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GERTIE YANKED THE LID off of Bonnie’s trashcan and stuck her gloved hand inside, pretending to sift through the garbage as Ida Belle stood next to her holding a canvas flour sack.
Whitey ran over to the fence and barked, while his tail whipped back and forth. Ida Belle reached into the pocket of the granny dress she wore and pulled out a dog biscuit that she fed to Whitey through the chain-link fence.
“Is Marge giving us the signal to get Whitey’s sample?” Gertie asked.
Ida Belle glanced over to the sliding glass door in the back of the house. “No. Bonnie’s standing there staring at us.”
Gertie sighed. “I told Marge to give us a head start before knocking on Bonnie’s door. She got there too early.” After a moment of silence Gertie said, “I feel you glaring at me.”
“No, I’m shooting you daggers. Marge gave us plenty of time. If you hadn’t stopped at all those trash cans on the way over, we would have timed it perfectly. Bonnie would have been busy greeting Marge and getting her settled.”
Gertie pulled her head up from the can. “Mrs. Germain threw away a box full of cookie cutters. I couldn’t pass them up. Besides, we have to look legitimate. My Granny Magoo would have never passed up a box of cookie cutters. And you know I couldn’t pass by old man Harley’s place without stopping. Lecherous old coot. The Playboy magazine and bottle of booze I dug out of his trash will come in handy.”
“Come in handy?” Ida Belle asked.
Gertie jabbed her thumb in the direction of the house next to Bonnie’s. “Did you forget who lives there? Celia’s family. Until she marries and moves out, Celia’s there as well. Can you imagine how she’ll freak out when she empties the family’s trash next and thinks the booze and Playboy came from her father?” Gertie let out her best cackle.
Ida Belle shook her head. “We are trained spies. Aren’t we beyond those childish rivalries?”
“No!” Gertie shot back. “Is Marge giving us the signal now?”
Ida Belle glanced back at Bonnie’s house. “Not yet. Bonnie’s still watching us.”
Gertie returned her focus to Bonnie’s trash. “Bottle of blonde hair dye. No surprise there. If we’re lucky, we’ll find some bloody clothes from the crime scene. Why don’t you wave at Bonnie? Maybe she’ll leave us alone if she knows we see her watching.”
Ida Belle sighed and waved at Bonnie who then returned the wave.
“She’s still there, watching us. I think if there were some bloody clothes in her trash, she’d be running out here and shooing us away.”
Gertie pulled a lunch bag out of the trash and opened it. “Ewww.” She closed it. “Well, I see Bonnie cleaned up her yard of Whitey’s poo. This’ll save us a hop over the fence to go find some.” She held out the bag to Ida Belle.
“What do you want me to do with that?” asked Ida Belle. “You drew the short straw. If you don’t like the outcome of the draw, take it up with Jesus.”
“Jesus?”
“I know you prayed before picking your straw. I saw your lips moving. By the way, it’s poor sportsmanship to pray that your friend gets stuck with poop collection. That’s probably why God made you lose.”
“Fine!” Gertie dropped the paper sack next to the garbage can. “I’ll collect it later.”
Ida Belle tugged at her granny dress. “These old-lady support hose are cutting off my circulation. If I don’t get out of them soon, they’ll choke off my blood supply and you’ll have to find a rusty tin-can lid in that garbage and amputate.”
“My pleasure,” Gertie said.
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BONNIE CONTINUED STARING vacantly at the goings-on in the alley. “I never noticed how much they snipe at one another.”
Marge needed to get Bonnie’s attention back into the room. She spotted a pack of cigarettes on a side table. While Bonnie’s back was turned to her, Marge picked up the pack of cigarettes. Virginia Slims. The same brand as the one she found near the downed tree limbs near the rental.
Slipping the cigarette pack into her jeans pocket, Marge asked Bonnie if she happened to have a cigarette she could spare. “I’ve been trying to cut down. But with all the excitement, I got hooked again.” Lie. Marge had never taken up smoking.
Bonnie turned away from the sliding glass door. “Don’t I know it. I’ve been going through pack after pack the last couple of days.” She pointed to the side table. “There should be a pack by the telephone.”
“Hmmm. I don’t see them,” Marge said, making a show of examining the area.
“That’s odd.” Bonnie left her spot at the sliding glass door and took a look at the floor beneath the table. “I guess I must have smoked the entire pack. I have a new carton in my laundry room. Be right back.”
Once Bonnie disappeared into the kitchen, Marge ran to the sliding glass door, opened it a few inches and stuck her hand out and waved, then rushed into the kitchen in order to further stall Bonnie, who was walking toward the laundry room situated off the kitchen.
“Nice kitchen,” Marge said, though she really had no idea what would constitute a nice kitchen to most women. A nice kitchen to her would be a table, chairs, refrigerator and food that magically appeared on the table already prepared. Come to think of it, that would be her mother’s kitchen.
“You think so?” Bonnie said. “I had a hard time deciding on the color scheme, but then I decided avocado will always be in style, so I went with it.”
Marge nodded as she followed Bonnie into her laundry room. “My mama still has her pink kitchen from the fifties.”
Bonnie grabbed a small step stool and placed it in front of the dryer. “Oh, yes, Maime Eisenhower Pink, I remember that. My first kitchen was painted in Maime.”
The step stool allowed her to reach the cupboards above the washer and dryer. While she searched for the carton of cigarettes, Marge noticed a hamper of laundry ready to go in the wash, as well as one that Bonnie had washed earlier, all folded neatly in another basket. And it struck Marge, what if Bonnie had a few bloody items ready to wash? Surely, she would have tended to that yesterday. But blood was tough to wash out. Maybe she was putting the murder clothes through a second or third wash.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Bonnie said as she stepped down from the step stool. “I’m so rattled that I forgot that I left the carton in my garage. Do you mind?” Bonnie opened a door that led to her garage.
“Not at all,” Marge said. “I’ll just stay here and admire your avocado green washer and dryer. They are beauties.”
Bonnie touched Marge’s shoulder. “I’ll have these avocado beauties till the day I die.”
Bonnie closed the door and Marge quickly went through the clothes in the hamper, holding the blouses up against the light from the bulb in the ceiling. There were five total. One appeared to have a stain, but it was small. Marge figured that the amount of blood at the murder scene would probably result in a larger darkened area than that. For all she knew, the small stain could be a grease spot. She turned her attention to the basket of cleaned clothes. A yellow blouse sat folded neatly on top. Marge lifted it up to the light and couldn’t detect any residual stain. She sighed. What was she even doing? Surely Bonnie wouldn’t be stupid enough to keep the bloody murder clothes.
She folded the blouse and started to return it to the top of the clothes pile when she spotted it.
For a moment, she stood stunned as she stared at the article of clothing that had been beneath the blouse.
Marge whistled. A pair of men’s undershorts.
And monogrammed to boot. Two letters. WG.
Wade Guillory?
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“THAT’S A GOOD BOY,” Ida Belle said as she clipped a sample of Whitey’s fur. She placed the clump inside a glass tube, capped it and dropped it in the canvas sack. “Okay, let’s head out.”
Gertie shook her head. “Not until I load up Celia’s trash can with a few goodies.” Gertie rushed to the cans next door and began transferring several items from her canvas bag into Celia’s trash. In went the Playboy and the liquor bottle, as well as a tube of hemorrhoid cream.
“Would you hurry?” Ida Belle said. “I wasn’t kidding about these support hose. My legs are going to die in about five minutes.”
“That reminds me...” Gertie pulled out a mannequin’s arm from the canvas bag and cackled. “I wish I could be here when Celia or her mom or dad come out to empty the trash and there’s an arm holding onto a liquor bottle. All that on top of a Playboy magazine.” Gertie laughed. “I guess I could camp out in the alley and keep watch.”
“Hey, you two old bats get away from our garbage!”
Ida Belle looked up to find Celia stomping out of her back door and heading their way.
“I thought I told you two to stay away from my family’s cans! Now, scat or I’ll call the Sheriff!”
“Is she holding a bat?” Gertie asked.
“Okay, let’s go,” Ida Belle said. Not that she wouldn’t love to see someone get the better of Celia. But they both had had martial arts training in the Army. She could restrain herself, that was easy. But if Gertie got her ire up and actually let loose on Celia, it would make the gossip circuit within minutes. Besides, her legs were starting to go numb. How did old ladies do it?
“She would take a bat to my granny?” Gertie asked, indignantly.
“Now,” Ida Belle urged. “Let’s go now.”
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MARGE HAD JUST STUFFED the men’s underwear in her bra when the door to the garage opened and Bonnie stepped back inside the laundry room, holding a carton of Virginia Slims. “Found ‘em.”
Bonnie pulled out a pack and began to hand it to Marge when she stopped and frowned. “Did you hear that? Sounds like it’s coming from out back.”
Marge followed Bonnie through the kitchen and into the living room where Bonnie pointed to the patio door. “You’d better get out there. It looks like Celia’s having words with the grannies again.”
“What?”
Bonnie shook her head. “You have no idea what it’s been like, having that awful girl as a neighbor all these years. I’ll be so glad to see her married off and moved into her own damn house.”
Marge rushed over to the door. Outside, in the next yard, Celia was waving a baseball bat in the air and yelling obscenities. Marge could feel her face heating up. She’d learned over the years to just let Celia’s insults roll off her. But Celia was yelling as if she thought she was yelling at two little old ladies. One of them her grandmother. This she couldn’t let stand.