Baby Daddy Mystery by Daisy Pettles

Author:Daisy Pettles [Pettles, Daisy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780981567846
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

“You’re sure about this?” I asked Pooter.

We sat facing each other in the front seat of the Impala with Pooter sitting between me and Veenie, chewing his fingernails. The pole light in the IGA parking lot sprayed a cone of light into Veenie’s side of the car. The light bounced off Pooter’s sunglasses and chrome frames, making him look like a large-eyed insect. He had a pack of cigarettes stuck in the breast pocket of his wide-lapel jacket. I’d seen him working the backdoor at the VFW, selling the cigarettes at a quarter a pop to folks who snuck out the back door into the parking lot to steal a smoke during the bingo showdown. Folks rarely carried pocket change, and most of the crowd at the VFW drank too much. All this meant that Pooter often raked in a paper dollar for each cigarette. Not a bad gig for a kid his age.

I asked him where he got his new suit jacket and seersucker shorts, and he hitched a thumb toward Veenie. “Granny Goens.”

Veenie shrugged. “Plucked it up at the Goodwill. Thought it would look mighty good on the little fart.” Veenie had a soft spot for Pooter, whose dad had a perpetual time-share over at the state prison, but she wasn’t about to admit it. Most days the two of them pretended to tolerate each other, but they didn’t fool me. Pooter made the best snitch because he roamed around town on his sister’s banana-seat bicycle, sticking his sun-crisped nose into everybody’s business. He could be found every Monday morning in the back parking lot of the Hoosier Feedbag, selling past-its-prime produce the Feedbag had tossed in the dumpster or that he’d bogarted from the gleaned fields. He called himself an “entrepreneur,” though when he said it, it sounded more like “enter-manure.”

I asked him again if he was sure about the news he’d reported to me and Veenie.

“Course I’m sure. I seen it with my own two little eyes.” He jabbed two fingers toward his insect eyes. “Down by the river at the Moon Glo Motor Lodge.”

What Pooter claimed to have seen was Bromley meeting up in a motel room with a man who was, as he described it, “a right fancy dresser.”

“And you didn’t recognize that man?”

“Nah, ain’t from around here. I’d never seen him before he showed up out at the Moon Glo.”

The Moon Glo was an old motor lodge out by the covered bridge that passed out of its prime about the same time Veenie and I did: the early seventies. Its neon sign had lost its fizzle. About the only guests who stayed there long term these days was a family of turkey buzzards who nested in the fizzled-out neon sign. Back in the day its air-conditioned rooms and Magic Finger beds had attracted tourists, who came for the catfishing. These days, the clientele were mostly cheating-heart Romeos who needed someplace to do the dirty that was a bit more romantic than the rusted-out bed of a pickup truck.

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