“Well, Mary Scarlett?” he finished hopefully.
“Get up, Allen. You’re ruining your pants.”
He rose slowly, grinning down at her, still holding her hands. “You weren’t listening to a word I said, were you? Why, you were a million miles away. Mary Scarlett, I just asked you to marry me!”
“I know, I know,” she said impatiently. “But right now I have to call the airlines and see if I can still get a flight to New York.”
“Then you agree?” he whooped.
“To New York. Not to marriage.” She tossed her words over her shoulder as she dialed the phone.
“Hey, I’ll take what I can get for now,” he answered with a lusty chuckle. “But once I get that mirror for you, I’ll expect more than a simple thank you.”
Mary Scarlett missed thus last bit from Allen. She had someone on the phone and was making arrangements to go to New York. When she was put on hold for a moment, she suddenly recalled what the spirits on the other side had told her through Helga at Dr. Schlager’s—that the mirror was with a great “bird.” As Bolt had suspected, it had been on a plane at the time, winging its way from Savannah to New York.
To Bolt’s vast relief, Lumpkin Quincey was not a tough nut to crack. Once he was in custody, he spilled his guts about everything. Bolt stood outside the mirror-window of the interrogation cell, drinking bad coffee from a styrofoam cup while he watched the thin, mean-tempered thief and extortionist squirm under two detectives’ unrelenting questioning.
“I never heard of Richard Lamar or any woman named Magnolia,” the pointy-faced punk said, shying away from the direct gaze of the “bad cop” officer firing questions in an angry snarl. “You got the wrong guy. I’m just an honest, hardworking security guard, trying to get along. You gonna mess things up so I lose my job. I don’t know nothing.”
“If you’re the wrong guy,” the second detective said almost pleasantly, playing the “good cop” role to the hilt, “perhaps you’d care to explain to us how all that stuff in those boxes got into your room, Mr. Quincey.”
His narrow head twitched to one side with a nervous tic. “Don’t know,” he mumbled. “I guess somebody broke in and left all that junk at my place. He’s the guy you ought to be looking for. Why don’t you arrest him for breaking and entering?”
Bolt noted that Quincey glanced up quickly to see if the officers were buying his story.
“Well now, Mr. Quincey, I guess it could have happened that way, but, you see, the manager of your apartment told us he saw you hauling all those boxes from your van the day you moved in.”
“He’s lying!” Quincey snapped.
The big, farmboyish officer nodded slowly, as if considering that possibility. “That brings up a problem, doesn’t it? Your word against his. I guess we’ve got no choice but to call in our polygraph expert and let him run tests on you and the apartment manager.” Detective Edgerton sounded bored, world-weary, but still amiable. “Then we’ll have to run fingerprint comparisons, phone all those numbers in that book we found and check them out, find this Lamar fellow and his lady friend Magnolia. It’ll be a whole lot of work, but if you won’t cooperate, we can do it And we will. And we’ll get to the bottom of all this. And you’ll likely have time to get a library card all your own down at Reidsville, where guys who don’t cooperate tend to wind up for a long stay.”
Bolt watched Quincey squirm under Edgerton’s calm gaze.
No one said anything for several minutes. The only sounds coming from the room were Quincey’s jeans rubbing the wooden seat of the chair and the nervous cracking of his knuckles.
“Well, Haggard, what do you think?” the nice cop said to his surly, short-tempered companion.
“What do I think, Edgerton?” Haggard’s deep voice boomed inside the small cell. He sounded angry enough to rip Quincey’s ‘possum-head from his scrawny body. “I think he’s a goddamn liar. I think we oughta lock him up down at Reidsville and throw away the fucking key! He’s too dumb to help himself, so why should we try to make it easy for him? The bastard ought to see by now that he’s peanuts … that it’s Lamar we want, the brains of the operation. But if he says he don’t know no Lamar, then I guess Mr. Q here will have to serve time. If he had the brains God give a billygoat, he’d tell us where to find Lamar and we’d cut him a deal.”
Quincey looked up quickly to see if Haggard was serious.
“He’s right, you know,” Edgerton said in that velvet voice. “If you helped us find Lamar and explained to us what all this is about, we’d go easy on you.”
“How easy?” Quincey wanted to know.
Edgerton smiled sweetly. “That depends on you, on what you can tell us and how much it helps.”
Once Lumpkin Quincey started running off at the mouth, it seemed to Bolt that he just couldn’t stop. He had known Big Dick Lamar since college. They had been fraternity pledges together, but Quincey hadn’t lasted into a second quarter. Over the years, he’d always been at Lamar’s beck and call, for the right price. He was the one who had arranged to smuggle Big Dick’s Cuban cigars into the country. He was the one who found women for Lamar when he couldn’t find his own. He had talked to the right people to fix DUI charges against Lamar, to hush things up when Big Dick got caught with a teenage girl whose mother threatened to blow the whistle on him. And when Miss Lucy had had all she could take and had threatened to divorce her husband, Quincey had come up with the idea of Lamar’s ill-fated fishing trip.
Bolt set aside his coffee cup and leaned closer to the window when Quincey got to that part of his story.
“You’re telling us that Lamar would have been embarrassed if his wife had divorced him and on account of that he faked his own death?” Edgerton exchanged an exaggerated look of disbelief with Haggard.
“Naw, that’s not what I’m saying,” Quincey added quickly when he saw the anger in Haggard’s ugly face. “Big Dick had this gal. He wanted to run off with her. It just so happened that was at the same time that Miss Lucy started threatening divorce.”
“And this gal…” Haggard paused and smiled—a frightening sight to see. “Her name wouldn’t happen to be Magnolia, would it?”
Hypnotized by the evil gleam in Haggard’s eyes, Quincey first shook his head, then nodded. “Uh, well, I guess that’s what she calls herself now. Back then she was just plain Jenny Flower. A waitress down on River Street. But she was a looker.”
“Let me get this straight,” Edgerton interrupted. “You are telling us that you set up everything so the two of them could take off on a joy ride all over the country. That kind of cut you from the pattern, didn’t it? I mean, without Big Dick around, what did you do as a means of support?”
The ‘possum grinned. “I ain’t so dumb as you think. I let Lamar know before he left that I’d be needing some funds from time to time to keep my mouth shut.”
“And?” Haggard demanded.
“And he give me a bag of gold coins to tide me over till he got back.”
“Got back?” Edgerton asked. “You mean Lamar returned to Savannah?”
“Just once. Long enough to visit his wife one last time and get some of his stuff from the house.” Quincey’s nervous, lopsided grin betrayed him. He obviously wasn’t telling everything he knew.
Haggard quickly wiped the smirk off his suspect’s face. “That’s it, Edgerton! I ain’t giving this louse no more time. He’s playing with us, kidding around, thinks he’s so goddamn smart. Well, he ain’t! And I say we throw the book at him for wasting our time.”
Bolt watched Edgerton reach out and grab Haggard’s arm to keep him from throwing a punch at their prisoner, who was now cowering instead of grinning. “Hold on now, Haggard. He was just fixing to tell us the rest. Weren’t you, Mr. Quincey? I can tell from that look on your face that you’re just dying to tell us everything. Right, ole buddy?”
He nodded vigorously, leaning as far away from Haggard as possible. “Yessir! But, you see, the part
you want most to hear, I wasn’t there to see. That’s why I didn’t tell it. I wasn’t holding out on you guys. Honest!”
“We know you weren’t, Mr. Quincey. Now, just take your time and tell us the rest,” Edgerton prompted calmly.
“Yeah!” Haggard growled, then slammed his fist down on the table. “And you better be quick about it, butt-head!”
“He killed her!” Quincey yelled. “He killed Miss Lucy!”
Bolt stood riveted to the spot, listening to Quincey’s second-hand account of Lucy Lamar’s death, almost the same in every detail as Magnolia had told it to Bolt. He also told how Big Dick had tom up his room in a rage when he found most of his valuables missing. He had then carried off anything pawnable—silver, paintings, jewelry. After that, Quincey had been hanging around Savannah, keeping an eye on Magnolia for Lamar and extorting money from her for himself, a scheme that had been financially satisfying for years. It kept Big Dick happy and kept Magnolia paying for her blackmailer’s silence.
In his talks with the police during the week, Bolt had told them, too, about old Delsey’s death by conjure. So it was no surprise to him when Haggard demanded to know “What about the Lamars’ maid? What happened to her?”
“The mojo got her,” Quincey muttered.
“And who arranged that?”
“I didn’t do it!” he snapped in a scared tone. “Big Dick gave me a number to call in Savannah. I delivered the message—don’t even know the guy’s name.”
“What did you tell this man?” Edgerton asked.
“To get them chickens, then throw a little grave dirt old Delsey’s way. That’s all! I swear it! I don’t mess in no voodoo. That’s mean stuff!”
Finally, Haggard asked the question that Bolt had been waiting to hear. “Where is Richard Lamar now?”
A deep silence fell over the scene. Then Quincey drew in a ragged sigh and let it out. “Dead!”
“Dead?” the two officers said at once.
“You kill him?” Haggard demanded.
For the first time, Quincey raised his voice to the tough detective. “Hell, no! What you think, I’m crazy? Shit, man, I had to go back to work once he was gone. Why you think I’m busting my ass as a security guard at that crumby mall? All I got left to show for all I done for Big Dick is that little bit of jewelry I was fixing to pawn. That’s the last of it—the last there’ll ever be. Man, I wouldn’t kill my main meal ticket.”
“Then what happened to him?” Haggard growled.
Quincey laughed. “He died in a fishing accident.”
When Haggard let out a roar, Quincey covered his head with his arms. “Hey, I’m telling the truth! I almost went with him. Coulda been me out there feeding the alligators. He had this place down in the Okefenokee Swamp. Just a shack, but it was a good hideout. He even had a gal in there with him for a while, but she got bored ‘cause there was no TV About three months ago, I thought I’d go out to his place to spend a day or so, see if there was anything left I could get out of this relationship. If not, I figured I’d move on. He didn’t have a thing left, not worth having anyway. He fried us some fish and rattlesnake over a fire. We ate, then he said he was going out in the boat with his pole for a while to catch breakfast. He asked me to come on along. Me, I ain’t no fisherman. Can’t even swim, so I stay clear of boats unless I’m getting paid to go. I would have left, but I couldn’t do that either. It was dark by then, too dark to find my way back to civilization without his help. So I figured I’d get some shut-eye, have breakfast with him, then say so long for good. Find me some bigger fish to fry, so to speak. But I never saw him again. First light, I found his boat washed up a few yards from camp. It had a hunk chomped out of it by a ’gator. The teeth prints were right there to see. So, breakfast got caught that night, but not by Big Dick. He was breakfast!”
“You didn’t report it?” Edgerton asked.
Quincey shrugged. “Who the hell would care? His kid was off in Spain or somewhere and they never got along anyway. Besides, I figured there wouldn’t have been any remains to find once that ’gator finished with him. And I just plain didn’t see no reason to get involved.”
Bolt had heard enough. The sun was already up and he was dead on his feet. Haggard came out of the room for a minute.
“You still here?”
Bolt nodded and rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin. “Had to hear it all,” he said.
“So, what do you think?”
“I think he’s a scrounge and a jerk and the scum of the earth, but it doesn’t sound like he killed anybody. Sounds like that Okefenokee alligator took care of seeing that your killer was brought to justice.”
“What about his daughter? Somebody has to notify her.”
“I’ll do it,” Bolt said, feeling a pleasant rush when he thought of Mary Scarlett, even under such unpleasant circumstances. “I’m going to catch the first flight back to Savannah. I guess I’ve finished my business up here.”
“Sounds like it, Mr. Conrad.” Haggard extended his hand. “We really appreciate all your help. You have a good trip home now.”
Bolt turned and left. He broke into a trot once he was outside the building. All of a sudden, he couldn’t wait to get back to Mary Scarlett. He had to go to his hotel to pack and check out. He would call and tell her he was on his way.
But by the time Bolt got someone in Savannah, it was too late. Pearlene answered the phone at the Bull Street house.
“Naw, sir, Mr. Bolt. She done left to go up to New Yawk with Mr. Allen. They been gone ‘bout a hour already.”
Bolt sagged down on the bed and groaned.
“Allen, are you out of your mind?” Mary Scarlett whispered as they rode up on the roomy elevator at the Plaza. “Fourteen hundred dollars?”
She wasn’t referring to the price of the mirror she had come to buy, but the cost per night of the suite Allen had reserved.
He chuckled and squeezed her hand. “It’s only money,” he said. “Besides, I want you to enjoy your stay in New York to its fullest. Nothing’s too good for the woman I plan to marry.” He failed to mention the fact that he was putting the bill on Mrs. Hampstead’s account.
Champagne and a dozen red roses awaited them in their magnificent rooms—one of the corner turret suites that overlooked the busy traffic on Fifth Avenue, but was too high above it all for any city noise to intrude. Sipping champagne, Mary Scarlett strolled from room to room, admiring the ornate gilt decor, the fine velvets and tapestries of the furniture, the Roman bath, and the king-sized bed.
Allen came up behind her and kissed her neck as she stood staring at the bed.
“Great, isn’t it?” he whispered.
“Lovely,” she answered, “but where are you going to sleep?”
He chuckled, thinking she was making a joke. Not until after they had been to the Winter Garden to see “CATS,” then shared a late dinner at the Russian Tea Room did Allen find out she was deadly serious. When they returned to their suite at the Plaza, Mary Scarlett went straight to the bedroom. Allen smiled, anticipating her return to the parlor after she had changed into something more comfortable. Instead, she returned—still dressed in the svelte black suit she had worn to the theater—carrying a pillow and a blanket, which she dropped on the burgundy velvet sofa.
“For you,” she said sweetly.
Allen’s blissful smile faded. “You can’t be serious! Mary Scarlett, I’ve asked you to marry me. Don’t tell me you plan to put me out in the cold.”
Glancing around the lavishly decorated room, she answered, “I’d hardly describe it that way. I’m simply not going to share the bedroom with you. I’m sorry, Allen.”
“Not even with us about to get married?”
She stared him straight in the eye. “I never said I would marry you or anyone else.”
“Still can’t decide between me and Bolt, eh?”
“This has nothing to do with deciding between you. Actually, I don’t think
I’m cut out for marriage. I came up here for one reason—to get my mirror back. The fancy frills are your idea, Allen. I’m sorry if I’m ruining your trip, but it can’t be helped. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Allen flopped down on the sofa, all the wind out of his sails. It was a good thing he wasn’t paying for any of this or he’d really be upset.
“I should have gone to see that voodoo woman in Thunderbolt before the trip,” he muttered. “She deals in passion potions. Hell, it worked on old Delsey, so why wouldn’t it work on Mary Scarlett?”
After a few minutes of stung contemplation, Allen rallied, left the suite, and headed downstairs to cruise the bar.
Mary Scarlett tried to feel bad about turning Allen down after he’d reserved this gorgeous suite and offered to buy back her mirror. But she couldn’t. There was something about his attitude that irked her. It seemed almost as if Allen Overman thought he could buy her as easily as he bought anything else he wanted. It was an attitude that smacked of Raul and Big Dick. The comparison made her shudder.
Suddenly, she could hardly wait to be back to Savannah, back to Bolt. She was mad at him for seeing Kathleen in Atlanta, and he would undoubtedly be at least as angry with her for coming to New York with Allen.
She sighed and forced a mirthless laugh. “Maybe Bolt will figure we’re even again now.” A second chuckle died in her throat. “Or maybe this is the end for us. Maybe Bolt and I were just never meant to be.”
She lay in bed staring up at the reflection of Fifth Avenue’s lights on the ceiling, thinking about how good things had been between her and Bolt since her return to Savannah. What was she doing here? Why wasn’t she home, waiting for Bolt?
The sound of the door to the suite opening and closing made her jump. She hadn’t realized she was almost asleep. For a second she couldn’t think where she was. Then she relaxed, realizing that Allen must have left to go in search of more compliant females. She wished him luck—tonight and tomorrow at the auction. Just before she dozed off, she told herself that the minute the auction was over and she had her mirror, she would be on the first plane back to Savannah … back to Bolt, if he’d have her.
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