Murder Boogies with Elvis

by Anne George

  “You look like you’re already in mourning,” Sister said when I came into the den. “You should wear bright clothes to a hospital.”

  “You want me to go with you or not?”

  Sister nodded and stood up. She was bright enough for the two of us in a flowered broomstick skirt and her purple boots. “It’s just that color cheers people up.”

  “You’re right,” I admitted. “And you look very nice.”

  “Well, you can’t help it if you don’t have my flair.”

  She was telling the truth.

  “I left Haley’s chair at their house on my way over here,” she explained as we walked to the car. “Just stuck it in the hall.”

  “I didn’t know you had a key.”

  Sister patted her purse. “Visa card. It’s a wonder somebody hasn’t robbed them blind. You’d think Philip would have better sense.”

  “They have the alarm system.”

  “With the code numbers punched so much they’re worn off. Besides, I saw what you hit the other day to set it.”

  We climbed up into Sister’s Mercedes. “I miss my Jag,” she said. “I’m going to get me another one, I swear.”

  And with that, she backed out of my driveway, and we hauled ass to University Hospital.

  “I think I’ve decided on my dress,” she said, nodding toward the books Bonnie Blue had brought, which were bouncing on the backseat as we hit a few potholes.

  “Is it one I’d remember? One of the ones you and Fred were looking at?”

  “No. It’s farther back in the book. It’s called the Rubenesque design. No frills or froufrou. Princess style. But it’s got a round neckline cut real low.” She drew a circle almost to her waist. “I mean real low.”

  “The bridesmaids’ dresses aren’t going to match it, are they?” I asked, alarmed.

  “Of course not. You don’t have anything to hold it up.”

  I couldn’t argue with her there.

  “Look. There’s a woman coming out of a parking place.” Sister crossed two lanes of traffic on Nineteenth Street and grabbed it. A man in a Nissan, who had been slowing down, planning on parking there, shot her a bird.

  “Rude,” Sister said. “I swear folks get ruder every day. Don’t make eye contact with him, Mouse. It’s folks like that who cause road rage, and they say not to look them in the eye. You don’t want them to think you’re challenging them.”

  There was no way that I was going to look the man in the eye. I was concentrating on catching my breath. I had almost succeeded in breathing normally by the time we got to the hospital elevator.

  An attempt had been made to make the intensive care waiting room at University a soothing room. The walls were painted an attractive shade of pink, almost a peach, and a flowered wallpaper border at the top picked up the pink and added several other colors including the dark green of leaves, which a couple of the sofas matched. The other sofa and chairs were an industrial gray. On the TV mounted on the wall, Oprah and Deepak Chopra were discussing how important it was for people to renew the power of spirit in their lives. The message seemed to be missing its target here. Only one woman was looking at the TV, and she didn’t look too hopeful.

  Tammy Sue, Olivia, and an older small woman with gray hair, who was introduced to us as Larry’s aunt Maude were sitting on one of the sofas. Aunt Maude sat between the two girls. I liked her immediately.

  “I love your boots,” she told Mary Alice, “and I hope you’ve come to get Tammy Sue out of here some. If she doesn’t get a decent meal in her body and some sleep, she’s going to fall over, and we’re going to have two patients on our hands.”

  “That’s what we’ve come for,” Sister said. “Any news?”

  Tammy Sue shook her head no. Her eyes were so swollen that I wondered if she were seeing clearly. “They say there’s nothing to do but wait. We get to go in to see him five minutes every hour.” She caught her breath. “He doesn’t even look like himself.”

  “Well, Aunt Maude’s right, Tammy Sue,” Olivia said. “You need to get out of here for a while. Larry doesn’t know you’re here anyway.”

  Tammy Sue bristled at her sister-in-law. “Yes, he does. He does so know I’m here.”

  “No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t know a thing.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  The other people in the waiting room looked up with interest. Aunt Maude turned to Olivia and informed her quietly that she was acting like a Simpson. The Simpsons, I assumed, were the common-as-pig-tracks branch of the Ludmiller family. Every Southern family has one. At any rate, Olivia slid back into her corner of the sofa, thoroughly chastised.

  “You go, honey,” Aunt Maude said to Tammy Sue. “I’ll be right here. Get yourself some rest and some food.”

  Tammy Sue looked at her watch. “We get to see him in ten more minutes. Then I’ll go.”

  So we sat down and waited. And not even the pleasant decor of the room could make it anything but depressing.

  “What are we going to feed her?” Sister asked while the three women went in to see Larry.

  “She needs comfort food. Some homemade vegetable soup maybe, and some cornbread.”

  Sister nodded. “That sounds good. Do you have any?”

  “In my freezer.”

  “Then we’ll take her by your house to eat.” She picked up a People magazine and glanced through it. I have no idea what she saw in the magazine that made her inform me and the other people sitting around us that, Lord, she was grateful that she was heterosexual.

  An elderly woman got up, poured herself some coffee, and motioned for us to make room for her to sit on the sofa. Sister and I scooted down. The woman looked around the waiting room to make sure everyone had gone back to their sleep or returned to their magazines and then leaned over and whispered, “Elvis was here last night. I know everybody thinks he’s dead, but he’s not.” She paused to see what kind of reaction she was going to get from Sister and me. “He had on his white satin jumpsuit, and he sat right on this couch.”

  “That was Buddy Stuckey,” Sister explained. “He’s an Elvis impersonator.”

  “No, this was Elvis. He looked good, too. Lost a lot of that puffy weight he’d put on. I just thought I’d tell you so you’d know that your loved one’s going to be all right.”

  “Thank you,” we both said.

  “You’re welcome.” She glanced at the other occupants of the room again. “There’s some here don’t believe it.”

  Sister nodded. “I can understand that.”

  “Lost a lot of weight, he had. Wasn’t good for him anyway. Just asking for diabetes, you ask me. That’s what’s wrong with my sister in yonder.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sister said.

  The woman sipped her coffee. “She’s going to be all right.”

  We agreed that we were sure that she was.

  Tammy Sue looked more woebegone when she came out than she had when she went in. “He’s so pitiful,” she said. “Black and blue.” She wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “Who would have done this?”

  “We’ll find out,” Aunt Maude said soothingly. “And he moved his leg. That’s a great sign.”

  I caught my breath. I hadn’t thought of the possibility of paralysis, which, of course, existed.

  “Come on, Tammy Sue,” Mary Alice said. “We got a great parking place almost at the front door.” She put her arms around the girl’s shoulders. “And how does some homemade vegetable soup sound to you?”

  “Okay. And a shower would be wonderful.”

  I looked back as we left the waiting room. Olivia Ludmiller was standing by the window, her small face awash with tears.

  An hour later, Tammy Sue, Sister, and I were sitting at my kitchen table. Tammy Sue and Sister were eating vegetable soup and corn muffins. I always double the recipe when I make corn muffins and put the extra in the freezer. A minute or less in the microwave, and it’s like fresh-baked muffins. I wasn’t hungry since I had had lunch with Fred, b
ut I couldn’t resist a muffin.

  “This is good,” Tammy Sue said, tasting the soup. She had taken a shower, washed her hair, and had on the navy velour bathrobe I had bought Fred for his birthday, which he didn’t say he didn’t like, but which he’d never worn. Draw your own conclusions.

  “Patricia Anne’s a good cook,” Sister said.

  I was pleased at the compliment.

  “She spends a lot of time in the kitchen.”

  I wasn’t as pleased with that remark. It sounded like I didn’t have much of a life. I gave her a little kick on the ankle. “So does Martha Stewart.”

  “When Larry gets out of the hospital, I’m going to subscribe to Martha Stewart Living and do all of the things she does. Like make my own Christmas decorations instead of buying them at Wal-Mart. And I’m going to bone my own chicken and cook it with rosemary stuffed under the skin. I saw her do that one day on TV.” Tears came into Tammy Sue’s eyes. “Do you know I’ve never boned a chicken, and I don’t even know what rosemary is?”

  “It’s an herb like parsley, sage, and thyme,” Sister said. You could hear the three beats between sage and thyme.

  “My mother was a wonderful cook. Not fancy food but good stuff like chicken and dumplings. I wish I’d paid more attention to how she did things, gotten her recipe for turkey and dressing, for instance. Things like that.” Tammy Sue sighed. “She kept our house so clean you could eat off the floor.”

  “Really?” Sister cut her eyes around at me.

  “And she’d even iron Daddy’s underwear.” The tears spilled over. “I’ve never ironed Larry’s underwear.”

  Sister put her spoon down. She was beginning to look panicked.

  “I’ve never ironed Fred’s, either,” I said. “I don’t believe in ironing what doesn’t show.”

  Tammy Sue gave me a weak smile.

  “You could eat off her floor?” Sister asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. She loved a clean house.”

  I could hear Muffin scratching in the litter box in the pantry. So much for eating off of my floor.

  Tammy Sue heard the sound, too. “I love cats,” she said. “Larry and I have two of them now. But when I was little, every year I’d ask Santa Claus for a kitten, and I never got one. Daddy hates cats.”

  Visions of Bubba Cat, asleep on his heating pad on Sister’s kitchen counter, danced through my head. Through Sister’s, too, I’m sure. I glanced at Tammy Sue to see if she was putting us on. But her face as she leaned over her soup was guileless. Sister, on the other hand, was frowning as she broke open a muffin and buttered it. She had been, I knew, considering taking Bubba Cat with them on their honeymoon in the RV, rationalizing that if she put him on a counter on his heating pad, he wouldn’t know the difference.

  I decided I’d better change the subject. “Something nice happened while you were in seeing Larry,” I said. “A lady came over and told us that Elvis had visited them in the waiting room last night. Mary Alice told her that it was Buddy, but she didn’t believe it. Tell him he’s very convincing.”

  Tammy Sue looked up, puzzled. “Buddy wasn’t there last night. He had to do a show at a VFW hall, and I told him to go ahead. There wasn’t anything he could do at the hospital.”

  “Oh.” I leaned over and concentrated on buttering my muffin. The rest of the meal was very quiet, each of us concentrating on her own thoughts.

  “Maybe he left and came back while Tammy Sue was dozing or was in visiting Larry,” Sister said later. Tammy Sue was asleep in my guest room. Sister and I had cleared off the kitchen table and she had brought Bonnie Blue’s books in.

  “Probably,” I said.

  She opened one of the books to a place she had marked with a folded page from the Birmingham News that had a picture on it of spring shoe fashions. “Here’s the Rubenesque.”

  It was beautiful, very simple, and certainly not cut as low as she had drawn it.

  “Perfect.” And it was true.

  She sat down and studied the dress. “I don’t know, Mouse. You heard all that stuff about Virgil’s first wife. He’s not going to get a spotless house or ironed shorts from me. He’s not even going to get the body that all my other husbands married me for.”

  “Don’t be silly. They didn’t marry you for your body. They married you because they loved you. And so does Virgil.”

  “Well, I know that. But the first three never expected to have their shorts ironed, and they all loved cats. That really worries me. Virgil never mentioned that he didn’t like Bubba.”

  “Maybe he’s changed. Mellowed.”

  “I’m going to find out. That’s for sure.”

  The phone rang and I grabbed it, hoping it hadn’t awakened Tammy Sue.

  “Patricia Anne?” It was Bernice Armstrong’s voice. My stomach knotted, but I didn’t get the anger from her that I had expected. Instead, she said that she wanted to apologize for Day’s putting a knife in my purse and causing me so much trouble.

  “I swear I can’t imagine what came over that child,” she continued. “She says it was on the floor of the stage, and she picked it up, not thinking, and then when she saw in the paper that it might be a murder weapon, she panicked. And your purse was there. She says she hardly remembers dropping it in.”

  “Has she told the police this?”

  “She’s still down there. I went down there with her, but they’re going to do a bunch of stuff, make sure she’s telling the truth.”

  “A voice-stress analyzer,” I said.

  “That sounds about right. Anyway, they said I might as well come on home, and it’s a good thing I did because poor Maurice had fallen right over on his face in the foyer. It’s the strangest thing. Looks like some kind of animal attacked him. There’s fur everywhere.”

  It took me a second to put the name Maurice and the stuffed grizzly bear together.

  “He’s heavy as lead, so the best I can do is vacuum around him until I can get someone here to help me stand him up to see if he’s all together.” She paused. “I don’t know where Dusk is.”

  “I’m sorry, Bernice,” I said. What else could I say?

  “No, I’m the one who’s sorry, and Day is going to call you herself and apologize as soon as she sets foot out of that jail. I promise you that. I didn’t raise my girls to act like that.”

  Apparently it had never occurred to Bernice that there might be more to the knife incident than Day just happening to see it on the floor and pick it up. I wondered if Dusk had told her mother about her marriage to Griffin Mooncloth and the fact that he was blackmailing her. I doubted it, or she would have sounded more upset about the consequences of the questioning that Day was going through at the police station.

  “Well, let me go vacuum, Patricia Anne. And you can be expecting that call.”

  “Bernice,” I said to Sister when I hung up. “Day admitted putting the knife in my purse. She’s down at the police station now. Bernice was apologizing for her.”

  Sister closed the books and stood up. “You know, I just can’t see Day Armstrong getting so mad at Griffin Mooncloth for trying to stay married to Dusk that she kills him. Unless she’s in love with him herself. There are four things people kill for, Mouse. Money, revenge, jealousy, and hatred. And, of course, sometimes they’re just plain nuts. But, think about it. Would you kill a man because he wanted to stay married to me?”

  “No. I’d let you kill him.”

  “Exactly. So, unless Day was madly in love with Griffin herself, Dusk was the one who killed him.” There was some sense lurking around in here somewhere. Sister picked up the books and said she was going to the Big, Bold, and Beautiful Shoppe to talk to Bonnie Blue but that she would be back to take Tammy Sue to the hospital. “Let her sleep a couple of hours. Lord knows she needs it.”

  So the rest of the afternoon was very quiet. I pulled off my good gray outfit, put on some jeans, and cleaned the house. It was the first time I had felt like it in several days. I couldn’t vacuum, but I mopped the kitche
n floor and dusted, even in the living room, where we never go. I cleaned the toilets and scrubbed the sinks. By the time Tammy Sue woke up and came out of the guestroom, the whole house smelled as if a lemon tree had been grafted onto a pine.

  The first thing she did was call the intensive care waiting room and talk to Aunt Maude. “Yes, ma’am,” I heard her say. “Okay.” And then, “Is Olivia still there?” When she hung up, she leaned over the counter as if she were too tired to stand up.

  “Any change?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “He’s still unconscious. Where’s Mrs. Crane?”

  “She had a couple of errands to run. She should be back in a few minutes. You want some tea with a lot of ice in it?”

  “That would be great.”

  “Then why don’t you go sit down in the den, and I’ll bring you some.”

  “Thanks. Do you have any Tylenol or aspirin?”

  I opened the kitchen cabinet and handed her the Extra Strength Tylenol bottle. She took two and walked into the den as if all of her muscles were stiff. When I came into the den, she was stretched out in Fred’s recliner.

  “I didn’t know it was possible to get this tired,” she said, taking the tea. “This should help, though. Thanks, Mrs. Hollowell.”

  “You’re welcome, Tammy Sue. You want a snack of some kind?”

  “No, thanks.” She took her Tylenol and drank some of the tea. “At least Olivia’s gone from the hospital. Maybe she’ll stay gone for a while.” Tammy Sue stared into her glass as if it were a crystal ball. “I know she means well, but she’s driving me crazy. She’s not the easiest person to get along with at the best of times, and God knows this isn’t the best of times.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I am, too. She’s so crazy about my brother, Buddy, that sometimes I think she’s going to get him. Which is fine with me.” Tammy Sue put her glass on the table and shrugged. “What do I know? They might be the happiest couple in the world. But right now she keeps saying that it’s her fault that Larry was hurt, and that there’s something she has to tell him. I keep asking her what, but she says she has to tell Larry.”

  “If she knows something about who attacked him, she needs to tell the police, not wait around.”