Chapter 28 #2
He shakes his head. “I was at a funeral last weekend, and the stairs out front—woooowee. It’s like they’re trying to get more
business, if you know what I mean!” He winks at me.
Tasha laughs awkwardly and then mimes popping a pill, nodding at Merle.
Holy cow, what. Merle does drugs? My mind is spinning a million miles a minute. This is bad. This means digging up dealers, sticking my
nose into a seedy underbelly of the city I hadn’t even considered—
Wait. She’s miming painkillers. For the leg. Got it.
“So . . . you fell down the stairs at the funeral?” I ask, making absolutely sure I understand.
“Broke my leg in two places. I got the hardware to prove it!” He knocks on his cast and nearly topples over. Tasha helps prop
him back up. “I got screws, nuts, bolts, the whole megillah!”
I echo what he said. “You broke your leg in two places.”
He frowns. “Well, in one place. The funeral home.”
“And the screws . . . you got those at the hospital?”
“Well, I didn’t get ’em from Ace Hardware!” He guffaws at this and then squints at me. “Did I?”
I shake my head. “I think they’re different screws.”
He nods, then turns to Tasha. “What am I doing out here?”
“Meeting a voter,” Tasha says. “This is Mo Ellery.”
“Hi. So,” I say. “Bear with me, I’m really interested in, um, how fast injuries heal—”
Merle’s face lights up; it’s like he just got new batteries. “Always a pleasure! Just ignore this cast. I was at a funeral
last weekend, and the stairs of that place—woooowee. It’s like they’re trying to get more business, if you know what I mean!”
He winks at me.
I open my mouth to tell him he already said all that, but then he starts the whole bit over again. Tasha elbows me and gives me a look.
Welp.
My dude is out of it.
The alderman rambles on while I do some quick mental calculations. The funeral and Merle’s broken leg happened Saturday. Claudia’s
garbled text (“investigate alderman office”) came in Sunday evening, when she was delirious from gas poisoning and too weak to do anything about her overaggressive
autocorrect. And then, according to the first responder gas guys, she was dead within hours.
Merle couldn’t have killed her himself, because he was in the hospital during the critical stretch of time—the two or three hours before her death. And I know Merle
didn’t tell Tond to kill her; that Funeral Deep Throat conversation was just about bribery.
So the other option is that Merle told someone else, a different henchman, to kill Claudia.
Seems risky, not to mention complicated, putting separate henchpeople on a murder operation and a bribery operation against the same person at the same time. But then again, I’ve never murdered before so what do I know.
The honest truth is, I’m grasping at straws here. I have precisely zero leads.
Nuts.
“Hey, Tasha,” I whisper, “I should probably head out—”
“Oh, Merle, for chrissakes, listen to yourself—” A woman’s voice snaps me out of my reverie.
“Lesliebear?” Merle says, breaking off from his leg-breaking story and blinking into the air. “Is that you?”
Leslie from the funeral comes around a cubicle wall—and wait, Lesliebear? Is that the drugs talking? Or is he one of those politicians who gives everyone a nickname? Can I suggest my own? I have
thoughts.
Charlie extracts himself from the dogpile and limps over to her.
“Oh hello, Charlie,” Merle says affectionately. “Have you met Charlie?”
I nod.
“He’s a champ, yes, he is, aren’t you, kiddo?” Merle tries to pet him, nearly losing his balance again. “I’m kind of the third
wheel in this family,” he says in a stage whisper.
Tasha steps in to help prop the alderman up.
“This is Leslie,” Merle introduces us. “My wife.”
Ohhhhh. Wife. Not a general nickname guy.
So much for picking my own nickname. I hardly knew ya, GeneralissiMo.
“I am also your chief of staff,” Leslie reminds him before reaching into the giant fanny pack she’s wearing and pulling out a dog treat
that Charlie instantly scarfs up. Embarrassingly, the poodles also pop up and swarm her for their share.
“Manners,” I hiss, but to my chagrin, they completely ignore me.
Leslie, meanwhile, holds a treat up in the air and all three of my guys sit obediently. She winks at me. “I guess my real job is Dog Mom Extraordinaire!”
“My job is more like Dog Mom Mediocre,” I say sadly, pronouncing mediocre so it rhymes with extraordinaire. If I have to be humiliated, I want to be cute while I do it.
“Nonsense!” Leslie says, giving the poodles a nod of grandmotherly approval. “After everything they’ve gone through, these
guys look really fat. In a happy way! You’re doing such a good job.” She puts a hand on my shoulder and smiles kindly. “Better than that Benny character
ever did.”
Well. That’s nice. Finally, some appreciation.
“Are you crying?” Tasha whispers.
“No,” I whisper back. It’s not just Leslie. It’s also the relief of the Merle-as-murderer theory turning into a dead end. Hopefully,
Tond will still pay me.
I’m trying to figure out how to get Leslie to be my friend and give me more compliments without sounding needy, but I don’t get the chance because just then, the front door creaks open, and my new bff, the Dog Mom Extraordinaire,
starts screaming.