Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery by Rosemary Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

behind a scarecrow and a towering stack of baled hay.
    The Guatemalan nursery employee who had helped me saw me lean backward and must have thought I was fainting. He screamed for someone inside to call 911, and in a clumsy attempt to catch me wound up knocking over the hay bales, the scarecrow, and me on top of them. From my horizontal position in the driveway, I saw the truck pass, with two Hispanic garden workers and what looked like a mixed-breed Lab inside, none of whom I’d ever seen before. All of them, even the dog, appeared to be laughing.

Six
    I laughed myself the next morning as I drove to Babe’s, thinking about the disturbance I’d created at the nursery, but as I approached the diner, I saw a cluster of Springfield police cars with their lights flashing. All the cops I knew walked across the road to the Paradise. Either someone was having a retirement breakfast or something bad had happened, and I was afraid it was the latter.
    I pulled closer and saw a man being handcuffed and led over to one of the cars by Sergeant Mike O’Malley, a Springfield cop I’d gotten to know in the last few years. Not in the biblical sense, but Lucy and Babe still gave it a fifty-fifty chance.
    I instantly recognized the vest and sweatshirt on the person now being helped into the patrol car; it was Countertop Man. With all the official vehicles in the lot, the only parking space still available was at the far end near a hair salon that I’d never seen anyone enter or exit. I took it, then jogged to Babe’s private office in the back of the diner, where I met Babe and Mike O’Malley.
    “What’s going on? You okay? Was that Countertop Man?” I asked, pointing to the man in the patrol car. “I knew there was something fishy about that guy.”
    “I thought you didn’t know him,” O’Malley said to Babe.
    “He said his name but I don’t remember it. I know he likes black coffee and fried eggs and he asked me if my name was Brittany. He’s been in the last few days, that’s all. Said he worked for a countertop company downtown. I just feed them, Mike. I don’t ask for references.”
    Then O’Malley asked what I knew about the man, but I didn’t have anything substantial to contribute other than my gut feeling, which didn’t seem fair to share with the police given that it was based on the guy’s inability to tell Formica from limestone, which was not a crime, although perhaps it should be. I spared Mike the nursery anecdote, since it no longer seemed all that funny.
    “So you think he lied about being in the countertop business and he flirted with Babe and you thought that made him weird? Doesn’t everybody flirt with Babe?”
    For my benefit Babe repeated what happened. “I closed up around 7 P.M. last night—business was dead, so I came in early today, to make up for it. When I got here, I found that guy, whatever his name is, in my office, curled up on my inflatable bed. He scared the crap out of me, so I backed out of the room as quietly as I could, locked him in, and called the cops after I looked myself inside the diner.”
    “It’s lucky he didn’t just wake up and run away,” I said.
    “He did wake up, and busted my lock in the process, but I’d blocked the door with my SUV. He couldn’t get out. Even the windows are painted shut. I’ve been after Neil all summer to scrape them. Now I’m glad he didn’t get around to it.”
    Countertop Man claimed to have left his ID in his other suit which was kind of funny since he didn’t strike any of us as a suit-and-tie kind of guy. All he’d said was that his name was Chase McGinley.He was babbling in the back of the police cruiser, his head rocking back and forth in an animated argument with himself. Against the odds, he appeared to be losing.
    McGinley said he’d just been sleeping one off someplace warm, but apparently he’d gone through Babe’s garbage, her files, and a bottle of Bombay gin before passing out on her sofa. When the cops cuffed