Playing the Devil

by R. J. Lee

  Hollis’s voice suddenly had a nervous edge to it, even cracking at one point. “A little bit longer. I can’t say how long. By the time I reached my mother’s office, she told me that Wendy Winchester and Miz Ogle had gone to the little girls’ room together. Mother also said that Miz Ogle would be checking up on that husband of hers. Why, I don’t know. She’d just told him off in no uncertain terms, and he did everything to ignore her. I can’t tell you how odious that man is . . . or rather, was.”

  “Care to go into detail?”

  Hollis had struck one of his dramatic poses at that point, Ross recalled. “I’ll cut to the chase, as you police types like to say. He enjoyed picking on me because he didn’t like the fact that I was out of the closet. I didn’t stare at him, but he would always stare at me when I went into the locker room to use the bathroom or change out of my swimming trunks. He went out of his way to make a big to-do out of my very existence. Like I had no right to be anywhere near him. Paranoia, thy name is . . . or was Brent Ogle.”

  Ross had exhaled noisily at that point and said, “Seems he went out of his way to find something not to like about everyone. By the way, was Carlos Galbis out on the portico with you and Miz Carly at any time?”

  “Nope. Miz Carly and I were alone the whole time we were out there.”

  “Thank you very much for your time,” Ross had said, ending the interview.

  Next, Ross reviewed his talk with Tip Jarvis. Particularly the sequence where the altercation between himself and Brent Ogle had become physical.

  “Why did you attack him, Mr. Jarvis?” Ross had asked.

  And Tip had not answered immediately. Ross remembered that Tip had hung his head, looking somewhat embarrassed before finally speaking. “Because I just lost it, Mr. Rierson. The three of us had been drinking, and Brent was so cocky about what he said his daddy had done. I just . . . I just wanted to strangle him for being such a pompous ass about it all.”

  “Or hit him over the head with a pestle?”

  At that point, Tip had protested vehemently. “That never happened. Connor and I never left the locker room after the lights went out. We passed the time scrolling on our phones to keep our sanity, since we couldn’t keep playing gin.”

  There was a pause in the tape, and then Ross said, “Did you and Mr. James hear any peculiar noises out in the hallway during the blackout?”

  There was another pause. “Noises? Afraid not. Just the weather outside is all we heard.”

  Connor James’s interview produced the same results largely. But Connor’s reaction to Brent’s revelation about paying off the officials to win the game was slightly different.

  “I thought Brent might be telling the truth about the clock operator,” Connor said. “Of course, he was really drunk. We all were to some extent. So I tried to pull Tip off when he went for Brent’s neck. It was a knee-jerk reaction on my part, but I have to admit, I could understand why Tip was so upset. As for me, I kind of hold things in when I shouldn’t. Sometimes, that backfires on me.”

  “And neither of you left the locker room during the blackout?”

  “No. We resigned ourselves to sitting on the bench and scrolling on our phones. It was boring as hell.”

  To be sure, Ross found it somewhat puzzling that neither man claimed he had heard anything at all out in the hallway. No thuds, no shriek, no sound of someone running. But the men’s locker room was farther away from the deck than the ladies’ locker room was. And when Ross and his partner, the burly Ronald Pike with the buzz cut, inspected the lockers after all the interrogating was over, they discovered that on the one hand, the changing benches in both were deep inside near the showers and well away from the door. The stalls, sinks, and several mirrors off to the right, on the other hand, were the first thing people saw when they walked in. It then stood to reason that someone in a stall like Wendy was would have heard more than the two men sitting on one of the changing benches could have.

  In Ross’s final interrogation, Mitzy Stone had expressed great consternation that the power outage had temporarily deprived her of getting some long-overdue online inventory ordering and also some filing done that she had been postponing.

  “We’re running out of golf tees for one thing, and I’ve got to get a new supply in fast,” she had added. “I take great pride in my job. I did agree to participate in a discussion with the others in this very office about Brent Ogle. But it was delaying my getting to my real work. I really wanted to get the discussion over and done with.”

  “And how did you pass the time when the power went out? Did you leave the pro shop and your office?”

  “No. I kept up with all the college football scores on my ESPN app. As you well know, Saturday is huge during the fall in the South. Everybody roots for one team or another. If you don’t, you’re practically considered a pariah or an alien from another planet.”

  At that point, Ross had abruptly changed the subject.

  “What was your experience with Mr. Brent Ogle?”

  Ross remembered that Mitzy had closed her eyes and shaken her head. “Unpleasant. He made it clear to me that he thought I had taken a job away from some man and his family somewhere. I’d taken food off that man’s table. There’s always that nebulous fellow out there who came first in everything for people like Brent Ogle. You know, the usual male chauvinist bull.”

  “And how did that make you feel?”

  Here, Mitzy had laughed. It seemed strange and exaggerated upon playing it back. “I shook it off like the professional I am. If I allowed myself to let that kind of thinking bother me, it would affect my job performance, and that’s the last thing I’d want. Don’t think Brent Ogle is the first man who has resented me, by the way.”

  “I can imagine,” Ross had said, noting the intensity of her tone.

  “You just do what you have to do,” Mitzy said. “Sometimes I wish men had to try as hard as we women do to succeed.”

  * * *

  After taking a brief stretching break from all his winding and rewinding, Ross sat back down and referred to the notes he had made of the type of shoes everyone was wearing during their interviews, along with a few observations from his questioning:

  Wendy—flats (she’s so practical but still looks good)

  Carly Ogle—heels (those really high ones—yikes!)

  Carlos Galbis—men’s dress shoes (to go with tux)

  Hollis Hornesby—sandals (I don’t like seeing toenails!)

  Deedah Hornesby—heels (but lower than Carly Ogle’s)

  Tip Jarvis—sneakers (said he changed from golf shoes w/cleats)

  Connor James—sneakers (changed from golf shoes also)

  Mitzy Stone—sneakers (did not play golf because of weather)

  As Ross reviewed his list, he immediately saw another major discrepancy. Both Wendy and Carly had claimed that the running footsteps had not sounded loud but muted—even “soft.” Yet Carlos Galbis, his leading suspect at the moment, was wearing heavy black dress shoes during his interview. That particular hitch did not last long, however, as the obvious quickly occurred to Ross. It ran across the front of his brain like a ticker tape: Shoes can be removed or changed entirely ... also, people running in socks make much less noise . . . for that matter, people running barefoot make even less noise. . . .

  Ross shut down his thought process, stood up, and rubbed his eyes. Were the sounds that shoes made that important, after all? Perhaps Carly’s claim that there was a lack of a fragrance in the air had more bearing on the case. At any rate, he was very tired of talking and listening and trying to make fine print out of raw chunks of information. Then, a text came through from Wendy to lift his spirits:

  r u through yet?

  He sat back down and replied, though his thumbs seemed as if they were operating in slow motion.

  just about

  wow! another murder of a mover and shaker

  yep . . . headed home now

  take care

  u 2, hugs

/>   CHAPTER 4

  It wasn’t so much that Wendy enjoyed having a woman as her editor and mentor at the Citizen as much as it was that the man who had hired her originally, Dalton Hemmings, had been a three-year trial by fire. The seventy-ish curmudgeon had kept her on a short leash, the one he particularly reserved for females under his command, whereas Lyndell Slover asked for her input at the very beginning of every assignment and took her contributions seriously. What was not to like? At last, her journalism degree from Mizzou was being utilized as fully as it was supposed to be. It was the ultimate accompaniment to her sleuthing and mathematical problem-solving skills, and it was a pleasure for her to go to work every day.

  The gold and silver plaques that had replaced those of Dalton Hemmings on the walls of the editor’s office were impressive, indeed. Numerous awards from the state press associations of Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee; and now Lyndell Renee Slover was continuing her tour of the Deep South in Rosalie, Mississippi—a spot many considered to be the “deepest” in the region.

  As Wendy and Lyndell huddled in her office on a late October Monday morning to discuss the murder of Brent Ogle at the RCC over the weekend, they both realized that the slant they chose for her proposed investigative feature was crucial. In retrospect, Wendy felt that perhaps she had been a bit too cavalier about Brent’s murder with Ross on Saturday, and she had figured out why. No one at the RCC, including Brent’s wife, Carly, had really liked the man much, and to Wendy’s way of thinking, he appeared to have no saving grace. He was a bully, a chauvinist, a homophobe, and a xenophobe, all rolled into one. She had to try very hard to push the thought out of her mind that he had finally reaped what he had been sowing for a very long time now. It didn’t quite amount to he probably deserved it. But the phrase came perilously close to justification, and Wendy did not like herself for considering it even briefly. She had always believed in deferring to her better nature.

  “What I think we need to do,” Lyndell was saying from her comfortable leather chair with a coffee mug in her hand, “is paint a picture of the dynamic out there at the RCC. Not having visited even once, it’s my understanding that it is much more of a sports-oriented club rather than a social watering hole. For the longest time, it was dominated by men, but that’s no longer the case.”

  “That’s absolutely correct,” Wendy told her. “In Rosalie, you have to belong to one of the garden clubs if social standing is what you want for yourself and your family. But if it’s tennis or golf or swimming you’re after, you join the RCC and get the exercise. Of course, Deedah Hornesby and I just recently introduced the game of bridge into the mix.” Wendy paused for an ironic grin that she didn’t hold very long. “None too successfully, I might add. As it turned out, we were upstaged by a pestle and a dead body in a hot tub. A bit grisly.”

  Lyndell nodded sympathetically. “It certainly wasn’t the unveiling you imagined, I’m quite sure.”

  For not the first time, Wendy appreciated the woman’s patient, low-key personality—a welcome change from Dalton Hemmings’s bombastic, throat-clearing directives and ultimatums. Lyndell was also easier on the eyes by far than Hemmings with his wrinkled clothes and face had ever hoped to be. The only thing they remotely had in common was that both were unmarried. Where he was bloated and sloppy, she was trim, wore business suits to perfection, disdained a lot of makeup, and wore her hair in a sensible short cut. Yet she was no glamorous model, either. Her middle-aged face was a bit too long and angular, and her smile was slightly crooked but hardly off-putting. It all meant that everyone took her seriously, but she generated no fear and loathing from her employees as Hemmings had done universally.

  “I’m starting to think that I should stay away from bridge entirely,” Wendy added. “It’s been a matter of life and death for some of the people involved in it with me these past couple of years.”

  “Are you implying you’re somehow cursed?”

  They were both unable to suppress a chuckle, and Wendy said, “Maybe that should be the slant of our feature. A paranormal piece.”

  “I realize we aren’t too far away from Halloween,” Lyndell said with a quick wink. “But I think we won’t go there.”

  Then she leaned in, and the previous levity in her tone disappeared. “Seriously, do you think you’ve gotten to know how everything runs out at the RCC to get a human-interest angle on this? That’s what I think we should aim for. I’m quite sure we can afford to leave the solution of the crime to the Rosalie Police Department. Do you have any brilliant ideas?”

  Just where the inspiration came from, Wendy did not know; but suddenly—there it was full-blown, and she was quick to run it up the flagpole. “What about the female angle? I mean, here you sit in front of me, the Citizen’s first female editor doing a bang-up job. Meanwhile, out at the RCC, Deedah Hollis has become the first female director, and Mitzy Stone is the first female golf pro. In a nutshell—the times, they are a-changin’. Even in a conservative outpost like Rosalie. And by the way, Brent Ogle was bitterly opposed to both of those hirings, and he let both women know it in no uncertain terms many times over.”

  Lyndell looked intrigued. “So we’re back to the Devil angle again, are we?”

  “It’s interesting that that keeps coming up in my conversations with everyone. You may or may not have heard this, but Brent Ogle’s nickname around town was The Baddest Devil of Them All because of his quarterbacking ability for the Rosalie High School Devils back in the day. And he acquitted himself well at LSU, too.”

  There was the slightest hint of amusement in Lyndell’s voice. “As a matter of fact, someone did mention it to me. I forgot who and where. One of those good ole boys, probably. Rosalie seems to have minted a thousand of them, like those collector coins you can buy in hopes they’ll improve in value with age. But I thought it was because of Mr. Ogle’s reputation as Mississippi’s preeminent personal injury lawyer. You know, the ‘I’ll get you five hundred thousand dollars for stubbing your toe’ type. Whoever it was said the man almost never lost a case and that some people thought the Devil was actually on his side because of that.”

  Wendy’s sigh seemed to have a great deal of thought behind it. “Under those circumstances, someone played the Devil and won Saturday night. But since it was murder, it was also a legal and moral loss.”

  Lyndell was moving her lips now, clearly repeating to herself what Wendy had just said.

  “That seems a bit convoluted, but as I said before, I think we should leave the detective work to your father and his officers. I like your female slant on your assignment very much. I want you to concentrate on explaining the changes that hiring women in positions of responsibility have produced at the RCC. There will probably be some sidebars that result from your research, and we can run with them as they arise and as we see fit.”

  Wendy nodded with a measured enthusiasm, stood up, and shook Lyndell’s hand crisply. “Understood.”

  What she did not say was that she fully expected that her interviews might very well turn up clues to the identity of Brent Ogle’s murderer. She might even end up solving the crime herself. It had worked that way for her the year before when preparing her features on the four wealthy matrons who had been simultaneously poisoned in what Rosalie had called The Grand Slam Murders. For that achievement, Dalton Hemmings had promoted her from society columnist to full-time investigative reporter. Now she found herself fully inspired by the feminist angle that Lyndell Slover had embraced, and she knew that neither Deedah Hornesby nor Mitzy Stone were wallflowers where their careers were concerned. They would be a rich source of material, and she was certain she could mine it to perfection.

  “I’ll set up appointments with Deedah and Mitzy as soon as possible,” Wendy said. “I know they’ll be more than happy to cooperate.”

  “And I’m more than confident that you can get the job done.”

  “One last thought,” Wendy added. “Shall we include you in this piece as the Citizen’s first female editor
?”

  Lyndell was very emphatic as she shook her head, took a stack of papers, and straightened them with authority. “Let’s not make this about me. When I came aboard, there was an adequate description of my résumé. Let’s just concentrate on the RCC for now.”

  “Understood.”

  * * *

  The next morning was Merleece Maxique’s day to clean Wendy’s little bungalow out on Lower Kingston Road. Merleece—she of the high cheekbones, winning smile, and rich brown skin—and Wendy had become good friends while Merleece was cook and housekeeper for Liddie Langston Rose, one of the four Gin Girls who had been poisoned last year at one of their bridge club luncheons. As it turned out, it was something that Merleece had said to Wendy that had helped her solve the crimes when the entire Rosalie Police Department—including her father, Captain Bax, and her boyfriend, Ross Rierson—had been stumped.

  Wendy and Merleece had become so close by then that neither wanted to lose contact. So Wendy had decided to broach the subject over the phone one day. “I’ve been wondering,” she had begun, “do you think you could squeeze one morning every two weeks out of your schedule for Miz Crystal there at Concord Manor for you to clean my little house for me? I’d pay you the same hourly rate you’re getting from Miz Crystal, and that way, we could have a little visit and catch up with each other as friends. After all, I’m your Strawberry and you’re my Merleece, and nobody can keep us apart.”

  Merleece had not hesitated. “Lissen, my Strawberry with that pretty hair a’ yours, I don’t even have to ask Miz Crystal. I’m ’a tell her I’m gone do it, and that’s that. She knows they’s nobody like me in Rosalie to keep up that fancy mansion a’ hers the way she like it—and who’d also put up with her nonsense.”

  Wendy had pursued the subject out of irresistible curiosity. “What’s her latest nonsense?”

  It would surely be another priceless story. The widowed nouveau riche, supremely lacquered Crystal Forrest was always up to something preposterous, as she labored mightily to portray herself as a sixth- or seventh-generation Rosaliean when everyone knew quite well she had arrived from Al-benn-y, Georgia (she had explained to everyone that that was the correct pronunciation) a mere three years earlier to restore the dilapidated Old Concord Manor.