Chapter 16
Carter stood on the porch and he stared at me, looking a bit taken aback. “You’re here.”
“It appears so. Did you need Ida Belle?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, then you should sort of come inside. She’s in the kitchen.”
Carter stepped inside and followed me back to the kitchen where Ida Belle was scrubbing the cheddar cheese off the cabinets. I figured the best thing I could do was keep my mouth shut and let Ida Belle work her plan.
“What are you guys up to?” he asked.
“Movie night,” Ida Belle said.
“She’s making us watch the Fast and Furious movies again,” I said, referencing the DVD I had queued up in the living room.
“Gertie’s here, too?” he asked.
“In the shower,” Ida Belle said. She waved a hand at the scattered cheddar cheese. “She had a run-in with the popcorn garnish.”
He reached over and brushed some off my shoulder. “I see.”
“Who’s there?” I heard Gertie shouting from the bathroom.
“It’s Carter!” Ida Belle shouted. “You better not be dripping on my hardwood floors.”
We heard the bathroom door slam shut, and Ida Belle shook her head. “You want something to drink?” Ida Belle asked.
Carter shook his head. “No. I’ve got to get back to the sheriff’s department.”
Ida Belle stopped cleaning and looked at him. “Any particular reason you stopped by?”
“I got a call from Whiskey at the Swamp Bar,” Carter said. “He said an old woman assaulted him with darts and stole a boat.”
“And you immediately thought of us,” Ida Belle said. “How charming.”
Carter shuffled a bit. “Well, I, uh, thought I’d work this one from an elimination standpoint.”
Ida Belle narrowed her eyes at him. “You going to knock on the door of every senior citizen in Sinful, are you?”
Carter opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“Didn’t think so,” Ida Belle said. “Well, now that you’ve done a bed check, can the prisoners get back to their free time?”
“Sure,” Carter said, and looked over at me. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Great,” I said, enjoying his discomfort entirely too much.
I walked him to the door, gave him a good-night kiss, then headed back into the kitchen. “Oh my God,” I said. “You are a genius. You came up with all of that in minutes. And he bought it.”
Ida Belle nodded. “Because it was decidedly typical of Gertie but not so absurd it made him suspicious. And as much as I would like to take credit for lightning-fast critical thinking, I had all afternoon to plan.”
“You planned this before we went to the bar? Why?”
She let out a single laugh. “You have to ask?”
“Never mind. I need to take lessons from you. I never get things by Carter that easily.”
“That’s because you’re always winging it, but you’ll improve.”
I grinned. “I suppose you have had a century to practice covering up for Gertie.”
“Not quite a century,” she said drily, “but long enough.”
“Is it safe to come out?” Gertie’s voice sounded behind me and I turned around to find her standing there wearing a fluffy blue bathrobe and a towel wrapped around her head.
Ida Belle shook her head. “It’s a little late to ask now, but yes.”
“You told her to stay in the bathroom?” I asked. The one worry I’d had when the whole thing was going down was that Gertie would come out of the bathroom and totally blow Ida Belle’s performance.
“I told her to stay in the bathroom but yell out the door asking who it was,” Ida Belle said. “I was afraid Carter wouldn’t believe we were all here if he didn’t at least hear her voice.”
“Perfect,” I said. The voice ensured he knew she was in the house, but being holed up in the bathroom ensured Gertie couldn’t poke a hole in Ida Belle’s carefully crafted plan.
Ida Belle plopped the bowl of popcorn on the bar and pulled three beers out of the refrigerator. “Let’s go over what we found out. Then we’ll get some real food going. Fortune?”
I told them about my conversations with Whiskey, Buck, Trick, and Trevor, careful to explain my perceptions of the men as I went.
“So,” I said when I was done, “it’s clear that Whiskey was uncomfortable with Trevor being in the bar, and he’s serving up alligator off-season, claiming it’s some kind of special cut. Is there such thing?”
Ida Belle shook her head. “There’s alligator tail and alligator tail. He’s probably spouting that other nonsense so he can sell at a premium.”
“Wouldn’t locals know the difference?” I asked.
“Who knows?” Ida Belle said. “Some of them will believe anything, especially if Whiskey feeds them a line of bull after they’ve been drinking a while.”
“What about Buck?” I asked. “He seemed a little edgy talking about poaching. It was so slight a regular person wouldn’t have noticed, but it was definitely there.”
“He’s clever,” Gertie said. “And sly. Always gave teachers fits. You wouldn’t think it to look and talk to him, but rest assured, something’s always processing in that mind of his.”
“So he’s capable?” I asked.
Gertie nodded. “Very capable, I’d say.”
“Okay,” I said. “I know my next question isn’t going to be popular, but we have to cover everything. Is there any chance that Trevor is right about Petey? Even that giant guy, Hazard, suggested Petey was strong enough to do it, and I assume he’d have the knowledge.”
Gertie and Ida Belle both frowned, and they were silent for a long time. Finally, Ida Belle said, “Neither one of us wants to think it, but you’re right to bring it up. We wouldn’t be very good detectives if we didn’t consider all the possibilities.”
“So?” I asked. “What do you think?”
“I think he’s got the strength,” Gertie said, “and he probably hates alligators enough to want them dead, but I still can’t get past the water part of things.”
“Ramona saw him getting closer every time she spotted him,” I reminded them.
Ida Belle shook her head. “Anything is possible, but standing on the bank is still a huge gap from driving a boat around, especially at night. I can’t imagine Petey could sneak out without Quincy noticing.”
“He couldn’t,” Gertie said. “He put a security system on the house before he brought Petey home from the hospital. The doctors warned him that Petey was already trying to wander.”
“Okay,” I said. A good deal of the poaching was probably done at night, so it added another layer of difficulty to Petey’s ability to pull it off. I wasn’t crossing him off the list altogether, but he was at the very bottom.
“What about the boats?” I asked Ida Belle.
“I found several with Evinrude motors, but didn’t get to search through them all before Gertie started a fray. I got pictures of several that I want to check out.”
Gertie started bouncing up and down on her stool like a six-year-old. “I found something in the boat I stole. When I hit the bank, the top of the cooler popped open and an alligator skin flew out and hit me smack in the face. I tried to find it, but it fell off when I hit the water.”
I stared at her. “And you’re just telling us this now?”
Gertie put her hands on her hips. “I was a little preoccupied on the ride home, trying to keep from dying in that death-mobile. Then Ida Belle put me through her new prisoner processing routine, then Carter showed up. And what difference does it make anyway? Were you going to stick around and look for it? Stick around and hope Carter showed up before Whiskey so you could turn over the evidence?”
“I guess not,” I said, “but you don’t have to be so grumpy about it.”
“You didn’t have to ride in the back without a seat belt or a seat,” Gertie said.
“I also didn’t throw a dart in your boob,” I said.
“Oh yeah,” Gertie mumbled. “Never mind.”
“You’re sure it was gator skin?” Ida Belle asked, getting us back on task.
“Positive,” Gertie said, “and based on the smell, it was fairly fresh.”
“That was Whiskey’s boat,” Ida Belle said.
I frowned. “Was it?”
“He said it was when he took out after Gertie,” Ida Belle said.
I nodded. “Yes, but a guy in the bar told him someone was in his boat so that’s the assumption he made when he went outside, but Carter said Whiskey called him to report a boat being stolen, not his boat.”
“You think that means something?” Gertie asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” I said. “Were there two boats at the pier that looked similar enough that he could confuse them in the dark?”
“Yeah,” Ida Belle said. “As a matter of fact, the boat right next to his was the same model and had the same engine.”
“Red stripe on the motor?” I asked.
She nodded. “But I don’t have any idea who the second boat belonged to.”
“I think I might,” I said. “Buck is the one who took Whiskey to chase Gertie. They were headed for the same place Whiskey’s boat was docked when I made my exit.”
“But you’re not sure they got in the matching boat,” Ida Belle said.
I shook my head. “And I only got a picture of Whiskey. I don’t have one of Buck. We need to figure out whose boat Gertie stole. That skin seals it.”
“Do you think we could get it out of Carter?” Gertie asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, it’s not the sort of thing we’d normally have a conversation about.”
“Meaning, he’d be suspicious right away,” Ida Belle said. “I suppose we could always check tomorrow and see if the boat is at the Swamp Bar. If it’s there, then the stolen boat wasn’t Whiskey’s and could be Buck’s.”
“What if he’s not at the bar during the day?” I asked. “Just because the boat’s not there doesn’t automatically make the stolen one Whiskey’s. He could be out fishing or have it somewhere else. Do you know where Whiskey lives?”
“At the bar,” Ida Belle said. “There’s a couple rooms off the kitchen. Whiskey and Nickel live there. Their dad lives in his old house off the highway to New Orleans.”
“So if we check out the bar, we might run into both brothers and in daylight,” I said. “That’s not good.”
“I don’t think so,” Ida Belle said. “I wondered why I didn’t see Nickel last night and asked someone at the bar. They said he was in jail in New Orleans and wouldn’t be out for a week or so.”
“Okay, so only Whiskey is in residence right now,” I said. “And if the boat’s there, we push him down on the suspect list. What about Buck?”
Ida Belle shook her head. “He lives in an apartment somewhere up the highway. I don’t know where he keeps his fishing boat.”
“He wouldn’t keep it with his shrimp boat?” I asked.
“No,” Ida Belle said. “They pay a premium for large slips down at the shrimp house. He’s probably got his fishing boat somewhere else.”
“Like maybe the place where Petey’s boat was?” I asked as a thought occurred to me. “Do either of you know what kind of engine is on Petey’s boat?”
Gertie’s eyes widened. “It’s an Evinrude. I remember when Quincy bought it.”
Ida Belle whistled. “Whoever set Petey up made sure they did a good job of it, down to picking the same engine. If the state found out about Hot Rod, he could be called to testify, and that engine is the only thing he’d be able to give them.”
I nodded. “And if they asked other people if they’d noticed anything suspicious, they might also point to the same engine. I have to give the poacher credit. It’s the perfect plan.”
“Clever,” Gertie said. “Which points more to Buck than Whiskey.”
“So tomorrow, we find out whose boat is missing,” I said. “Then we decide what to do with that information.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Ida Belle said. “Now, let’s get some steaks on the grill. I’m starving.”
I spent a good portion of the night nursing the headache, which had returned full force as soon as the whiskey wore off.
Since Gertie had already taken control of my one and only ice pack, I’d sat on the couch for hours with a bag of frozen strawberries on top of my head, waiting for the headache to subside.
Finally, I’d thawed out the strawberries, so I put them in the sink and headed up to bed around 4:00 a.m. I’d threatened Gertie with bodily harm if she woke me up for anything other than a house fire or the death of someone relevant, and was hoping to get some sleep now that my head had stopped pounding.
I was awakened by my cell phone.
I opened one eye and saw light streaming into the room at the edges of the blinds. It was morning, but it sure didn’t feel as if I’d been in bed for long. I lifted my phone and groaned. Carter was calling me at 7:00 a.m. That was never a good thing.
I answered the phone, waiting for the inevitable yelling about car chases and boat stealing, but he went a whole other direction.
“Have you seen Gertie this morning?” he asked.
Since I’d seen her after midnight, I’d technically seen her this morning, but I figured this wasn’t the time for exactness.
“No,” I said. “I was still asleep. Is something wrong?”
“I’ve gotten five frantic phone calls in the last ten minutes.
Every one of them claiming she’s walking an alligator down the street on a leash.
Please tell me that’s not possible. That the people in this town are experiencing a joint hallucination.
That it’s an illegal drug experiment being conducted by our government. Anything.”
I jumped out of bed and walked across the hall to the guest room. Gertie’s bed was empty and her nightgown was neatly folded on the end of the bed.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “She spent the night here, but her room’s empty and the bed is made.”
“You told me you were putting that alligator back in the swamp.”
“We did. I swear.”
“Uh-huh. And what swamp did you put him in?”
“The one behind my house.”
“Jesus H. Christ. It didn’t occur to you that would be a problem?”
“Of course not. Why would it occur to me that a wild animal given a choice of freedom or walking around like a dog on a lead would chose a collar and hanging out with Gertie on pavement? Where did you expect us to take him? Florida?”
“Farther away would have been nice. Anyway, I’ve got the state on the way to my office in ten minutes.
Sheriff Lee isn’t answering the phone—probably asleep at his desk—and Deputy Breaux is trying to sort out the mess that went down at the Swamp Bar last night.
I need you to handle the situation with Gertie or I’m sending the state over to deal with her and that gator when they get here. ”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Get them off the sidewalk and put that animal back in the water.”