“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Ida Belle said. “You’re not going to prison. When the cops come, you tell them we knocked on the door, no one answered, and you left. There’s not a shred of evidence to indicate you did anything unless you go leaving some in that relic. Just be glad Fortune didn’t talk to the woman at the store along with us.”
“She’s right,” I said. “Besides, he’s been dead for at least a day, probably more. It would hardly make sense for you to kill him, then come back later and ask for directions to his house.”
“Okay,” Gertie said, somewhat mollified. “I suppose that’s true.”
“Then let’s get in there and try to find something and get out before we do get caught,” I said. “And be careful. It’s a minefield of broken crap that can gouge skin. The last thing we need is someone bleeding.”
I walked in the front door and waved my hands. “Gertie, take the kitchen. Ida Belle, you get the living room. I’ll cover the bedroom with the dead guy.”
Gertie looked relieved and headed off to the kitchen. I went into the bedroom and started tossing the room while reminding myself to breathe with my mouth. There was a single nightstand but it didn’t have a drawer, and the top contained only a lamp and an ashtray. The dresser drawers had women’s underwear in them, which I assumed had belonged to his mother. Or maybe Willie had been into the freaky stuff. If so, that secret could be between him and the coroner.
The closet contained mostly women’s clothes shoved to the side. A couple pairs of men’s blue jeans and some ragged T-shirts hung in the center. A pair of worn-out boots was in the bottom. The top shelf contained only bed linens and a worn pair of women’s slippers. I felt the back of the closet wall for a secret hiding place, and checked the floorboards as well, but the room appeared clean. The last thing I had to do was a sweep in between the mattress and the box springs. I held my breath and passed my arm between the two layers, then hurried to the other side and did it again.
Nothing.
The room was clean. Aside from a couple items of clothes and the ashtray, there was no sign that Willie even lived here. I went into the bathroom and found a half-used package of antacids and a bar of soap. A shelf above the toilet contained two rolls of toilet paper and a stack of car magazines. I shook the magazines, to make sure nothing was hidden between the pages, then headed into the sewing room and gave it a once-over, but it yielded nothing but dusty old fabric.
Disappointed that I had nothing to show for my effort, I headed back into the front room.
“Anything?” I asked.
Gertie shook her head. “A bunch of chipped dishes, some holey dish rags, and two cans of beans. All that’s in the refrigerator is beer.”
Ida Belle looked up from the coffee table, where she was flipping through more car magazines. “No television,” she said. “He must have spent all his time reading.”
I nodded. “There’s a stack in the bathroom too.”
“You didn’t find anything?” Gertie asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “You can barely tell he lived here.”
“It is rather sparse,” Ida Belle said, and lifted another magazine. She flipped through the pages and a sheet of paper fell out. I picked it up and opened it.
“It’s a flyer for an auto auction,” I said. “And look! There’s your SUV.”
Ida Belle stepped closer to me and eyed the flyer. “Yep, that’s mine all right. I’d recognize that custom grille anywhere.”
“The car lot must have put it up for auction. That’s probably how Hot Rod acquired it.”
“There are four other black SUVs on the flyer,” Ida Belle said. “Hot Rod might have picked up more than one at the auction.”
I nodded. “Willie didn’t have this stuffed in a magazine for no reason. All he had to do was find out who bought the vehicles and he’d know where to find them. He might have even been at the auction when they were bought.”
Ida Belle frowned. “But if Willie is the one who attacked Hot Rod, then who killed Willie? The Seal brothers? It had to be more than just Willie stealing the SUVs from Hot Rod’s place. Why kill Willie when they didn’t find the key?”
I shook my head. There were a couple of things I was pretty sure about, but a whole lot I needed to dwell on for a while and not while standing in the middle of a crime scene. There were a ton of moving parts and right now, some of them appeared to be floating around with no pieces fitting together. Those that did fit, didn’t get me any closer to the answers I needed.
“Let’s finish up and get out of here,” I said. “I’m getting a really bad feeling about all of this. I don’t want whoever shot Willie to come back to search the place like we did.”
Gertie’s eyes widened. “Why would they come back? Surely they searched the place before.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “This place would look completely different if it had been searched, especially by amateurs who weren’t concerned about covering their tracks.”
“And the Seal brothers would fit that bill,” Ida Belle said, “but it wouldn’t explain why they killed Willie.”
“Could be a bunch of things,” I said. “Maybe they had a falling-out over something. They got the information on the location of the SUV out of him and they didn’t need him for anything else. Or maybe it was someone else entirely. Willie’s not exactly a corporate banker. There’s no telling who else might have it in for him.”
Gertie took the auction flyer from me, folded it, and stuffed it in her bra.
“That’s evidence,” Ida Belle said.
“And?” Gertie asked. “What are the local cops going to do with it? They won’t be able to connect it to anything, and that’s if they bother to spend much time investigating the murder of a career criminal at all.”
“She’s right,” I said. “Whatever Willie knew or didn’t know might have been worth killing him over, but the police wouldn’t know the significance of the flyer. Honestly, it doesn’t tell us anything either except how Willie located the SUVs.”
I looked over at Gertie, then back at Ida Belle. “Besides, she’s not going to give it up voluntarily, and I refuse to take it from her given the current positioning.”
Ida Belle shook her head. “Let’s flip through the rest of those magazines just to make sure there’s nothing else that Gertie can use to stuff her bra, then we’ll trek back to Sinful.”
“I’m going to check outside,” Gertie said. “Take a lap around the house in case there’s an outbuilding or somewhere else he might have hidden something.”
“Good idea,” I said.
Gertie headed outside, and Ida Belle and I flipped through the remainder of the magazines one at a time, but there were no more hidden papers inside.
“I guess that’s it,” Ida Belle said. “It seems rather underwhelming considering a man was killed.”
I nodded. “I’m afraid that what we need to know might have only been in Willie’s head.”
“Which means figuring it out the hard way,” Ida Belle said.
She sounded so defeated that it made me sad. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I have some ideas.”