The Traveling Corpse (28 page)

DeeDee asked, “Isn't it hard ta pull an
alligator out of water? They're strong, aren't they?”

“Oh, yes, m'am,” the trapper answered
politely, “Usually, I kin pull ‘em out by myself. But, if it's a
really big one, I'll use tha winch on my truck.”

Doc pointed to the pole Pete laid on the
ground and asked about it. Pete said, “That's my bang stick. It's
got a 44 magnum tip on tha end. I don't like ta use it though
lessen thar's danger ta people. I'd rather take tha ‘gator ‘live.
But, if I have ta, I jest hit that critter hard on the head with
tha bang stick an' that cartridge explodes an' kills tha ‘gator.
Tha's all thar is ta it!”

DeeDee shivered in fear, “All there is to it?
Why, I declare! Ya got ta get mighty near ta that big ole scary
animal. Five feet's closer than I'd ever want ta get ta an
alligator!”

Doc asked Pete, “How did you ever learn to
trap alligators? How did you happen to start?”

Pete answered easily, “Been doin' it since I
was jest a lit'le fellow. My daddy was a poacher. I'd go out with
him nights, but I don't take a chance poaching anymore. This is all
legal—on the up and up. When the Sheriff's Department calls me ta
get a nuisance ‘gator, I pull a permit before I even start
out.”

Doc said, “Maybe I shouldn't ask this, but
like the old Welsh woman said, ‘It's really none of my business,
but I'd really like to know!' I'd like to know how much they pay
you to trap an alligator, if you don't mind telling me?”

DeeDee said, almost under her breath, “You
couldn't pay me enough ta make me go out ta trap a ‘gator!”

Pete laughed, “Sure I'll tell ya. They don't
pay me nothing.” The seniors were shocked, but he went on to
explain, “My pay is tha ‘gator itself. I get ta keep him; tha's why
I like ta take him ‘live. I want ta protect the meat, an' in this
Florida heat, ‘specially in summer, it doesn't take long fer meat
ta spoil. I take it home ‘cause I've got a state approved
processing workshop there. If a trapper don't have his own place,
then he takes it ta a USDA approved shop. I put tha ‘gator in my
big cooler fer 24 hours after I kill it. It may surprise ya, but a
‘gator kin still move up ta six hours after ya kill it. If it
moves, then tha hide tears an' ya lose part of its value. I skin
it. The leather's worth a lot. Then I cut the meat off and cube it.
Then we vacuum seal it and freeze it. We eat the meat or sell it to
restaurants. This trappin' jest something I do on the side; I got a
business rentin' out equipment. I jest do trappin' as a side thing
ta pick up some extra cash money.”

Barb directed a question to the sergeant,
“Will you be there when he cuts the animal open?”

Menendez answered, “Not normally, but since
we are looking for evidence, yes, I'll be there.” She asked Pete,
“When will you process him?”

“Depends when I kill him,” Pete replied.
“I've got a big cooler; we can process it whenever it works for
you.”

A Blue Heron flew in; the dignified bird
stood quietly along the shallow edge of the pond and waited for his
dinner while they waited for the alligator to come take the bait.
Finally, Doc looked at his watch and said to DeeDee, “Guess we'll
have to leave if I'm going to sing at Vespers.”

Barb didn't want to leave either, but since
she'd invited them over to their house, she said to Brad, “We'd
better go too. We need to do a few things to get ready.”

The two couples had just driven away when
Verna pointed. The alligator was swimming towards the bait. Only a
small part of its back and head showed above the water line as the
reptile effortlessly moved through the murky water. The action that
followed was quick; yet unhurried. They watched Pete yank on the
rope as soon as the alligator swallowed the cow lung. That anchored
the hook in its stomach. Then he pulled the animal on shore and
duct taped its mouth shut before tying it up. Gingerly, Juarez
helped Pete lift it into the bed of the pickup truck. Pete and
Menendez spoke a few words; then the trapper drove off with his
prize.

Annie shook her head, “I have seen and
learned more new things these past seven days. It has been quite a
week!”

Art agreed with her and so did the
Vigeauxs.

 

* * *

 

The four couples gathered at the B's pristine
triple-wide. All but Annie were wearing slacks; it was a little
cool for shorts on this January evening. Annie had slipped into one
of her comfortable Granny dresses and sneakers. The others all had
on knit tops except for Brad. He preferred wearing woven sports
shirts because they didn't cling and were less revealing over his
barrel chest. Verna was outfitted in her favorite color—red—red
pants and a red and white polo shirt, in honor of St. Valentines's
Day which was coming soon. These seniors still took pride in their
appearance; age had not dimmed their interest in style. They just
didn't wear ‘teeny-weeny, polka-dot bikinis' anymore.

When the eight friends were settled in
Bradkowski's contemporary black and white dining room, Barb said,
“I hate to make you think seriously while you eat, but the game
starts in a little over an hour, and I'd like to know what do we do
now?”

Barb looked around the table. Silence.

Finally, Annie answered. She said only one
word, “Wait.”

“But,” Barb sputtered, “Brad and I saw Karl
Kreeger leave that field in his golf cart on Thursday night. We
followed him home. Doesn't that count for anything?”

“Sure, it means a lot to us, but does it
prove that he did anything wrong? I know it's hard, but I don't
think we can do anything but wait. We have to wait until the
Sheriff's office let's us know about two things.”

“And these are?” Doc asked.

“First, a report on Karl's golf cart. If they
don't find anything linking him to Twila, then he'll probably never
be charged with a crime. He didn't actually kill Jiggs—just got him
in a very bad spot with that very big bird, but that's not a crime.
Jiggs could have said, ‘No'. And the second thing is that we have
to wait to see if that big old alligator has anything in its
stomach that links it to Twila. We have to wait on the trapper to
process ‘Mr. Alligator' as Pete calls it. So, we wait,” Annie
concluded.

“But, it's not fair,” Verna insisted. “It's
not fair if Karl doesn't have to pay for what he did.”

“It may not seem fair,” Barb agreed, “but
Annie's right, you can't send a man to prison unless you can prove
he did something wrong.”

Brad commented, “You girls told me that you
think both Karl and Jiggs met with Twila on Tuesday afternoon
before Bingo. Is that right?”

“That is tha very best that we can figure
out,” DeeDee stated. “We think they were meetin' in Old Main, most
prob'bly, they were on tha stage. That seems ta be tha closest
thing Karl had ta bein' his office. Twila must've asked ta see some
of tha Bingo records. She prob'bly could not believe that there
wasn't some proper paper work on Bingo, what with all that money
involved.”

Verna picked up, saying, “We think one of
those two men may have lost his tempah and threatened her to mind
her own business—that Bingo was making lots of money for BradLee;
so just leave things alone and then everyone will be happy. But,
Twila wasn't about to let those men bully her! From what we've
learned about her from the Thompson's, we think she must have stood
up to them. She'd been in lots of big business board rooms during
her career; no, she didn't let men bully her. She was a tough,
experienced business woman. We think that one of them, eithah Jiggs
or Karl, lost his cool. If one of them pushed her, she may have
fallen from the stage and hit her temple, or broke her neck, and
she died.”

Barb took over, “Twila could have started
down the stairs from the stage. Maybe one of the men was so mad
that he shoved her, and when she lost her balance, she hit her
temple on the hand railing. Or, if she were standing on the floor,
she could have hit the front edge of the stage. It could have
happened either way.”

“Then they panicked, and they hid her in that
drawer under the boxes—the one where I found her the first time,”
Annie ended.

“So,” Brad asked, “which one of them actually
shoved her—Karl or Jiggs?”

“That's the question that we can't answer for
sure,” Barb concluded, “but we think it must have been Jiggs.” She
looked at her women friends.

Almost in union, they replied, “Yes, it had
to be Jiggs.”

“Why?” Brad persisted.

“Well, by deductive reasoning,” Barb
answered. “We think it was Karl who was skimming the money from
Bingo, not Jiggs. Oh, Jiggs could have taken a little if he wanted
to, but he wasn't in a position to take more than, say, ten or
twenty dollars a night. No, Karl was the one who could easily
pocket as much as a hundred dollars each Tuesday, and no one would
ever know because nothing was double-checked. He just paid any
expenses out of the Bingo money without recording it. I doubt that
Jiggs even knew about it, even though they were best of friends.
Jiggs was basically a good man; he probably had no idea that Karl
was stealing money. If he did, I think he would have quit working
Bingo long ago. No, Karl kept it a secret; he didn't even tell
Kitty. She has no idea how he paid for their new things; he doesn't
let her handle any of their finances. Anyway, the Bingo figures
could have been recorded, and always should have been—should have
been done years ago. It's easy to criticize after the fact; don't
you know? Each person who comes to play buys a certain number of
cards. So, they know how much money comes in. Then, they know how
much they pay out to winners. Subtract one figure from the other
and you have the gross amount, minus the expenses gives you the
net. The wiggle room is the expenses—no records were kept at
all!”

“Makes sense to me,” Brad agreed.

His wife continued, “If Karl pushed Twila, do
you think Jiggs would get so deeply involved in covering it up? We
don't think so. He might want to help his good friend, but not to
the point of perjuring himself and being an accessory to
manslaughter at the least, and tampering with a corpse and evidence
… . But, if Jiggs lost his temper because he is so disgusted
with Twila for upsetting his friend that he shoves her—remember
that both of these men dominated their own wives—and as a result of
the shove, she dies; then Karl has good reason to help Jiggs cover
it up. If he doesn't, then the law is called in and there will be
an investigation, and Karl's milk cow dries up. And, if it comes
out that he's been skimming, then he'd be indicted. Karl doesn't
want to go to prison; so he wants to keep everything quiet. And he
keeps it quiet by showing Jiggs how and where to hide Twila's
body.”

Annie finished, “So, Karl gets involved big
time and encourages Jiggs to hide the body in that drawer. Then
that evening, they see me pull out that decoration drawer and my
rummaging around in it; so they have to move the body to keep me
from finding it again, even though they can't be certain that I
found anything to begin with. Jiggs was a nice man, but he didn't
have the smarts that Karl has. We think Karl was the brains behind
all the moves.”

“He would have been smarter ta have jest fed
poor ole Twila ta tha alligator in tha first place. Then Jiggs
would still be alive,” DeeDee declared.

“No, that wouldn't have worked,” Doc
explained. “It was too cold on Tuesday and Wednesday. Alligators
don't feed when it's cold.”

“That's right. I remember now, ya told us
that before,” DeeDee said, “but would Karl know that?

Barb shrugged, “I don't know; there's lots of
information on the television, especially on the nature shows. All
I know is that he
didn't
leave her body for the alligator
until Thursday night. He'd been moving it around since Tuesday
afternoon and Jiggs helped him. He had to have been helping because
Jiggs was the one that the ostrich kicked to death, and both Brad
and I and Von and Verna saw Karl leave that field.”

Annie finished the summation. “We think they
planned to bury the body under the golf cart path. Once the cement
was poured and the body was permanently hidden, they would have
committed the perfect crime. They might have gotten away with it if
I hadn't opened that storage drawer during Bingo.”

Doc reminded them, “As of right now, Karl, at
least,
has
gotten away with it. Have you female detectives
figured out why Jiggs and Karl used Gilly's field? Why didn't they
just drive the cart straight out to Number Five?

“We talked about that,” Verna answered. “We
aren't quite sure, but Barb has a theory.”

“I saw Karl's cart kinda tucked behind an old
shed in Gilly's field when we played golf on Thursday. It was near
the new restroom but over in Gilly's field. They may have been
there waiting to cut the fence. Whenever there were no golfers
around, they'd work on the fence. Also, they knew that there would
be half an hour after the end of the Women's Scramble that no men
would be around; so they could finish the job then ready for that
night.”

“Also,” Annie added, “they may have thought
it safer to be coming from the field because of the space lift-off.
They would know that Number Five is a good place to view the
lift-offs; so they wouldn't want to be out there with a body and a
shovel on the golf cart.”