Cherokee Purple

by Rob Hunter

part 3 of 9

As you got closer to the corpse, Thelma’s scent was not the smell of death — nitrate and gunshot residue. This was Aqua Velva with overtones of Lilac Vegetal — a bargain men’s cologne re-bottled under Parrish’s own label. Parrish must have gotten a deal and Thelma honored his memory even in death. Cologne aside, Ol’ Parrish knew his hardware — after twenty years his bullets were still good. Ask Thelma. Like I said, Ed Seitz blew his cushion shot and I won five dollars.

A hanky embroidered with plum-colored thread was clenched in Thelma’s free hand. The hanky reeked of patchouli. Whatever lonely secrets she whispered in her bedtime prayers, Thelma’s dialog with the Almighty was to be continued in a heavily scented afterlife.

The White Street Billiards and Snooker had a public payphone on which Thelma conducted all her business. The number was written on many a kitchen wall throughout the county — a useful resource when wandering husbands might be required at home for some heavy lifting. Outgoing calls were mainly for the taxi to pick up some Bourbon Deluxe at the bootlegger’s with a stop for crushed ice at the drug store soda fountain. Thelma monitored all outgoing conversations.

Ed tried to step around Thelma’s body to where the phone hung on the wall behind her counter. He shivered and stood stock-still, eyes bulging; he was breaking a sweat that threatened to melt his scissorbill collar. “I can’t do it, Harley. You call.”

I rummaged in the cash drawer and tossed him a key. Frisky Giblets, a chicken and ribs joint, was the standby sanitary facility when Thelma had a heavy beer night with customers lined up for the urinal. And the nearest phone Ed wouldn’t have to hurdle over Thelma’s body to use. He went across the alley, dialed 0 and told the operator to send the police. I pocketed Thelma’s other spare. You never knew when nature would call.

* * *

Colonel Wildrose Mahaffey himself — pale, with lidless eyes and a thin-lipped mouth that showed the gold of many metal teeth, the commandant of Piedmont’s 12-man force — appeared in response to Ed’s call. Felonious assault, death resulting, was not a foremost police priority. Col. Wildrose Mahaffey’s first concern was the county’s possum plague.

Victory over Japan had generated an unheard-of fecundity amongst the lowly possum, death by collision resulting for both the rodents and the drivers. “Eat Mo’ Possum,” a favorite football chant, fired Mahaffey’s imagination. He got a brainstorm for turning the highway pest into what us sales types call a “self-liquidating premium.”

Eat mo’ possum road signs and bumper stickers proliferated. The public outcry over the rash of highway deaths regularly got the colonel’s picture on the front page of the Chronicle, cradling his shotgun and hoisting a brace of slaughtered possum. Col. Mahaffey ran for sheriff. Public opinion counted him a sound man and he held the two positions — commandant of police and county sheriff — simultaneously.

Wildrose Mahaffey wore a Sam Brown belt and a campaign hat with a chin strap that made it easy to confuse him with a scoutmaster or one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. The knife-edge crease of his twill uniform trousers announced that even when he sat in the back of his chauffeured prowl car, he never bent.

The Colonel considered an invisible piece of lint besmirching his uniform as his chauffeur, a sergeant, checked the premises for any perpetrator-in-hiding. He lingered in the toilet to pee, flushed and emerged.

“Okay, Colonel,” said the sergeant.

“And who are you two?” said the Colonel, fixing a withering stare on Ed and me. The sergeant stood back five paces, hand on his pistol butt. It looked like we were the prime suspects. I did my level best not to smile or laugh all the while maintaining eye contact. The Colonel’s spiritually vacant blue pools offered no haven, no recognition.

Ever notice that when you are trying to ignore a blatant disfigurement — a harelip, cotton eye or birthmark, in the Colonel’s case his emotionless water-blue eyes — on an otherwise altogether perfectly pleasant person, you go all stiff and a demonic possession forces you to stare at the blemish? On Mahaffey’s lapel was a campaign button just like Truman and Dewey, except yellow and shiny right over his heart: Eat mo’ possum. I gave it up as a bad job and, under the Colonel’s icy gaze, broke down laughing.

“Colonel, sir, I eats possum every day.”

The Colonel seemed pleased. There was a discernable twitch at the corners of his lipless mouth.

“You boys’re not from around here.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Oh, yes, we are.” Ed Seitz piped up. “We’re working with Dixie Duck and Process out on South 100.”

The Colonel’s eyes got a dreamy, far away look. “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” He tapped his Eat mo’ possum button. “After the Yankees won the war, we ate the wild pigs. Now we eat possum.”

A woman, fortyish, stylish and from away, poked her head in the pool hall door. “Oh, hello, Wildrose.”

“Hello, there, Norma. Haven’t seen you since 1928.”

“That championship team.”

“That championship year. It was never the same with you away, honey. Glad you come back home.” The Colonel nodded at the body in its pool of coagulating blood. “Thelma couldn’t wait. She’d have been glad to see you.”

The five of us — six, counting Thelma — were silent. The Colonel, apparently an avid reader of Nick Carter and Ellery Queen, was having a dramatic moment. He was waiting for one of us to break down and confess everything. Confess to what? Thelma had shot herself with her own pistol. Ed and I were witnesses; we had called the police. Case closed.

We had seen this in a thousand movies — about here your average hard-boiled private eye would make some snappy crack and exchange meaningful glances with the femme fatale. We fidgeted; no one wanted to be the first to clear his throat. Any eye-rolling or throat-clearing would be a dead giveaway. We were a gift from above for a small town cop to keep on ice for a while in case he needed someone to blame for anything.

Wildrose’s sergeant stood legs apart, blocking the door to the alley, Frisky Giblets, and freedom. His knuckles were white on the grip of his weapon as if he expected us to make a break for it.

“Billy Wayne. Easy,” said Wildrose Mahaffey. The sergeant relaxed and grinned. “Suicide or death by misadventure. Folks in South Carolina don’t kill themselves. Against God’s word. Thelma must have been cleaning it when it went off, right? You. Right?”

“Me?” Ed Seitz.

“You. You keep shufflin’ your feet like that and you’ll wear out the linoleum for sure.”

“It’s not linoleum, Boss,” said Billy Wayne the sergeant. “It’s terrazzo.” Meaning the poured, polished rock aggregate stone floors favored by elementary schools.

“Billy Wayne. Shut up. You people watch too many movies.” Billy Wayne smiled. He was the distraction to put everybody at ease. This was a dog and pony show the two men had done many times.

Norma laughed.

“’Course, if somebody,” here Wildrose looked toward Norma, “felt they had been wronged by Ol’ Parrish they might have done him in. Hypothetically. Parrish is an open file. The Catawaba River mud tends to hold its secrets. I don’t figure the county budget would allow for years of excavation looking for something the wild hogs ate up anyway, twenty years back.”

“Pigs,” Ed looked upset. “You mean pigs eat people?” This was a reversal of the natural order. For Ed Seitz, pigs were a commodity, a menu item, not fanged aggressors.

Wildrose knelt by the body. I noticed he removed the patchouli-scented hanky and put it in his pocket. A clue. I read Nick Carter and Ellery Queen, too.

With Thelma’s death Ed and I had been initiated into the life of Piedmont as deep as you can get with an up-North accent and a snap-brim fedora. In normal circumstances Ed’s hula-girl neckties were the icebreaker; they got people talking.

After a few of our monthly stopovers in Piedmont, South Carolina we knew all about Norma, the ruined cheerleader and Ol’ Parrish, the devil seducer. Or conversely, Norma the seducer who led a weak man astray. Pick one, please.

The basic story, however, remained unchanged in its salient details — older man with hots for teen beauty cleans out his bank account and disappears with said babe. Except that here was the babe, tailored and with big city smarts, at the scene of the wronged woman’s suicide. And twenty years after the fact.

Norma’s eyes grew shrewd, but not cold. Surprisingly warm, in fact. A secret knowledge passed between the policeman and the cheerleader, a shared glance was all, and that got me thinking. I smiled at her; she gave me a wink. These two had a history.

“Rosie?” Norma.

“Norma.” Wildrose Mahaffey.

“That was you followed us that night.”

“It was.”

“That was so long ago and I was infatuated with Parrish.”

“Ol’ Parrish.”

“Not that much older as it seems now.”

“Twenty years. Like the twenty years you’ve been gone in Chicago.”

“You knew where I was. Oh, that figures — you being a policeman and all. That championship team. I figured you for another musclehead football player with no future after high school. You knew it all along — all about Parrish dying where we stopped on our way out of town.”

“And I was in love with you.”

I got the feeling Ed and I had become part of the wallpaper and, like the famous flies thereupon, were witnesses to a passing moment that meant very much to Wildrose and Norma. I had a bad itch in my probables that Ed Seitz and Harley Pigeon could be in big trouble because of who we were and where we were — the wrong place at the wrong time. And we were being ignored. This made me more than a little bit edgy. I thought of the flypaper at the General Longstreet.

* * *

Proceed to part 4...