Hickory Smoked Homicide

by Riley Adams

  “What was your motive again?” asked Lulu, squinting as if she was trying to see the memory from a far-off distance.

  “The way Tristan blackballed me from joining the Memphis Women’s League,” said Cherry darkly. “The witch. But now I’ve decided I don’t want to be in it after all. Evelyn told me there was no barrier to my joining, and then she handed me the schedule of events and told me that they’d vote me in at the next meeting. But Lulu, that calendar was jammed full of fund-raising bake sales—and I don’t bake or want to start now.”

  “Couldn’t you pick up something from the bakery to put out?” asked Lulu.

  “Sneaky Lulu!” Cherry laughed. “I wouldn’t have expected a professional cook to say something like that. No, I’m not interested in doing that, either. It’s not just the bake sale—there are also dances. A spring dance and a fall one. And you’d have to put a gun to Johnny’s head to get him to even go to a dance. Even if you got him there, he’d be a total wallflower. He’d probably be hanging out in the parking lot and drinking.”

  Lulu couldn’t imagine that the sight of Cherry’s husband with a bottle of beer in his hand would go over very well with the Women’s League. “So you’re not so interested in joining anymore. Although you were at the time, so I guess we can’t eliminate your motive.”

  “No, to be perfectly honest, we can’t. We can eliminate my opportunity, though. Because I didn’t have a chance to even slip off to the restroom at that party. I was with people every single second, and it was all accounted for. There were tons of snobs there, but also a few people that I knew. We were jabbering about how bad the food was and talking about art—I didn’t have a minute to myself the whole time. I even found another Elvis aficionado at the party, and we talked forever about Elvis’s big comeback concert. The police triple-checked my alibi with the folks I talked with. So, my being a social butterfly really paid off—I think they’d have tried to pin it on me.”

  Lulu blinked with surprise. “How did the police know about your motive, Cherry?”

  “That Dee Dee,” said Cherry, knitting her brows. “Remember the day that Tristan was coming out of the dress shop while I was going in? I was complaining how mad I was with Tristan? Well Dee Dee, of course, had to spill all to the police. She makes me so mad! Now I’m pleased as punch that I wasted her time the other day with all that shopping for clothes I didn’t want.” Cherry looked mad enough to spit.

  “Okay, Cherry, you’ve convinced me that you’re not a cold-blooded killer. And there is something I think you can do for me.”

  Chapter 10

  Cherry’s face brightened. “More skulduggery? I just love being devious. I almost died laughing when we were tricking Dee Dee at her Dah-ling Dress Shoppe. She looked so bent out of shape and frowsy, trying to get me in and out of all those dresses and then lie about how cute I looked. And all the time you were reading her secret notebook!” She paused a second. “Hey! Wait a minute—you never told me what you saw in that notebook! I got so carried away by the mission and our narrow escape and my almost having to buy a wardrobe of sweet little dresses that I never asked you what you found out.”

  “It was mostly her notes about what dresses each girl was wearing and their talent. But it also looked like she’d made some notes about gossip that the girls had mentioned. I think she was feeding all that information to Tristan as sort of insider knowledge that Tristan paid her for.”

  Cherry made a face. “It couldn’t be that important. Who cares what each girl was wearing?”

  “Tristan might even have paid Dee Dee to make sure a few of the girls in a particular pageant were wearing the same color or the same style dress so that her contestant really stood out. Something like that. It could have been a very big deal, as far as pageants were concerned.”

  Cherry looked disappointed. “I thought it was going to be something a lot more exciting than that.”

  Lulu said, “Well, there were more than just the pageant notes. There also looked to be some notes about other gossip—stuff that didn’t have anything to do with pageants. It made me wonder if Dee Dee was a blackmailer as well as a pageant double agent. She’d actually jotted down in that notebook that Tristan was having an affair. And there was a picture in there of Tristan with some man, but I couldn’t tell who he was.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere!” Cherry rubbed her hands together. “Let’s say Dee Dee was blackmailing someone. Blackmailing and murder always go hand in hand in those TV cop shows.”

  “But that’s because it’s the blackmailer who gets murdered,” said Lulu. “Why would Tristan get murdered if it’s Dee Dee doing the blackmailing?”

  “Maybe Tristan wouldn’t pay. She doesn’t seem like the kind of person who really gives a rip what people think of her. Maybe she even told Dee Dee she was going to expose her—and tell people that she was in the pageant-espionage business. If everyone thought she was a blabbermouth, it would take Dee Dee off the pageant gravy train really quickly.”

  Lulu tried to follow her logic. “So you think that Dee Dee was actually more of a blackmail victim of Tristan’s. It sounded friendly enough that day at the shop, though. Dee Dee gave Tristan some information. Tristan paid Dee Dee.” But then Lulu remembered something. “But you know, Dee Dee did make some kind of reference to money. Like she thought maybe they needed to renegotiate fees or something. At the time I didn’t know what she was talking about, but it makes more sense now.”

  Cherry rocked triumphantly in the chair. “Like I was saying—Dee Dee had a motive, too. And I bet Dee Dee cared a whole lot more about keeping her shop open and chock-full of pageant contestants than Tristan cared about losing face as a coach. Heck, it would probably make Tristan an even more popular coach—she gets down and dirty in the quest to have her girls win! Now tell me what the new mission is because I’m thinking it has nothing to do with Dee Dee. Especially since Dee Dee probably isn’t speaking to me after the shopping incident.”

  “I’d like to talk to your neighbor, Pepper. I hadn’t told you this yet, but Pepper really had a to-do with Tristan at the party that night.”

  Cherry’s green eyes widened. “Pepper was at the party? And had a blowup with Tristan? When did that happen?”

  “Remember when I went looking for some seasoning for all that bland food? Well, Pepper’s husband, Loren, and Tristan were having a scene in the kitchen while I was there. Loren was all lovey-dovey, and Tristan wanted nothing to do with him. When Tristan was finally pulling away from him, Pepper saw them together and really lost it. Threw some wine all over Tristan’s dress. So Pepper knew that Tristan was having an affair with her husband.”

  Cherry gave a low whistle. “I bet she blew her top—she’s got a huge temper on her. She was a lot madder than I was about the whole Tristan blackballing incident, too. Loren’s affair with Tristan is probably like rubbing salt in her wounds. I didn’t know anything about Tristan and Loren being an item. So Pepper had a lot of motive to kill Tristan. She was even more upset about getting blackballed from the club than I was. Plus the fact that Tristan had an affair with her husband on top of it all!”

  Lulu nodded. “That’s a whole lot of motive right there. Revenge and jealousy are powerful stuff!” She thought for a second. “Are you and Pepper pretty good friends? I don’t want to mess up a close friendship between y’all or anything.”

  “Not so much,” said Cherry casually. “We’re neighbors, and that’s really all. We talk to each other when we see each other out in the yard.”

  “Do you think you can get her to have lunch with you?” asked Lulu. “I’m trying to think of a natural way to ask her some questions, and I know she doesn’t come to Aunt Pat’s much to eat.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Cherry, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Piece of cake. I’ll tell her that I’ve got the club schedule and wanted to talk to her about getting in now that we’re not being blackballed anymore. In fact”—Cherry pulled out a cell phone with a rhinestone-studded cover—“I�
�ll go ahead and buzz her right now. No time like the present. Besides, I’m starving.”

  Lulu knew that she hadn’t met Pepper under the best of circumstances at Tristan’s party. Her impression that night had been that Pepper was shrill and shrewish, although she definitely had cause to be. She’d also stood out at the party because, having just followed her husband when he left the house, she wasn’t dressed for a party.

  Pepper looked much tidier as she put away some barbeque at the restaurant. But she was just as shrill as she’d been at Tristan’s party. She might be small, but her voice carried across the restaurant to where Lulu was coming out of the kitchen to join them.

  Pepper was studying the calendar with interest when Lulu sat down at the booth. Cherry said quickly, “Pepper, I don’t know if you remember Lulu or not. This is Lulu Taylor, who owns Aunt Pat’s.”

  Pepper looked up with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Nice to meet you.” She looked back down again at the papers in front of her. “So, Cherry, you were saying that these are the events the club has planned for the fall and spring, right? And Evelyn said that nobody else was standing in the way of us joining?”

  Cherry swirled her iced tea around in her glass. “That’s what Evelyn said. I did want to let you know, though,” she said, clearing her throat, “that I’m not quite as crazy about joining the Memphis Women’s League as I thought I was.” Pepper’s mouth dropped open, and Cherry said, “I know, I know, it’s all we’ve been talking about for the last month. Looking at that calendar of events, though? Can you see me doing a bake sale? Or dragging Johnny to a dance? What would happen is that I’d start skipping meetings. Then I’d start skipping the different events. Then I’d conveniently forget to pay my dues.” Cherry shrugged. “Before you know it, Evelyn would be furious with me that she stuck her neck out and got me admitted to the club . . . and then I didn’t do anything. Better just to not join.”

  Cherry shot Lulu a panicky look when Pepper started fussing at Cherry to persuade her to join, so Lulu quickly interrupted the tirade. “Pepper, Cherry had been telling me about how y’all were trying to join the club and how Tristan was blackballing you.”

  This diversion seemed to work. Lulu guessed it had been Pepper’s favorite topic of conversation for the past thirty days. “She was such a pill, Lulu. I don’t know if you knew Tristan or not, but count your lucky stars if you didn’t. All she wanted to do was mess with people. She’d do her darnedest to figure out what it was that you wanted the most and then try her hardest to block it from happening. It was her hobby.”

  “Why didn’t she want you and Cherry in the club?”

  Pepper said in a harsh voice, “Simple. She didn’t think we were good enough for the Memphis Women’s League. Tristan thought that by letting us in, they’d be lowering the club’s standards. That’s what Evelyn told Cherry, anyway.”

  Cherry bobbed her head in agreement.

  “Know what the funny thing is? Tristan thought that I wasn’t good enough for her club, but she thought my husband was good enough to have an affair with.” Pepper gave a grating laugh.

  Lulu blinked. Pepper didn’t seem to have any kind of filter to keep from talking about really private things. “I’m sorry, Pepper. I didn’t know your husband was involved with Tristan.” She saw Cherry hide a smile at Lulu’s discomfort over fibbing.

  “Well, I knew he was seeing somebody, Lulu. I didn’t know it was Tristan until I followed Loren out that night of her party. I knew he had to be seeing somebody, but I didn’t know who it was. He’s cheated on me before, you see, so I don’t trust him a lick. He was mooning around the house, acting all lovesick and distracted.... I knew I wasn’t the cause of it. He’d always change the computer screen whenever I walked into the room and erase his text messages so I couldn’t see who he’d been writing. And he started working late and running lots of errands on the weekends.”

  Pepper took a big bite out of her peach cobbler as if to remove the bad taste from her mouth. “Finally, I had enough of his nonsense. When he told me that he was going out that night to meet someone from work, I followed him. He’s never met folks from work at that hour before. Sure enough, he drove right straight to Tristan Pembroke’s house. Now I know that she didn’t want him there—that she was trying to dump him. Who knows why she started going out with him to begin with? Maybe she thought it was funny to screw up everything in my life.” Pepper jabbed viciously at a big peach slice with her fork.

  “Maybe he was going there to end things with Tristan. Maybe he’d gotten the message that she wasn’t interested anymore, and he wanted to break off the relationship in person,” suggested Lulu mildly. She wanted to find out exactly how much Pepper knew about what was going on between her husband and Tristan.

  Pepper snorted. “More like the other way around. He would have been pleased as punch to continue their affair. When he was pleading with me last night not to dump him, he said that he couldn’t bear any more rejection. That Tristan had been trying to end their relationship and hadn’t been answering her door or his phone calls or e-mails. He’d even shown up at some of the pageants to try to talk to her! He said he couldn’t handle it if I suddenly ditched him, too. However, that seems to me like something he should have thought about before he cheated. No, he’d still be trying to get Tristan to take him back—if she wasn’t dead.”

  “So did you wait for him out in the car outside the party that night?” asked Lulu, trying to act as if she didn’t know the answer to that question already.

  “Absolutely not! I marched right in there and dragged his sorry rear end out the door. I gave Tristan a piece of my mind, too, which was long overdue. Threw a glass of wine at her, too. I was so mad! Of all the people for him to be messing around with—and he knew exactly how much I hated Tristan! I didn’t care that I didn’t have a spot of makeup on and was wearing my sweat suit. I was that determined to pull him out of there.”

  “So, obviously,” said Lulu, “you weren’t at the party when Tristan’s body was found.”

  Pepper sighed. “Actually, yes, I was still there. But I wasn’t inside Tristan’s house then—I was out in the car yelling at Loren. We were going to drive home and finish our fight there, but that storm blew in, and it was raining so hard that I didn’t want to drive in it. I just chewed Loren out while we waited for it to let up a little bit. I didn’t even notice the lights had gone off at the house.... Cherry was telling me about that the other day. I was so focused on setting things straight with my husband.”

  “How did you find out that Tristan was dead?”

  Pepper made a face. “The police came up with a flashlight and shone it right in the car window like they thought we might be in there making out or something. I rolled a window down, and the police said there’d been a murder at the house and the guests were supposed to go to some particular place on the grounds and they’d be asking questions. I asked who it was who’d been murdered, and he said it was Tristan. Then, as soon as the cop left, we started fighting again because Loren was putting up such a howling ruckus over Tristan being dead.” Pepper shook her head and picked at her nail polish, which was already chipped to bits on her fingernails.

  Cherry said, “Hmm. I wonder who could have done it.”

  “Tons of people! Half the town was at her house that night. And I can’t believe she had any real friends.... She was too much of a backstabber. She was the type that couldn’t keep a friend for more than a few minutes without talking about her behind her back. But, you know, in these kinds of cases, they always say they look at the family first.” Pepper shrugged like she didn’t really care who murdered Tristan—she was glad that somebody had stepped up to the plate.

  “I thought,” said Cherry, “that they always looked at the husband or boyfriend first.”

  Pepper’s eyes narrowed to slits. “What are you trying to say, Cherry?”

  Cherry knit her brows as if she was trying to remember what she did think—or what she was supposed to
think. This, thought Lulu, was the big problem with lying—you ended up losing track of what your position was supposed to be.

  “Oh. I don’t know.... I was thinking about those cop shows and what they do when someone goes missing or dies. I was thinking it’s usually the spouse—just on TV, you know . . .” Cherry spluttered as she tried to get back on solid ground again.

  “As long as that was all you were thinking,” said Pepper darkly. “Because Loren is a cheat, a liar, a coward, and a sorry excuse for a husband. But he’s not a killer.”

  Lulu jumped in again. “You think Tristan’s family is behind it? Who were you thinking of?”

  Pepper blew out a sigh. “I don’t know. Steffi, I guess, is the obvious choice. I know Tristan treated her as awful as she treated everybody else, and the poor kid put up with it for all these years. Who’d blame her if she finally blew a gasket and couldn’t stand it anymore? I wanted to kill Tristan, and I only spent a tiny amount of time with her. If I’d spent a lifetime with her, I’d never have been able to keep myself from wringing her scrawny neck.”

  Cherry said, “I didn’t even know you knew Steffi, Pepper.”

  “Oh, sure—I know all of them. Tristan’s sister, Marlowe, is my age, and we went through school together. We always hung out in the same crowd. We were never best friends, but we had the same friends so we ended up doing a lot of the same stuff. So I knew Tristan and Marlowe growing up. And I paid attention when Steffi was born—felt sorry for the baby, actually. Marlowe used to go on and on when we were teens about how terrible Tristan was. And now I know she was telling the truth.”

  Lulu poured Pepper a little more tea from the pitcher on the table. “What kinds of things did Marlowe used to say about Tristan?”

  “Well, growing up it was all kind of silly stuff, I guess. But it wasn’t silly at the time—you know how everything feels so important when you’re a teenager. Tristan would do things like steal Marlowe’s boyfriends, or tell people something really mean about her sister . . . like a gross habit she had or something. I think she even pulled pranks on her at different times, just to make her feel like a fool.”