Jess Lourey - October Fest

“How come it doesn’t smell down here?” I asked before my social filter clicked in.

“I figure they want to live as cleanly as I do,” Cindy said. “I spend a lot of time cleaning bedding. Now I have Darcy to help me.” They exchanged eye syrup and dopey smiles. “Follow me.”

I sidestepped the bird, holding my fingers over my face like the bars of a cage to remind him who had the power. Cindy led me to the bunny pen and reached out to hand me a soft, warm puff of white.

“It’s shaking,” I said.

“Pet it like this.” She showed me where to stroke behind the ears, and I snuggled my nose into its sweet fur. “Feel anything?” She asked.

“Love and warm rainbows.”

She smiled. “No itchy nose?”

“Nothing.”

“OK, come over here.” She removed the bunny from my hands against my will and led me to a cage full of tiny brown and white rodents, short-snouted versions of Hammy. She reached in and selected one for me.

I held it up to my nose. Nothing. Damn! That was my whole theory up in smoke.

“Not allergic?”

“No, but I was positive I was.” I hung my head.

Cindy and Darcy exchanged sly glances before bursting out laughing. Darcy delivered the punch line. “That’s a hamster, not a gerbil!”

Oh, what fun. “Do you have gerbils?” I asked impatiently.

“Over here.” Cindy led me two cages down, and my eyes started watering immediately. I wasn’t even holding the gerbil when the sneezing began.

“Yup,” Darcy said. “You’re allergic.”

Just to be sure, he handed me one. My eyeballs burned so bad they tried to scratch themselves, and the postnasal drip was immediate. I thanked them profusely and scurried out of the house.

Next stop, Gary Wohnt. Despite no longer being police chief, he had reclaimed his old office, making me wonder where Kennie had set up shop. He was sitting behind his imposing metal desk rifling through paperwork when I entered.

“Got a minute?”

He peered up, and I steeled myself. His glance left me bare, but this time I didn’t fight it. He was in his deep blue uniform, hat off to reveal slicked-back black hair. Judging by the soft appearance of his mouth, I guessed he still had his Carmex habit, but his lips were the only soft thing on him. His face was chiseled, shoulders broad. I stood my ground and let him give me the up down. I was here for once not because I felt guilty but because I wanted to help him.

“One.”

“That’s all I need.” I dragged the lone empty chair in the room to the front of his desk and laid into the story. I told him how I’d sneezed when I’d first come upon Webber’s body. I hadn’t thought much of it until I realized that I had the same reaction whenever I was near Kenya, who always kept her trained gerbil close at hand. And then, I pulled it all together with the coup de grace: gerbil turds found around Webber’s body in a room that Kenya had no reason to be in if she wasn’t killing Webber. I explained that although Kenya had provided an alibi for her mother the night of Webber’s murder, she’d also said her mother had been knocked out on sleeping pills and so Kenya herself had no alibi. And I shared my fear that Kenya had given her mom sleeping pills and then killed her, too.

He held up his hand. And then held it there for a moment longer, apparently searching for the right words. “You’re asking me to accuse a woman of two murders because you’re allergic to her pet?”

“It’s not a lot, I know, but she’s unstable. Glokkmann told me Kenya has attachment disorder, and a symptom of that is defiance and inappropriate attachments. She had motive to kill Webber to frame her mom.”

“A lot of people had motive,” he said. His sleeves were rolled back enough to reveal muscled forearms flexing with impatience. “What makes you think she also killed her mother?”

“I didn’t at first. I thought Glokkmann really had killed herself to protect her daughter-she’d told me in jail that she’d do anything for her kids-but then her assistant Grace told me at the funeral that the Representative would never have done that. And she’s right. Glokkmann was selfish, superficial, and too convinced of her own worth to ever end her own life.”

He glared at me wordlessly.

“Look,” I said. “If you can prove her gerbil was in the room Webber was murdered in, wouldn’t that be enough?”

“Not by a long shot.” He steepled his fingers. “And the room has been thoroughly cleaned.”

My heart sank. “I know I haven’t always been up front with you, or reliable, but I know she did it, Gary. I know it.”

I’d never called him by his first name before, and it hung in the air between us awkwardly. The muscles on his forearms flexed again. Finally, he spoke, his voice low and controlled. “What did you have in mind?”

“A sting.”

His eyes flashed with impatience or suppressed laughter. I was not good at reading this man. “A sting?”

“Yes, a sting.”

He arranged the papers on his desk, standing to file a loose one. I couldn’t help but stare at his butt, which looked roughly firm enough to crack a walnut. Damn that man and his psy ops. He turned and caught me staring. A muscle in his cheek jumped, and he sat back down. “I’ll pass on the sting. And if I hear that you’re within a hundred yards of Kenya Glokkmann, I’ll arrest you.”

I coughed on my own spit. “On what charges?”

“Don’t need any. At least not right away.”

I was so angry I could only see out of one eye. “Is that all?”

“You tell me.”

The one time in my life I needed a comeback more than a fish needed water, and I had nothing. I stormed out, slamming the door on my way and then returning to slam it again.

I was so angry when I stomped out of the police department that my footprints gave off sparks. Sure, the phrase “the gerbil turd” wasn’t going to replace “the smoking gun” in the lexicon anytime soon, but Gary didn’t seem to have anything better to go on. What a hardass he was. Literally, not figuratively, dammit.

But I didn’t need him. I’d stumbled through by myself just fine until now. Well, sort of. The bummer was that if I was going to nail Kenya, I did need Bad Brad. I tromped over to his two-bedroom apartment above the Klassy Kwilt Shoppe in downtown Battle Lake and rang the bell.

He buzzed me in, informing me over the intercom that his apartment was the third door on my right at the top of the stairs. He was thrilled to see me, meeting me in the hallway and offering me a tour of his digs. I’d never been to his local abode before and followed him in reluctantly. I thought it a gimme that the place would be a dump with beer cases standing in for furniture and trash to the ceiling, but I found it to be neatly-kept. One of the bedrooms housed his musical instruments, all of them in their cases on a custom-built shelf or displayed on the wall. Peeking in the second bedroom revealed that the bedspread didn’t match his pillow cases or his curtains, but he had all three, and they were where they should be. In his kitchen, his dishes had been washed and were drying, and he even had a (intentionally) dried flower bouquet on this kitchen table. The furniture in the living room was old and mismatched but there were no dirty clothes lying around or dust collecting. I refused to go into his bathroom for fear of finding that he did not have booby magazines stacked next to the toilet. That would be too much topsy-turviness for one day.

While Brad showed me around, I filled him in on the details of my plan. Part of me didn’t want to tell him the whole story, that I thought Kenya had tricked Webber into meeting her in a room she knew would be empty so she could knock him out, suffocate him, string some of her mom’s hair around his fingers, and stomp around in her mom’s shoes, made muddy courtesy of the ditch and some lake water. I didn’t know how to convince him to secure to his person the handheld tape recorder I’d picked up at the hardware store on the way over without telling him, though, and I certainly didn’t know how I’d get him to trap her into confessing if he didn’t have some insider info. Plus, it hurts to lie to a guy without eyebrows.