I nodded. “Well, it’s not going to stop us but we definitely have to be careful. The good thing is, Casey’s captain doesn’t know us or our MO so it should be easier to fly under radar. The bad thing is that he’s not Carter so we’re not likely to get even a hair of a pass on anything they do catch us doing.”
“What about the acting troupe?” Ida Belle asked. “You still want to question them?”
“I do,” I said. “With Casey focused on getting the dirt on Sinful suspects, she won’t be looking at the acting troupe right away. But I’d still like to see if any of them got close enough to Gil to know his personal business.”
“Like if Gil was hound-doggin’,” Gertie said.
Ida Belle nodded. “According to Tiffany, rehearsal starts after regular work hours. So what’s our cover for not being at the festival tonight?”
I frowned. “Crap.”
“We’re still going to look at hot tubs, right?” Gertie asked. “What time do they close?”
“Six, I think,” I said.
“Do you think it’s going to take long to buy the thing?” Gertie asked.
I shook my head. “If I like it, I’m buying it. No financing.”
“Then let’s just say we got there midafternoon but the sales guy you talked to on the phone had to bounce for an emergency and wouldn’t be back for a couple of hours. Since you didn’t want someone scamming his commission, we stuck around until he got back and then we decided to grab some dinner and wait for work traffic to die down before heading back. We figured we’d just skip the festival because we weren’t working it anyway. And besides, the two nights we have gone we had run-ins with a dead man and a skunk.”
“That’s very detailed and logical,” I said, trying to keep the surprise out of my voice.
“Yeah,” Ida Belle said. “What gives?”
Gertie shrugged. “Maybe Fortune is rubbing off on me.”
“I carry a wallet in the pocket of my jeans and admit my real age,” I said.
“Okay, so you’re not rubbing that much,” she said and we all laughed.
“So what now?” Gertie asked. “We have the morning to kill.”
“It’s time to do some legwork on Tiffany,” I said.
Since I figured Casey would make a beeline for Tiffany first thing, we decided to start our legwork with a background check. That meant making a trip over to Mudbug, a town I referred to as Sinful’s equally colorful cousin. Gertie had an old schoolteacher acquaintance there and figured she’d be up for a gossip session, especially given all the recent drama. Gertie also knew the teacher favored good whiskey in her coffee, so I’d retrieved a bottle of the quality stuff from my stash and we were armed and ready.
We elected not to call first because people had a harder time declining company when you were standing on their doorstep, especially when you were holding good booze. And I preferred people have no warning because then they couldn’t think about what they might say and what they shouldn’t say. I wanted people to say everything that came to mind. A lot of it might be nonsense, but I could parse through that.
The teacher’s name was Brenda Randolph and she lived just a couple blocks from Mudbug’s downtown area. Her house was typical of the same fare in Sinful, was painted white with yellow shutters, and had yellow flowers in the beds with the shrubs. A black Lab with a silver muzzle looked up from his sleeping spot on the porch as we approached. His tail thumped twice, then he dropped back off to sleep.
Gertie rang the doorbell and we waited a bit, but there was no movement inside. An old Toyota Corolla was in the driveway in front of the garage door, so we assumed she was home. Gertie rang the doorbell again and this time I heard a woman’s voice inside, ranting about salespeople interfering with her game shows. A couple seconds later, the door flung open and the woman I assumed was Brenda glared out at us.
Mideighties. Five foot three. A hundred pounds, maybe. So little muscle content that I wasn’t sure what was holding her upright. Only a threat to the whiskey Gertie was holding.
Brenda stared for a couple seconds, then blinked and scrunched her brow.
“Gertie?” she asked. “Is that you?”
“It’s me,” Gertie said and held up the whiskey. “How are you doing, Brenda?”
Brenda broke into a smile as she turned around and started walking. “Oh hell, I’m fine.