Midnight Crossroad

“I already took care of that,” Fiji told him. “It’s still broadcasting, but it can’t hear our voices.”

She sounded very sure. “But if it can, it knows where we’re going,” he said.

“We?”

“Yeah. We’re going to talk to this girl. We’re going to find out why she did this. She sure didn’t look like any spy to me.”

“I know you feel like you need to go do this. But . . . well, I guess I can’t talk you out of it.”

“No,” Bobo said. “I’ll see you at six.”

He walked with her to the door. She picked up Mr. Snuggly as she crossed the road, and put him down when they’d reached her yard. The woman and the cat went up the walkway together side by side, and she looked down at the cat. He saw her lips move. Bobo smiled. She was talking to it.

“You deserve a whole can of tuna,” Fiji was telling Mr. Snuggly as she opened her front door. “Let’s get you one.”

“About damn time,” said Mr. Snuggly.

24

At six o’clock, Bobo picked up Fiji and they set out to the address Lisa Gray had given when she’d bought the drying rack. Bobo had already entered it into his GPS.

He didn’t feel much like talking on the way to Marthasville. He was bracing himself for an unpleasant confrontation. When he rang the doorbell of the dilapidated rental house, in the middle of a row of identical dilapidated rentals, the girl he remembered from the pawnshop answered the door.

He glanced over at Fiji, and she nodded. This was the girl whose wedding she’d witnessed. From the way her tight T-shirt fit, Bobo was as sure as shooting that Lisa was expecting a baby.

Lisa’s reaction to seeing them was a dead giveaway. She was scared; more than that, she clearly felt guilty when she looked at him.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a rush. “Mister, I’m really sorry.” She stepped back to let them in.

Feeling old and sad, Bobo stepped in after Fiji. It was no surprise that the rent house was small, or that it was in ill repair, or that Lisa and her new husband didn’t have much. It was a surprise that the living room was not only neat, but clean. The only sign of activity was a huge basket half full of laundry.

There was an ancient green Naugahyde couch in front of the big (and new) television, which was tuned to a game show. An old cushioned armchair was at one end of the newly polished coffee table. Lisa instantly switched off the TV and gestured to them to sit down on the couch.

The already-folded clothes from the basket were on the chipped coffee table, along with magazines, a romance novel, and a box of tissues.

Lisa sat in the flowered armchair. After her guests were settled, she muttered, “Okay, I did a bad thing. I don’t know how else to say it.”

Bobo felt his store of righteous anger seeping away. He said, more gently than he had intended, “Lisa, I know you remember Fiji from your wedding. And maybe you remember me; you put a spy camera in my shop without telling me. Fiji tells me your husband’s name is Cole. Did he know what you were doing?”

“No, sir. And he’s at work now. Today is my day off.”

“Then I’m glad we caught you at home,” Bobo said. He paused, tried to think of how to phrase what he wanted to say. “You seem like a nice young woman. I don’t know why you’d cooperate with a man who wanted to do something illegal.” It was illegal, wasn’t it, to tape someone’s activities in their own place of business, without their consent?

Lisa looked miserable. She pulled some T-shirts from the basket and began to fold them, as if she had to be busy.

“Here’s what happened,” she said, not looking at either of them, concentrating on the garments she was folding with speed and precision. “One of Cole’s daddy’s friends came by, said he’d heard Cole and I had gotten married in Midnight. He’d also heard we have a baby on the way.” She glanced up, as if to see their reaction. Fiji and Bobo both nodded. “So he said he figured we needed money, and I said, ‘Sure.’ Cole’s got a job at Western Auto, and I got a job at Dairy Queen, and we’re doing . . . okay.”

“Okay” must be the new “barely scraping by,” Bobo thought.

Lisa put aside the stack of folded T-shirts and started on the underwear with no self-consciousness at all. “But we got a baby due in five months. Babies need a lot of stuff. Our folks are just barely paying their bills, and my sister’s still using all her baby clothes and furniture. So when he told me he’d give me two hundred dollars if I just put a little transmitter thing inside an old camera in your store, I said I would. He said he was trying to catch you selling drugs, that he owned the pawnshop.”

“You knew he was lying,” Fiji said sternly.

“Yes, ma’am, I did figure he . . .” And tears started to roll down her face. “I apologize, I really do. Please don’t send me to jail.”

Fiji looked startled. She has a soft heart, thought Bobo. She never even thought about that.

“Lisa, I won’t send a pregnant woman to jail if I can help it,” Bobo said. “But I can’t say that I’m happy with you, either. You did a bad thing, the kind of thing that can get you hurt, or locked up, and you did it knowing you were wrong.” He shook his head, and Lisa’s tears accelerated.

“I did,” she said, with the air of one facing a firing squad. “The Devil tempted me, and I gave in.” She grabbed up a clean T-shirt and blotted her face with it.

“What’s the name of this man who came by here, Cole’s daddy’s friend?” Bobo said. And there wasn’t any sympathy in his voice at all. He knew giving her sympathy would just make the girl weep again.

“I shouldn’t tell you,” she said.

“You owe Bobo that, at the very least,” Fiji said. “Also, you can keep your mouth shut about our visit. You kept your mouth shut about what you put in the pawnshop, after all.”

Lisa looked as though she were at the end of her tether. She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “It was Mr. Eggleston, him that owns the real estate agency and the lawn service company,” Lisa said. She used another tissue to blow her nose.

Bobo said, “We’ll leave now, but I’m counting on you to keep this to yourself. It’s for your own good. You don’t want to get drawn into this any deeper.”

“I will,” Lisa said. “I ain’t gonna say a word to Mr. Eggleston.” She rose, and they rose with her. “Like I said, I never want to get mixed up in anything like this again.” Her nose reddened as if she were about to cry again.