The Baby Blue Rip-Off

6

Sheriff Brennan took off his white Stetson and played with a lock of greased brown hair. He was wearing a red-and-blue hunting jacket, and under that the cream-colored shirt and cream-colored slacks that, along with the badge on his chest, made up his uniform. Brennan was well over six feet tall, a wide, solid-built man, with less paunch than most men his size, age, and disposition.

When he first came in, accompanied by his deputy Lou Brown, he was all business, and brusque but not offensive in his questioning. I had told him some of the details over the phone-I’d caught him, not a deputy, when I called-but he was taking it all down again, and some new stuff I hadn’t got around to saying before, writing it all in a little notepad.

I told him I couldn’t be sure how many of them there had been, but at least three and probably four. When I mentioned the red-white-and-blue GTO, license number three, Deputy Lou Brown chimed in, “That’s Pat Nelson’s car. He called it in stolen.”

So much for remembering license-plate numbers.

Nonetheless, Brennan had called the local and state police to let them know about the GTO and the green van. He made several other phone calls, the first of which was to the coroner, and it was after that call that he sent Lou Brown out to the patrol car to get a camera for the coroner’s dead-body pictures. Brown, who was about my age and an old high school acquaintance of mine, was a tall thin guy with black hair and a white complexion, extra white tonight. His pencil mustache and neatly trimmed sideburns looked especially black next to his pale, pale face.

After the initial questioning, Brennan said not a word to me, while he got everything in motion. But now that the situation was under control and the detail work beginning, Brennan was starting to get restless. He paced. He wandered around like a caged animal. He was simply too big a man for Mrs. Jonsen’s little house; he was the freak show’s giant stuck in the midget’s dressing room. Restless, pacing, wandering around, Sheriff Brennan was getting pissed off, and that meant he’d be talking to me again.

You see, Brennan didn’t like me much. And our mutual dislike was about all we had in common.

I was sitting on the arm of the couch in Mrs. Jonsen’s living room. From where I was, I could see into the dining room, off to the right, beyond which was the kitchen, off to the left. The couch was one of a handful of things left in the room. The television was gone, along with the cabinet of antique china and some of the older, nicer pieces of furniture; most everything was gone. In addition, much that remained had been torn apart, as if looting the place wasn’t enough and a finishing touch of vandalism had been necessary. Pillows and couch and chair cushions had been gutted by some sharp knife; even the flowered wallpaper had been chopped into here and there. The braid rug had been rolled carelessly to one side, and floorboards had been pried loose. Any furniture that didn’t fit the category of antique had been knocked over, mostly broken by the force of the act.

Suddenly Brennan stopped pacing. He looked at me like he hadn’t noticed I was there before. He said, “What’re you doing here, Mallory?” He rocked back and forth on his feet.

I didn’t say anything. He seemed to want me to be a smart-ass, so he could yell at me or maybe slap me around a little. But I didn’t oblige him. I’m never witty after getting kicked in the nuts.

“What’re you doing here?” he continued. “What’s this delivery-boy horseshit?”

“It’s just something I was doing.”

“What were you delivering food at seven o’clock at night for?”

“I was about an hour behind schedule. I got to talking to one of the other old ladies.”

Light flashed from the kitchen, where Lou Brown was taking pictures of the body. Brennan turned to go out to the kitchen and said, over his shoulder, “I’ll be talking to you some more, Mallory.”

“Terrific.”

“You sit right there.”

“And here I was planning to dance,” I said, finally obliging him with the smart-ass remark he was after.

He stopped and looked at me hard. “Maybe you find this funny.”

I stood. “Not at all, Brennan. It’s just I’m bored with your stupid macho act, which is what you fall back on for lack of being able to launch an actual investigation.” I was pointing a finger at him like a gun.

“Don’t point your finger at me-”

I showed him another finger.

“Brennan!” It was Lou Brown, in the kitchen.

“Yeah, coming,” Brennan said, glaring at me, then joining Brown.

I sat down.

More light flashed in the kitchen doorway. Two ambulance attendants came in, rolling a stretcher behind them. Brennan told them just a minute, and they stood outside the kitchen in the dining area, which was just as emptied and torn up as the living room. The attendants wore traditional white and seemed anxious to get in there, like guys on the bench waiting to get in the game. I wondered if they’d run the siren coming out here. I doubted they would run the siren going back.

A fat man in a brown suit burst through the front door. He was just short of being round; his flesh was doughy and paler than Deputy Brown’s. His hair was the same color as his suit, and he was balding, combing his hair over the front of his head from in back where it was still growing, Zero Mostel-style. In fact, he resembled Zero Mostel, only not funny.

“Look at this place,” he said, looking at it. “Oh my God, look at it.” He peered into the living room and covered his face with a pudgy hand. “Jesus Christ, will you look at it! So much gone, so much ruined!”

He padded into the kitchen and the house seemed to tremble.

I heard him say, “She’s dead?”

There was a mumbling that must’ve been Brennan or somebody saying, “That’s right,” or something. It wasn’t a question that took much of an answer. It didn’t take a doctor to pronounce that body dead.

“What can be done?” he said. He spoke loud. His voice was baritone, but not very masculine.

There was another mumbling: somebody saying, “Nothing can be done,” or the equivalent. Maybe somebody said, “Bury her,” which is about all you can do for a dead person, after all.

It was silent for a while.

Brennan waved the ambulance boys in, and some of the people in there (which ones I don’t know, because I was still in the living room and couldn’t see into the kitchen) got Mrs. Jonsen’s remains untied from the chair and moved onto the stretcher. It was a slow process. Five minutes went by before the attendants passed through the dining room with the covered stretcher. The fat man in the brown suit followed along behind them like a pallbearer. Brennan closed the door after the fat man and the ambulance attendants.

No siren.

“Who was that?” I said, knowing.

“The son.”

“Edward Jonsen?”

“Edward Jonsen.”

“Isn’t there a married sister?”

“Lives out of town. Not contacted yet.”

“Oh. He sure seemed upset. About the house, that is.”

“People react funny in these situations. What do you know about it anyway, Mallory?” Brennan said that, and then his face flushed, as he remembered I had lost both my parents in recent years. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Why was this place torn up, Brennan?”

“I don’t know. Add insult to injury, I guess. Looking for something, maybe. Buried treasure. The Jonsens had a reputation for being hoarders, stingy, that sort of thing. Who knows? Now I want you out of here, Mallory.”

“I thought you wanted to talk.”

“You thinking about getting involved in this, Mallory?”

That phrase again. Getting involved. Damn.

“What if I am?” As if I wasn’t.

“Just don’t. You used to be a cop once, I hear. Now you’re a big mystery writer, with a book coming out one of these days. Maybe you want some publicity. Forget about it.”

“Can I ask you one thing?”

“No.”

“Can you find the people that did this?”

“I don’t think that’s your concern.”

“Oh, it’s my concern. For one thing, I knew the woman they killed. She was a friend of mine. For another thing, those sons of bitches kicked me more than any man should ever have to get kicked. And one last thing, Brennan-I’m a taxpayer and you work for me; I pay your goddamn salary, so don’t tell me it’s not my concern.”

I guess I expected my little speech to get a rise out of Brennan, but he disappointed me.

Because my outburst had cooled him down, if anything, and he touched my shoulder in a fatherly way that would’ve angered me if it hadn’t been sincere. “Let’s not bitch at each other,” he said. “Tonight you think you’re the detective in your book. Tomorrow morning you’re going to know better.”

“Answer my question, Brennan.”

“I don’t know, Mallory. I can tell you some about it tomorrow. Come talk to me. Can you wait till then?”

“I guess.”

“How you feeling?”

“Bruised. In every way imaginable.”

“Will you go on over to the hospital and get looked over? I’ll call them at Receiving and tell ’em you’re on your way.”

“That’s not necessary….”

“Yes, it is. Get checked over.”

“Well. Okay.”

“Feel up to driving there yourself? I’d like Lou to stick here with me awhile, or I’d have him drive you.”

“I can manage.”

“You take it easy, Mallory.”

“Yeah. You too, Brennan. Uh, sorry I….”

“Yeah, I know. We shouldn’t be bitching at each other right now. There’s a woman dead, and that’s more important than how we feel about each other.”

For once I agreed with him.