Рита Браун - Crazy Like A Fox

“Nope.”

“While I’m sitting here I can send out an email as to where we’re hunting tomorrow.”

She leaned back in the chair. “The problem is footing. Where can we park the trailers? I don’t worry so much about the horses. I mean, horses have been dealing with mud for millennia.”

He laughed. “Some people don’t realize that.”

She smiled. “There are fewer and fewer horsemen. In the old days, if one was a good horseman it was seen as an insight into character. Horses trusted him or her. Now—” She shrugged.

“I know you’ve thought of this, but we really only have two choices. Mill Ruins or After All. The parking is good there. Two days of steady rain, good in some ways, not in others. If it had been below freezing, imagine the mess.”

“Wonder if we’ll get a hard winter?”

“Snow,” he replied. “Farmer’s Almanac.”

“Haven’t looked that far ahead. Give me one minute. I’ll call Walter on his cell.”

She reached him, asked if they could hunt at Mill Ruins on Saturday. Of course. This Thursday looked like a wash. The Weather Channel predicted rain through Wednesday. As Gray listened he started tapping out the information.

“Push back the time to eight A.M. More light now,” he said.

“You know I hate to do that,” she replied.

“I do, but most people hate getting up early.” He held up his hand. “I know there’s only a half hour’s difference but it’s psychological, and it is now October.”

“Okay,” she said as he finished sending the email and requested, “Go back to the cowhorn.”

They both studied it again.

“It really is distinctive.” Gray admired the horn.

She slapped her hands on her thighs. “This is giving me a headache. I might as well get used to the cowhorn at the end of our hunts. I am nowhere near figuring this out, and no one has been murdered. So why worry?” She tried to convince herself.

“Honey, someone was murdered. In 1954.”

—

Weevil stood in front of the receptionist’s desk at Brightwood Assisted Living, an expensive place to park the old and incompetent, unloved as well as loved.

No one manned the desk or commanded it. He peered over the top, read the room assignments. The building near downtown Charlottesville on a well-kept side street was a formerly handsome large house converted into suites as well as individual rooms.

Randall Farley lived in room nine. A guide affixed to the wall provided a map of the rooms. Weevil walked down a short hallway, plush carpet, which struck him as odd for it’s hard for people to roll wheelchairs on carpet. But perhaps the people on this hall could still walk unaided, or not walk at all.

Wearing thin goatskin gloves, he knocked on number nine. A TV played within, the sound dimmed. He knocked again.

“Who is it?”

“Your past.” Weevil opened the door.

Randall’s jaw dropped. He tried to rise from the easy chair before the TV; a large bed was visible in a small adjoining room. Weevil produced a bottle of stiff rye that he’d hidden in his inside coat pocket, just in case liquor wasn’t allowed.

Like many whose minds slip, Randall remembered the past clearly.

Randall collapsed back in the chair. Eyes bulging, he jammered, “I didn’t have anything to do with Lennox Bancroft knowing you were sleeping with Evangelista. As for Margaret, those two years later, maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. I swear, I kept my mouth shut.”

“So you say.” Weevil handed Randall the bottle, which the old man opened and greedily gulped.

“You’re dead.”

“In a manner of speaking.” Weevil smiled. “Lennox is dead, his wife is gone, Evangelista, Margaret, too—just about everybody. You made out all right.”

“Just go.”

“That’s no way to treat an old buddy.” Weevil grabbed the remote, cut the volume. “I think you ratted me out to Brenden DuCharme, too. You know, Randall, you were just too interested in where I parked my pecker. If you hadn’t been so fat you might have gotten lucky, too.”

Tears welled in Randall’s eyes. “I had nothing to do with any of it.”

“I think you did. You’re dumb as a sack of hammers, Randall, and all of a sudden, after I was gone, you had investments, investments managed by my detractors, so to speak.”

“I swear I had nothing to do with it, and I didn’t know you were murdered. I thought you were but I didn’t know.” He sobbed. “Why are you here?”

“For the truth. You spread stories about my stealing Margaret’s bracelets, necklaces, and rings. Many of them major jewels. Her husband believed it. Alfred and Binky believed it. Such an old, malicious gossip. I would have thought you had died of shame.”

“Alfred and Binky”—Randall stopped himself, shifted the sentence—“are emotional and stupid. Someone stole a fortune in jewels.”

“Why think it was me?” Weevil’s face was close to Randall’s.

“You had opportunity, if you did steal them.” Randall hastily added, “I don’t care if you did. Feeble and Meeble”—Randall used the nicknames for the brothers—“believed it.”

“They spent money like water. How do you know they didn’t steal their mother’s jewels to pay their debts? If Brenden had known how bad it was, he would have killed them.” Weevil took the bottle of rye from Randall.

Randall greedily grabbed it back. “Goddamned pansies in here. No liquor. No tobacco. No sex.” He grimly smiled. “At least we can still enjoy the pleasure of a drink or a drag.”

“What happened to Margaret after I disappeared?”

Randall shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Nothing.”

“No divorce. She traveled to Paris. Brenden bitched and moaned that she spent a fortune on clothes.”

“Idiot.”

“He realized he ignored her. I remember when she came back she was awfully thin. Lived out her life doing good works. One charity ball after another.”

“Was she happy?”

Randall shot Weevil a withering look as he gulped another slug. “Who’s happy?”

“Clearly you’re not. I should kill you, Randall, for your evil mouth, but I’ll spare your sorry ass, not because I’m forgiving you but because your future will just be more and more miserable. You hurt a lot of people.”

Randall didn’t reply. Weevil left the still unsupervised assisted living. If those people coughing up eight thousand bucks a month for starters only knew. Randall had no one to tell that he saw Weevil. And if he had, they wouldn’t have cared.

—

At Beveridge Hundred, Yvonne listened to her lawyer, the head one, on the phone.

“He’s thinking it over,” Bart Hanckle reported.

“Bart, you might inform my soon-to-be ex-husband and business partner that what we showed him is a preview. I have more. Much more and it’s far worse.”

“I like a client who is prepared.”

“Let him know I have such a fascinating play-by-play of him in Mistress Number One’s high-rise. She is sitting on his lap. He’s naked. Never a good idea when you’ve hidden your six-pack behind a wall of fat, but there he is. They are on a very expensive sofa. Mistress Number Two is straddling his face and between his ministrations, when he comes up for air, he praises Jesus.” She paused. “Such a religious man.”

Bart chuckled. “I will be sure to tell him.”

“And you might hint that I also have footage of him with sisters. He treats us far less kindly than he treats the white girls. I don’t know whether if anyone had died her hair blonde it would have helped. This isn’t to say that I like him sleeping with any woman, but there does seem to be some difference in how he handles them depending on race.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Bart knew, as did Yvonne, that whatever else she had would ruin Victor Harris forever.