Three Dumb: Wheelin' & Dealin' (A Val & Pals Humorous Mystery Book 3) Read online

  A disconcerting shiver went up my spine at the delighted gleam in Laverne’s eye as she wielded the knife like Norman Bates in a shower and popped the bulging, clear-plastic blisters covering the paper trays. Satisfied with her work, Laverne plopped the meal that was supposed to be lasagna on the counter in front of me. It appeared to have been pre-chewed for my dining convenience.

  “Can you believe it? Only 300 calories!” Laverne exclaimed.

  She sidled onto the stool next to me, still wearing nothing but that gold thong bikini. One glance at her dinner made me grateful I’d opted for the lasagna. The chicken cacciatore looked as if it had been scooped up from a local vomitorium. Thankfully, the portions were miniscule. I took a bite of lasagna. It tasted better than it looked, but that wasn’t saying much.

  “This isn’t bad,” I said. “But really, there must be like, two tablespoons of food here, Laverne. For 300 calories, you could eat two tablespoons of anything.”

  Laverne grinned, wide-eyed and goofy as a child. “I know, right? Isn’t it amazing?”

  My first prick hadn’t burst Laverne’s bubble. I decided to not be a prick by taking another poke. Instead, I took the second, and final bite of my lasagna. Shit. I could have eaten a Mounds bar for 300 calories. I sighed. Then I lied.

  “That was delicious Laverne. Thanks.”

  Laverne studied my face, her head cocked sideways like a confused Rhesus monkey. A square-ish piece of carrot from her cacciatore clung to her long chin like Picasso’s interpretation of a witch’s wart. Despite the appearance of lacking sophisticated cognitive faculties, Laverne had picked up on my lack of enthusiasm.

  “What’s wrong, sugar? I thought you’d be happier about your party and your birthday surprise.”

  My shoulders drooped. “Oh. I’m sorry, Laverne. Does it show?”

  Laverne’s drawn-on eyebrows arched. “Like a black bra through a wet t-shirt.”

  I slumped on my stool. “Crap. I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but that new backyard is going to take a lot of maintenance. That’s work I’m stuck doing. And did you know? Tom sold my RV without asking me.”

  Laverne shrugged. “Yeah. So?”

  “The Mr. Peanut bank…it was in the RV, Laverne. I’ve lost Glad – again.”

  Laverne’s smile wilted. “Oh. I’m so sorry, honey.”

  “And somehow Tom made me feel like this was all my fault. I mean, isn’t some of it his fault? I know I should be happy about the yard…about the party. But I’m not, Laverne. I’m just…pissed.”

  “But what are you winning?”

  I shot Laverne an angry glare. Was she even listening?

  “What do you mean?” I groused.

  “In Vegas, we had this saying. What are you winning?”

  Laverne smiled at me sweetly, like a mother donkey. She’d chosen to ignore my rudeness, and part of me was grateful. But it wasn’t fair. Laverne had Lady Luck on her side. She’d hit the sweet spot with intelligence. She was smart enough to function in society, but dumb enough to always be in a good mood. High IQs were definitely overrated. I didn’t watch TV or read the papers, hoping to benefit from the old adage, ignorance is bliss. But the tantalizing idea that Laverne didn’t even know that she was missing out on anything made me want to bite through a car tire with envy.

  “I don’t get what you mean,” I muttered.

  “So, what are you winning by being pissed?”

  Dammit! Her dumb question was actually pretty smart.

  “I don’t know. My self-respect? My right to be…right?”

  “Maybe. But that ain’t hitting the jackpot.”

  “What? What’s the jackpot?”

  Laverne’s horsey face registered the innocent, dumbfounded concern of a worried puppy.

  “Why, happiness, honey. Don’t you know that?”

  Laverne’s kind, simplistic answer ignited a blaze of rage inside my chest. I scrambled off the stool, too angry to remain seated.

  “But why should I have to pay for others’ mistakes, Laverne?” I screeched. “Why does happiness always come at a cost?”

  Laverne, unfazed by my anger, didn’t miss a beat. She smiled at me sweetly.

  “Well, that’s easy honey. Can’t nobody win the jackpot without playing. And it always costs something to play.”

  Chapter Three

  I’d spent Sunday evening alone, cooling down slowly, like the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. I’d avoided a critical meltdown, and when I woke up Monday morning, I’d found myself on the verge of no longer being a lethal danger to other life forms.

  After a cappuccino and a long, cool shower, at 8 a.m. I called Lefty’s Hauling again. It rang fifteen times, unanswered. This was, of course, totally unacceptable. It was time for Plan B.

  I slipped on a sundress and sandals, put my hair in a ponytail and climbed into the red pleather driver’s seat of Maggie, my 1963 Ford Falcon Sprint convertible. With a little encouragement in the form of smashing her gas pedal to the floor, Maggie carried me north along Gulf Boulevard. The four-lane road, lined with two- and three-story beach resorts, skirted the Gulf of Mexico like stiches in a hem.

  Year round, tourists flocked to the quaint mom-and-pop motels and sugar-white beaches. I couldn’t blame them. All-in-all, St. Pete Beach was a great place to be.

  I turned east on 107th Avenue. Immediately, the salt air and kitsch beach shops disappeared, replaced with anywhere-USA strip malls. At 66th Street, I turned north in the direction of good-old Pinellas Park.

  Every major metropolitan area had a section designated especially for rednecks. How they found each other, I didn’t know. Maybe they were all related, or there was some special redneck hotline I wasn’t privy to. At any rate, in Pinellas County, the mecca for country bumpkins and politically incorrect-and-proud-of-it folks was definitely Pinellas Park.

  If it weren’t for Florida’s history of hurricanes and tropical storms, Pinellas Park would have choked to death on doublewide trailers decades ago. But in 1993, a freak storm took out all but the very highest quality manufactured homes. It had been dubbed the “1993 Storm of the Century” by some, the “’93 Super Storm” by others, and the “Great Blizzard of 1993” by the Yankees up north. But we locals simply called it the “No-Name Storm,” because it had come up so quickly and unexpectedly not even the weather forecasters had had time to register it with an official moniker.

  It had begun on March 12th as a cyclonic storm in the Gulf of Mexico, then quickly grew into a beast that stretched from Cuba to Canada. It moved into Florida around midnight, catching us unaware with winds over 100 mph. It spawned 11 tornadoes and a storm surge in St. Pete that topped out at seven feet. For folks along the coast, bay and rivers, it had been devastating. It wiped out or damaged over 18,000 homes in the Sunshine State and killed 47 of our citizens, more than Hugo and Andrew combined. Suffice it to say, it was not a good time to be living in a tin can on wheels.

  Florida’s seasonal tropical storms like No-Name and the annual seven months of relentless heat and humidity were like cancer and the plague to anything made of metal. Even so, every year, seniors and other derelicts from up north took their chances in RVs and mobile homes. They came down to Florida by the millions right after Thanksgiving and left the day after Easter in hordes like migrating wildebeest, after carefully placing tinfoil in the windows of their metallic abodes – to protect them from space aliens, I guess.

  It was the first week of May, so the snowbirds had already flown the coop. In their stead had come the hard-faced, barrel-chested, androgynous Europeans in speedos and industrial-strength two-piece suits. Insulated with blubber and Nordic genes, they thought any ocean water above freezing was warm enough to swim in. Bless their hearts.

  On 66th, I drove past the endless rows of uninspired strip centers anchored by monotonous chain stores. These were the same kind of soulless shopping centers that had popped up all over the country like mushrooms after a rain, and threatened to turn St. Pete into another generic city. I sneere
d and took a left onto a side road called Lewis Lane.

  A few blocks in, I was surprised to find commercial buildings give way to open, grassy acreage big enough for horses to roam. I followed a double-rut, white-sand road wedged between horse pastures to a chain-link fence that marked the end of the line. A hand-painted sign on the right side of the twelve-foot-wide gate read, “Lefty’s is Right Here.” Next to the sign was a three-foot wide butt of someone bent over in a pair of dirty blue overalls. At the sound of Maggie’s glasspack muffler, the overalls straightened up and turned around, revealing a white male occupant with a cue-ball shaped head, a trace of eyebrows, and not a single front tooth.

  “Woo hoo! That’s a beaut!” the ruddy-faced man said in a spot-on impression of my redneck friend Winky. He hobbled up to the car, limping as if he might have recently injured or lost part of his lower left limb.

  “Thank you. This is Maggie.”

  The man reached over to shake my hand with fingers as big and round as already plumped Ball Park franks. Thankfully, he didn’t have to prove his manhood by squeezing my fingers to the bone. Instead, he put a thick thumb in my palm and daintily shook the ends of my fingers as if they were made of fine porcelain.

  “Nice to meet you, Maggie. I’m Lefty. What can I do you for?”

  “No, I’m…” I thought about explaining that I was Val Fremden…that Maggie was my car’s name…but I figured there was no real point. “I came to get back an RV you hauled away on Saturday. Down in St. Pete Beach?”

  Lefty showed me his toothless grin. “Oh yeah. Cute little thang.”

  “So, what do I need to pay you to get it back?”

  “Oh. Nothing, Maggie. ‘Fraid you’re a little late. A girl come by yesterday and bought her.”

  A needle of pain dug a sharp, deep stitch in my chest. “But…I thought you were closed yesterday.”

  Lefty laughed and scratched the top of his head. “Yeah. Don’t nobody pay no attention to that around here. And this here girl, she was a mighty persistent little spitfire. Seen that RV and wasn’t nothin’ gonna stop her having it. Paid cash. I like me some cash, you know.”

  “Selling the RV. It was…a mistake. I need it back. Can’t you help me? I have cash too.”

  “Sorry, little lady. Wish I could help, but the man who swapped it give me clear title. Then this girl come up Saturday with cash. I hadn’t even had no time to re-register the title yet. She said she’d take care of it. I mean, what’s a feller to do?”

  “Can you tell me her name?”

  “Uh, yeah. Let’s see…Baloney?”

  “Baloney? Is that a joke?”

  Lefty scratched his head. “Um…no. That ain’t it. Dang it! I can’t rightly recollect at the moment.”

  “Well, where’s the RV? Did you haul it to her place?”

  Lefty’s face broke out into a proud, toothless grin that made me think of the Gerber Baby – if he was forty years old and chewed tobacco.

  “Ha ha. That’s the beauty part, Maggie. I hauled the RV here and old Nick, our mechanic, cleaned the sparkplugs and changed the oil and air filter and that little RV hummed right back to life. Good old American-made engines. Don’t build ‘em like they used to. Doubled the value in an hour’s work. Good old Nick. He can fix anything. So you see, I didn’t have to haul it nowheres. That girl drove it right on out of here.”

  As he spoke, the needle of pain in my heart got busy sewing a quilt. Shit.

  “Did she leave something with her address? Fill out some paperwork?”

  “Paperwork?” The idea sent Lefty into fits of laughter. “Do I look like the kind of guy who’d bother myself with paperwork, little lady? Hell, I don’t even have a bank account. Those fat-cat bankers ain’t gonna steal my money away.”

  “Well, in case she comes back, would you have her call me?”

  “Why shore, Maggie. Be glad to.”

  I handed Lefty my card. He slipped it into the back pocket of his overalls without looking at it. As I drove away, I had the sinking feeling that, for all the good it had done, I may as well have used the card to wipe my own ass.

  ***

  On the drive home, I passed Ming Ming’s sushi place on Central and saw Milly’s red Beemer parked out front. It wasn’t until I was a block past her that I remembered I was supposed to meet her there for lunch. Crap on a cracker! I hit the brakes and pulled a one-eighty on Central Avenue, causing a jaywalker to kick it up a notch to jay-sprinting. I checked the time on my cellphone as he waved an angry fist at me. It was two minutes until noon. Sweet! I wasn’t even going to be late. I pulled into the lot and made my way inside the restaurant.

  One look at Milly’s face and I knew she was chomping at the bit with some juicy news of her own.

  “Hey, Valiant,” she sneered playfully as I walked in the door.

  “Hey, Millicent,” I sneered back.

  After we’d insulted each other with the despised names given to us by our parents, it was time to get down to business. For Milly, that always meant men.

  It wasn’t her fault completely. Milly had always been a man magnet. She was blonde and had a button nose and a body that, on several occasions, even made me think about giving up chocolate. Her looks had always garnered lots of flirty attention from the opposite sex. But when it came to actually dating, she’d proven as finicky as a blue-ribbon show cat. Over the dozen or so years I’d know her, she’d endured so many bad dates she could’ve easily been listed in Ripley’s Believe it or Not. But to her credit, Milly had always taken it all in stride. In fact, she’d turned her penchant for shooting down men’s proposals into an all-season sport.

  I wasn’t in the mood to hear about her latest shenanigans. But I needed some cheering up. Her horrific tales of dating made me appreciate my own pathetic life.

  “So, spill it, Milly. Who, what, where, when.”

  Milly’s eyes sparkled with delight. “Good old, direct Val. You’re the poster child for keeping it real. Have I told you lately that I love you?”

  I grinned back. “No. But it seems to be going around.”

  Milly eyed me curiously, then her eyes flew open like a kicked-in door. “Wait. What? Did Tom –”

  I smirked. “Yes. Saturday. At the party.”

  “Oh my god! What did you say?”

  My smirk switched to a grimace. “Oh. Uh…‘Thanks.’”

  Milly flinched. “Ouch!”

  I shook my head. “That’s not the half of it.”

  “What else –”

  Milly’s voice faded as the waiter came to the table to take our order.

  “Sea dragon roll and an iced tea for me, please,” I said, looking up at the waiter.

  “The same for me,” Milly rattled off absently, then dismissed the waiter with a flick of her hand. Her eyes remained locked on me. I got the feeling she’d have replied “the same” if I’d ordered a deep-fried cow patty. She leaned over the table and whispered.

  “So what’s the other half?”

  I raised my left shoulder to my ear and let it drop again. “We had a fight. I haven’t spoken to him since.”

  “What?! After all he did –”

  I leaned in and glared at Milly. “Before you go taking sides, hear me out. He sold my RV without asking me. The piggybank with mom’s cremains was in the RV.”

  Milly’s judgmental expression crumpled. “Shit, Val!”

  “Hold on. It gets worse. I just came from the junkyard that hauled it away. They’ve already sold it to somebody else for cash. No paperwork. No name. No nothing. Milly, Glad is gone for good. I don’t have a clue where to even begin looking.”

  “Aww! Double shit, Val. I’m sorry!”

  The waiter set two glasses of tea in front of us, along with a pair of straws. We both smiled up at him courteously, as if he existed in some other dimension, then shifted back to glowering at each other as soon as he left.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “There’s nothing I can do but hope that ‘Lefty’ g
ives me a call.”

  “Lefty?”

  I shook my head and blew out a breath. “Don’t ask.”

  Milly studied me for a moment and played with her straw. “I’m sorry about your mom’s cremains, Val. But you know, you have to let go of her sometime. I mean, now that the house is finished, you need something to do. You have too much time on your hands.”

  “That’s weird. That’s exactly what Laverne told me yesterday. She said I should take an adult education class at the college. She’s starting a ceramics class next week.”

  “Ceramics? Are you crazy? You don’t need a hobby, Val. You need a job.” Milly cocked her head coyly. “Did I mention we have an opening?”

  I raised my eyebrows dubiously. “No. No you didn’t.”

  “Would you be interested?”

  I curled my upper lip. “I’m not broke by any means. But according to my bank account and the average mortality charts, it’s probably a good idea.”

  Milly smirked. “A word of advice, Val. Don’t use that line in the interview.”

  I jerked to attention. “Interview? What interview?”

  “I set one up for you. Tomorrow at ten. It’s for a junior office assistant.”

  I stared at Milly like a kid who’d just been grounded for a month.

  “Come on, Val. It’ll be good for you. You need to get out and do something…normal.”

  “Normal?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  The scary thing was, I actually did know what she meant.

  “You’d be a natural, Val.”

  “As far as I can tell, I’m unemployable, Milly. Thanks to my seven missing years abroad, I can’t even get a job as a waitress. Who’d hire me?”

  “I would.”

  “Is the hiring at your decision?”

  “No. But let’s just say I can pull some strings.”