Fry Me a Liver Page 17

  “Barrel chested, on the stumpy side?”

  “Yeah, yeah—”

  “Sounds like Gar McQueen,” I said. “He’s a lawn-care guy, does a lot of work for downtown businesses.”

  “It’s very possible he’s the man. He had the look.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Grunted a lot, but I don’t blame him. Those bags were heavier than dry cement.” Moss laughed. He pronounced the word “see-ment.” There was something quaint about that. “I give people their money’s worth of manure.”

  He had that in common with other politicians, I thought.

  “I’m going to have to think about what to do with this information,” I said. “But in any case, I won’t tell anyone where I heard it.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything else and, declining a horseback ride which would not have ended well for me or My Friend Flicka, I stood and thanked him.

  “If you don’t get into town much, what are you going to do if you win the election?” I asked.

  “Get in more,” he replied with a wink. “I believe in what I stand for, Ms. Katz—limiting cell phone towers and cables and expanded roads and everything that’s destroying our local beauty and heritage. That’s worth gettin’ off my duff for.”

  Once again, I found him more admirable than impressive, and seriously unlikely to win the election. He seemed to think so too, because apart from a poster stuck to a stake at the front of the driveway, I saw nothing that indicated a campaign was in full swing.

  I decided to swing by Josephine’s home on the way back. Not to talk to her but to eyeball the place and see if all that fertilizer was actually being used. I got her home address from the Nashville Restaurant Authority website—a members-only organization for the airing of grievances and little else. Like most associations, they certainly didn’t solve any problems, mutual or otherwise.

  Josephine lived in a small brick house set toward the front of a three-acre lot on Peach Blossom Square. Most of the property was out back, which was where she was doing her gardening. Or rather, that’s where Gar was doing it. She was already at her restaurant. The lawn-care professional was in the back planting in the areas of lawn that had been newly torn up and fertilized.

  She’s certainly doing what she said she’d be doing with the bags, I thought. I tried to count how many were out there but I was at a bad angle. I didn’t want to go back there and tip my hand, especially if Josephine had been behind the blast. There was certainly enough fertilizer there to level the block I live on.

  I drove on, having learned very little from the morning’s adventure—though there was one thing I wondered as I drove away.

  What if Josephine wasn’t the one who used some of this fertilizer?

  I stopped the car, made a U-turn, and went back to Josephine’s house.

  Chapter 17

  I parked curbside and walked around the Josephine Young homestead. There was a forehead-high hedge to my left and a two-yard-wide swath of rich green grass that bumped up against a rose garden beside the house. It smelled very aromatic here, the floral scent trapped in the narrow passage. I understood something about the South, just then. People moved slowly not just because of the heat but because it allowed you to literally stop and smell the roses. Move through it quickly and it would dissipate like mist. You would think something like that would have been obvious. But in a world where everything was rush-rush, the obvious was often buried and overlooked. I didn’t bother to count how many layers of my life had to be removed to get me here, to that realization.

  I rounded the back of the house where the scent mixed with the decidedly different odor of fertilizer. It wasn’t unpleasant; it was just different, like the Moss farm but without the big valley wind to blow the smells away.

  Gar was shirtless. He had a bulk that suggested strength but without strong, youthful definition. It wasn’t an athletic look, not like the hospital superhero whose name must not be mentioned; it was more like a dockworker.

  He looked up as I sauntered around the corner. “Mr. McQueen? I saw your truck out front, saw you working here.”

  Now, at this point, someone thus addressed would talk back. Say howdy, smile, grunt. I expected him to do one of those, since I potentially represented work, a new client. He didn’t. He stopped hoeing long enough to look at me and wait for whatever was coming next. I had nothing, so I fumbled through.

  “My name is Gwen Katz and I—”

  “I know who you are,” he answered. He said it like he’d seen my punim on a wanted poster and was giving me sixty seconds to turn my horse’s tuchas toward him and head out of town.

  “Oh,” I replied. “Is knowing me a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “It’s a no-thing,” he said.

  “Do you mean n-o or k-n-o-w?”

  He didn’t answer. The way he had spoken reminded me of a prizefighter who was really good at one thing—beating the kishkes out of people, or in this case, planting stuff—and then went still and dumb when he wasn’t doing that. For example, trying to speak.

  “Anyway, I was wondering if you might have time to do some work at my home,” I went on. “I live on Bonerwood Drive, the least crappy looking place on the block, but I think it can be made to look even less crappy still—”

  “Not today,” he answered dismissively. “I’m working.”

  “No, it wouldn’t have to be today,” I replied.

  “I mean, I can’t even think about it today,” he said. “I’m doing this.”

  “Right,” I said. “Of course.”

  “Call the number on the truck and leave a message,” he said. “I’ll call back when I have my calendar.”

  “All right,” I said. “Is this a real busy time of year for you?”

  He looked annoyed. “I’m always busy. Lawns and gardens are important.”

  “I know. I just thought there’d be a lot of competition, that people would be eager to have work—”

  “That’s not an issue for me!” he crowed, and suddenly got very articulate. “Ms. Katz, some people go to school for this. A whole bunch of those people are accountants or teachers who can’t get those jobs, or people who became real estate agents until the bottom fell outta that and thought this would be a good alternative. They’re too educated or too uneducated. I apprenticed,” he said proudly, actually slapping his hairless chest and sending beads of sweat flying. “I know the earth. I get results.”

  “I understand,” I told him truthfully. “And I admire that. Josephine obviously does as well.”

  “She is an artist. I am an artist.”

  “I see. You don’t mean her restaurant, you mean she was a dance artist—”

  “Is,” he said. “Is a dancer. I have seen DVDs.”

  The gardener glared at me for a moment and then went back to work.

  I turned back toward the street. I had learned absolutely nothing about the fertilizer and its possible role in blowing up my deli. But I had learned a little about the man, a loyal man who might be easily manipulated by a strong woman—and by that I mean, sadly, a strong woman other than me. Perhaps he would conceive of doing something to impress her—such as taking out the competitor who had won the restaurant competition.

  There was something smelly here, I felt, and it had nothing to do with manure. Some people were antisocial . . . but a businessperson who was unenthusiastic about business? That didn’t sit right with this former Wall Streeter. While he was hidden behind the house, I was tempted to have a look inside his truck, see what there was to see. From where I stood, it looked a little messy. Maybe he used the back seat as a place to toss garbage. I did. The address on the side was a post office box which suggested he carried the business around with him . . . possibly on the laptop sitting in the bucket of the passenger’s seat. But with enough traffic and daylight on the street, having a look at it here and now, even if he were logged on, didn’t seem like the greatest idea.

  H
e looked up as I drove away, our eyes locking for the briefest moment as I passed the other side of the house. I went home and, with a Coke and a smile and my laptop on my lap, I did some Web checking on Gar McQueen. Now you may ask, Gwen, by your own meshuga reasoning shouldn’t every gardener in Nashville be a suspect?

  Theoretically.

  But my little ballet dancer restaurant rival had a potential motive, Gar was working with her, and it was at least worth checking to see if the burly landscaper had anything that could conceivably tie him to questionable acts, including hate crimes.

  His Facebook page did not have many privacy settings, so I was able to see the usual sports Likes and family stuff. No siblings but a lot of young cousins. Just being there, scrolling through photos of silly people pouting their lips and making rock star gestures, bored me out of my skull. I left the social media, dug into newspaper archives, and found articles going back two years about what he was landscaping and where, and a couple of awards he had won. I even found a photo of him as third runner-up in a bodybuilding competition four years earlier.

  Okay, so he wasn’t a prizefighter, but he might’ve dropped some dumbbells on himself. The weight lifting would explain my first impression of his bare-chested body. He looked pretty good in the photo, greased up in his little trunks. He must have given up competition after that since he didn’t look quite as buff these days. That used to be a debate around the dinner table in the Katz home. Not about bodybuilding but about giving up. My mother used to think it was negligent and irresponsible to give up on anything until the job was done or the goal achieved. My father, predictably—given his history in the area of farlozn, quitting—thought it was the wise man or woman who knew when to retreat and try something else. Me, being like a dog with a bone in all things, naturally sided with my mother.

  I considered the photo a moment longer. Gar had lost just like Josephine had lost. Maybe he identified with her, imagined her disappointment, looked to settle the score on behalf of a woman he admired.

  Putting the puzzle aside for the moment, I checked on my hospital-bound staff. Thom was awake but groggy from her medication, A.J. was still critical but somewhat responsive, and the nurses I spoke with seemed guardedly optimistic with the “you-didn’t-hear-this-from-me-Ms.-Katz” caveats. I decided not to visit. It might sound strange but I felt a little toxic. It wasn’t as if I’d done anything wrong or could have prevented this thing from happening. But with the live-or-die threat gone, I worried that A.J. Two or someone else might see me and suddenly think, “Hey—we want our pound of flesh.” If that were going to happen, I didn’t want to see it dawn in their eyes.

  I called my attorney and insurance agent in turn. As yet, my attorney hadn’t received any notifications about complaints from the staff, but that was still my biggest fear. It wasn’t just the idea that my employees, my friends, my de facto family could become adversaries, it was also the prolonged aggravation and expense of such an action. My attorney reminded me that while a few days had passed, that didn’t mean we were out of the woods, not at all. Luke, A.J. Two, Dani, and others, including Benjamin and Grace, might still be weighing the pros and cons of such an action.

  Which made finding out who did it even more imperative. Let someone else’s insurance agency knock themselves out worrying about this.

  Speaking of insurance, my brief chat with agent Zebeck was surprisingly succinct. He was wading through the miasma of electronic filing and bureaucracy and had only one question for me.

  “Do you want to rebuild or abandon?” he asked.

  “Just like that?” I asked, a little surprised.

  “It’s a big, basic question that needs to be answered.”

  “To be or not to be . . . ,” I thought. I’d gone from Shylock to Hamlet without leaving my sofa. “Good God, Alan, I don’t know. We don’t even know how long it would take to reboot the place.”

  “That’s right, and I can’t ask for an evaluation and cost estimate until you’ve weighed in,” he said.

  “When do I have to let you know?”

  “I wouldn’t take more than another day or so,” he said. “Whatever you decide would send things in a different direction in terms of what we file and with whom. There are not only insurance considerations but city deadlines as well.”

  “Understood. I’ll let you know sometime tomorrow.”

  I surprised myself by my indecision. I thought I would have told him to put Humpty Dumpty back together, bigger and better than ever. Was I that afraid to face my people or was I really and truly beaten by a place where I probably didn’t belong, by people with whom I didn’t have a whole lot in common, by men who were less venal but more disturbingly clueless than the putzes I’d left behind in Manhattan? Whatever the case, I had just given myself twenty-four hours to figure it all out.

  Those chores done—and they were all onerous, something I hadn’t realized until I was done and felt a whole lot lighter—I phoned Detective Bean. The good inspector said they were still reviewing forensics and security cameras, still conducting interviews, and she had nothing to report.

  “Nothing to report or nothing to report to me?” I pressed.

  “The latter,” she admitted. “Have you looked at the newspapers or their websites?”

  I admitted I had not.

  “The papers are reporting that it was not a gas explosion, which is accurate,” she said. “Sources tell the press that the bomb was planted, which is accurate.”

  “Homemade?”

  “Apparently, since dynamite or plastic explosives would have left a crater where the deli is standing and identifiable chemical traces,” the detective said. “Candy Sommerton is reporting that the Metro Police are considering several persons of interest, which is true if a bit strong. We’re doing a thorough by-the-book investigation.”

  Ah, Candy. Saying the same thing with a different slant creates news where there isn’t any.

  “Candy also reported that this was not a politically motivated act, which may be accurate. None of the candidates seem to have that level of animus for one another.”

  “Their aides?”

  “Checking that,” the detective admitted. “Eager beavers are always a possibility and a problem.”

  “And me?” I asked. “Does anyone you’ve talked to have that level of animus toward me?”

  “You have not been offered police protection,” she pointed out.

  That was an answer, at least by inference. It suggested that the police didn’t think I was the target. That was something of a relief, given my paranoia and my track record.

  “What about the butcher?” I asked. “Could the bomb have been in his container and meant to go off earlier or meant for his daughter while she was making deliveries?”

  “We’ve talked to all the protestors who were at his shop, run checks, found nothing other than unpaid parking tickets and domestic disturbance arrests. As for Alex and Sandy Potts, he seems to adore his daughter and she does not appear to be suicidal.”

  That would have been my reading as well. The idea that Alex would attempt to kill her or that she would attempt to kill herself and take others with her was a chilling thought. That didn’t make it impossible, but it went onto the backmost of my back burners.

  “Can I ask one more thing?” I said.

  “Go ahead. And Ms. Katz—you do know I’m not trying to be evasive here.”

  “I know that, Detective. I appreciate everything you’re doing for me. I’m not used to compassion in authority figures.”

  She actually chuckled at that. “Believe it or not, this helps me too.”

  “How so?”

  “Reminds me that there are people, like me, at the other end of these situations. What was that last question you had?”

  Her openness had gotten me off track. I hopped back on. “Right. Has Homeland Security gotten involved?”

  “TOHS is automatically informed about incidents of this type,” Bean said, referring to the Tennessee Office of
Homeland Security. “All relevant data is being sent there. So far, they have not sent anything back with a red flag.”

  “So this is really a big bag of bupkes.”

  “If I understand the word correctly—”

  “It means bird poop,” I said. “Just a bit. Not a real bad curse.”

  “Charming,” Bean replied.

  “It kind of is,” I explained.

  “Then you believe there’s been little progress.”

  “I believe there is little to go on, thus impeding progress,” I told her. I didn’t want her to think I was running her efforts down. Or bird pooping on them.

  “I don’t agree,” she replied. “Often, the elimination of major suspects and motives is more progress than following a tiny thread. That is the phase we are in now. What’s left when that process is completed will give us a much more manageable situation. I guess you could say we’re clearing away the bupkes one pigeon at a time.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to impugn what you are doing.”

  “I know what you meant,” Bean replied. “And frankly, we’re frustrated too. We’re either dealing with an amateur or a professional who made the crime scene look like the work of an amateur.”

  “That sounds sinister.”

  “If it’s true, yes.”

  We chatted a little more in generalities, about how background checks on the “new people” in the hole—Benjamin and Grace—hadn’t brought up anything similar, and we parted no more or less friendly than when we started. For me, that was something of a novelty.

  The procedural aspect of the case aside, going from big to small was her way of saying that the trail was not so much cold as the evidence really, really thin. What that told me was there were no uniquely specialized ingredients in the bomb. Otherwise, they’d have a direction in which to move.

  And at least the lady took my call. She didn’t have to do that. Grant used to, of course, but then he was a detective with benefits and I was a stationary target at times. Bean truly seemed to want to be of assistance. Maybe it was girl-bonding or professionalism or both. Whatever the reason, I was grateful for it.