The call to the local Drug Enforcement Administration office was business all the way. Yes, her contact said, Buford Dodd was a suspect in drug drops in Watkin County. But so were lots of other folks.
“These country boys can be mean,” the agent warned. “And I apologize for sounding like a chauvinist oink when I say this, Ms. Adams, but it’s no business for a lady. I wouldn’t sniff around these boys if I was you, even if I knew I had the right tree. They hurt you real bad when they fall.”
Nine
“What exactly is it that you want to know, Samantha?” Queen Ridley rose, stiff-backed, from her white sofa. “What are all these questions about that unfortunate ‘surprise’ party leading toward?” She lit a cigarette and exhaled through her lovely nose. “Or is this just some peculiar brand of torture that you reporters reserve for the bereaved?”
“Queen, I…” Blew it. Came on too fast, too strong.
“You are here as press, aren’t you? Asking questions about my—our personal lives. Isn’t that why you left your earring behind?”
Sam’s years of training stood her in good stead. She didn’t miss a beat. “No, truly, that was an accident. And I’m terribly sorry if I’ve offended you.”
Queen stood with her head bowed just a tad. It was quite some pose, the mourning Queen, sad but imperious, perfectly coiffed and made up. Shiny as ever, the Widow Ridley was in gray silk. Had Sam caught her on her way out to a dinner party?
“Thank you for coming by,” Queen was saying now as if she had just ended an audience. She paused at the bottom of the stairs. “I’m very tired. If you’ll excuse me.” She even managed a break in her voice on those last words, and then she floated upward.
Sam stood there debating. Did she dare slip into the kitchen to say hello to Lona? Or upstairs to see Liza? Too risky. Queen could come back down at any second. She turned and opened the front door.
Suddenly Oglethorpe raced past her like a black and white cannonball.
Lona was right behind him. “Ogle! You bad dog!”
Sam joined the chase down the front steps and across the lawn. The two of them charged along the sidewalk after the galloping dog. They caught up with him a block from Piedmont Park.
“Oh, thank you,” Lona gasped when she had the Dalmatian, whose tongue was lolling in a silly grin, firmly by the collar.
Then they turned and started back toward the house. Lona shook her head. Her imaginary silver bangles clanged silently. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with him now, with Mr. Ridley…” She trailed off, her lip trembling.
So Lona had liked Forrest Ridley. Well, why wouldn’t she? As far as Sam knew, everyone had—except Herman Blanding. She made a mental note to see Blanding as soon as possible.
“I heard what you asked Miz Queen about that surprise party,” Lona said. “Did she tell you about the note that came afterwards?”
Sam shook her head. No, she hadn’t—Liza had.
“They talked about it at the breakfast table,” Lona went on. “Miz Queen sure had a bee in her bonnet.”
“And Ridley?”
“He took it in stride, like he did everything else. He just laughed.” Her face clouded over then. “What do you think really happened up there?”
“I think he fell over Apalachee Falls. What do you think?”
“I think he was too smart to do anything foolish like that. I think somebody pushed him.”
“Who?” Sam asked bluntly.
Lona shook her head, but her face said she had her suspicions.
Two young neighborhood boys yelled greetings at Oglethorpe as they wheeled past on their bicycles. The dog lunged against Lona’s grip, but she was stronger than she looked. He was going nowhere.
“Now who’s gonna walk this monster all the way across the park every night?”
“Is that where Ridley took him?”
“I never was sure. They took off in this direction most nights. Right after supper, just as I’d be heading out. I don’t know exactly where they went.”
“Or for how long?”
“Nope. As I said, it was always when I was going. But Miz Queen used to say…” She paused.
Sam waited. She knew Lona didn’t need urging. She’d gotten onto the woman’s rhythm by now. The delays were caused by her thoughtfulness; she was weighing and measuring.
“Miz Queen used to be after Mr. Ridley all the time. Said he spent a lot more time with that dog than he did with her.”
“Was that true?”
“Just the two of them?” She nodded. “That’s for sure. But then”—a smile pulled at the corners of her mouth—“Ogle didn’t give him any backtalk.”
“You know what I’d like to know, Lona? I’d really like to know where Mr. Ridley went every night with this dog. Do you think if you gave him his head, he’d go on that same walk?”
“Looks like it to me. Every chance he gets, he heads out in this direction.”
“Not now, because I think Queen might wonder,” Sam said. “But some other time…”
Lona nodded. “I’ll see where he wants to go. And I’ll get you that party note. You’ll find out what happened to Mr. Ridley.”
It was a statement, not a question. Sam wished she felt that confident.
*
“Will he know what this is in reference to?” asked the secretary in one of those officious voices that made Sam want to fire off a smart answer. But the woman held the keys to the kingdom, so Sam held her tongue.
“Yes, he will,” she nicey-niced into the phone.
But of course he wouldn’t. Edison Kay would have no idea why Samantha was calling him, but he wouldn’t care, either—he found her an attractive woman. Sam knew that. Years ago as a cub reporter, she had inspected her arsenal and evaluated all its weapons.
“Why, Samantha dear, to what do I owe this pleasure? No, don’t tell me now. Why don’t you tell me over lunch?”
“Why, that’s awfully sweet of you,” she crooned, standing off to one side in her mind and listening to how well she dropped into her Southern belle voice these days. “But I’m afraid I have a previous engagement. What I called for, Edison, is to make an appointment with you for some other time.”
“I’m at your disposal.”
“Actually, I’d like to talk to both you and Kay Kay—and Totsie. We’ve decided to do a longer piece on Forrest Ridley for the Sunday magazine, a profile, and I’d like to have the input of those who knew him best.”
She knew that Edison wouldn’t know that that was not the sort of thing she did—nor did the Constitution know about any such story. The whole thing was a fabrication.
She really wanted to know more about Ridley and his practice and what skeletons might therein lie, and who better to ask than oily Edison, who was not only Ridley’s partner but such a good friend that he had delivered his eulogy? She was also curious about Kay Kay, who had bad-mouthed the deceased’s wife at his wake. And Totsie… There was more to Totsie than met the eye, and she’d known Ridley since the day she was born.
“Why, that’s a wonderful idea. I’ll have to check with Kay Kay’s calendar. That woman’s busier than I am.” He chuckled. There was a pause while he stuck a cigar in his mouth; Sam could hear him sucking on it. “Now, you’re sure you won’t change your mind about joining me for lunch?”
*
“Peaches, you have outdone yourself again,” George said, pushing back from the dinner table later that evening. She’d made crab cakes, pencil-thin asparagus, a green salad. For dessert there’d been the first of the season’s strawberries over her shortcake.
“Glad you liked it,” Peaches said, smiling. Though she could be vinegary, she was all honey when someone praised her cooking.
“One of these days I’m going to have to get my friend Annie to write one of her food articles on you,” said Sam. “You’re a walking cookbook just waiting for the doing.”
“Don’t say that,” George protested. “We see her little enough as it is. I couldn’t
bear for Peaches to become a star.”
“Get out of here,” Peaches said, but she was still smiling. “Scat, both of you. I’ve got work to do.”
“Why don’t we take our coffee out on the front porch?” Sam suggested.
“A capital idea,” said George.
The porch was actually a terrace, a stone-floored continuation of the front entrance, which no one ever used. They settled into black wrought-iron chairs sporting a patina of green.
“Now I remember why we never sit out here,” George grumbled. “Horace,” he said as the man approached with a tray loaded with the small silver after-dinner coffeepot and George’s cognac. “Tomorrow I want all this furniture to go to the Lighthouse for the Blind’s resale shop. And I want you to find me some wicker chairs with soft cushions and a good-sized table to match.”
“They won’t hold up.” Horace was ever practical about George’s money.
“I don’t give a damn. If they rot, we’ll get new ones next year, and every year after that. I am not going to spend my old age with this goddamned uncomfortable furniture stamping its imprint into my butt.”
“Yes, George,” Horace said. “I’ll call Rich’s tomorrow.” Then, just as he was about to turn away, he slipped an envelope in front of Samantha as if it were an afterthought.
He should have been an actor, Sam thought as she slit the envelope. His timing was perfect.
Inside were two sheets of paper. One was the folded and refolded note to the Ridleys that had arrived after the surprise party.
Liza was right. It was typewritten, with no errors, no erasures. And her quote was exact: Did you like your surprise? There’ll be more you’ll like even less. The words practically jumped off the plain white paper.
Samantha shivered.
“What is it?” George asked.
She handed him the note, and inspected the second sheet, smaller, lined, and inscribed with pencil. But she began to wave it as if it were an engraved invitation from the Princess of Wales.
“This is it! Listen: ‘202 Virginia Circle is where Oglethorpe goes. Lona.’”
“Huzzah!” cried George.
“Can I get you anything else?” asked Horace.
“Tell me something,” Sam said. “How’d you do that so fast? I saw Lona only this morning.”
“Telegraph’s built for speed,” he replied enigmatically and then turned to leave.
“Beats the hell out of computers, doesn’t it?” asked George.
“Now, a computer is just a bunch of zeros,” Horace responded, changing his mind about his exit. “I went and looked at one the last time I was in Rich’s. It was cold. I like dealing with people myself. They can be in a real hurry, if they see that it’s something you need—and something they care about with their hearts. As far as I can see, a computer doesn’t care about anything.”
Peaches appeared at the front door. “Dr. Talbot’s on the phone for you, Sam,” she announced, her voice as cool and noncommittal as if Beau, who hadn’t rung this house that she knew of in almost two decades, did so every day.
As Samantha left the porch, Peaches asked, “So what have you all been talking about? Did I hear computers? I suppose you two old men are thinking about joining the bandwagon of high tech?”
“I knew it was going to come to this,” Horace said to George, “when they gave her that first computer down at the literacy program office.”
“Well, I told you then that there are four-year-old children those machines have taught to read,” Peaches retorted.
“Does that mean you think we’re dumber than four-year-olds if we don’t get one?” George asked.
“I just said then, and I’ll repeat, there’s illiterate and there’s illiterate, if you know what I mean.”
“Horace, would you please buy Peaches a computer while you’re at Rich’s getting the wicker furniture? We might as well, because there’s uncomfortable and there’s uncomfortable, if you know what I mean.”
“I do,” Horace said, “I do indeed know what you mean.”
*
Sam took the call in the kitchen.
“So?” Beau said.
“So what?”
“So what happened when you went to see Queen?” Sam held the receiver out in front of her for a moment and stared at it.
“How are we going to work together on this case if you don’t keep me up on the skinny?” Beau complained.
“There’s a real obvious answer, Beau. We aren’t.”
He was unflappable. “So what do you think? Did she kill him for his money? Or because he was stepping out on her?”
“What makes you think that?”
“Which?”
“That there was another woman?”
“Often is, isn’t there?”
There was a long pause before Sam said, “Yes, Beau. Quite frequently, yes.”
He cleared his throat. “Well, did she give anything away?”
Sam looked down at Lona’s envelope, which she was still holding. “Can you take fingerprints off paper?”
“Sure, if we’re lucky.”
She told him about the surprise party note.
“It’s probably been handled to hell and gone. Am I right?”
“Right. Me, George, Lona, Liza, Queen, Ridley, God knows who else.”
“Well, it’s worth a try anyway. But you’re going to have to get me smooth prints of everyone you just named.”
“Mine are on file at the paper.”
“And Ridley’s I can get from the—hell, no,” he said, “I can’t. There was no autopsy.”
“But he was an attorney.”
“You’re right. He’s on file with the PD. What about the others? Can you manage them?”
Sam thought about how quickly Lona had worked through Horace earlier in the day. “I think so.”
Beau’s voice was excited. “Now we’re cooking. The physical evidence never lies. That’s why I love it. Your hunches and my facts—we’re gonna be a great team, Ms. Adams.”
“We are not.”
“You want to be a glory hog? No problem. You don’t have to give me a word of credit. Just helping you is enough. I’ll be plenty satisfied.”
“Oh, Lord.” What was happening here? It was like a seduction: she kept saying no and he kept going right ahead.
“Send the prints right over when you get them. Or I can pick them up when I get home.”
“What?”
“When I get home tonight. Didn’t I tell you we’ve filed for a divorce? I moved into Mother’s house yesterday. I’ll be right across the street.”
“You what?”
And with that bit of news, he rang off.
Ten
The next morning Sam was headed toward the Virginia circle address Lona had given her when she came upon a crash between a fire engine and a garbage truck. A motorcycle cop waved her in precisely the opposite direction from where she wanted to go. She was driving south toward Grant Park, Oakland Cemetery, and Cabbagetown, looking for a place to turn around, when it dawned on her—Cabbagetown! Veering from the right turn she’d been about to make, she winced at the screech of brakes behind her. Herman Blanding, the all-gray man who’d threatened Forrest Ridley’s life, lived in Cabbagetown. He was second on her list; she’d move him up one.
Cabbagetown was a residential community that grew up around the skirts of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill in the nineteenth century. It initially housed employees of the factory, who at the century’s turn numbered some 700 souls transforming bales of Georgia cotton into finished cloth. As World War II created a demand for sandbags for bunkers and bomb shelters, Fulton Bag grew more prosperous, hiring almost 3,000 workers working in three shifts around the clock. Smokestacks rising from the red brick buildings spewed exhaust across the neighborhood; the reverberating looms shook the small shotgun houses. Charles Dickens would have felt at home in Cabbagetown when Fulton Bag was at its height.
The mill was shuttered now, absorbed into first one cong
lomerate and then another, and finally closed because its old-fashioned methodology, working from raw material to finished product, made it noncompetitive. But the neighborhood remained, its small one- and two-family tin-roofed frame houses threatened by yet another modern specter, gentrification, as young people seeking close-in, affordable places to live moved in.
“We shall not be moved” was the motto of the residents, holding on in their poor little houses on winding, sometimes unpaved streets. These were descendants of the rural Georgians who’d come from the mountains and the plains to find employment in the big city. “Recalcitrant white trash” was what the real estate speculators called them. “Proud” was what they called themselves as they planted signs reading “Speculators Keep Out” amidst the cabbage roses.
There was a sign, too, on the front porch of Herman Blanding’s house on Pearl Street. The “KEEP OUT!” was printed. Scrawled in a slanting hand below were the words “This means YOU!!”
Any reporter worth her salt ignored such warnings. As she approached the tumbledown, peeling house, Sam cocked her head to the left to correct its fifteen-degree list. On the front porch was piled an amazing collection of goods, the sort often seen around houses in the country. But one rarely found such a hodgepodge of old sewing machines, car parts, furniture, tires, wooden crates, and broken bottles within city limits. Sam picked her way through the littered yard for a better look.
As her foot touched the bottom step, a fiend of hell lunged out of the moldering debris and, with its loud bark and hot breath, nearly took her head off.
She stumbled backwards as if in slow motion, fearing that this long, loud second was her last, aware of her thundering heartbeat, forgetting to take a breath. Then out of the maelstrom, she heard a man call: “Who is it, General Lee? Did you kill ’em yet?”
The torn screen door screeched open on its one remaining hinge, and the all-gray man she had seen at Ridley’s funeral stepped out into a tiny clear space on the front porch. He patted the raging German shepherd, who instantly calmed at his touch. Herman Blanding was monochromatic again today, but this time his garb was no overcoat. He was decked out, cap to boots, in the frayed uniform of an officer of the Confederate States of America.
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