Spawn With the Wind, page 12
part #5 of Matchmaker Marriage Mysteries Series
“Then, he wanted more money from her, and she refused, so he choked the living breath out of her. Either way, he did it. He’s guilty. Get with the program, Zelda. Don’t be so naïve. You’ve always been so naïve.”
“I’m hardly naïve, Ruth. I’m in the love business. I’ve seen it all.”
“Love business. Like that’s a real thing. At least Gladie moved on to weddings. Weddings are a business. They don’t pretend to be something they’re not, like an airy-fairy cloud of feelings. Lies, Zelda. All lies.”
Ruth had had a bad relationship years ago, and it had soured her on the whole love thing. I understood. I had a lot of matches like that. They had given up, but they still held onto a glimmer of hope. I knew that there was a glimmer of hope left in Ruth, but I also knew that I wasn’t allowed to speak to her about it.
“Oh, men. When will they ever change?” Ruth continued. “They’re always choking or stabbing or beating to death the women they so-called love.”
“I don’t know. I’ve always gotten the impression that John Senior was very mild-mannered. I don’t see him as the choking type. He eats oatmeal.”
We went to John’s house, but no one was home.
“This is where he lives? He got it bad in the divorce,” Ruth said. “Obviously, he was very angry about it.”
John lived in a one-story cottage nearby the lake. I knew the cottages well. They were built in 1948 for returning GIs who never returned to Cannes. Instead, the GIs moved to San Diego or Los Angeles. Each cottage had a postage stamp front yard, a one-car garage, two bedrooms, and one bathroom. John’s house was painted white with yellow trim, and it had flower boxes under every window. There was a frog statue by the front door.
“The house doesn’t look angry,” I pointed out. “It looks like Walt Disney decorated it.”
We tried the neighbors to see if they could give us more information on John and his wife. They thought the couple was at their bridge club, or maybe they were shopping at the discount food store outside of town. They liked their deals on yogurt; they told us.
I caught Ruth’s eye, and she scowled back at me. Yogurt lovers didn’t seem very murderous. Neither did the bridge club thing.
“That crazy killer in the Midwest who made sure folks’ lawns were cut just so was also a yogurt lover,” she said to me as we left the neighbors’ porch.
“I don’t think we’re thinking clearly. We’re going at this all higglety pigglety. We’re chasing our tails. I don’t think Gladie does it this way.”
“Are you kidding? Your granddaughter could place gold in the Olympics in chasing her tail.”
“There’s something we’re missing,” I insisted. “Something we skipped. We got distracted with the ex-husband.”
“Well, you did let the murderer go, Zelda. You let him drive away after he admitted he had been stealing from his mourners.”
She unlocked her car, and I opened the passenger door.
“That’s it!” I shouted as another bolt of lightning hit me. “Remember what he said about it not being his idea?”
“Yes, but he didn’t say whose idea it was.”
“We’re missing something.”
We got into her car, and she started up the motor, but she didn’t put the car into drive. She didn’t lift the parking brake. Ruth stared out into space. I knew she was thinking, trying to work out the puzzle. I gave her a few minutes while she thought.
Finally, she blinked. “Holy crap, Zelda. We’re so dumb. We’re so old. We’re so blind. How could we have just let it pass us by? We shouldn’t be trusted with turning off ovens, we’re so old and stupid and blind.”
“You know that I never turn on the oven, Ruth. I haven’t cooked in years, not that I ever cooked much when I was younger. I do like to warm things in the microwave, though. And the toaster oven. I use the toaster oven every day. And the coffeemaker. I have to use the coffeemaker.”
Ruth stared at me like I had two heads, and she was trying to figure out which head I was using to talk. “Zelda, listen to me, would you? The insurance calls. The burial insurance. We’ve been going at this the wrong way.” She slapped the steering wheel. “Well, how do you like that? I’m Columbo! This investigating isn’t that hard. Why do we always give Gladie so much credit? She’s not that great. It’s simple, really, if you just pound the pavement, wear out some shoe leather, and go from one clue to another. It’s simple. Hey, do you think I should close up Tea Time and become a private investigator? Or may I should consult for the police station. I could get me some of those government benefits they give the police.”
“Ruth, you should take a breath,” I said. “You’re awfully red in the face.”
“You’re not listening to me. You’re ignoring me.” Ruth pouted and turned away from me.
“I always listen to you. I was just worried that you were going to have one of those little strokes that everyone is having these days. Your face was red, and your left eyelid was twitching a little.”
Ruth took off her glasses and put her hand up to her left eye. “It was? Damned old age. It’s a mean bitch.”
“Now that you’re calmer, tell me more about how you’re Columbo.”
“The insurance calls for burial insurance,” she started again, but this time I noticed that she was careful to remain calm. “They were targeting old people, finding out more about them, getting them to talk. This whole thing is a big conspiracy. There’s Moses and the burial insurance company. Don’t you see, Zelda?”
I nodded. I did see. It was pretty clear. “It’s scary being old these days. Not just because we get sick and die. It’s all the scams targeted at us. Phone calls, emails, on the internet, and in person. We have to be wary of every stranger, distrust every friendly overture.”
Ruth slammed her hand on the steering wheel, again. “It’s a minefield out there, and they’ve brought the minefield into our homes through the damned computers and stupid smartphones. They’re scamming our generation left and right. You know what, Zelda? I want revenge on these people. I want to be a Viking warrior, beating them up with an axe and burning down their homes. I want them to be scared of old people, instead of the other way around. I want them to leave us alone and disappear into the cesspools of their own lives. How dare they scam us? How dare they prey on our good natures and our technological illiteracy? How dare they!”
I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with her outrage. That’s when I realized that her outrage was keeping my outrage company. I had plenty of outrage already in my lungs and my other organs, as well.
“You know what, Ruth?” I asked. “I think I want revenge, too. I think we should make them pay and make them pay big. I feel like a Viking, too. One of those big Vikings with muscles and lots of weapons. I want us to be Thelma and Louise without the bad ending. Do you really think we can make them afraid of us?”
Ruth turned her head to face me. “Look at my face. Isn’t this a scary face?”
It was a scary face, but I decided not to tell her that.
“Mary Kay is the burial insurance person,” I said, instead. “Lucy told me about her. A nice lady. I guess that’s her cover.”
Ruth put her car into drive. “I’m going to wipe that nice lady act right off her ass. Are we going to do the good cop, bad cop routine, again?”
“Wait a second,” I said, and Ruth put her foot on the brake. “I think we should do this differently. Our good cop, bad cop routine didn’t work so well with Moses.”
“Are you crazy, woman? We got him to confess. He’s going to turn himself into the coppers, if he’s not on his way to Mexico. We were great at bad cop, good cop. We should do it all the time. We should take it on the road and clean up the whole damned country. If we drive right through, we could make it to Washington DC in three days, and just think what we could do with Congress. We could completely change the laws for old folks. We would be lauded as heroes. We would get Nobel Peace Prizes. Just think what we could do for people all over the planet.”
Her face had turned red again, and her eyelid was doing the twitching thing again.
“I don’t think the good cop, bad cop worked too well, because he wouldn’t tell us who started this whole thing. He held back,” I pointed out.
“Semantics, Zelda.”
“No, I think I’m right. And I don’t think this Mary Kay would care about our good cop, bad cop routine. She’s not going to relate to two smart, capable women. She’s used to taking advantage of people like us. I think we need to go at her sideways instead of full-on. I think we need a mole.”
“A mole?”
“Yes. We need a hapless moron to get taken by the insurance company and have no idea what’s going on. And then we need the hapless moron to give us all the information.”
“Hapless moron? Which hapless moron?” Ruth asked. “This town is completely populated by hapless morons.”
Ruth and I locked eyes. “No, this town has one very specific hapless moron. Someone who outshines the rest.”
Ruth sucked in air. “Holy crap, Zelda. You’re talking about the mayor.”
“Yes. We need to enlist the mayor to help us.”
“But he can’t know he’s helping us.”
“Oh, no,” I agreed. “If he knows he’s helping us, he’ll mess it up. We need him to be in the dark. That’s the only way he’ll be effective.”
“Criminy, you’re a genius.”
“Finally, you figured that out, Ruth. It took you long enough.”
Chapter 12
Mayor Wayne Robinson
I gave my beloved donkey Dulcinea a good brushing and put her in the paddock. I had five acres up by the lake in Cannes, California, and I used them well. I have a donkey, a llama, a llama baby, five cats, a parakeet, a house, a barn, a paddock, sixty trees that I planted myself, and a raised garden bed where I grew cilantro, tomatoes, potatoes, and okra.
Yes sir, I was a man of the land.
And a man of the people.
My name’s Wayne Robinson. Mayor Wayne Robinson. I’ve been the mayor of Cannes, California for nearly fifteen years. Or is it nearly twenty years? I don’t remember. I’m usually the only one on the ballot because I’m beloved, respected, and trusted in this town.
Sure, there was that one time that Darth Vader ran against me, but he turned out to be Canadian, so that didn’t count. I don’t like to talk much about the Darth Vader race because my therapist says I have PTSD from it. She’s got me doing puppy therapy for it, which includes playing with golden retriever puppies once a week. It’s helped a lot. I rarely have Darth Vader flashbacks now.
I have to say that those golden retriever puppies sure are cute. I wouldn’t mind taking one or two home with me, but Dulcinea is allergic to dogs, so that’s a no-go, unfortunately.
Heavy is the head that’s attached to the mayor of Cannes. It’s a lot of responsibility. We are a small town, but we’re important. Historical. A tourist haven. Just last week, I had to oversee the stringing of the new twinkle lights in the big tree in the little park on Main Street. Stuff like that is important. Tourists love twinkle lights, and if they’re strung wrong, our shopkeepers could lose business.
That’s why everyone loves, respects, and trusts me. I’m a hands-on mayor. I understand how important every citizen is. I understand about tradition and progress, with tradition being way more important than progress. After all, we used to have gold here. We used to have gunslingers. I’m pretty sure that Wyatt Earp came through here at one point, along with Teddy Roosevelt. Or did they come at different times? I don’t know. I’m not a historian.
But what I’m getting at is that my job is very important. Very important indeed. I’m like the Pope or the Secretary of Energy or something like that.
Today I was worried. We had had another murder after a terrible run of crime. Normally, Cannes was a very safe place to live. Much safer than San Diego to our west. A million times safer. I didn’t know why so many more tourists went to San Diego when we were obviously more beautiful and a lot safer.
Hmmm… Maybe I should get a committee together to figure out why San Diego was more popular, I thought. I wondered who could be on that committee? Usually, folks were a little standoffish when I approached them to be on a committee. I had had a devil of a time setting up a committee to investigate the asphalt deterioration on Plum Avenue. I had had a suspicion that it was caused by skateboarders, but we never did find out conclusively. Phew. That was a hard investigation. I was running after skateboarders for weeks to determine if they were damaging Plum Avenue. Interestingly, I never actually saw them on Plum Avenue. They were very sneaky like that. They didn’t let me see them damaging the asphalt.
With Dulcinea taken care of, I went back into my house, washed my hands at the kitchen sink, and filled a glass of water at the tap. There was something I was forgetting to do today, but I couldn’t dig up the memory.
Just as I was trying to remember, there was a knock on my door. I put my glass down on the kitchen counter and answered it. I was almost knocked off my feet with surprise to find Zelda and Ruth on my threshold. Zelda rarely visited me, no more than a handful of times in the past three years, and Ruth liked to joke with me that she would rather stick a knitting needle in her eye than talk to me. Oh, that Ruth. She was such a kidder.
“Well, look at this wonderful surprise,” I said. “Come in. Come in. Are you visiting to get a slice of my homemade pear pie? Oh, wait a second. I don’t have any homemade pear pie. It’s not pear season. But we’re close to strawberry season. If you come back in a month or so, I could make you a homemade strawberry pie. I mean, once I learn how to make a strawberry pie. Maybe I could find a recipe on the internet. Or on Ina Garten’s show. I just love her.”
“Oh, for the love of Pete,” Ruth grumbled in a jovial way and pushed past me. She was obviously in a hurry to sit on my living room couch.
Zelda shook my hand and stepped past me into the living room, too. “Thank you for your kind offer, Mr. Mayor,” she said. “We’re not hungry, though. Perhaps another time for pie. Come sit with us, so we can have a little chat.”
I sat across from Zelda and Ruth in my favorite armchair, the one I used to sit on when I watched sports. Nobody knew that I was an obsessive sports fan. I had to keep it a secret, because as mayor I had a serious reputation to uphold, which didn’t include painting my face and torso while I watched Chargers games. Oh, Chargers. Why did you abandon us all and move to Los Angeles? That wasn’t kind at all. Nevertheless, I had been rooting for the former San Diego team, and I couldn’t let it go.
I blinked. Ruth was snapping her fingers at me.
“Wake up,” she said. “You drifted off there, mayor.”
“Sorry, I was just thinking about our septic tank situation.”
“How lovely,” Zelda told me with a smile. “The septic tank situation is definitely a situation. That’s definitely true. But Mr. Mayor, I have something even more important to talk to you about.”
I scooted forward in my chair. Something more important than the septic tank situation? Was that possible? “Wait a second,” I said, recalling our morning’s conversation. “Does this have something to do with Gladie? I was supposed to help with that, right? With Annie’s murder?” I whispered the word murder. Homicides were bad for tourism, so I didn’t like to highlight them. “I was just about to get right on that. I had a plan.”
I searched my brain for a plan, but I couldn’t come up with one. Perhaps I could set up a meeting with Chief Bolton and his two detectives and see what they had come up with. After all, I was a mayor, not a policeman. I couldn’t do everyone’s jobs for them.
Ruth laughed. “We don’t need your plan.”
Zelda put her hand on Ruth’s arm. “Like I was saying, we have something even more important to discuss. Burial insurance.”
“Excuse me?” I asked, confused.
“We need you to get inside the burial insurance company in town,” Ruth said. “You understand me?”
“No.”
“You’re going to be our mole,” she continued.
“Ruth, what are you going on about? I’m not a mole,” I told her. Poor elderly women weren’t in their right minds if they thought I was a burrowing animal.
“Of course, you’re not a mole,” Zelda assured me. “You’re our mayor. And Mr. Mayor, we need your help. We need you to go to the burial insurance company and tell them you’re interested in getting burial insurance.”
“But…” I started, but Ruth interrupted me.
“Just listen and do what we tell you,” she said and proceeded to explain the oddest plan I had ever heard in my distinguished life.
I wasn’t totally clear what I was doing at the insurance company’s office. It was a small office in the same strip mall as Bernie’s Rib Shack. It had a large glass window in front with a few posters of happy old people in cemeteries, at their homes gardening, and one on a motorcycle.
I opened the door and walked in. There were two women sitting at utilitarian desks. One of them older than the other. The older one looked up from her computer when I walked in. She looked confused, but then she smiled, stood, and walked over to me.
“Aren’t you the mayor?” she asked, extending her arm. I shook her hand. “Such illustrious company. To what do we owe this honor, Mr. Mayor?”
I liked when folks gave me the proper welcome. After all, I was the mayor. But less and less often was I greeted this way. It was the way of the world. First, there were blue jeans, and then there was less respect for public servants. It was a downward spiral that I wasn’t sure was ever going to end. But this woman wasn’t wearing blue jeans. She had respect for my office. I liked her immediately.
“Yes, I’m Mayor Robinson. And you are?”
“Mary Kay Polk. I own this little branch of our insurance company. We cater to the mature segment of our population. I bet you didn’t know that the mature segment of our population is woefully underinsured.”
Was that true? If it was, it was horrible. We couldn’t let our mature segment remain underinsured. That sounded dangerous. We needed to fix it. Maybe I should form a committee, I thought. “I didn’t know that. What can we do to solve that situation?”
