Free Devil Red by Joe R. Lansdale Page B

money?” I said.
    “Not really,” Marvin said. “She was old enough to think about it. Maybe she finally felt motherly and thought if anything happened to her, Mini would get it and she would check out making up for not being the best mom in the world. And if Mini died, well, there was the animal shelter. The husband did hire a lawyer on contingency to try and pry the money from the fuzzy little paws of all those desperate kitties. I don’t know how that worked out. But there’s nothing about Bert that has to mean murder. And the mother, well, I figure too much alcohol and a big case of the stupids did her in.”
    I glanced over at Leonard and his deerstalker. I turned to Marvin. “Do you come across many murders where a fella didn’t like his best friend’s hat?”
    “No,” Marvin said, looking at Leonard, “but I can understand the impulse.”

19
    Marvin gave us some contact information for people we might want to talk to, and I folded that up and put it in my coat pocket. We left when his sandwich arrived. We knew when we weren’t wanted.
    At my place we fried up some egg sandwiches and sat on the couch and turned so we could look at each other. Leonard had finally taken off the deerstalker, so it was easier to do.
    We decided we had to see Mini’s stepdad, Bert. I called the cell number we had for him. The phone rang awhile, but finally he answered.
    I told him we were investigating his stepdaughter’s murder, that the mother of Mini’s boyfriend had hired us, and could we meet up with him.
    “Can’t we just talk over the phone?” he said.
    “I suppose, but we’d rather do it in person.”
    “Not anything I can tell you, and since I don’t know you, I ain’t wantin’ you to come out to the house.”
    “Okay.”
    “I’ve had threats.”
    “Threats?” I asked.
    “That’s all I’ll say about it.”
    “Look, I don’t know about the threats, but we’re on the up-and-up. What say we meet someplace public? We’ll buy you lunch.”
    “Made a sandwich already.”
    “Well,” I said, “how about just meeting you in town?”
    He was silent for so long I thought the connection was broken. But just when I was about to give up, he said, “I’m going out to the auction barn, catch me there.”
    “Not sure what you look like.”
    “Call my goddamn cell, man. Use your head. When you get there, call me.”
    On the way out to the auction barn, I said, “He sounds paranoid.”
    “Doesn’t mean someone’s not after him,” Leonard said.
    “Take off the hat, Leonard. Where we’re going is cowboy country. You going in there looking like that, you’re asking for trouble. Only thing missing is a purse.”
    “This is anything but effeminate,” he said. “In Merry Ole England they wore these to hunt deer. Real men. Real guns. Real deer. And this hat.”
    “Deer probably laughed themselves to death.”
    When we got out to the auction barn, the parking lot was full of pickups and trailers and everything smelled like animal shit; it was so thick you almost had to climb over the reek to get to the auction barn.
    Inside, the place looked like an ad for chewing tobacco and blue jeans. Cowboy hats floated on the crowd, and there was a lot of crowd. Last time I’d seen that many people was in a rerun of The Ten Commandments . Who knew cows were that exciting. The animal crap smell was now so intense I felt I needed mountaineer equipment to scale it.
    We started moving in among them, and as we went, Leonard pulled the deerstalker out of his back pocket, unfolded it, and popped it out like a wet towel and put it on.
    “You sonofabitch,” I said.

20
    As we rambled through the crowd, a tall cowboy with a hatband full of toothpicks watched Leonard pass with open curiosity. I was right behind Leonard. I said to the cowboy, “He’s working a child’s party after this.”
    The cowboy looked at me and nodded, like that explained everything.
    We found a spot with a break in people, and went there. I took