Hot Enough to Kill (11 page)
"It's his third," Lucille said as I explained the latest sorry state of affairs. "So I suppose he didn't want anything in the paper about it. He didn't stay with the first one any time at all. I think he was married to a girl from Nocona after that. Lasted five or six years. Haven't heard much about this one."
While it was semi-interesting to learn the life stories of my old friends, I needed a new plan on how to deal with the current unpleasant situation, namely someone wanting to kill my mother. "I could call one of the staff reporters, tell them I know Gary, see what happens."
"They've already written their little ho-hum story about BigJohn, and I suspect there will be a small piece in this afternoon's paper about Jerry. The high temperature for the day will get more attention, I'll tell you for sure. It's hot enough to kill out there today and nobody's going to want to be out in it snooping around about some crazy what-if."
She was most likely right. When it got into the triple digits and stayed there for weeks, people tended to get cranky--and complacent. The level of water in the lakes and how many kilowatts the electric company was supplying were about the best you could hope for in the local lead articles. In short, chasing down a story about a crazy shooter would require someone to remove himself from in front of his refrigerated air conditioner unit and knock on doors; therefore, it wasn't likely to happen. Of course, I could be a little jaded in my assessment.
Lucille leaned back in her recliner. "There's just no help for it, I suppose. We'll have to do the investigating ourselves. If we stick together, we can watch out for people with guns lurking in the bushes and find out who's after us all in one whack."
"Uh, huh, and just exactly what do you mean, by 'we'?"
After a few more ineffective phone calls and another brief chat with my mother, it didn't take me long to confirm that "we" meant "me", and sticking together meant Lucille telling me what to do and me doing it.
We were still glaring at one another across the kitchen table regarding the chain of command when I decided to pretend I'd won and get on with the business of deciding what I was going to do next. Besides, it was probably for the best anyway--the part about Lucille not getting physically involved, not the part about telling me what to do.
No matter what age you happen to be, having your mother boss you around can cause resentment, rebellion and ridiculous behavior--or in my case, all three. I have, at various times, gone to great lengths to prove that I don't have to do what my mother says. In my youth, those instances generally coincided with the times I was also compelled to prove my stupidity. I am older and wiser now--at least one would hope--and recognized that regardless of whose idea it was, we needed to try to figure out what we could. So, I flipped open a notepad to a clean page and began my own interrogation.
Determined to be objective and thorough, I wrote down almost everything my mother said. I carefully noted all the names of the players in the various mayoral issues and their specific reasons for despising BigJohn. I made a similar list for my mother's enemies. It was no surprise to anyone that even with Kickapoo being a really small town, not a single name showed up on both lists. Things are never that easy for me anyway.
I also quizzed Mother about who might want to do Jerry harm and why. After we eliminated all the obvious criminal elements that unnaturally inhabited the area, Mother had an epiphany of sorts.
"Why, Jolene," she said, a real twinge of awe in her voice. "I never thought about it until just now. That bullet could have been meant for Jerry."
I did not see the light along with her. "So said Leroy the Slug."
"Leroy's an idiot who can't see past the end of his bulbous old nose," Lucille said, turning her own slim nose up at the very idea. "All he thought about was that Jerry got shot so somebody must have meant to shoot him. I doubt it's that simple."
I doubted it, too, although I didn't have any great alternative theories. However, from the studious look on my mother's face, I figured she did, or she was busy concocting one.
Lucille clicked the nails of her good hand on the table. "What if someone got jealous that you and Jerry were seeing each other again?"
I groaned. "That's pretty unlikely. Hardly anybody even knows I'm here, and exactly none of those care."
"Everybody knows you're here, Jolene. Word spreads fast at the Dairy Queen. Why, once when Merline let it slip that she'd not be averse to visiting with a certain new widower, the phone was ringing before she even got home. Besides all that, you went to dinner with Jerry Don. Why, that right there could have sent somebody into a tizzy."
"Because I went to dinner with him? It's not like we went to a motel and put 'Jerry and Jolene are in room one twenty-two' on the sign by the highway."
Lucille raised an artfully drawn eyebrow. "Did you go to a motel?" "No, Mother, we did not. I was being sarcastic."
"Well, I wouldn't put it past you. I knew what all you and Jerry Don were up to, don't think I didn't."
Personally, I didn't want to think about that on any level whatsoever. "That somebody shot Jerry because of me is too ridiculous to consider, even in Kickapoo, Texas." I realized my mistake at about the same time the words left my mouth.
Right on cue, Lucille's eyes flashed and her mouth tightened into two thin lines. One did not disparage Lucille's hometown or the great state of Texas--ever. More to the point, I needed her cooperation, not the cold shoulder treatment that such a remark would earn me. I like to think I've learned a thing or two in my forty-three years, but if I have, none of them are related to dealing with my mother.
Lucille didn't cross her arms, most likely because the sling prevented it, but she sure looked like she wanted to. "I am certainly sorry that you find all of us here to be such imbeciles," she said, her hackles up and bristling. "I was, however, smart enough to raise you."
That was the start of a very bad downhill slide that I'd traversed on numerous occasions, and never once had I been able to backpedal fast enough to make things right with my mother--never. Therefore, I knew better than to even try. The best I could hope for was a distraction. "You know, Mother, you do have a point. But what if it wasn't one of my old boyfriends that wanted Jerry out of the way, but one of his would-be girlfriends? He's here all the time. He's a good-looking man. He's got to have women following him all over the place."
Lucille sniffed and twirled a curl of Frivolous Fawn. "That was exactly what I was trying to tell you, if you'd been so kind as to have let me finish." She stuck her nose up in the air. "It would seem to me, senile though you think I am, that his ex-wife would be the most likely suspect."
"Amy?" I said, a little too incredulously. I ignored Mother's creased brow and pressed on. "Amy Parker hardly seems like a homicidal maniac. I met her at the hospital, you know. I suppose she could have some personality disorder that makes her go nuts and try to kill people, but when I talked to her, she seemed really sweet." Sweet is a highly desirable trait in Kickapoo, but it didn't look like it held any sway with my mother in this particular situation.
Lucille's nose twitched up another notch. "She may have seemed sweet to you, missy, but you don't know half as much as you think you do."
No, apparently I did not. But I did know things would be going a whole lot better if I'd remembered to bring along my eggshells to walk on. In truth, this non-meeting of the minds usually happened within the first ten minutes of being with my mother, so the fact that I'd made it a full day and a half was something to be proud of. That we'd spent most of that time discussing murder motives or medical care for shooting victims, namely Lucille, was beside the point.
"Okay, you're right," I said sincerely. "I'm not nearly as smart as I think I am." It wasn't so much an agreement with her as an accurate assessment. If I was smart, I'd be somewhere else--like another state. "But if I were, what would I know?"
"For your information, Jerry Don left his wife nearly two years ago," Lucille said huffily. "She didn't make it easy for him to get a divorce, though, I'll tell you that for sure."
Besides the fact that Jerry and Amy's marital history was none of my business, I'd found that, over the years, the less I knew about Jerry's love life, the more charitable--and supportive--I could be. Nevertheless, Lucille had baited up a fat worm of curiosity and I was compelled to bite. "So what's the rumor, another woman?"
Lucille got a Cheshire cat grin and fairly licked her lips. "I suppose I should have mentioned it before, but yes, there was talk of another woman."
Ridiculous or not, my heart twisted up in my chest, then took a plunge into my stomach. I hadn't even been here, but it hurt to think that Jerry would have fallen for someone else when he had to have known I was available--sort of. Seven hundred miles isn't exactly around the corner, but it isn't unavailable either.
I glanced at Mother to see just how deep her self-satisfaction went. She wasn't smug, but she was snickering. Whatever the case, I didn't think it was the least bit funny. I tucked my hurt feelings and temper away as best I could and mustered up my most businesslike voice. "So who was the woman?"
"Some girl out of Redwater. I don't know her name. I don't like listening to gossip, you know." Another sly grin. "But I heard she was kind of kinky."
Kinky? What did my mother know about that? And where did kinky fall on the latest yardstick of morality in Kickapoo? Did that mean the woman wore leather and carried a whip or that she drove the car when they went out? Don't laugh. In Kickapoo, real men do not let women drive them around.
I know this personally because before my dad died, he was, for all intents and purposes, blind as a bat--and would have been declared legally so if they had caught him--yet he continued to drive everywhere. No way was he going to be seen riding shotgun for a woman, particularly his wife. In keeping with his very macho image, he also continued to ride his Harley, without a helmet, by God. How he died in the house of natural causes rather than under a semi on the highway is still a mystery.
So, you see, kinky is a matter of perspective--and geographic location--which is why I decided to ignore the issue completely. "So how long did the relationship with the other woman last?" I asked, belatedly wondering why that particular question jumped into my head. Then again, a three-month relationship was different than a three-year one, although I wasn't feeling particularly enthusiastic about either option.
Lucille patted her hair. "Oh, they're still living together, as far as I know."
After my stomach did another free fall, I looked my mother straight in the eye and glared. "This is not funny, Mother. What exactly are you talking about?"
"Oh, all right," she said, sighing dramatically. "I understand they only live together when she doesn't have the children."
Her children, his children, what? There was something not quite right here. "So Jerry only lives with a woman when her kids aren't there, or is it his kids you mean?"
Lucille snickered in a "you poor dumb thing" sort of way. "It's not Jerry Don we're talking about here. Amy Parker's the one with the girlfriend."
I know my eyebrows raised because I felt them. "Oh."
Not a brilliant response, but the best I could manage, considering. This was definitely a new twist in the story that opened up a whole new can of questions. Amy was a lesbian? I'll admit to a twinge of relief at the prospect, as ridiculous as that may sound. My selfishness was short-lived, however, as the implications of the situation became painfully clear for Jerry. It would have been horrible enough for Amy to have left him for another man, but for another woman? That had to hurt. Bad. I wondered for a moment why Jerry hadn't told me about it, but what was he going to say: "By the way, did you know my wife prefers to sleep with women?" Not exactly first date conversation material, not that it was a date, of course. Meeting Amy, it was believable, I supposed, but only to a point. "From what I saw at the hospital, I would have sworn that Amy really loved Jerry."
"I'd heard that too," Lucille said, a little too flippantly. "Maybe she does, or maybe it's like a brother-sister thing, or maybe she doesn't at all. In any case, you can't blame him for being upset when he found his wife and her lover in bed together, doing whatever those kind do."
Those kind...kinky.... Oh, great, I knew exactly where this was headed and I didn't want to go there. I'll admit that I enjoyed a rather idyllic childhood here in Kickapoo; small school, small classes, lots of opportunities to be a big shot, and very few worries. And for the most part, I was oblivious to the underlying attitude of the times, which was that anyone other than white heterosexual Protestants (Baptists being best) were regarded with suspicion, fear and outright loathing. In fact, I was probably around eight when it occurred to me that the only person with a skin color other than white I'd ever seen was a friend of my dad's. I also remember overhearing my mom and dad worry about him being okay after he left our house. I didn't understand it, just knew it scared me too. Later, I realized he'd literally been taking his life in his own hands by coming over to visit us--not kidding.
I'd like to believe that things are different today. And to be fair, on my last visit to Kickapoo, I heard a kid at the Dairy Queen gleefully chattering about the "two black guys" on the high school football team who were, and I quote, "gonna kick everybody's butt all the way to state." Funny how an upswing in the Class AAA football rankings helps smooth out those pesky pigmentation issues. Helps a little anyway.
Armed with that little prehistoric perspective on tolerance, how well do you figure a gay person would fare in this lovely, open-minded haven, especially one that wasn't a star football player?