A Bloodhound to Die for (18 page)

“He should call me,” I repeated.

“Fine.”

She began to clear the table and I got up to help. After the dishes were washed, she said she had to study and left early.

I decided to call Little Bemis. He was my contact, the one who did all my computer searches and raided large institutions for pertinent information. Due to being a computer nerd and quitting the high school football team after only one season, he had had a very difficult time in school, as the whole county was counting on him to be the great white hope for winning the state championship. Now he works for a large corporation and has a responsible job, but suffers from one grand illusion—that he is the last great spy in the
universe. I feel silly when I have to look up the code of the day before I call him for information using my code name, and couch my requests in mythical fantasy, but I’m not silly enough to make an error. One deviation from the set protocol and he would hang up; I would never be able to use his valuable services again. I dialed his home number, and when he answered I began my weird request.

“Chief, this is Lila of Lilliput. I heard about some humbugs today?” This took care of my code name and the day’s code, which was
humbugs
. “The name for the case file is ‘The Pale Prince of Prison.’ The subject is Jimmy Joe Lane. I need every relative you can find, however tenuous the connection, his or her current address, phone number, employment, and if any one of them owns property.”

“Anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“Use drop nine by ten hundred hours tomorrow.”

He hung up before I could say thank you.

“Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore, that’s for sure,” I said into the silent phone before I replaced the receiver. I picked up the list of twenty different drops and groaned. Number nine was under the train trestle at Jackson’s crossing, almost in the center of town. How could I explain crawling under there if anyone spotted me?

I sighed and eyed the silent phone. Picking it up, I dialed Hank’s home number. It was still early, just after nine.

“Hello.”

The female voice that answered had a soft drawl and a dulcet tone. I was so shocked I couldn’t make my voice work.

“Anyone there?” She now sounded amused. “Hello?”

“I’m sorry … I dialed the wrong number,” I said with precise diction when I finally got my tongue unglued from the roof of my mouth.

“No problem,” she answered.

Hank has two sisters, three sisters-in-law, and bushels of female cousins that live in this town, but I was certain none of them would answer his phone sounding as if molten honey was dripping from her jaws. Suddenly I was standing in a desolate landscape without a stitch of clothing on and feeling the cold wind chill my bones. I went to bed to get warm.

  
20
“A Week After”

I
smiled at Miz Jansee across the steam table as I headed for the wall phone. The buffet was loaded with everything that constituted a great Southern breakfast: sausage, bacon, ham, grits, red-eye gravy, scrambled and fried eggs, sausage gravy, buttermilk biscuits, home fries, and pancakes. She had been cooking since six.

The common room was bright and cheerful. The tablecloths were soft pink with dark wine-colored napkins. Lena Mae, the maid, had cut pink- and wine-colored rosebuds, white baby’s breath, and a sprig of verdant fern for the cut-glass bud vases on each table.

I picked up the chirping instrument. “Hello.”

“How’s everyone doing?” Susan asked.

“Great. You sound chipper this morning.”

Susan always enjoyed the week-long seminars that we hosted once a month to introduce law-enforcement personnel to our bloodhounds and to train them in how to live and work with the dogs in the future. It gave her a chance to meet six different males and to practice her feminine wiles. I had detailed dossiers on all six, so she knew who was single and who was married and out of bounds. She faithfully came for cocktails and supper each evening and stayed for the conversation afterward. Each night she was dazzling in her different and startling choices of garments. Jasmine and I were awed as much as the men.

“Have you heard from you-know-who?”

She was referring to Hank.

“Not a peep or a visit. It’s as if he has disappeared from the face of the earth.”

“When are you gonna call him?”

“Have you heard me mentioning hell freezing over?”

“Don’t you want to hear what he has to say?”

“Not particularly. Silence is very telling.”

“Well, I’ll see you a little after six.”

“Looking forward to it,” I told her truthfully, ending our conversation.

Someone had activated the jukebox and country ballads were playing softly, creating a soothing background sound to the clink of silverware and coffee cups, and the murmur of conversation. I was feeling fine. The seminar was going well, no major glitches so far, as I mentally knocked on wood, and I wasn’t a
mental case from Hank’s inexplicable behavior, as of yet. Congratulating myself for my sensible attitude, I took a deep breath and felt pangs of remorse and abandonment slice into my rib cage and careen into my gut. I diagnosed them as acid from stress and detoured to the kitchen to take some fizzy stuff.

Back at the table, the plate I had loaded down with enough food for a starving family of four, before the phone call, now looked grotesque. I caught Jasmine, at the next table, looking at me with a questioning expression and I gave her a weak smile, a short negative shake of the head, and then picked up my fork. I would eat if it killed me.

“Isn’t that so, Miz Jo Beth?”

The young woman speaking was a trainer, Nola Faye Dowling, who had just turned twenty-one. She was a pear-shaped dishwater blonde who wore Coke-bottle glasses, and had no discernable breasts and wide hips. She also had a smart mouth and an abrasive personality—which is why I placed her at my table so I could watch her like a hawk—and I had no idea what she had just said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

She tossed her head with impatience and nodded abruptly toward the man seated to her right.

“I was telling Sergeant McHenry that Matilda is slow, and that he shouldn’t coddle her and hold back when she hesitates. He has to be firm with her.”

I gave Nola Faye a benign smile although all I really
wanted to do was march her behind the barn, out of sight, and shake her till she rattled.

“I’m acquainted with your speech patterns, Nola Faye, but you don’t want to confuse Sergeant McHenry with your choice of verbs.”

I turned to him to continue.

“Nola Faye meant that Matilda is slow in movement, not in brains and knowledge. I would describe her as thoughtful and thorough. What I’ve noticed the past two days is the fact that you two seem to work so well together. I believe that we achieved a fortuitous match when we paired you with her, sight unseen.”

He beamed from my praise, and my accompanying smile included Nola Faye, but she didn’t see it. She was looking at her plate. She knew that she had yanked my chain and that I was furious with her. Little Miss Troublemaker had achieved another tiny victory in that I was forced to notice her and to correct her nonsense. I wished that I didn’t understand her insecurities so well. I’d then have been able to cheerfully fire her soon after she was hired.

When I saw that most had finished eating, and Lena Mae was picking up empty plates and refilling coffee cups, I rapped on my water glass and got everyone’s attention.

“Welcome to day three of your training session. It seems that you are all bonding nicely with your animal partners. As I told you at the first breakfast meeting, if anyone has any doubts about the bloodhound we have
chosen for you, any personal dislike of our choice of the dog we paired with you, please feel free to speak to Jasmine or me and we’ll try to remedy the problem.

“Wayne will now show you what we will be doing this morning. We come back in from the field at eleven-thirty, lunch is at twelve, and we resume training at one-thirty.”

Wayne, who was seated at the head of the third table, stood and slowly turned so that the sixteen of us could easily read the printed message on his Etch A Sketch: “One-on-one man trailing on a mile-long course.”

Chairs were pushed back and people began heading for the kennel to pick up their dog and take him or her to the training field to the right of the building. Some detoured to the rear of the room where the rest rooms were located. I sat and finished my cup of coffee.

I told myself I should remain here and help Wayne, Jasmine, and Donnie Ray, but I had called Jimmy Joe’s parents last night and had a ten o’clock appointment to see them this morning. Little Bemis had come through with some very complete records; I had the family listed through the past three generations. It was amazing in this day and time that so many of them had remained here and hadn’t moved on. Jimmy Joe was obviously not the only one in this family who loved swamp life.

My large pegboard in the office had red and blue pushpins lining the edge of the swamp in this and two
other adjoining counties. Red was for family members’ home sites and blue was for their property. When I was working on the large detailed county map and placing the pins, I felt envy that Jimmy Joe had so many living family members. I had no doubt that each and every one of them was intensely loyal to him and would help him if he asked. I felt as if I would be taking on an army of enemies if I changed my mind and decided to seek him out.

I had one blood cousin who had skipped the country when his plan for my incarceration had failed. I had some third cousins who lived far away who were on my adoptive parents’ family tree and who wouldn’t put me out if I were on fire, and that was it in my family.

I didn’t miss having relatives until I saw others, like Hank and Jimmy Joe, who had so many. I only missed what I didn’t have when I was blue and I had been in that state since Hank had taken me to bed and then disappeared into the woodwork the following day. Our sleeping together was as much my idea as his. I had reached for him willingly and eagerly. After seven days, I had to face the fact that his abandonment was deliberate and cruel. Mea culpa. My former behavior of quickly kissing him off was the reason I was now in pain. Obviously, he was getting even, or giving me tit for tat, or whatever.

I spoke with Lena Mae and repeated her duties for the rest of her shift. Repetition was not wasted time in regard to Lena Mae. She was slow moving, tightly
packed in her tall frame, a farmer’s daughter who hummed country tunes as she moved languidly through her eight-hour shift. When I had first hired her, I tried to tutor her, to improve her reading skills and interest her in thinking about her future. She had been polite, inattentive, and simply not interested. After six months I admitted defeat. She was content with her life and had no future expectations.

I met Donnie Ray going out the door. He was loaded down with his camera, extra lens, and a portable light reflector. He puts together a video of the six men who attend each of our seminars, with candid sequences of them working with their dogs, and ends it with them posing with their canine partners at the graduation party, the men dressed in their department’s full uniform. We mail them a copy as a souvenir of their visit.

“How’s it going?” I inquired.

“The shots from yesterday turned out fine,” he said with little enthusiasm. He didn’t look happy.

“And …?” I knew something was bugging him.

“It’s Wayne. He’s acting funny, you know?”

“I’ll talk to him as soon as I get a chance. We’ve all been busy the past few days. Got any ideas?”

“He hasn’t talked to Amy lately and she hasn’t been by. Last night I asked him if they had a fight and he like to have bit my head off. You think they’ve broken up?”

“Give him some slack until I can find out what’s going on, okay?”

He shrugged and brushed by me without answering.

I checked the kennel but I was sure that Wayne was already out in the field where they were holding the man-trailing exercises. I went to the north door of the common room and gazed out at the stick figures several hundred yards away milling around with dogs in tow and decided to wait until this afternoon.

I went to the house and debated with myself whether or not I should change clothes. The only occasions that we dressed up for around here were church and funerals. I decided my jeans and T-shirt would put Jimmy Joe’s parents more at ease.

I ran a brush through my hair and put my wallet in my hip pocket. Bobby Lee took off for his leads, hanging on the back porch, and Rudy stretched, then came out to watch. He knew he was not welcome in the common room while meals were being served. He was banned because he circled each table, abandoning all dignity and begging piteously for food. He didn’t enjoy riding in the van or the car. He only tagged along to see if Bobby Lee was going or staying.

I slipped on a pair of gloves as Bobby Lee stood on his hind legs and gently unhooked both leads from the large nails in the post rail. He pranced back to me trailing leads and drooling slobber. I kept the six-foot lead and carefully placed the twenty-foot lead, where the hook protruded the correct distance, back in his mouth and told him to hang it up. He raced back and worked it over the nail after several tries.