Free Murder in the Hearse Degree by Tim Cockey Page B

shirt of his.’ ”
    She cackled again, and slapped her hand down on Munger’s knee.
    “I fixed her up, though,” Stella went on. “If I do say so myself.”
    Pete asked, “Fixed her up?”
    “Did you ever meet her?” Stella asked us. “Do you know what she used to look like?”
    “We just came from the home where she worked before she came here,” I said. “We saw a picture of her.”
    “Was it one with all that hair of hers?”
    “She had a good head of hair, yes,” I said.
    “Lopped it off,” Stella said proudly. “I took her into town myself and sat her down in Elsbeth Finkle’s chair and I told Elsbeth exactly what we wanted.”
    “Excuse me,” Pete said, “what do you mean by that? What we wanted?”
    Stella gave Pete a fierce look. “Girl looked like a little ragamuffin when she got here. I told her if I didn’t know better she could have passed for a twelve-year-old. No sense of style in that child. None at all. I’m sorry, you might say it was none of my business, but I say a person only lives once. And I told her. I told her we were going to get her fixed up and I got Elsbeth to lop off that hopeless hair of hers and we got her nice and cute in a little bob cut. Now that, I told her, that’s sophisticated. Give the boys something to look at. You could see her face, for goodness sake. With all that crazy hair she was like someone peeking out of a cave. Still had to pinch the silly little thing to get her to smile, but at least now you could see it. And for a little thing the girl had herself a nice little figure.” She grinned at Pete. The way a shark grins at a foot wagging off a raft. “And don’t men like a good figure. Of course the problem was you wouldn’t know Sophie was even a woman in those god-awful sacks she wore. So I got her to pick up a few nice-looking outfits.”
    I squinted at the woman’s electric citrus wardrobe. Say it ain’t so.
    Stella lifted her bulbous nose into the air. “All the girl needed was a little guidance. I don’t know how long she’d been living under a rock, but I’ll tell you two this much, I dragged her out into the sun and I’m plenty proud of it. She looked good enough to eat by the time I was through with her. You could see it in her face, too. She felt a whole lot better about herself. You boys probably wouldn’t understand. Men can go three days without shaving and girls’ll still crawl over you, isn’t that right?”
    Neither Pete nor I responded quickly enough. Stella elbowed Pete in the ribs.
    “Isn’t that right?”
    “If you say,” Pete said. He was sounding pretty helpless.
    “I do. And I’m just saying in this world it’s the woman who’s got to do all the prettying up. That’s just how it is. Now myself I’ve never had a problem with that personally. But I told Sophie. I said girl, you’ve got to blossom. You’ve got to make it happen. There’s too many other pretty flowers out there.” Stella wagged her head. “I just cannot believe she’s dead. Poor girl didn’t get much out of this life then, did she?”
    “We understand from Sophie’s last employer that Sophie was working for a caterer when she was living here,” Pete said. “Do you know anything about that?”
    “That’s right. She got a job helping serve food. She didn’t cook it, she just walked around and handed it out. I’m not sure the girl could cook water. One time she brought home a whole bag of chicken on a stick. There was some sort of peanut goop all over them, but they weren’t half bad after you washed them off. The chicken was fine.”
    I asked, “Would you know the name of the caterer?”
    “The name? Nope. No idea. Food something something. Sophie wasn’t exactly the world’s biggest talker, you know. I had to hold up both ends when I’d get her to sit down for a talk. Practically had to crawl into the little girl’s mouth sometimes just to grab a word out of her.”
    She cackled again. Deep within my soul, glass