Bubba and the Dead Woman

  Chapter Nineteen

  Bubba and More Questions

  Still Saturday

  “They’re looking for clues,” Leelah Wagonner said proudly. She glanced at Deputy Willodean Gray, saw that she was cute, sighed for her lost waistline, and told herself that life was good at the Wagonner house, no matter that Leelah would never be a size four again. Or a size six or probably even a size eight but that was really getting off the point. “Bubba’s an innocent man.”

  Willodean stared at Leelah in a manner that only a licensed law enforcement official could accomplish. The stare stated emphatically, “What on God’s green earth do you mean by that? Are you legally intoxicated? Have you been committing some kind of crime? How long do you think it will be before I get the truth out of you?” It was a patented stare that three generations of Grays had perfected over decades of law enforcement. It was a stare very similar to the Snoddy stare of doom.

  Finally, Willodean turned to look at Tee Gearheart who winced and suddenly found the stained linoleum floor extremely interesting. Then she turned her authoritative gaze on Mike Holmgreen. Mike blushed and found a magazine nearby to examine. It didn’t particularly matter that the magazine was called Texas Country Gardener or that he was holding it upside down. Finally, Willodean’s daunting stare came to rest solely on Bubba.

  Bubba didn’t flinch, blush, or glance away. He liked looking at Willodean. She was the prettiest woman he’d ever seen, not only that, but she had a brain that she could actually use, plus she had a gun. Bubba wondered if she might be the kind of woman who liked to go fishing with a fella.

  “Bubba,” Willodean said. “I just talked to Melvin Wetmore.”

  Bubba nodded. A scene where Willodean and he were covered with chocolate Jell-O pudding popped into his head. Amazingly the two of them were covered with pudding and fishing for bass at the same time. Hmm. It’s purely amazing what a lack of sleep and being knocked unconscious will do to a man.

  “I guess you know what he told me about the night that Melissa Dearman was murdered,” she said calmly.

  “I guess Sheriff John didn’t really care to find out why no one else was around that night,” Bubba said, snapping back to the moment. There was a definite lack of chocolate Jell-O pudding. Dammit.

  “I think he might very well say that you arranged it,” Willodean said promptly. “That’s what the D.A. is going to say. Then there wouldn’t be anyone around to say whether you came, went, or stayed right here. After all, you’ve been planning it for years.”

  Bubba took a deep calming breath. A fella finally thinks of some circumstances that will take his butt out of a sling and here came someone to shoot him down. Not only was the shooter the beautiful Willodean, but she was most likely about to cut him off at the knees by dragging his hiney back to jail.

  “Tell her about the wires on the cameras,” Leelah said quickly. “Ain’t no reason for Bubba to have done that. Uh-uh. He knew they weren’t real. Hell, we had a pot on who was going to get robbed next and the amount of time before the po-lice gave up on catching the thief. On account of us not having real security cameras and George’s die-hard stinginess.”

  “The security cameras are dummies,” Willodean said, stating a fact.

  “They are,” Bubba answered. “Someone else didn’t think so.”

  So Bubba patiently explained to Willodean while Mike let Precious out of the minivan for a dogly rest break and Leelah proceeded about her business in the store. Two curious customers later, Willodean was staring at the cameras and rubbing her jaw in an agitated manner. “I’m going to get fired,” Willodean muttered. “I’m going to get fired and have to move back to Dallas and into my parent’s house. Dad’s going to say, ‘I told you not to move down to bumpkinville, honey.’ Mom’s going to make so many chocolate chip cookies that my ass will explode. I’m going to have to beg for that patrol job back again on the south side of Dallas. Then I’m going to die when some seventeen-year-old robs a 7-Eleven because he wants Twinkies and doesn’t have time to get his paycheck cashed from the fast food place he works at.”

  Bubba listened to Willodean’s monologue with a great outpouring of sympathy. After all, Willodean didn’t need to put herself out for Bubba. She barely knew him, even though he’d very much like to change that. But first there was the little matter of the multiple murder charges and, not to mention, making sure that Willodean didn’t get fired in the process.

  Ah, life can be such a challenge, Bubba considered. “So are we a go?”

  “Dammit,” Willodean grumbled miserably. “Where does Mary Bradley live?”

  Leelah told Willodean happily.

  Twenty minutes later, one county car with one deputy and one alleged felon drove up to the front of a house on Wagon Wheel Road. The county car was followed by a minivan with one jailor, one felon, who had pled his way into a very light sentence, and one Basset hound who was perturbed that she hadn’t been allowed to ride with her very favorite human in the whole world.

  Like all of the houses on Wagon Wheel Road, the one at which they’d stopped was one story, built in the 1950s, had a red brick exterior, and a car port big enough for the three rusting refrigerators and an automobile engine of unknown origin. There was also a decrepit Mercury Villager parked in the meager driveway indicating that at least one person was in residence.

  Bubba got out of the county car and walked around to open the door for Willodean. Willodean was not amused and used her own unhandcuffed wrists and hands to open the door for herself. She put her baton back into her belt, adjusted her shirt, and said, “Let me do the talking, Bubba.”

  The minivan parked behind the county car and Tee clambered out, followed by Mike, and Precious, who wasn’t about to let an opportunity pass her by again.

  Consequently, there were four adults and one dog waiting at the front door when Mary Bradley answered the bell. Mary was in her forties with short blonde hair and bright blue eyes. She wasn’t trim and she wasn’t fat. She wore tight jeans and a t-shirt that proclaimed, ‘I’m still hot. It just comes in flashes.’

  Mike started to ask what the t-shirt meant when Tee lightly slapped the eighteen year old on the back of the head.

  Mary stared at her visitors and finally said, “Okay, then. Bubba, I didn’t know I was having a party today.”

  Willodean grimaced and said, “I’m Deputy Gray from the Pegram County Sheriff’s Department and you would be Mary Bradley.”

  “Someone didn’t die, did they?” Mary asked calmly. “Unless it was my weird Uncle Felix. That man’s got screws loose that you couldn’t find with the most powerful magnet in the world. But he does have some money and no real children.” She considered and added, “That we know about.”

  “No. No one died. At least not in your family. You are Mary Bradley?”

  Mary had an expression on her face that said, “Heck, yes, I’ll play this game.” “Yes.”

  “Good. You remember a week ago Thursday?” Willodean said quickly. Bubba was getting antsy, and she stepped on his toe to give him something to really think about.

  Bubba looked down at her petite foot in its brown work boot and wondered if a fly had landed on his boot. But he did give Willodean points for accurately gauging his frame of mind.

  “You mean the day Bubba went out and…” Mary stopped and looked at Bubba.

  “Allegedly,” Mike put in.

  “Right,” Mary said. “You’re that kid who tried to burn down the school.” Then she looked at Tee and saw the patch on the shoulder of his uniform. “And I know your wife from our knitting circle. How’s the pregnancy going?”

  Tee smiled genially. “Poppiann’s real good. Snores a lot but that’s because she has to sleep on her back, and…” he stopped as Willodean turned and landed that terrible gaze upon him again.

  “Last Thursday,” Willodean said slowly. “What was going on?”

  “Well, I took my mother to Pokerama. She said she saw you there, Deputy,” Mary said amusedly. “Then I
watched a DVD with my son. Young Frankenstein. You know that old Mel Brooks film. God, that’s my favorite. We burned the popcorn.” She giggled to herself. “Had to leave all the windows open for hours to get the smell out.”

  Bubba bit his lower lip. “You were home all night,” he said firmly, not asking a question.

  “Yeah, Bubba. I heard Mark Evans quit, but I don’t know why I didn’t get called to work.” She smiled. “I need all the hours I can get. Alimony only goes so far, you know.”

  Frowning, Bubba started to say that he had called Mary. She hadn’t answered. He remembered very well because he knew that he hadn’t wanted to run the cash register in the store. Hell, he didn’t even know how before that night. As a matter of fact, the burn on his arm from the thrice-cursed hot dog machine was still healing.

  “But h-ey,” Mary said with sudden clarity before Bubba could get into the first sentence. “That must have been the night my phone went dead.”

  “Your phone went dead,” Willodean repeated.

  “Sure. I don’t know exactly when, but I had to call the phone company on Friday because I didn’t have any service. I went next door to the neighbors on both sides, and they had service. I even checked to make sure the phone was plugged in correctly.” Mary shrugged. “The service guy came out on Monday.” She made a disgusted noise. “Said someone played a joke on me.”

  “Let me guess,” Bubba said. He made a cutting motion with the index and middle fingers of his right hand. “Clipped your phone lines.”

  “Right around the side of the house,” Mary confirmed. “Right where they go into the house. Kids I reckon.” She looked pointedly at Mike, who rapidly looked up at the sky.

  “And this happened on Thursday,” Willodean said.

  Mary’s face wrinkled in concentration. “I think so. I didn’t have to call anyone until Friday, and I remember getting a call from a cousin on Wednesday. So on Thursday, I dropped Mama off you know where and then stopped off to get some KFC. My son got the DVD from Blockbuster’s and that was the whole kit and caboodle.”

  “It didn’t matter if she knew about the phone wires being cut or not,” Bubba said slowly. “As long as no one could call this number from work and get an answer.”

  “Holy crap,” Mike said. “Oh, sorry. I meant holy carp. But someone really was trying to set Bubba up. They knew he would call Mary so they cut her wires.”

  “But how did they know Mark Evans was going to quit that night?” Tee said.

  Mary looked at the four people and one dog, who were all looking at each other. “Good question. You going to see Mark next?”

  Bubba sighed. “None other. You know, Mr. Evans said some very nasty things about my mother.”

  Willodean sighed in response. “A lot of people say some nasty things about your mother.”

  Mike chirped in. “I don’t.”

  “That’s nice, Mike.”

  Then Precious woofed to put her two cents in and then proceeded to chase her tail for a solid minute. Mary took the brief respite to ask Bubba, “Is it true what they say about the Snoddy Mansion, Bubba? There’s a sh-” she glanced meaningfully at Mike, “a bunch of buried you know what out there?”

  Bubba glared meaningfully at Mary, who got the message and shut up.

  Mary watched the two vehicles drive away and wondered what the Jolly Green Giant was going on. Then she went to call her mother and tell her all the gossip. Ten minutes later someone else knocked on the door and asked Mary where Bubba Snoddy had gotten to, and Mary answered truthfully.

  Willodean drove her county car to Mark Evan’s address and silently smoldered. Bubba didn’t say anything, but she could feel his presence beside her like a very large, very solid rock. A rock that smelled of musk and dog. A rock that had a whole lot of bruises, and cuts, and bumps on it. Quite probably a rock that had been set up as a patsy to take a fall.

  “Why?” she said finally.

  “Why,” Bubba repeated.

  “Why set you up?”

  “To get the Snoddy Mansion and all the Snoddy lands that go with it,” Bubba answered. “All proper and legal.”

  Willodean had seen the Snoddy Mansion. It was a ghost of what a Southern plantation house was in its heyday. The paint was peeling. A couple of the columns were listing like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The grass was overgrown, and the Spanish moss had taken over the live oaks down the driveway. In addition, the caretaker’s house was ruined by the fire so recently set to it. To be even more precise, half the land was reputedly swamp and useless for anything except catching mosquitoes. “No offense Bubba, but I don’t get it. It’s a dump.”

  “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Pretty much. It’s going to fall into the ground soon, and it’s going to be the Snoddy Hole. As soon as we find Mark Evans, I’ll tell you why someone wants the damn place. And it ain’t because they wanted it to be a Walmart Supercenter.”

  However, finding Mark proved elusive. His one room apartment was empty. The neighbor said that Mark was probably at the community college. The registrar at the community college said Mark was in Psychology 101. The Psychology 101 professor said Mark was absent because he needed some extra cash serving warrants, and writs, and such.

  Bubba could tell Willodean was getting tired of it all. He could even see by the look in her eyes that she had visions of being very publicly fired dancing merrily about in her head.

  “Serving papers on folks?” Tee said to the Psychology 101 professor. All the students gazed on interestedly. It wasn’t every day that a pretty sheriff’s deputy, a large man with more bumps than a Motocross track, a large jailor, a teenager who looked like he was having the time of his life, and a Basset hound wandered into their classroom looking for one of their own.

  One of the students raised a hand. Tee glanced at the young woman wearing a Jim Morrison t-shirt and said, “Yes, Ma’am?”

  “Mark works for Minnieweather Process Serving,” she said proudly, sticking her chest out. She was a pretty young woman with blonde dreadlocks and bright blue eyes. Mike stared at her chest until Tee slapped him on the back of his head again. The dreadlocked blonde went on blithely, “Some of us do stuff for Minnieweather sometimes. Extra cash.” She smiled knowingly. “No one expects to get served divorce papers from me.”

  “I wouldn’t expect to get divorce papers from you,” Bubba acknowledged wryly. “But first I’d have to be married.”

  The blonde with the dreads handed a business card to Willodean. “I’ve heard of this guy,” Willodean said moodily. “He serves papers on anyone. And I do mean, anyone.”

  Twenty minutes later the troop was standing inside a miniscule office looking at a man who could have been Colonel Sanders’s long-lost twin brother right down to the white suit, black bow tie, and snowy goatee.

  The sign on his desk proclaimed him to be Edward Minnieweather, owner and proprietor of Minnieweather Process Servers. Edward appeared mildly surprised to have this many people in his office, all at the same time, and one with hand cuffs still attached to his wrists.

  Bubba was getting tired of running around town. He said simply, “Mark Evans.”

  Edward blinked.

  Bubba said, “Where. Is. Mark. Evans.”

  Willodean sighed.

  Tee glanced at his watch.

  Mike farted and pretended that Precious did it.

  Precious tried to get as far away from Mike as she could. It was very difficult considering that it was a very small office.

  “Hospital,” Edward said.

  Everyone’s attention focused solely on Edward Minnieweather.

  “He was serving papers on Dan Gollihugh,” Edward explained, as if that was enough.

  For Bubba it was. Daniel Lewis Gollihugh was the biggest (7 feet tall), baddest (four felony arrests, two convictions, one dismissal, and one that was pending), most obnoxious (one of the arrests was for peeing on a police car while the police officer was in the car) individual in all of Pegram County. He went through wives like candy
and was working on wife number six. Additionally, he didn’t care for authority (as significantly evidenced by his aggravated urination on an official vehicle). Finally, he had an infamous temper (upon learning of his latest wife’s wish to divorce him, he had dumped a load of cow manure in the back of her Ford Mustang convertible and slugged the mailman just because the unfortunate person happened to be delivering mail at the wrong time).

  Every police officer in Pegram County knew about Dan Gollihugh. One didn’t go to his farmhouse property without backup of at least ten other officers in full riot gear. One didn’t go without having pepper spray, Tasers, and the heavy-duty bean bag gun. It was very likely that the police would use all three in the process of apprehending Dan. And lastly, one didn’t go to his place on a Friday or Saturday night whilst Dan was likely to be drunk on homemade rotgut and ten times more agitated than usual.

  “Mark Evans went to serve divorce papers on Dan last night around nine PM,” Edward said by way of explanation.

  “That poor, poor bastard,” Tee said pityingly, referring to Mark Evans, not Dan Gollihugh.

  Even Mike had heard of Dan. “What did Mark ever do to you?” he asked Edward derisively, as if Mike knew both Mark and Dan personally.

  “I told the kid to wait until this morning,” Edward said hastily. “Told him three times, but he said he had a psych class on Saturdays he didn’t like to miss. Something about the cute blonde with dreadlocks who does work for me sometimes.”

  “Yeah, she’s awful cute,” Mike murmured, thinking of her Jim Morrison t-shirt.

  Willodean and Bubba were still staring at Edward. Bubba said, “You sent Mark Evans to serve divorce papers to Dan Gollihugh, and Mark is now in the hospital because Dan made mincemeat out of him. Would that be about right, fella?”

  Willodean nodded firmly in agreement of Bubba’s question.

  Edward nodded slowly. “Yes.”

  Bubba unhurriedly scanned the room. In the back of his mind he was looking for the eleven herbs and spices that made up Colonel Sanders’s secret chicken recipe. It wasn’t there. Truthfully, he was running out of ideas and patience. Melvin Wetmore and Mary Bradley’s statements were enough to cast a shadow of doubt upon Bubba’s guilt. As a matter of fact, Willodean was looking upon him with an expression akin to pity.

  Pity. Bubba frowned. He didn’t want pity from Willodean. And he needed a whole lot more than a little doubt to clear his name. Sheriff John wasn’t going to go for it. As a matter of fact, Bubba would be elevated to the level of master criminal for such inventive planning.

  “Can he…uh…talk?” Mike said. “Whatshisname? Mark?”

  Edward shook his head. “Dunno. Cracked ribs. One broken tibia. A fractured collarbone. A shattered patella. Three missing teeth. Three fingers sprained. Believe Dan stomped on his hand at one point in time. And…well, finally, Dan decided to put poor Mark back into his car.” Colonel Sanders’s long-missing twin brother grimaced in compassion. “Via his head through the front windshield. I went to visit him this morning and he’s on one of those machines that injects morphine directly into the veins. Mark didn’t flicker a single eyelid while I was there.”

  Bubba let out a breath that was the last vestige of hope of his future freedom. If Mark Evans were conscious, he might be able to tell them who had tipped him off about getting fired from Bufford’s. Mark had said something about it when he had served Bubba his grand jury notice. Bubba hadn’t been at the top of his game that day and it had slipped past him. But it wasn’t slipping past him now.

  They had to try, however. All of them loaded up, drove to Pegram County General Hospital, where a nurse screamed at them about the hygiene of animals, until Willodean said that Precious was a seeing-eye dog and Mike pretended that he was blind, stumbling crookedly into a wall, a coke machine, and a little old lady in a wheelchair, until the determined nurse relented. They badgered another nurse into taking them into the critical care unit, where they ended up staring down at Mark Evans, who was thankfully (for him), unconscious.

  Mark was a mass of bruises, casts, bandages, and tubes. Dan Gollihugh had wiped the proverbial floor with him and then squeezed him out to dry.

  “I don’t think he’s coming to, any time soon,” said the nurse not unkindly.

  “Well crap,” Mike said. “I mean, carp. You’re going to have to wait until he wakes up.”

  Bubba didn’t say anything. It could be days, weeks, or months before Mark woke up. Provided he woke up at all. The pathetic, dumb son of a bitch.

  “Jesus Christ have mercy,” said a new voice. “Do you know how hard it was to track you down, Bubba Snoddy? Do you have any idea how many places you’ve been today since skipping out of the jail? Do you know how much gossip is circulating in this cesspool that we call home?”

  Everyone in the crowded hospital room turned to look at the latest addition. It was Miz Demetrice, and boy-howdy, was she ticked off.

  ~ ~ ~