Frankenstein

LaPierre’s husband.”
    “Why’s he Poor Fred?”
    “He got a brain stroke years ago. Poor Fred can’t talk no more, and he gets around in his walker. They live next door.”
    “So this Trudy wanted him killed, made to look like it happened during a burglary.”
    “Mr. Bob Pine he was going to put stolen stuff in my house, I’d go to prison.”
    Eyes pinched to slits, shoulders hunched, head thrust forward, like one of those birds that ate dead things on the highway, Mr. Lyss came close again. “Is that your story, boy?”
    “It’s what almost happened, sir. But Mr. Bob Pine he got a cold in his feet.”
    “In his feet?”
    “Such a bad cold, he didn’t feel good enough to do the stealing and killing. So he goes to Chief Jarmillo, tells him all what Mrs. Trudy LaPierre hired him for.”
    “When did this happen?”
    “Yesterday.”
    “So why are you here?”
    “Mrs. Trudy LaPierre she’s dangerous. Chief says she’s got a history of dangerous, and she’s all crazy-mad at me.”
    “She hasn’t been arrested?”
    “Nobody can find her.”
    “Why would she be mad at you?”
    “It’s silly,” said Nummy. “Mr. Bob Pine come to my place to see me before doing the stealing and killing. He wanted to cremate me.”
    For no clear reason, Mr. Lyss got angry and shook his bony old fist in Nummy’s face. His knuckles were dirty. “Damn it, boy, don’t complicate dumb with stupid. I’m trying to get a simple truth out of you, and you snarl it up so I just about need a translator.
Cremate
? Burn you to ashes? If he’s going to pin the crime on you, he’s not going to cremate you first.”
    Easing back toward the bunks, trying to escape his cellmate’s breath, which burned in the nose worse than gasoline fumes, Nummy tried harder to get the word right. “Creminate. No.
In
creminate.”
    “In
crim
inate,” said Mr. Lyss. “Pine wanted to incriminate you, set you up for old Fred’s murder.”
    “
Poor
Fred.”
    “But he hadn’t stolen anything yet, he didn’t have anything to plant in your house.”
    “No, what he come for was to get some stuff of mine he was going to put in Poor Fred’s house.”
    “What stuff?”
    “Stuff I didn’t know was stuff I even had. Deeanhay.”
    “What? What did you say?”
    “Deeanhay. Chief Jarmillo says like some of my hairs, my spit on a water glass.”
    “D-N-A, you damn fool.”
    “My fingers on the glass, my marks.”
    “Your
prints.”
    “My fingers, my marks again, on a hammer handle. Chief Jarmillo says I wouldn’t have no idea I was giving this stuff away.”
    Mr. Lyss followed Nummy to the bunks. “So what happened? Why didn’t Pine go through with it?”
    “Mr. Bob Pine he comes, I’m making toast.”
    After a moment, Mr. Lyss said, “And?”
    “It’s just white-bread toast.”
    Mr. Lyss shifted back and forth from foot to foot, back and forth, as if he might break into a little dance. He kept knocking his fists together, too, and his eyes bulged more than it seemed eyes could bulge yet not fall out of their sockets.
    He was for sure an excitable person.
    “Toast?”
Mr. Lyss said as if the whole idea of toast disgusted him. “Toast? Toast? What does toast have to do with anything?”
    “What it has to do with is Grandmama’s peach preserves,” Nummy said. He started to sit down to get away from the man’s sickening breath, but he popped up again before his butt touched Mr. Lyss’s bunk. “I made good toast for Mr. Bob Pine. He was crazy for the peach preserves, so I told about Grandmama, how she teached me everything I needed to live okay at home by myself after she went to God.”
    Lyss said, “He liked the peach preserves.”
    “Sir, he was crazy for them preserves.”
    “Because he liked the peach preserves, he decided not to kill old Fred—”
    “Poor Fred.”
    “—decided not to pin the murder on you, and decided to turn the bitch Trudy over to the cops.”
    “Mrs. Trudy LaPierre,” said Nummy. “She done a bad thing, which is never a good idea.”
    Mr. Lyss rapped his knuckles against Nummy’s chest, the way he might knock on a door. “Let me tell you something, Peaches. If it was me you made toast for, there’s no preserves in the world good enough to keep me from earning Trudy’s blood money. I’d have killed old Fred—”
    “Poor Fred.”
    “—and I’d kill you to make it look like a remorseful suicide after you offed your neighbor. What do you think of that?”
    “Don’t want to think of