meals and washing his damned underwear, either.' She grinned slyly. 'If you get my meanin'.'
Joanna nodded. She got it, all right. 'So has he been in today? I tried stopping by both his house and his shop. His truck was there, but he didn't answer at either place.'
Belle shrugged. 'He hasn't been in so far, and once I close the doors at three o'clock, he'll be out of luck. Probably got himself a snootful last night and he's sleeping it off today. He does that, you know-drinks to excess. That's one of the reasons I divorced him-for drinking and carousing both.'
'Well,' Joanna said, 'since he isn't home, is there anywhere else in town he might be?'
'My guess is he's in the refrigerator he calls a bedroom, sleeping the sleep of the dead, and can't hear you over the sound of that damned room air conditioner of his. That's another thing about him. The man's so tight his farts squeak. He's cheap as can be about everything, but not air-conditioning, no, ma'am. Keeps his shop and bedroom so cold they're like as not to freeze your butt. Us'ta be, I'd walk in there to go to bed in the summertime and my nipples would turn to ice. Now that I'm alone, I sleep upstairs here with just a single fan. Sometimes, even in the summer, I don't bother with that.'
'Getting back to Clyde…' Joanna hinted.
'Want me to go over and wake him up for you?' Belle Philips offered. 'We've been divorced a long time, but l still have a key. He coulda changed the locks, but like I said, he's so damned cheap…'
Glad of an excuse not to drink the awful coffee, Joanna pushed the still brimming cup aside. 'That would be a real favor, if it's not too much trouble.'
No trouble at all,' Belle said. 'All's I got to do is turn out the lights and lock the door. Since I'm my own boss, I can come back later on and finish cleaning up. I do that sometimes, anyway, especially if it gets too hot of an afternoon.'
While she waddled over to the door and turned the CLOSED sign to the front, Joanna put a dollar bill down on the counter. The sign over the cash register said coffee cost seventy-five cents. After a moment's consideration, she added a quarter to the single.
Belle returned and plucked a huge, fringed leather purse out from under the counter. 'Ready,' she said, jangling a ring of keys. 'My car or yours?'
'Let's take mine,' Joanna told her. 'It's parked right out front.'
When Belle Philips clambered into the Blazer, the seat springs groaned under her weight. She had to struggle with the seat belt to get it to reach all the way around her. 'Nice car,' she commented, once she was finally fastened in. 'Not like one of those little foreign rice buckets. That's mine over there.' She pointed to an enormous old white-finned Cadillac. ''That one's real comfortable. That's one thing Clyde does for me, and I 'preciate it, too. Twice't a month or so, he goes down to Naco or Agua Prieta and brings me a couple of jerricans of regular old gas. You know, the leaded hint the kind you can't buy on this side of the line no more. If it weren't for that, I wouldn't be able to keep that old Caddy purring along. I just love that car. Couldn't stand to give it up.'
Joanna knew what she meant. In fact, to a lesser degree, she felt the same kind of attachment to the county- owned Blazer. She remembered when the vehicle had been severely damaged by a dynamite explosion down near Douglas. The blast had blown out the windows and then sent a hail of shattered glass into the air, shredding both the head liner and the upholstery. After surveying the damage, the county insurance adjuster had totaled the vehicle. For months the damaged Blazer had languished in the departmental lot waiting to be cannibalized for parts, while Joanna had been forced into using one of the department's new, two-wheel-drive Crown Victoria cruisers. Two-wheel drive and a sedan-type construction, however, were a poor match for Cochise County 's miles of rural back roads.
After seeing some of Jeff Daniels' auto restoration handiwork, Joanna had prevailed on Frank Montoya to find a spot in the budget to pay for repairs. For far less money than the adjuster had estimated, Jeff Daniels had put the Blazer's interior back in almost perfect condition. There were still occasions when Joanna used one of the Crown Victorias, but usually she drove the Blazer, preferring that over anything else.
Less than three minutes after leaving the restaurant, Joanna stopped again outside Clyde Philips' house. Belle opened the car door and lumbered out. Standing on the decrepit front porch, she spent the better part of a minute digging through her capacious purse and finally extracting both a cigarette and a lighter. With the cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth, Belle selected an old-fashioned skeleton key from her key ring, stuck it in the lock, pushed open the creaking door, and stepped inside.
Wrestling with probable-cause issues, Joanna hesitated, thinking it would be better if she remained outside until Clyde himself invited her into the house.
'It's okay if you wan'ta come on in,' Belle called back to her.
Joanna considered. As far as she knew, no crime had been committed. She was there to talk with Clyde. The man certainly wasn’t a suspect in any ongoing investigation.
'So are you coming or not?' Belle urged.
Shrugging, Joanna stepped over the threshold. Her first Impression upon entering the hot and stuffy little house was that a goat lived there. The place stank. It smelled of dirty mocks and dirty underwear, old shoes, stale beer, and cigarettes. Even though the unscreened windows stood wide open, without air-conditioning, the heat inside the room was overwhelming. The room was tall and narrow with a rust-stained tin ceiling. A single light fixture dangled from the center of the room. Ratty, broken-down furniture was littered with a collection of beer cans, paper trash, garbage, and bugs.
''That's the other thing about Clyde,' Belle said. 'His mama never taught him about cleanliness bein' next to godliness and all that, and he never did learn how to pick up after hisself, either. As you can see, once't I quit doing for him, the whole place went to hell in a handbasket. Hang on,' she added. 'If you think it's bad out here, you sure as heck don't want to see the bedroom. He allus sleeps in just his birthday suit with hardly any covers.'
Joanna nodded. 'You go on ahead,' she agreed. 'I'll be happy to wait out here.'
Belle lumbered toward a short hallway. Beneath filthy, chipped linoleum, the aged plank floor groaned in protest with each passing step.
' Clyde?' Belle said tentatively, tapping on a dingy gray door that might once have been painted white. 'You in there? It's me-Belle. There's somebody here to see you. A lady, so don't you come wanderin' out with no clothes on, you hear?'
There was no reply. In the answering stillness of the house, there was only a faint but insistent mechanical sound that Joanna assumed had to be coming from the bedroom air conditioner Belle had mentioned earlier.
Belle knocked on the door again. ' Clyde?' she said insistently. 'Listen here, you gotta wake up now. It's late. After three, but if you're very nice to me, I might consider whipping you up an omelet just because. Okay?'
Again there was no answer. Belle glanced apologetically over her shoulder in Joanna's direction. 'Sorry about this. The man always did sleep like a damned log. Guess I'm gonna have'ta go give him a shake. If you'll just wait here…'
With that Belle opened the bedroom door. As soon as she did so, a chilly draft filtered into the room, carrying with it an evil-smelling vapor, one that totally obliterated all other odors. That putrid smell was one Sheriff Joanna Brady recognized and had encountered before-the awful scent of death and the rancid stench of decaying flesh. Without even seeing it, Joanna guessed what kind of horror lay beyond that open door, but for a time, Belle seemed oblivious.
' Clyde?' she said again. 'Wake up, will you?'
Then, after a moment of silence with only the air conditioner humming in the background, the whole house was rent by a terrible, heart-wrenching, wordless shriek. Hearing it, Joanna cleared the living room in two long strides. When she reached the doorway, she stopped long enough to observe a scene that might have been lifted straight from some grade-B horror movie.
With her cigarette still in her mouth, Belle had crossed the room to where a male figure lay on an old-fashioned metal-framed bed with a sagging single mattress and no box springs. Just as she had predicted, the man was naked. Above him swirled a cloud of flies.
As Joanna stepped inside she saw Belle lift the man up by the shoulders. Belle began shaking him back and forth the way a heedless child might shake a loose-jointed Raggedy Andy doll. It was only then, when she raised the man off the pillow, that Joanna realized Clyde Philips wasn't entirely naked. A black plastic garbage bag covered his face and was fastened tightly around his neck with a belt.
Seeing the way the head flopped back and forth, there was no question in Joanna's mind that the bag had already completed its awful work. No amount of shaking would awaken him. Clyde Philips. He was dead.
