Part 13 (1/2)
”I dunno. I was too cross-eyed to git any farther than this seat right here.”
I left the bus, considered questioning the boys in the band, and decided to leave it as an act of total desperation. The possibility that I might arrive at that point shortly did nothing to lighten my mood as I drove out Finger Lane to our local bed and breakfast.
Ripley answered the door and led me into the living room, where Katie sat on the sofa, ”Our hostess,” he said, ”is on the telephone, and our host is in the attic. May I offer you tea?”
Only for the very briefest second did I allow myself to imagine Jim Bob in a feather boa, prancing around the trunks. ”I need to speak to you,” I said to Katie.
”Speak,” she said listlessly.
”In private.”
Ripley leaned toward me, his fingertips under his chin. ”We don't have any secrets, Arly. You just ask Miss Katie Hawk anything you want, and I'll help her answer.”
It occurred to me that he was beginning to annoy me. ”I need to speak to you,” I repeated to Katie, who, for the record, was also beginning to annoy me. ”We can go out on the porch or we can go up to your room.”
Katie led the way to her room. Once we were inside, I sat down on the ruffly bedspread and said, ”When is the last time you spoke to Pierce Keswick?”
”A week ago. He had some new material he wanted me to listen to. Something called 'Your Death Put a Damper on Our Love.' I wasn't real excited.” She stood in front of the mirror and began to brush her waist-length hair, but she was watching me furtively.
”Pierce's secretary said you called yesterday at four o'clock. She said you called collect from a launderette.”
”Well, I didn't.”
”If you want to lie about it, that's up to you--but there are two or three dead bodies in town, depending on whose tales you believe, and this is a police investigation. Did I mention that the telephone company will have a record of the call?”
Katie's aloofness vanished, and she looked as if she wanted to stamp her foot or s.n.a.t.c.h up the brush and fling it at me. She seemed to be leaning toward the latter, but instead narrowed her eyes and said, ”Okay, so I went to call Pierce. I wanted some privacy--”
”You wanted privacy so you went to a public phone?”
”I had to because the woman who owns this place is the type to eavesdrop in the hall or listen in on an extension. Matt's driving me crazy. He wouldn't leave me alone on the bus, and I thought Pierce ought to know.”
”And what did Pierce say?”
”Nothing.”
”Did anyone see you leave the house?”
”I climbed down the drainpipe outside the window. Back home there was a walnut tree that was mighty useful when my pa wouldn't let me go out at night. He never did figure out why I had scabs on my elbows and knees all the time. Ma had her suspicions, but she never said much.”
”Let me get this straight,” I said. ”You climbed down a drainpipe and walked to the launderette to call Pierce collect and tell him that Matt's been bothering you. Pierce says nothing, but drops everything and comes das.h.i.+ng here within a matter of hours. What was he going to do--slap Matt on the hand?”
”I told you,” she said, getting more agitated and glancing at the door with every word. ”He didn't say he was coming here. He just said he'd talk to Lillian about keeping Matt away from me.” She went to the window, pulled back the drape, and looked down at the yard as if terrorists were creeping up the hill through Mrs. Jim Bob's loblolly pines. ”You don't know what it's like to have someone after you all the time. When I perform, he comes to the club and sits at the front table. He brings champagne backstage. He hangs around my apartment door. He calls all hours of the day and night and sends flowers two or three times a week!”
”A nightmare,” I said evenly. ”I mean, you have to find vases for all those flowers.”
She finally cracked and stamped her itsy-bitsy foot. ”And Lillian is doing everything she can to destroy my career because she's jealous. She flat out told me to either keep Matt away or go on back to West Virginia and marry a coal miner. It's so pathetic the way she thinks she can hang onto him by threatening everybody. If she'll just agree to a divorce, Matt can get a big contract and he and I can--” She chomped down on her lip.
”Can what?”
”I don't know! I didn't want to come here in the first place. I should have listened to my instincts and refused to come. At least there are places in Nashville where Matt can't find me.”
”Did he find you last night?”
”No, but only because I was in here with the door locked. Ripley went off somewhere, though. I heard 'em talking about it in the hall, first when he was supposed to have supper, and later when they were arguing about whether to leave on the porch light.”
I didn't doubt the argument, and I didn't doubt who won. ”Why did you stay in here with the door locked?”
She stood up and gave me the terribly sincere smile of a slick little liar. ”Matt might have tricked that woman into letting him in the house. When he gets to h.e.l.l, he'll start grinning and the devil will give him a desk in the reception room and a key to the executive washroom.”
I noticed a ca.s.sette player on the bedside table next to a Bible. ”Recording scripture verses?” I asked, also noticing several ca.s.settes on the floor.
”I'm a professional singer,” she said, maintaining the smile. ”I listen to myself so I can perfect the material.”
Her tone made it clear she was no longer going to indulge in temper tantrums for my enlightenment. We started downstairs, not exactly chatting amiably, and then froze as we heard a voice in the living room.
”There's no L in our lovin' anymore,” Jim Bob sang loudly, enthusiastically, and very atonally, ”but Christmas ain't the season for frettin' 'bout the reason, why there's no L in our lovin' anymore.”
”Interesting,” murmured Ripley.
”You think it's got potential?” demanded Jim Bob, less loudly but with the same enthusiasm. ”I knew it was in a notebook up in the attic. Like I told you, Mrs. Jim Bob gave away a whole G.o.dd.a.m.n box filled with songs just as good as this, but I remember most of 'em. Should I sing this for Matt before the concert or come to Nashville and have a tape made at a studio?”
”By all means, come to Nashville. We'll work things out to everyone's advantage, and I think you'll be pleased with the deal. You do remember what I said yesterday, don't you? This is between you and me.”
”And Matt Montana,” said Jim Bob.
”Yes, indeed.”
Jim Bob began to sing his song once again. I slipped out the front door and stood on the porch, trying to make sense of what I'd heard. In one small way, it did make sense. Katie had been in the house yesterday, too, and might have overheard the conversation between Jim Bob and Ripley (an unlikely alliance, granted, but anything was possible). Whatever it was sent her to the pay phone at the launderette.
The one thing it was not was the discovery of the hottest new country lyrics since ”You're a Detour on the Highway to Heaven.”
Miss Vetchling approached the second house with her brolly clenched in her hand. It was a duplex, and the side on the right was the one to which she'd sent Kevin Buchanon on his Fateful Day. Both sides were equally disreputable. On one porch was a disemboweled was.h.i.+ng machine surrounded by stacks of yellowed newspapers and magazines; on the adjoining one were several boxes filled with empty whiskey and beer bottles. The shared yard was a hodgepodge of weeds, raw earth, orange rinds, and flattened eggsh.e.l.ls. It was difficult to conceive of either tenant being worried about life-threatening germs in the carpet. The property itself was a biological warfare battlefield.
But she was a woman with a mission, Miss Vetchling told herself as she knocked on the door, and she would see it through to the bitter, or in this case malodorous, end. She knocked again, then turned and stepped carefully over the decaying remains of a pepperoni pizza that not even the neighborhood scavengers had touched. ”Yo,” called a voice. ”You selling Girl Scout cookies? I got a hankerin' for those chocolate patties.”
”A mission,” she said to herself, tightened her grip on her brolly, and turned back. Her smile faded as she took in the potbellied man dressed in boxer shorts and a dingy unders.h.i.+rt, his mouth slack and wet, his spa.r.s.e hair greasy, his nose quite rosy enough to rouse feelings of rivalry in Rudolph. ”I am,” she said, ”looking for a gentleman named Arnold Riggles. Are you he?”
”At your service.”
She gave him her prepared spiel. He looked so blank that she came a bit closer and said, ”His name was Kevin Buchanon, and he would have been carrying a--”
”Oh, h.e.l.l yes!” Arnie said, slapping his knee and cackling with such fervor that Miss Vetchling prudently retreated. ”He's a great guy, that Kevin feller. He came inside and spread out so many tubes and odd-shaped brushes and mysterious gadgets that I thought he was gonna a.s.semble a Stealth bomber. I told him that'd be a waste of time 'cause we wouldn't be able to see it!”
He found this so amusing that he staggered out of view, and all Miss Vetchling could do was hope he ceased braying and emerged from his dwelling, since she had no intention of pursuing him into it. When he finally did, his shoulders still shaking and his eyes bluffed with tears, she said, ”Then you found the demonstration to be interesting and effective?”
He considered this with great seriousness. ”It would have been. I mean, it had potential, if you follow my drift. Kevin, he says this vacuum cleaner can suck stains right out of the rug. Any stain at all, he says. I say it can't suck up catsup, and he says it can. So I go get a bunch of those little packets you get with your fries and he and I rip 'em. open and squirt catsup all over the rug. Then we dance all over it and squish it in real good. I wish you coulda seen us!”