Iced Chiffon

by Duffy Brown

  “They’re used to pain–in–the-neck customers driving them nuts. They may have hated Janelle, but if hair salons and shoe stores killed every nasty customer who walked though their doors, they’d have bodies piled high as the Forsyth Park Fountain and no one around to shop.”

  “You’re giving up? We’re giving up?” KiKi took my hand and looked sad clear through. “Oh, honey, this is plumb awful. You’ll lose the house if Hollis goes to trial. The lawyer fees will be horrendous. I think you and Bruce Willis should move in with Putter and me; I truly do. Putter’s always wanted a dog.”

  Only if that dog played golf and drank martinis at the club. “BW and I already have a place lined up with a good view of the river. We’ll be fine.”

  KiKi and I finished our coffee and cake, talking about mundane things that didn’t matter. Cupcake’s murder had consumed so much of our lives this last week that it was hard to revert back to daily humdrum and be excited about it.

  When BW and I got home, I changed into a skirt and blouse and put moisturizer on my face. I looked like a buttered russet potato. I told BW to mind the store and I’d be back by ten. I caught the bus and headed for town. When I got off near Boone’s office, Dinky was unlocking the front door to Walker Boone, attorney at law. We stepped inside together, Boone following.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said to him.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “Hair-dryer malfunction.”

  “I’ve never met anyone else like you.”

  “Right back at ya.”

  Boone walked into his office, and I trailed along. “What now?” Boone asked from behind his big antique desk, which had probably belonged to Lee or Davis or Al Capone.

  I looked to the wall, the bullet hole still there. “Aren’t you going to fix it?”

  “Great conversation piece. Keeps clients in line.” He shot me a meaningful look.

  I took a seat in a red-leather club chair, the same one I had sat in so often during my divorce. It still had my clenched finger marks embedded in the armrests. I parked Old Yeller beside me. “I thought lawyers wore suits.”

  “Have you ever seen me in a suit? You’re stalling.”

  “Do you have any suspects for who killed Janelle?”

  “And I should tell you so you can go mess up more lives? Sissy Collins was in such a state after you and KiKi talked to her that the church secretary had to call the life squad. It was some kind of anxiety attack. Sissy didn’t kill Janelle.”

  “You want anxiety—she nearly ran me over with her car; now that’s anxiety.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I’m out of the murder business.”

  “And the pope isn’t Catholic.”

  “I’m letting you find the killer. I quit. The case is yours, all yours.”

  “You’re giving up?” This time Boone sounded more serious. He let the words sink in for a second and raked back his unkempt hair, messing it even more. I doubted the man owned a comb. “About time you came to your senses. You don’t have a clue what you’re doing out there, running around looking for a murderer. The only thing you accomplished was to drive the killer underground and make finding him harder.”

  Teeth clenched, I leaned across Boone’s desk. “I’ve been dragged into an alley, had my dog poisoned, my house broken into, been nearly run over, parboiled in a tanning bed, and will probably lose the roof overhead. I am in less than a good mood this morning, Mr. Attorney at Law. Do you want me to tell you what I know or not?”

  Boone got a folder from the top drawer of his desk, and Dinky came into the office. “Mrs. McCoy needs to see you right away,” she said to Boone. “Her husband just transferred their life savings to a bank in the Cayman Islands. I gave her a Valium and put her in the conference room.”

  “I have to take this. Don’t hide pizza in my computer.” Boone left. With nothing to do, I opened the file to pictures of Cupcake wrapped in plastic, her eyes wide open, vacant. I didn’t think it would bother me after all that had gone on this last week, but it did. Death was never pretty, just sad. The next picture was the trunk of the Lexus with the body in it, one without the body, a few close-ups of the “For Sale” sign with blood splatters, the dining room with the plastic cut out, and shots showing drag marks across the plastic. More shots of the back door, front door, the dirty floor with little yellow tent markers by a pen, black glove, used tissue, earring, and a blue sock—all left behind by potential buyers no doubt. Little wonder why real-estate companies covered carpets; they’d be trashed in no time.

  I flipped the pictures over; there was just so much of Cupcake dead I could take before ten in the morning. I started to read the police report, but there wasn’t anything I didn’t already know, except that Detective Ross misspelled chiffon. I got to the part in the report about blood on the dress, which happened to be my dress that Cupcake bought at the Fox. Little gears in my tired brain start to churn, trying to make sense of what I saw in front of me. I stopped reading and flipped back through the pictures, stopping at the dirty floor. The blue sock thing threw me; who leaves behind a sock? I stared at the earring. It was black and beaded and dangly.

  Holy mother of pearl! I bolted straight up in my chair. I knew that earring! I’d looked at the mate for fifteen minutes straight at the Fox trying to find a similar pair. That earring belonged to Dinah Corwin.

  Everything fit like puzzle pieces falling together. Raimondo had the interview with Dinah, but he said he had to wait. Wait for what? Wait for whom? Why? This was before Cupcake’s demise so there weren’t all that many interviews because Cupcake spread those rumors about Dinah. And there was the little fact that Cupcake stole Dinah’s husband back in Atlanta. Talk about a double motive. That first day Dinah came into the Fox, she said she’d spilled wine on her black dress. Raimondo mentioned it again when he said he was waiting for the interview. What if it wasn’t wine but blood?

  I grabbed the earring picture, stuffed it in my purse, closed the file neat and tidy as if all was right with the world, and walked out of the room. Dinky said Boone wouldn’t be much longer. I said I had to get back to the Fox and told her to tell Boone something smelled really bad in his office and this time it wasn’t my pizza.

  I caught the bus, and by nine thirty, I was hurrying right on by Cherry House and heading for KiKi’s. I banged on the front door.

  “What’s going on?” KiKi asked when I hustled inside. “You’re all atwitter, honey. Now don’t go getting yourself worked up this way; you can move right in with Putter and me. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “I’m not freeloading just yet,” I said, trying to catch my breath as much from exertion as excitement. “I was in Boone’s office looking at pictures of the crime scene.”

  “Honey, some people start the day with a walk in the park. You need to give it a try.”

  “There was a picture of the dining-room floor of the ‘For Sale’ house, and there was a bunch of stuff left behind by people who had gone through the house. There was even a sock. Who leaves behind a sock?”

  “You’re here to talk footwear?”

  “An earring. It’s black and beaded and it belongs to Dinah Corwin. She showed it to me at the Fox hoping I had a pair like it because she lost the mate.”

  KiKi led me to the kitchen table, where we drank coffee earlier. She pushed me down into a chair and pulled out the one next to me. “It’s too much of a stretch to think you’d recognize a black earring. Savannah is loaded with them. You can’t swing a dead cat around here without hitting a woman wearing a black earring.”

  “Dinah handed it to me herself and had me looking for a similar pair forever. By then I knew each bead by heart.”

  “Why would she let you look at an earring she left at a murder scene?”

  “She didn’t know she lost it there. How many single earrings do you have and don’t know where you lost the mate? Dinah had no idea I’d ever look at crime-scene photos; she didn’t know I was looking for the mu
rderer. My guess is she lost the earring while trying to wrap up the body and drag it all by herself to the car. And the police can’t find Cupcake’s purse. I bet anything Cupcake was carrying the Gucci bag Dinah’s husband bought for her in Atlanta, the one he took back from Dinah and gave to Cupcake.”

  KiKi sat still, hardly breathing. “Dinah got what was hers after she bashed in Janelle’s brains.” We both made the sign of the cross at the bashing part. KiKi confessed, “I have to admit, that’s what I would do. Now what do we do? We don’t have any real evidence to give to the cops, and that Detective Ross will never buy your black-earring story. That woman had on a polyester suit that must have been ten years old. Fashion is not that woman’s thing at all. She’ll never get it.”

  “So we make it her thing. Let’s go find ourselves a Gucci handbag and a black earring.”

  “Where? How?”

  “Dinah’s staying at the Marshall House, and I have no idea how to get in her room.” But the good news was that it probably wouldn’t involve a tanning bed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “I GOT Elsie and AnnieFritz to handle the Fox for me,” I said to KiKi as I climbed into the Batmobile for another day of killer on the loose. “They promised to walk BW and not feed him any more biscuits. Seems I have a dog with fiber issues.”

  “How do you plan on getting the Gucci purse away from Dinah? Maybe she threw it away already.”

  “Would you throw away a Gucci purse? And this one has special significance for Dinah; it’s her trophy.”

  “Like she won, and Cupcake lost,” KiKi added as we did the stop-and–go traffic shuffle all the way up Abercorn.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said to KiKi. “What if you take Dinah to breakfast, and I’ll get into her hotel room?”

  “Don’t you think it’ll look a little suspicious if I just ring her up out of the blue and say, ‘Hey there, cookie, let’s grab a bite’?”

  “Tell her you’ve heard rumors that Raimondo has a new rose coming out this summer and thought she might be interested in it for her TV show in Atlanta. Say it’s to make up for Savannah giving her the cold shoulder when she first got here. Take her to 17Hundred90; they have great Bloody Marys. Tell her about the Anna Powers ghost in room 204, make up stories, juggle, balance a ball on your nose, anything—just keep her entertained.”

  “We’re both going to hell for all the stuff we’ve pulled this last week; you know that, don’t you?” KiKi found a spot on the street so we didn’t have to valet the Beemer. I said to KiKi, “I’ll give you a half hour to get Dinah out of Marshall House, then I’m going in. Call me if you have a problem. Just think, if this works, I’ll be living next to you forever.”

  “Right now I’m trying to decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

  I pocketed my cell phone and some cash from my purse, then stuffed Old Yeller under the front seat in case a passerby had the hots for a yellow-vinyl bag and would be tempted to ravage the Beemer to get it.

  KiKi walked off, and I looked up and down Broughton Street, hoping for inspiration. The Gap, J.Crew, and Abercrombie and Fitch were not inspiring. A Dan’s Flora and Fauna van double-parked beside the Beemer. The driver, dressed in a green shirt and yellow ball cap, slid out, snagged a big bouquet, and hoofed it into the Gap store.

  In Savannah, delivering flowers got you a free pass anywhere. All I needed was an outfit of some kind, flowers, and a big dose of intestinal fortitude to pull it off. I could do this. I found a tourist trap in City Market and bought a yellow cap with Savannah stitched in teal and a matching T–shirt. I changed in the little dressing room and jammed my hair under the cap. I needed flowers, free flowers. The five bucks I had left would get me one rose, tops. I cut over to Hull Street and stopped in front of Colonial Park Cemetery.

  KiKi’s prediction of going to hell was about to take a serious turn in that direction. No one had been buried in this historical cemetery since 1850. That was a long time to be dead, but the soldiers there were not forgotten. The DAR made sure of that every Wednesday, when they had fresh flowers delivered to the center arch in memoriam. The random stuff I knew as a Southern history major was frightening.

  I walked to the center, where a wreath of gorgeous daffodils, azaleas, daisies, and tulips stood on a wire stand. A wreath wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it would have to do. “Look,” I said in a low voice to all the dead people around me. “I’m just borrowing this. It’s for a good cause, I swear. I’ll have it back in an hour. What’s an hour when you’ve been here for one hundred and seventy years, right?”

  Getting no objections, I lifted the metal stand, then felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. “What’s this all about?” said a voice with a deep drawl. For a second I thought it was God striking me dead for taking the wreath. Everyone knows God lives in Savannah because this is as close to heaven as one got on this-here earth in springtime.

  I turned and looked straight into the face of Officer Dumont, so his nametag said. He was tall and thick and formidable, but he was not the Almighty. “I’m with Dan’s Flora and Fauna,” I said, lying to the best of my ability. “We delivered the wrong wreath here. This one goes to the Savannah’s House of Slumber, over on Price. My mistake.”

  I held my breath and tried to keep my legs from shaking. Officer Dumont gave me a quick once-over. “Where’s your van?”

  Oh, Lordy, the blasted van. “My partner went to get the right wreath. I’m just going to walk this one over to House of Slumber, where it belongs, and make things right.” I lifted the stand and started off. When I got to the corner, I glanced back, and Dumont was walking down Drayton in the other direction. I crossed the street, slung the stand over my shoulder, and ducked down an alley till I wound up in the lane behind Marshall House. Thanks to Baxter Anderson, I knew where the back entrance was, and I took the rear steps to the second floor. “I’m delivering this to Dinah Corwin,” I said to a maid pushing a cart past room 210. “Do you know which room is hers?”

  “Good Lord, did she up and die? Who would order such a thing for a living, breathing person? Miss Corwin’s up in 312.” The maid got close and dropped her voice. “She’s a pain, that one is. Wants fresh towels twice a day, and the bed is never made up right to suit her.” The maid glanced at the wreath. “Maybe someone’s trying to send her a message.”

  I took the service stairs to the third floor. “I need to put this in room 312,” I said to the maid doing up room 314.

  “Sweet Jesus, are we having a funeral?”

  “It’s for Dinah Corwin.”

  “One can always hope.” The maid gave me a hard look. “Flowers are to be left at the front desk, you know.”

  “It’s on a stand. I have orders to put it in her room.”

  “Well, I’m not going to touch the thing. Bad karma.” She slipped her handy-dandy universal open-door card into the slot, and turned the handle on 312.

  “It’ll just take me a minute to freshen this up,” I said as I dragged the stand into the room.

  “Honey, I’m here to tell you that you can freshen up those flowers all day, and they’re still gonna look like they belong on a grave.”

  The maid shivered, made the sign of the cross, and left. I waited a minute, yelled thanks and good-bye, and then let the door slam shut, hoping the maid would think I was finished and left. Me and my intestinal fortitude pulled it off!

  I searched the closet, then the drawers. The black beaded earring was right in with the pair of earrings I’d sold to Dinah at the Fox. I sat on the bed feeling weak and strong and happy and flabbergasted all at the same time. Dinah was the killer for sure; I had the earring to prove it. The whole ordeal was over, except for Cupcake being dead. Hollis would come home, and how much I owed Boone wouldn’t be that bad, since Hollis didn’t go to trial. Cherry House was mine!

  I checked the door peephole. The maid wasn’t in the hall, so I picked up the wreath, opened the door, quietly closed it, and crept down the back steps. I’d found the killer! My
plan had worked!

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN MY PLAN WON’T WORK?” I said to Boone in his office an hour later. “I saw the earring that matches the one at the crime scene. Go to the police, get a search warrant, find the earring and probably Janelle’s Gucci purse, arrest Dinah—end of story.”

  Boone had that patronizing glint in his eyes that made me want to rip all his hair off and throw him out the window.

  “There’s a glitch,” he said to me in his know–it–all lawyer voice. “You broke into Dinah’s room, and from the looks of your outfit, I’m sorry I missed your performance. Anything you find because of the break–in is inadmissible in court.”

  “Tell the police you have a hunch the earring in the crime-scene photo is Dinah’s.”

  “Oh yeah, the police just love that hunch stuff.”

  “Janelle had a restraining order out against Dinah in Atlanta. That has to count for something.”

  “So Dinah and Janelle didn’t do lunch. The police can’t ransack her room and her rights because of that. I need something more, something concrete to connect Dinah Corwin to this earring before the police will move on a warrant.”

  Boone looked at me, his eyes serious, his brain having a power surge. He tapped the picture from the crime scene of the earring I’d put down on his desk. “What we need is a picture of Dinah wearing this earring.”

  He got up from behind his desk, and I followed him into the large closet with the expensive espresso machine. He stooped down by a pile of newspapers. “We’re here to look at your recycling?” I asked, the urge to strangle him stronger than ever.

  “This is the week of the Homes and Gardens Tour, and Dinah Corwin has had her face plastered all over the newspapers. Maybe there’s a photo of her with the earring. She dropped it when she murdered Janelle, so we’re looking at papers dated before then.”

  I pulled off a handful of newspapers. Boone did the same, both of us checking dates.