Mother Finds a Body by Gypsy Rose Lee Page A

blackout too quick. This is the way it happened,” Biff said to the sheriff. “Last week we got married. We bought the trailer for our honeymoon. First we send for Evangie so she can go along for the ride. Then we start running into these friends of ours. They’re all going east, and so are we. Plenty of room. So we ask ’em . . .”
    â€œYou ask ’em, you mean,” I said, just in case the sheriff got the wrong idea.
    â€œAll right then. I ask them. Anyway, there we are: dogs, monkey, guinea pig, friends, mother-in-law . . .”
    â€œAnd,” I interrupted again, “you might give my mother top billing.”
    â€œBill, our doggie, has developed an annoying habit of dragging presents into the trailer for us,” Biff said, ignoring me completely. “One day it’s a fish head, next day it’s a bone, then it’s something we can’t name. Anyway, these things have a rare smell to ’em. Evangie’s asthma powder has got a rare smell. Between the mixture, we don’t notice this other smell until we get in Ysleta yesterday. Then the three of us start looking. We naturally think Bill has come up with a prize, but what we don’t expect is what we find.
    â€œEvangie sees it when she opens up the bed in the back room. There’s a tin bathtub under it. We don’t use the tub because we always stop in tourist camps and they have showers. You have to carry a lot of water for that tub business, and it makes the trailer side heavy. So, we haven’t looked under that bed sincewe left San Diego. Anyway, Evangie lets the bed fall down and then she locks the doors before she tells us what’s in the tub. I take a look, and sure enough!”
    â€œThere it is,” I said.
    â€œThe damnedest, deadest body you ever saw.”
    The sheriff pinched his chin with a large hand. He looked at Biff from under his bushy eyebrows. “A body, eh?”
    â€œYep,” Biff said. “When I go to lift it out of the tub, a hunk of the face fell off.”
    That’s when I spilled my drink. Biff had promised me he would never mention that again. While I told him what I thought of him for going into all the sordid details when he knew very well how sick it made me, the sheriff began talking to himself.
    â€œThat fits, all right,” he said.
    Biff had brought my great great grandmother into the argument, so I didn’t get the sheriff’s question until he repeated it.
    â€œDid you recognize the body?”
    â€œOh, sure,” Biff said. “He was our best man.”
    The sheriff thought that meant that we had known him all our lives, so we had to go through the whole story of our water-taxi wedding; how we found the best man in a saloon, how we picked up the captain in another saloon, where we got the boat, and everything.
    â€œNever saw him before, eh?”
    â€œNever,” Biff said. “Never saw him after, either. That is, until I lifted up the bed and looked in the bathtub.”
    â€œExcept that time in San Diego,” I said firmly.
    Biff shook his head. “Gyp swears she saw the guy in San Diego, but the guy we saw didn’t even speak to us. If it’d been George, why he’d have fallen all over us. He was a very pleasant guy.”
    â€œGeorge who?” the sheriff asked.
    Biff and I looked at each other. That was the first time I had thought about our best man having a last name.
    â€œWe didn’t ask him,” Biff said. “Funny, now that I think it over. You’d think he woulda told us.”
    â€œYes,” the sheriff said. “Or that you would have asked him.Now, what about those other actors traveling with you? Any of them recognize the body?”
    â€œOh, we didn’t let them know what we were trouping around with us,” Biff said quickly. “Those two dames would have gone off their nut. Then, too, we thought we should tell the cops first.”
    â€œSo you waited a