A Dead Man's Tale Read online

  “Mrs. Reed looks like she’s waiting for someone,” Sarah said. The better to use her binoculars, she removed her floppy-brimmed hat and sunglasses and tossed both aside. The shades landed where she had intended (on the seat between them) but the hat sailed onto Daisy Perika’s lap. Sarah’s casual discard of that personal item onto the tribal elder’s person irked the feisty old woman quite a lot and then some. What am I, just someplace to put things she don’t need right now? Being one of those Christians who was inclined less toward the Sermon on the Mount and more toward Eye for Eye, Tooth for Tooth, the Latter-Day Pharisee decided that she would get even with the thoughtless teenager. Tonight, after I get undressed and put my nightgown and house slippers on, I’ll walk into Sarah’s bedroom and say, “My closet is too full for this stuff,” and then toss my clothes and shoes onto her bed. That ought to make the point. So that’s what I’ll do. The senior citizen grinned wickedly. Unless I can think of something better.

  Blissfully ignorant of the irritable auntie’s silent subplot, the honest young woman continued to think aloud: “Oh, I wish I could get close enough to find out who she’s here to meet—and hear what they talk about.” But you don’t want the target to know you’re watching them and there’s just no way I can get close without being spotted. Addressing Daisy, she pointed. “I’m going down there where I can see a little better. But don’t worry, this’ll just take a few minutes.”

  “Take as long as you like.” Her venom seemingly spent, Daisy patted the hound’s head, yawned, and closed her eyes. “I feel a nap coming on.”

  After smiling at the sleepy old woman, the girl got out of the pickup and took a brisk walk off the edge of the parking lot, then downhill to vanish in a narrow grove of young aspens that had sprouted along the border between the church and the country-club property. Once in position, the hopeful spy raised the instrument to her eyes. After fine-tuning the binocular optics, Sarah searched until she framed the shaky figure of Irene Reed. Steadying the binoculars against a sapling for a more stable view, the delighted detective whispered to herself, “She’s looking at her wristwatch. Whoever she’s supposed to meet must be late.” The young woman figured it was twenty to one that the tardy person was a man. A boyfriend. Who else would a married woman meet in such a lonely place?

  One minute passed.

  During which period Sarah Frank thrice recited the seven lines of Miss Dickinson’s “If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking.”

  While the Rocky Mountain Polytechnic University student paid lip service to her American literature course, Mrs. Reed uttered a string of unseemly obscenities, and checked her wristwatch three times.

  Two minutes.

  Sarah had completed the wood-cutter’s song in Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” but got stuck trying to remember what the ploughboy was up to.

  As she continued her vigil, Irene Reed appended unspeakable blasphemies to her obscenities. Her platinum wristwatch was consulted five times.

  Sarah had dismissed the ploughboy and said goodbye to Mr. Whitman. Continuing to peer through her Sears & Roebuck binoculars, our scholar had a go at Longfellow’s “The Day is Done.” But it was not. Not by a long shot.

  A few tick-tocks into Minute Number Three, when Irene was beginning to seethe with the volcanic anger of an attractive, vain, upper-crust female who has been stood up by a hairy-legged person she considers beneath her station, a young man with a dark complexion and a bright, toothy smile appeared. The fellow with the rake over his shoulder waved at Mrs. Reed. He appeared (to Sarah) to be well over six feet tall (he was six four), thirty inches wide at the shoulders (an amplification by the impressionable teenager), and superbly muscular, in which latter assessment Sarah was not guilty of the slightest hyperbole.

  There was more.

  The darkly handsome man had long, curly locks that fell to his shoulders. Long, curly, blond locks that (this was Sarah’s opinion) ruined the eye-popping effect of this otherwise virile specimen with just the slightest hint of…how to say it? Femininity.

  And there was still more.

  As Sarah watched the almost-flawless example of young manhood approach the married woman and gather her into a breathless embrace, something extraneous to the scene caught the exuberant spy’s eye.

  Enter (stage left) another player.

  Sarah Frank’s brow furrowed behind the binoculars. There was something eerily familiar about the hunched, sunglassed senior citizen under the wide-brimmed straw hat. The elderly person was being tugged along the paved pathway by a dog on a leash. A leash that resembled the orange nylon towrope that Sarah kept in the bed of her pickup. And those look like my sunglasses and that looks like my hat and that old dog looks a lot like Sidewinder—Oh, no!

  Oh, yes.

  Behold the shameless scene stealer—the star of this seamy little melodrama.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Pitiful Old Lame, Blind Woman (The Promised One-Act, One-Minute Production)

  While Daisy Perika and the hound had tarried just out of sight of the married woman and her muscle-bound boyfriend, sheet lightning flashed over mountain peaks that were veiled by a lacy gray smoke of swirling snow. As soon as the couple had decoupled and begun to use their lips to form syllables, the tribal elder was eager to hear as much as she could of the conversation. Alas, the noise of the gathering storm frustrated Daisy’s intrigue; the boom-and-rumble of thunder and the ploppity-plop of plump raindrops on new ash and aspen leaves was drowning out most of their verbal exchange. When a snoop can discern only one word out of three, the delicious novelty of eavesdropping quickly wears thin, and when it did, the Ute elder decided upon a tactical withdrawal.

  As often happens with animals, the Columbine hound had other ideas. Sidewinder was loath to depart before he had crashed the couple’s intimate party, and so off the odd pair went—this time, the dog taking the reluctant old woman for a walk.

  As the curious figure approached with the oak walking stick in her right hand and the taut dog rope in her left, the bemused twosome parted to make way for the senior citizen and her determined dog to pass.

  It seemed that they would do just that when Sidewinder stopped abruptly, apparently to sniff at an intriguingly disgusting scent upon the paved pathway. Daisy was unable to arrest what physicist Samuel Reed would have referred to as her “forward momentum,” which was equal to the product of Daisy’s mass and velocity. The poor old soul stumbled, almost tumbled, and would have fallen flat on her face had she not managed to make a successful grab for something to hold on to. The nearest sturdy object was the young man with the curly blond hair.

  “Yikes!” Daisy yelped.

  “Whoops!” saith Mr. Goldilocks.

  “Oh!” Irene Reed instinctively reached out to help.

  “I’m sorry.” Daisy held on. “I’m just an old stumblebum—can’t get around like I used to when I was eighty-five.”

  Weary of this tired old joke, the hound snorted contemptuously.

  The desperate comedian kept right on holding on to the golf course assistant groundskeeper. “It’s not just my limbs that don’t do what I want ’em to, I’ve almost lost my sight.” The sly deceiver blinked behind Sarah’s cheap sunglasses. “Just a few minutes ago the lady on the radio said it was almost noon, but things look so dark to me that it might as well be midnight.”

  Sidewinder—a canine who could not abide a lie—rolled his eyes.

  As she assisted her boyfriend in the embarrassing task of unclasping himself from the clumsy woman’s embrace, Irene Reed’s forced smile hurt her face. Dotty old people shouldn’t be allowed to roam around in public. Not without a designated guardian.

  After exchanging a few inane remarks with Mrs. Reed and her man-friend, Daisy brushed a crisply green little aspen leaf off her sleeve, turned in the direction whence she had come, and departed with the hound, who (apparently humiliated by the encounter) was pulling his embarrassing burden in the general direction of the Wesleyan Methodist Church parking lo
t and an eighteen-year-old novice detective who was extremely alarmed and also greatly vexed with Charlie Moon’s outrageously zany aunt Daisy

  But despite Sarah’s fertile imagination, her intimate knowledge of several of Daisy’s previous misadventures, and the fact that she had been an eyewitness to this latest escapade, she was not fully aware of what had transpired at the lovers’ rendezvous.

  Fortunately, neither was Irene Reed. Nor her boyfriend.

  What the hound knew must remain a matter of conjecture.

  While Daisy was being towed uphill by the Columbine hound, Sarah Frank watched Mrs. Reed and the young man embrace again to enjoy a parting kiss, then go their separate ways. After a brisk walk back to the members-only parking lot, the married lady slipped into her pink Cadillac and exited the Sand Hills Country Club gate with a perfunctory wave at the uniformed guard. Sarah took no interest in Irene Reed’s departure. Her entire attention was focused on the young man, who, after stopping to get a raincoat from a Chevrolet Camaro, had headed toward the Sand Hills Pro Shop. After he had pushed through the door and vanished inside, Sarah hurried back to her red F-150, arriving just in time to meet Daisy Perika, who was huffing and puffing from the dog-assisted hill climb. The Ute elder presented the floppy hat and cheap sunglasses to the girl without a word. But not without a self-satisfied smirk.

  Knowing that it would be pointless to complain to this habitual malefactor who took considerable pride in her misdeeds, Sarah Frank urged Charlie’s aunt and Sidewinder to “get into the truck as fast as you can—we might have to leave in a hurry.”

  Daisy and the dog complied without dissent. But once in the pickup cab, one of them said, “That rich matukach hussy’s already gone; I saw her drive away.”

  Somewhat frostily, the neophyte detective informed her critic that there was no further point in tailing Mrs. Reed. “We know where she lives.” Sarah asserted that she intended to follow the boyfriend home.

  Grimacing at the aches in her legs, the grumpy old woman grunted. “He might hang around for hours.”

  “I don’t care—we’re staying here until he leaves.” Sarah set her chin, pressed the binoculars against her eyes, and scanned the employees’ parking lot until she spotted the Camaro. Good—his old car is still there. I’ll watch it until he shows up, then I’ll follow him. But “follow” was a rather pedestrian descriptor, suggesting a seedy gumshoe.

  What the youthful sleuth hankered for was a modish sense of style. An elegant air of flair. Even a classy dash of panache.

  Sarah Frank whispered, “I’ll tail him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It Takes a Felon to Know One

  Whether or not this maxim is true in a general sense, it certainly applied to Mrs. Irene Reed’s favorite country-club groundskeeper—and to Daisy Perika. About a minute after the aforementioned tribal elder (henceforth designated Felon Number One) got settled in Sarah’s pickup, Felon Number Two slipped into his souped-up classic 1982 Chevrolet Camaro and pulled out of the Sand Hills County Club employees’ parking lot. As he motored along the boulevard, the driver was troubled about his meeting with the enigmatic female. No, not Irene Reed. The wealthy married woman was (he believed) entirely predictable—putty in his hands.

  It was his encounter with the blind woman and her Seeing Eye hound that bothered him. For some reason or other, the young man couldn’t purge the elderly woman’s jarring appearance from his thoughts.

  Sarah Sticks Doggedly to the Trail

  Her earlier misadventure at the intersection still fresh in her mind, Sarah Frank remained cautious on this sinuous road. Her rule of thumb was to stay about a block behind her target. That way, I won’t be spotted. And no way was she going to take a chance on rear-ending the spiffy Camaro when it stopped ( just around a bend) at a stoplight.

  And she didn’t.

  But when she saw the classic Chevy approaching a signal light that had just turned yellow, our novice sleuth knew what was going to go wrong, and it did. The boyfriend’s vehicle accelerated, passed under the light about two heartbeats after it turned red, and she was torpedoed. Scuttled. Sunk. And any other nautical description of disaster one might summon up. There was nothing for Sarah to do (with a state policeman not far behind her) but to brake to a full stop at the red light and wait. Except to chew the fingernail of her left thumb and bang her right hand on the steering wheel and wail, “Oh, turn green, please-please-please turn green!”

  After some sixteen hours, the traffic light complied.

  Irene Reed’s Boyfriend

  As the young man drove along the tree-lined boulevard, the autopilot portion of his brain was intently focused on the road ahead. But what the assistant golf-course groundskeeper saw in his mind’s inner eye was a definitely old, supposedly lame, allegedly blind woman being pulled along by a homely hound—the pair mutually attached by a length of nylon towrope. The eccentric had seemed so pitifully helpless, so charmingly harmless.

  But, by some deep inner instinct, he knew this was a sham. There’s something wrong about that old hag. He tried to put his finger on what didn’t fit. For one thing…She wasn’t confused or stupid; that was all a big act. His subconscious took a glance at the rearview mirror. And for another thing…The way she turned up right out of nowhere, it was almost like… The pair of bushy black eyebrows under his yellow hairline bunched, and behind the brow with the worried frown, his lurid imagination completed the chilling thought: It was almost like she was a witch.

  In his culture, like Daisy’s, brujas and brujos were ubiquitous. Why, if a fellow were to throw a half-dozen bricks into a crowd on any busy street corner in any town in the US of A, he was bound to hit two or three female or male witches. Not one of them would suffer a scratch or a bruise, but you could bet your last dime that they’d put the Evil Eye on you!

  About three minutes and a mile after the superstitious young man had deliberately run the red light, he made a stop at a busy Conoco station to fill the Camaro’s tank—and made a rather unpleasant discovery.

  What the hell—

  As the puzzled motorist stood by the gas pump, the red pickup his subconscious had noted in the Camaro’s rearview mirror came creeping along the street. He got a glimpse of the slender girl behind the steering wheel and a good look at the old witch in the passenger seat. The young man squinted to get a better look—and did. Chico Perez’s lips whispered the numbers on the license plate as he memorized them.

  Justifiable Frustration

  Neither Daisy Perika nor Sarah Frank noticed the furious yellow-haired man glaring at them or the low-slung Chevrolet. Both the frowning biped and the sleek motor vehicle were almost entirely concealed by a row of gas pumps and other vehicles.

  “Oh!” Sarah banged her small fist on the steering wheel again. “Where did he go?”

  “Well, unless that old low-rider can sprout wings and fly, he either went straight ahead, or he turned left or right.” Following this uncalled-for sarcasm, Daisy’s snort was of the derisive sort. “Either way, you’ve lost him.” Her chuckle could be filed under “self-satisfied.” “We might as well head back to the Columbine.”

  “Oh, shoot!” Yes. That is precisely what she said. And like the straight arrow she was, Sarah went straight ahead. Within less time than it takes to think about it, her F-150 was out of sight of Mrs. Reed’s muscular young boyfriend.

  Justifiable Homicide?

  That’s how the owner of the Chevrolet Camaro saw it. But despite his slowly growing anger, the dangerous man could not help but smile. Even a casual passerby with one glass eye would have noticed that there was more anticipation than mirth in his twisted grin. Like Daisy when Sarah’s hat was tossed into her lap, the party who had suffered the offense was determined to get even. He was already beginning to savor the sweet foretaste of vengeance. But the disciplined young man knew that a fellow shouldn’t start slicing his cake before it was baked. The first order of business was to find out who owned the pickup.

  Chico P
erez hoped it would turn out to be the girl he’d seen driving it.

  Temporarily Thwarted

  Sarah Frank continued for almost two miles before she gave up her futile effort to locate the Camaro. But the Ute-Papago orphan was not about to abandon her effort to assist Scott Parris in his investigation of Mrs. Reed, thereby earning the undying gratitude of the chief of police and eternal admiration of Charlie Moon. All I have to do is ask somebody at the country club who the big guy with the curly blond hair is and then I’ll look him up in the phone book. Very sensible.

  Except for a few minor issues.

  For starters, Sarah was not acquainted with that stratum of society that could afford membership in the exclusive club.

  For another, the assistant groundskeeper’s number was not in the telephone directory.

  Last—and this was a very serious issue—any inquiries Sarah Frank might make at his place of employment would almost certainly help Mrs. Reed’s angry boyfriend find out who she was just that much faster.

  Homeward Bound

  During the long drive back to Charlie Moon’s cattle ranch, Sarah—who was occupied with a multitude of regretful thoughts that all began with Oh, I wish I had—had nothing whatever to say to Miss Daisy.