perfectly willing to show me her charms. I always felt sorry for her."
My hackles went up instantly. He felt sorry for her? If I saw the woman right this minute, I knew I'd still feel like strangling her, but only after I'd clawed her lying little tongue out of her lying fat mouth.
"She had a rough time," Jerry continued, thankfully unaware of the evil ideas running through my head. "Family life wasn't so good for her, you know, probably worse than any of us could have guessed. And besides all that, she was just trying to find her way, like we all were. She just took a real hard path."
That right there is exactly why I loved--and was often severely annoyed by--Jerry Don Parker. Even as a kid, he could always look beyond the incident to the person, the life shaped by other things, and, well, he just saw things differently. Me, I didn't give a shit about her family sob stories. I just wanted to beat the little twit to a bloody pulp for trying to steal my boyfriend. I probably would have too, if not for Jerry. Looking back, the whole thing was almost funny--almost.
But he was right. We were just kids. I smiled, a lazy one-beer-induced grin. "I'm not sure, but I think I'm older and wiser now."