Dumpster Dying Read online

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DUMPSTER DYING

  By Lesley A. Diehl

  Oak Tree Press Taylorville, IL

  DUMPSTER DYING, Copyright 2011, by Lesley A. Diehl, All Rights Reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Oak Tree Press, 140 E. Palmer St., Taylorville, IL 62568.

  Oak Tree Press books may be purchased for educational, business or sales promotional purposes. Contact Publisher for quantity discounts.

  First Edition, January 2011

  Cover by MickADesign.com

  Interior Pages by: Linda W. Rigsbee

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-61009-006-3

  LCCN 2010939987

  Ebook Edition May 2011

  ISBN 978-1-61009-431-3

  DEDICATION

  This work is dedicated to the horses, cows, and dancing cowboys of the Big Lake country.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My appreciation to my critique partner, Jan Day Fehrman, who makes me write better than I think I can.

  As ever, I am grateful for his support, love, and patience—my cowboy, Glenn.

  CHAPTER 1

  Emily Rhodes, the new bartender at the Big Lake Country Club, blew damp tendrils of sun-bleached hair out of her face as she kicked and dragged three plastic trash bags across the sun-baked asphalt lot behind the clubhouse. A full moon illuminated the area’s lone palm tree under which sat a metal beast waiting for its nightly feeding.

  “Here you go, big boy,” she said. She let go of the bags and, with one hand, lifted the dumpster’s lid on the side closest to her. The usual stench of rotting garbage assaulted her nostrils. She ignored the smell and tried to heave the bag into the container, but it tumbled back out. Too full. She shoved back the lid on the other side, and mentally crossed her fingers that she wouldn’t have to hop in there and stomp around on that stuff to make room like she did the other night.

  By the glow of the security light she spotted a white object lying at the far end of the dumpster, a cowboy hat, a very special cowboy hat, a Silver Belly, expensive and worn by very few men. She’d encountered just such a man earlier in the evening. The circumstances of their meeting were not pleasant.

  What the hell was that doing here, she wondered. Emily leaned in as far as she could. Her feet left the ground, and she teetered on the rim of the dumpster. She struggled to reach the hat, tugged at it, and almost went head first into the bin, head first onto the man’s face hidden beneath the hat.

  Ugh! She fell back and dropped the metal lid, the clang reverberating off the side of the building in the still night. She covered her mouth with her hand, and leaned against the dumpster. That can’t be. I didn’t see that, did I?

  She turned, opened the lid once more, gingerly pushed a garbage bag to one side, and peered in for another look. She remembered him from earlier in the evening when he had grabbed her blouse and tried to pull her across the bar. He had worn a brilliant white cowboy shirt with roses appliquéd on the front yoke. Now the shirt front was as dark as the blood-red flowers.

  She gulped hard to hold back the bile working its way up from her stomach and looked around the lot. It was empty. Help. She needed help.

  She ran for the door of the clubhouse. The knob wouldn’t turn.

  Oh, damn. I did it again, left the door on auto lock. Now I can’t get back in. She felt in her pocket for her cell phone, then remembered she had left it along with her keys lying on the bar counter. But she had hidden a spare car key in the wheel well. I’ll have to drive for help, and the sooner the better. He might still be alive. Unlikely.

  She gripped the steering wheel with sweaty hands and hunched over it, the tension in her neck sending shooting pains up the back of her head. As she turned out of the country club grounds and punched the accelerator, she saw the flashing lights of a police car heading toward her. She sat back in the seat and dropped her shoulders. Oh, good. Help on its way.

  As the cruiser’s lights caught hers, its driver slammed to a halt and did a controlled skid blocking her lane. She stood on her brake, and stopped the car, then jumped out and ran toward the police vehicle. Frightened tears of relief poured down her face and onto her chin.

  Two officers with drawn guns greeted her.

  “Stop right there, on the ground, hands out,” said the officer who had been driving.

  “But officer, there’s a man there. I think he’s dead.”

  “On the ground, on the ground.” His voice chilled the hot, still night.

  Emily raised her shaking hands and dropped on rubbery knees. This can’t be happening.

  The other member of the duo placed his knee in her back, cuffed her, pulled her to her feet, and searched her.

  “Why are you doing this to me? I was trying to help. The man back there, someone killed him, I think,” Emily said. The officer walked her to the police car.

  “We know all about that. Got a call a few minutes ago, and we’re responding. Now we’d like to find out what you know about it.”

  She began to hiccup, her typical response when she was frightened. “Me? (Hic) Me? I found him (Hic) when I took out the garbage. I would have called it in, but I locked myself out of the bar, and I left my cell phone inside.” Her explanation sounded lame even to her ears.

  “Sure you weren’t running?” asked Officer Handcuffs.

  They shoved her into the back seat and headed toward the club house.

  “Sure I was running. I was trying to get help.”

  “Looks like you’re the one who needs it,” said the driver. The other officer turned in his seat and looked at her. There was a hardness in his eyes that she knew he reserved for the guilty.

  “My car. It’s in the middle of the road,” hiccupped Emily. She twisted her head around to look out of the back window. If anything happened to that car, she wouldn’t be able to afford another, and her insurance rates would go sky high. There was little point in telling the officers her financial concerns. They were after a criminal, and they thought they’d found her.

  Back at the clubhouse, the driver shone his high-powered flashlight into the dumpster, confirming their report.

  “Shot in the chest. Gotta be dead. Lotta blood.”

  She tried to shut out her memory of the body, but the officer’s words brought it back to her in IMAX and Technicolor. Just the reminder she needed to experience the gory scene yet again.

  “Dispatcher alerted an ambulance when the call came in. Too late for this guy,” said the driver. Emily could hear the siren on the main road. He walked over to the large trash bags Emily had dropped by the side of the dumpster.

  “These you
rs?” he asked.

  “From the bar,” she said. “I put them down, then I. . .” He held up his hand signaling he wasn’t interested in her explanations, walked to the back door, and turned the knob. To Emily’s surprise, the door opened.

  “Thought you said it was locked.”

  “It was. I swear. It locked behind me.” This was crazy.

  As she struggled to keep herself calm, the other officer played his light around the dumpster area. The beam illuminated two objects at the edge of the employee parking area.

  “What have we here?” he said. With forefinger and thumb, he stooped and picked up a set of keys. In the other hand he held a cell phone.

  “Yours?” he asked.

  Oh, Oh. Get a grip, she told herself. This is the law, and you’re innocent of any wrong doing. Well, pretty innocent. “I’m not saying another thing. I want a lawyer.”

  Well, truth be told, she already had a lawyer, but her attorney didn’t handle criminal cases. She’d have to hire someone else. And pay him. Let’s see. How can I divide my first paycheck in two? Half of three hundred dollars minus social security and FICA. Was that sufficient to retain two attorneys? Emily didn’t think so. Now she really was in trouble. Hiccup.

  Once at the station, her escorts walked her into an office at the rear of the building. The lettering on the glass door read, “Detective Myers.”

  “Don’t I get a phone call?” Her voice was high-pitched and shaky.

  She repeated her question, this time trying to put more assertion and less fear into her tone. They undid her cuffs and pushed her into a wooden chair in front of the battered grey metal desk. The window air conditioner was valiantly trying to cool and dehumidify the tiny room, but to little effect. The space smelled like dirty socks.

  Another man entered the room, but didn’t answer her question. This must be Detective Myers, surmised Emily. He looked kind of like William Conrad, short, round, but without the award-winning Matt Dillon voice. He was wearing cowboy boots, but then everyone who was male in these parts wore them. When she and Fred, both retired teachers, first settled in Central Florida to spend their winters, Emily was shocked to find that real cowboys even wore their spurs into the post office. What fun, she had told her friends back north.

  But her William Conrad look-alike cop was no real cowboy, and he probably wouldn’t prove to be much fun either. He pulled his pants up under his ample belly and strode across the room to his desk chair.

  “Sum kinda nerdin,” he said.

  “What?” Emily’s teeth began to chatter despite the warm, sticky room.

  “Ja minom,” he said. He bent to one side in his chair. Emily leaned over to follow his movements. On the floor beside his desk sat a large, rusty coffee can. He spit tobacco juice into it, then sat back up. Emily felt her empty stomach do a cartwheel of nausea.

  “I said, you seem kinda nervous, but then I guess I’d be too if I’d killed someone.”

  Emily opened her mouth to reply, then stopped herself. “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t have to talk to you. Charge me with something so I can call my lawyer.”

  Emily clapped her hand over her mouth, surprised at her audacity. This wasn’t like her. Well, correction, it wasn’t the way Emily used to behave, but since Fred, the rat, had died on her and left her without a cent to her name, Emily found she was developing a lot of backbone she didn’t even know she had.

  “You think you’re some kind of lawyer?” Detective Spittoon asked.

  “I watch a lot of TV, crime TV, and I read. I know my rights.” She probably shouldn’t have said that because the detective rolled his eyes and winked at the officers still standing behind her in the office.

  “A regular Law and Order buff here. Guess you got me on that one. I’ll back off and offer you a cup of coffee then.”

  “I don’t want any coffee. I know you’ll try to use the cup to get a sample of my DNA and then you’ll match it to something at the crime scene, and soon I’ll be heading north to the Lakewood Women’s Correctional Facility, and all over bad coffee. No thanks. I’d rather die of thirst in your office and have the Civil Liberties Union take on my case.” Emily folded her arms across her chest to stop her hands from trembling.

  The door swung open and a tall, broad-shouldered man with wavy brown hair entered the room. Emily’s gaze traveled from the full moustache riding his top lip down over his slim hips to his feet. Yep. He was wearing cowboy boots and from his tanned face and hands, he could have ridden the range.

  “Toby,” he said, “get out of my desk chair and go find yourself something to do. This is not your case. It’s mine.”

  The fat man jumped from the chair and scurried out of the room, the two officers in tow.

  “And, Toby,” the man said, “take your damn spit bucket with you.”

  “Yessir.” Toby, now-no-longer-Detective-Myers-nor-William-Conrad, hustled back into the office. He grabbed the rusty can and hurried back out.

  “Sorry about that,” the real Detective Myers said. “I’m Detective Stanton Lewis.”

  “The door says ‘Myers’,” Emily said. She wondered if this was some kind of a police scam to confuse her into a confession.

  Detective Lewis slid into the desk chair. “Myers retired years ago. We never got around to changing the lettering. Sorry about that.”

  “So far you’ve been sorry about two things, but neither of them includes apologizing for hauling me out of my car and dragging me into the station. I found a dead man. It’s not something I do everyday, you know.”

  Lewis cleared his throat and directed his attention to the file he was carrying when he entered the room. He opened the folder, and Emily looked across the desk at its contents. The goods on her.

  “It says here that you were fleeing the scene of a murder.”

  “It does not say that. You’re reading off the take-out menu for Charlie’s Grill.” Emily prided herself on being able to read print upside down.

  “I want in there.” Emily heard a familiar female voice through the door.

  “I’m here, Clara. Help me.” Bravado be damned, Emily decided. She began to cry again, and her hiccups returned.

  The door swung open and Clara Rogers, manager of the bar and restaurant at Big Lake Country Club stood there, towering over Toby. Emily had seen that look on her face before. It was the one she got when she was about to give the boot to some cowboy misbehaving at the club. The officers who had arrested Emily flanked Toby, whose expression said he welcomed the protection. Clara was one big woman.

  “Call off your terriers,” Clara said. She nodded her head in the direction of the officers who looked amused at the sight of Toby fearfully peering up into Clara’s angry eyes. “And take this troll on growth hormones outa here and get him a good mouth wash.”

  She strode into the room.

  Detective Lewis got up from his chair.

  “Give us a minute here,” he said. He gestured his comrades out of the room and closed the door. “You know, Clara, you may be the manager at the club, but you’re not the bouncer here.”

  Clara ignored Lewis. “I’m her lawyer,” she said. Emily’s mouth fell open in surprise.

  “I was told a witness to the altercation was being brought in,” Lewis said.

  “That would be me, too.” Clara plopped into the chair next to Emily’s and crossed her denim-clad legs, nodding her head of curly red hair up and down.

  “Let’s cut to the chase here. Emily is my bartender, but she’s a little absent-minded at times.”

  “I’m what?” Sure she let the door lock her out once, well, maybe more than that, but Clara had no right . . .

  Clara placed her hand on Emily’s arm. “Shut up, Emily,” she said.

  Clara pulled a tissue out of her jeans pocket and handed it to Emily.

  “You’re a sight, Emily. Anyway, she’s locked that door behind her five nights out of the three weeks she’s worked for me. Tonight she probably had good reason for forgetting the l
ock and her keys. Marcus Davey was in earlier, drunk as usual, and she refused to serve him. He took offense. That’s the altercation.”

  “That’s it?” asked Lewis.

  “That’s it.” Clara set her lips together in a firm line.

  “And then I found him in the dumpster with the rest of the garbage,” Emily said. She hiccupped and blew her nose.

  CHAPTER 2

  Detective Lewis’ eyebrows lifted in curious anticipation at what this pair would have to offer next. Clara he’d known for years. When he got time off work, which wasn’t often, he played a little golf with some of his friends, and he’d run into Clara at the course. He knew no one messed with her, not only because of her size and attitude, but because everyone knew Clara was a straight shooter. She treated her employees right, treated the members the same.

  Now the other one, the one not much bigger than one of Santa’s elves, Emily Rhodes, had to be “a winter visitor”, worse yet, a northerner, and Lewis wasn’t crazy about them. They added to the aggravation of his job, and he had enough difficulty with the locals to fill a twelve-hour work day.

  Snowbirds meant more of everything he dealt with: traffic, shoplifting, theft, spousal abuse, and an occasional murder. Those were crimes, and he could do something about them, but what burned him was the snowbirds’ inclination to treat the place as if it were a playground. Whether from the United States or Canada, they fed wildlife they shouldn’t, raced their boats up and down the canals at top speed, and over-fished the lake for catch they wouldn’t eat. This one had a real attitude too, coming on like Ms. CSI expert.

  “Why don’t you tell me what else there was between you and Mr. Davey?”

  “Don’t say a word more,” said Clara. She pulled Emily out of the chair and shoved her toward the door.