Ten

I love the Last Ditch on a quiet Friday night when Roger’s not on call and Kathi’s all caught up with the service washes. I loved them when we used to gather in Todd’s room, or in the office, and I love them even more now that we gather in Creek House.

Would I like to be in charge of issuing invitations? Would I prefer that to coming round the side of the motel past the oleanders, seeing the belch of smoke from my chimney, and realising that Todd had lit the stove already?

Well. You can’t have everything.

“Bombshell! You’ll never believe it,” I said, entering the living room. The four of them were gathered there. Todd and Roger on the couch, Kathi on one end of the other couch, Noleen in the armchair. They’re always very careful not to couch it up in two pairs, not to make me feel like the spare leg, which makes me feel like a spare leg with athlete’s foot and a bunion.

“I see your bombshell and raise you a meteor strike,” Roger said. If Todd had said it, I’d be looking round for a pinch of salt, but Roger isn’t given to hyperbole.

“Is the case solved?” I said. Of course, I hoped it was. Anything else would be heartless and tacky.

“Not even close,” said Roger.

“Yay!” I said, without meaning to. I sat down on the other end of the couch from Kathi and accepted the glass she put in my hand.

“And I was right,” Todd said. “I am vindicated. I am a genius. I could probably be a certified private detective once I put in a few hours to get my license.”

“Five hundred hours,” said Noleen. “Stick to cocktails.” She drained her glass and reached over to the shaker for more.

“Well, we’ll see,” Todd said. “Now then, Lexy, remember I said I thought a whole lot of the poem had been neglected on Halloween?”

“All the drinking,” I said. “Yes. But, Todd, honestly, I really do have news.”

“You’ll get your turn,” Todd said. “I’m bursting with this. And Roger was wrong by the way.”

“Bursting with news but takes the time to get that in,” Noleen said.

“Roger thought Tam was in his seventies,” said Todd. “Well, he wasn’t. He was sixty-eight.”

“A whole two years off,” Roger said. “And not even that if he repeated a year.”

“And yet no one ID’d him,” Todd said. “No one in the senior center knew him. Because although he graduated from Beteo County High, he hasn’t lived in Cuento since.”

“Which means what?” I said. “He was killed and brought back here to be dumped?” I was wondering how this nugget slotted in amongst all the stuff I’d learned and theories I’d formed.

“But no!” said Todd. “Think about it, Lexy. He graduated in 1968!”

“So he’s not quite seventy,” I said. “What am I missing?”

“It’s 2018,” said Todd.

“Right.”

“It’s fifty years later.”

“And?”

“What happens fifty years after you graduate high school?” said Todd.

“I dunno. Nothing in Dundee. Why, what happens here?”

“A high school reunion!”

“Ohhhhhhh!” I said. “That is a definite possibility. He was back in town for his fiftieth high school reunion? When is it?”

“It’s come and gone,” Todd said. “It was pretty huge too. A lot of hard partying. And it was held … wait for it … at the farmers’ market!”

“Okay,” I said. The farmers’ market was Cuento’s wild side. There’s kale, to be sure, but there’s also bands and food trucks, and when the kale’s all sold and the picnic blankets are rolled up, there’s dancing and drinking. “So they held their reunion at the farmers’ market. So what? I’ve seen wedding receptions there.” Then my brain caught up with my ears. “Wai—wai—wait! They all got together and got plastered at a market?”

“Back to our tale,” said Todd. “‘One market night, Tam got hammered pretty tight, and by a chimney blazing finely, of foaming ale they drank divinely.’”

“Wait a minute though,” I said. “If the reunion was at Halloween, Tam was four days dead by then, wasn’t he?”

“Who has a reunion on a Wednesday?” said Todd. “Pay attention, Lexy. The reunion was at the farmers’ market. Which is … ?”

“Saturday,” I said.

“Which is … ?”

I gave a long, low, gobsmacked whistle. “Four days before we found him.” It fitted perfectly with everything I’d learned. He had come to his high school reunion and they’d killed him.

“Now all we need to do,” said Todd, “is find someone from the class of sixty-eight who still lives here in town, show the picture, and get his name.”

“No need,” I said. “That’s my bombshell. I’ve got his name. And I think I know why he was killed too. Look.” I handed my phone to Kathi, who was nearest. I had the picture zoomed in on Tam, Vera, and Wanda in the back row of the Homemakers.

“That’s definitely him,” she said. “He needs to fire his honeys. Or teach them to smile anyway.”

“Don’t say honeys,” said Roger, leaning over and taking the phone. “Yeesh.”

“His name,” I said, “believe it or not, really is Tam. Thomas anyway. Thomas Oscar Shatner.”

“Tom O. Shatner?” said Noleen. “Poor schmuck. His parents should be taken out and—” She cleared her throat. “Bad choice of words. But they should be.”

Roger was swiping with Todd looking on. “Where’s his picture?” he said. “You don’t have a shot of his actual—Oh.” He had seen the pic I’d taken of the little note saying Tam wasn’t there. “They missed him? That’s a cardinal sin for a yearbook squad.”

“I think it was deliberate,” I said. “I think they missed him out on purpose. And I think I know why someone killed him too, all these years later.”

Roger looked up at me, with a look on his face that could turn the milk. “Are you saying what I’m thinking?” he said. “He’s only in the Homemakers, Nurses, and Librarians clubs? That’s … ”

“Weird?” I said.

“One way to play it, I was going to say. I went the other way.”

“What are you talking about?” said Kathi.

“I hit the gym, got some ink, and ran with a gang,” said Roger. “And Todd did the same.”

“Except for the ink,” Todd said. “Being perfect already. But I thought about it. I could have gone the way Thomas went. Easily.”

“What are you talking about?” said Noleen.

“I think Tam,” I began, “or should we call him Tom? Did they staple the hat to him after he was dead as an insult, or just because that was his name?”

“They?” said Noleen. “They who? Someone at the reunion? Why would they insult him?”

“I think he was gay-bashed,” I said. “I think the Jimmy wig and the horse’s tail and the cutty sark were all misdirection. This was a hate crime.”

The next question was whether to go straight to the cops this instant and tell all to the duty officer or wait until morning and tell Mike. On the one hand, she was the detective in charge of the case. On the other hand, she despised us. On one hand, she was herself a gay woman, which had to count for something. But on the other hand, she had the worst case of internalised heteronormativism I had ever encountered. On one hand, this was a police matter and our duty as citizens, or visa-holders in my case, was to hand over the information to the police immediately. On the other hand, if Mike had listened to me about the ring in the first place, they would have known who Tam was days ago. On a third hand, mind you, I still couldn’t explain where the ring had disappeared to. But on a very unlikely fourth hand, if they had paid attention to all the other signs and asked about Tam O’Shanter around Cuento—put it in the paper and on the local radio—someone would have remembered Thomas Shatner, surely.

But Shiva aside, the man was dead and we had a lead. To the Cuento cop shop, en masse, we had no choice but to go.

And all our soul searching about Mike or no Mike turned out to be academic, because she was still there as we marched in lock step through the foyer. The dispatcher looked up from behind her plexiglass with nothing worse than an expression of inquiry on her face. But Mike, standing beside her looking over some paperwork on a clipboard, gave a prize-winning scowl.

“You’re working late,” I said.

“I’ve got a murder to solve,” Mike said.

“And we’ve got information for you,” I said.

“More jewelry?” Mike said. “More poetry?”

“Have you put a name to the vic yet?” said Todd.

“Don’t say vic,” said Mike, Roger, Noleen, and me in chorus. Three of us smiled at the snap. One of us scowled even more.

“Because we’ve ID’d him,” said Todd.

“If you’ve been interfering in police matters, I’m going to take a pretty dim view,” Mike said.

“I consulted public records in a public place,” I said. “I don’t think I even contravened copyright; four pages out of two hundred.”

“His name,” said Kathi. Kathi was usually pretty low-key. She didn’t say much, never threw her weight about, didn’t even laugh out loud that often. Of the four of them it had taken me longest to warm to Kathi, or rather to decode her. Now I loved her with as fierce a devotion as the rest of them. As the rest of them loved her, I mean. And as I loved the rest of them too. Be that as it may, every so often Kathi surprised us all. And this was one of those moments. “His name,” she said again, “if you actually want to know his name.”

“Are you messing with me, Mrs. Muntz?” said Mike.

“I wouldn’t dare, Detective Rankinson,” Kathi said. “I’d hate to have a dim view taken.”

“You’re spending too much time with this one,” Mike said, jerking her thumb towards me. “Her with the mouth.”

“You get Mrs. Muntz,” I said. “And I get her with the mouth.”

“Look,” said Roger, “do you want to know who the dead guy in the slough is or don’t you? If you know already, we’ll go, but if you don’t know yet, how can it not be killing you?”

Mike gave an elaborate sigh and buzzed out from behind the divider. She planted herself in front of us and opened her notebook.

“His name is Thomas Shatner,” Todd said. “Thomas Oscar Shatner.”

“Tam O. Shanter?” Mike said. “You’re telling me you think that corpse is named Tam O. Shanter?”

“Shat-ner,” said Todd. “It’s not a joke. That’s his name. He was sixty-eight years old and he graduated from Beteo County High.”

“Right,” Mike said.

“We don’t know where he lived, but we think he was back in town for the reunion.”

“At the farmers’ market?” Mike said. “Someone saw him there?”

“We have no information on that,” said Todd. “But it was the fiftieth reunion of his year. And he died with his class ring on.”

“How many times must I say it?” Mike said. “There was no ring!”

“Okay,” I said. “There was no ring. I imagined it. I saw ripples of water that looked like BCSHS six eight and so I went to the library and looked in the yearbook and found him there. Total coincidence.” I had been pecking at my phone and now I handed it to her.

“This is him?” she said, looking at the Homemakers photo. “He was identified in the caption?”

“Well, no,” I said. “They missed his name out of the caption.”

“But do you have his senior picture?” She put an index finger down on my phone and looked at me. “Do I have permission to swipe?”

“Of course,” I said.

Todd squeaked. I assumed he was thinking of Tinder and ignored him.

“He didn’t have a … is that what you call it? … a senior picture?” I said. “But if you keep swiping”—Todd squeaked again and again I ignored him—“you’ll see that he was missed out of the collection. There’s just a note of his name. Now, we think that’s significant, don’t we?” I looked at Roger for corroboration but he was frozen, staring aghast at Mike’s fingers. “We think he was bullied at school. Ostracised. And we think—”

“So you don’t have a photograph with a name?” said Mike. She was still swiping. Todd squeaked a third time and Noleen made a low moaning sound in her throat. “You have a photograph of a young man with a glancing physical similarity to the victim and you have a name with no photograph.”

“Oh come on!” I said. “Come off it!”

“And you have nothing more than that?”

Swipe.

Squeak.

Moan.

“Lexy Campbell,” Mike said suddenly. “I am arresting you on suspicion of involvement in the murder of John Doe.”

“What?” I said.

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against—”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I didn’t kill him!”

“—you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney.”

“I didn’t see him until I pulled him out of the slough four days after he died.”

“Four days,” said Mike. “Good guess.”

“You told me that!”

“If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you by the court.”

“We can afford an attorney,” Roger said. “Lexy, stop talking.”

“Okay,” I said. “Mike, I did not kill Thomas Shatner. I didn’t know Thomas Shatner.”

“With these rights in mind, are you willing to talk with me about the charges against you?”

“No,” said Todd and Roger.

“Snap, jinx, I own you both,” I said. “Mike, I saw a ring, I went to the library, I found out his name. I took photos of the yearbook. That is all.”

“So how do you explain this?” Mike said. She turned my phone back to face me. I did not know, did not have the smallest clue, what I was going to see there. I still didn’t understand why Todd had squeaked and Noleen had moaned. “If you didn’t know John Doe, where did this come from?”

It was Roger’s photo. It was Tam, Photoshopped back to life, cut off the deck of Creek House, and pasted onto a pleasant scene in a beer garden. He didn’t look dead. He didn’t even look drunk.

“Umm,” I said.

“I’m calling my attorney,” said Roger. “Stop talking, Lexy.”

“Okay,” I said again. “Mike, is it illegal to photograph a corpse?”

Mike stared down at that picture again. Her eyes flared. “It’s illegal to converge on a crime scene to spectate or record and thereby impede emergency personnel in the performance of their duties,” she said.

“How did we impede you if you didn’t even know we had recorded anything until now?” I said. “And we didn’t converge. We were there already.”

“Sightseeing at the scene of an emergency,” Mike said. “California penal code 402(a) PC.”

“What emergency?” I said. “He was bloated up like a lifeboat.”

“402(a) PC?” said Noleen, stabbing at her phone.

“And you’ll never get that spliced Miranda past an attorney,” Kathi said. “You should have said it straight through and not let Lexy distract you.”

“Your word against mine,” Mike said.

But Kathi held up her phone and shook her head. “Wrong again. I got it all. Smile for the camera.”

Mike breathed in hard and long, swelling up until I thought her buttons would pop. Then she let it all go again. “Smart phones have ruined this world,” she said. “Get outta here.”

“I’m unarrested?” I said.

Mike pointed wordlessly towards the door.

“Thank you,” I said. “I look terrible in orange. And listen, check it out, eh? Once you’ve cooled off and stopped being annoyed. Thomas Oscar Shatner. Seriously.”

But Todd was dragging me by my elbow and Noleen was pushing me with both hands in the small of my back. Kathi was still recording. Roger was talking to an attorney. And Mike looked like she might easily change her mind. It was time to go.