by Julie Smith
He pulled out a handkerchief. “Delayed reaction,” he said, attempting a smile. “And the music.”
Embarrassed, she turned away, and for the first time, scanned the crowd. Since she hadn’t really come in her professional capacity, she’d focused on Austin rather than the bigger picture. She wasn’t surprised to see Rashad, though Janessa wasn’t in sight. Mimi Dirr was there, with a bunch of people from the literary festival. Protocol demanded that one of them would have to speak, Talba thought, though Hunt had been famous for accepting their invitations, turning up at their parties, and insulting half the women while hitting on the other half. They’d probably drawn lots, with the loser getting the honor.
Most people were standing, but about thirty chairs had been set up, and on one of these, near the front, sat Lynne Montjoy, her blond hair clipped into a low-slung ponytail, her skinny body in a black suit that looked absurdly formal in this crowd of fashion villains. Most of the men looked as if they’d gotten their clothes at Goodwill, then slept in them a few times to break them in; the women, suffice it to say, had left their pantyhose in their hosiery drawers (in the event they actually owned any). Talba herself was wearing flowing purple pants and knee-length matching jacket—for her, almost conservative except for her orange tank top.
All she could tell about Lynne was that she looked drawn—and who, under the circumstances, wouldn’t? Me, Talba thought. I’d be dancing in the streets. Lynne was sitting with Wayne Taylor, whose back was really all she could see of him. Rosemary McLeod, whom she recognized by her lustrous wig, was sitting on his other side. Talba figured she must be feeling a ton better, out two nights in a row.
A celebrated historian who taught at Tulane followed Peter James, offering a much more sober view of Montjoy’s work and influence, frequently and sadly mentioning the “gaping hole” he was going to leave in the “intellectual community.”
A young woman who’d had Hunt as a writing teacher spoke painfully of the influence he had had “over me,” an image that caused titters among the standees; and Mimi Dirr, who’d clearly lost the draw, was forced to eulogize him on behalf of the festival—which she cleverly managed to avoid by reading one of his own poems, about death and how unimportant we really are in the scheme of things. She kept a straight face—and her black dress helped—but Talba was terrified she was going to giggle aloud at the knowledge that she’d managed to pull off calling Hunt Montjoy unimportant at his own memorial service. Talba sincerely hoped he wouldn’t haunt the poor woman—she could hardly imagine a worse fate.
Unlike Cassie’s and Allyson’s service, this one could easily have gone on all night if the alcohol continued to flow. After about forty-five minutes, Lynne Montjoy rose and, instead of offering her own eulogy, only thanked all those who had spoken, announced a short break, and invited everyone else to have at it as soon as they’d wet their whistles—though she put it a bit more delicately.
Delighted with the invitation, Talba and Austin bolted for the bar, which, fortunately, was quite near. “Now this,” Austin said, “is my idea of a funeral.”
Noticing that Lynne had taken the opportunity to duck out, Talba said, “It might be about to get better—or worse, depending on how you look at it. Look, there’s Wayne Taylor.” Taylor was coming toward them—or more specifically, toward the bar. His face was so battered Talba suspected he had a broken nose. He was walking with a limp. “Hey, Austin. Baroness. Janet enjoyed meeting you last night.”
Talba made no attempt to control herself. “My God, Wayne. What on earth happened to you?”
He looked sheepish. “Tripped over a toy, and fell down my own front steps.”
They both made sympathetic noises, and let him through to order two glasses of white wine. Talba watched him take one back to Rosemary McLeod, thinking well of him for taking care of her.
The evening may not, as Talba had predicted, have gotten better after that, but at any rate, it got more embarrassing. Fueled by the plentiful supplies, more and more people were moved to recount their own experiences with the wild man—some of which were unsuitable for the widow’s hearing, and some pretty much unsuitable for anyone. Far from being properly appalled, Austin was having the time of his life. “Aren’t you glad you came?” he whispered. “You’d have had to commit suicide if you’d missed this.”
“It might have been preferable,” Talba answered nervously, and as she glanced back at the stage, she happened to see Rosemary McLeod whispering familiarly into Wayne Taylor’s ear. She had wrapped one hand around his neck and insinuated the other into his hand. It wasn’t sexual, necessarily, but it was certainly intimate, the kind of thing you did with someone you knew well if you really needed to get their attention. Or maybe, given the bizarreness of this crowd, it was sexual.
She grabbed Austin. “What the hell is that?”
“What the hell is what?”
“Taylor and McLeod—they’re acting like lovers.”
He snorted. “Are you kidding? She’s his mother.”
“She’s his mother? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
He stared as if she were crazy. “Uh… well… why would you need to know?”
He was right. There was no reason to have told her, no reason for anybody except Burford Hale—who had sent her to Rosemary—even to know Talba knew her. She saw Taylor help Rosemary up and out of there, which was undoubtedly what the desperate little clinch had been about. She probably couldn’t handle this tasteless circus for one more second.
Remembering the story about Allyson’s shop in Tallahassee, and the friends and their two sons, she suddenly realized something. “You’ve known Wayne Taylor all your life!”
Automatically, Austin shook his head. “No, I haven’t. I only met him when—oh! Wait a minute. Tallahassee. Well, that didn’t exactly count. I was four and he was sixteen or seventeen.” He shrugged. “A grown-up to me, anyhow. I didn’t remember him at all when Mother moved here a couple of years ago. Of course, Cassie’d already been here awhile—she went to Tulane, you know, and then she just stayed. Somewhere along the line I guess Mother got her to look up Wayne and Janet. All I know is, she was friends with them by the time Mother moved here. She introduced me to them, not Mother.”
Peter James got up again and tried to send people home, but they were having none of it. The stories were getting increasingly unflattering, revealing more and more of Hunt’s dark side, and quite a few people were getting off on it. Less subtly than Mimi Dirr had, they were insulting him at his own service, and James was visibly distressed.
Maybe, Talba thought, Hunt, like Allyson, also had only one true friend. Rashad, pushing his way out, came by to say hello. “You aren’t going to speak?” Talba asked.
Rashad shook his head. “I was, but seems like people just want to hear themselves talk.” He sounded profoundly disappointed. “I’m getting out of here.”
“Good idea,” Talba said, and followed.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
There was Ms. Wallis, first thing in the morning, as usual, eyes bright as a couple of diamonds, messing up his schedule again. He didn’t even wait for her to open her mouth, which meant he had to be quick as a lizard. “Don’t even think about it unless you’ve got coffee.”
She smiled, and held up a paper bag. “Not only have I got coffee, I’ve got good coffee.”
“Gimme.” He held out a greedy paw, wondering if there was such a thing as an employee who was just a little too eager, and quickly dismissed the thought: Eddie, ya just old. Ya hate it when she makes ya notice.
She was eyeing him critically. “Good color today.”
He touched a hand to his cheek, wondering what on God’s earth could have elicited such a peculiar comment. “Uh—really? What color am I usually?”
“Not your skin. Your eye bags.”
“What eye bags?” He was putting her on—she’d once roasted him by composing a sonnet to his bags; he knew perfectly well they were his most distinguishing characteristic. His best
feature, in his opinion.
“Those tan-lookin’ hampers you’ve got—bags isn’t right, really. They’re more like lunch boxes. Tan’s not bad, by the way.” She handed him his coffee and plopped herself in his other chair. “I went to Hunt Montjoy’s memorial service.”
That gave him a bad feeling. “Think I’d rather talk about my facial flaws.”
“Hey. I love your bags.”
“Uh-huh. I thought we were off this case.”
“Well, here’s the good news. Angie wasn’t with Austin. I was.”
Not sure what she meant, he supported his face in his hand. “Give me strength.”
“He asked me, so I went with him. Seems he wants us to reopen the case for real—meaning, for our usual hourly rate.”
For a moment, Eddie brightened, but on consideration, he couldn’t see a way. “Probably a conflict,” he said. “This is good coffee.”
“Don’t say I don’t take care of you. Here’s the thing—I told him he’d have to talk to you, but then something happened that made me think we should reopen it anyway.”
Eddie was liking the whole conversation less and less. “What kind of something?”
“You know how you were talking about some kind of real motive for killing Allyson? That self-preservation wasn’t good enough?”
He nodded.
“Wayne Taylor’s got one. Allyson duped his mother into investing in her company and then dug her in deeper and deeper, out of sheer incompetence and arrogance.” She shrugged. “For all I know, it may even affect Taylor’s inheritance—that part I can’t research. What I do know is, she’s oblivious about what happened to her—apparently has no idea in hell. But anybody she tells the story to kind of gets mad on her account—it’s that transparent. So if it makes me mad, how mad do you think it would make Wayne? The same Wayne, by the way, who was having an affair with Allyson’s daughter that Allyson had been trying to break up.” She paused, which gave him a little time to connect the dots. She was talking fast, but she was making sense. “And his mother has cancer. He might even blame Allyson for that. You know how people are.”
Despite himself, Eddie was getting interested. “Go on.”
“Well, I’ve thought about this quite a bit. If Taylor really was involved with Cassie, they kept it pretty quiet, and I think I know why. First of all, Cassie was friends with his wife.”
Eddie shook his head. “Women are bitches, ’scuse my French.”
“Yeah, well, it kind of balances things. Taylor and Montjoy being such saints and all.”
“All right. Touché.”
“And second, Wifey just had a baby. Maybe that was why they broke up. In fact, maybe Cassie was the one who did it, because now she could see Taylor was never leaving, etcetera, etcetera.”
“Same old story.”
“Either that or the guilt got to her. So she dumps him, and then starts seeing his buddy, which makes him mad. He wants her back, she won’t play, they fight, he stabs her.”
Eddie was getting into it. “Or Taylor dumps her and then she dates Montjoy to make him jealous. But it doesn’t work, he’s happily back with his wife and child, so she threatens him, maybe calls him names…”
Ms. Wallis’s eyes got even shinier, if that was possible—but maybe it was from the caffeine. “I like that one even better. He loses his temper bigtime. And then, when he sees what he’s done, and he’s trying to figure out what to do next, he remembers that remark of Hunt’s—about Allyson having to take the blame if anything happens to Cassie. And he thinks he can kill two birds with one stone.”
Eddie was thinking. “Only no one quite buys the murder-suicide thing.”
“When I really think about it,” Ms. Wallis said, “the way the crime scene was cleaned up points to Taylor more than anybody else. He writes these kind of… thrillers. I never read the book about the Nazis, but I kind of think that’s what it was. The other one was. And his one movie was about a cop. He was probably into all that procedural stuff. And getting that glass with the fingerprints—it’s exactly what a writer would do.”
Eddie set down his cup and folded his hands. Now was the fun part—the part where he got to tweak her. “Ya got a perfect little psychological case, Ms. Wallis. Only thing is, it’s all in ya mind.”
“Hold on a minute.” She was so excited she was spilling coffee. “I’ve got somewhere to go with this. There’s one little thing I didn’t mention.”
He pressed his lips together in frustration. Of course there was. Surprises were the woman’s middle name. He waited, not about to give her the satisfaction of asking.
“Wayne’s all banged up,” she said. “Got a broken nose and he limps. Like he’s been in a fight.”
“So?”
She shrugged. “I wonder if he fought with Hunt Montjoy.”
“I don’t see whatcha gettin’ at.”
“Lynne said when her husband left that last time she saw him, he told her he was going to see somebody. And it happened right after that fight with Austin. So I’m thinking maybe it was Wayne he went to see. See, the fight with Austin was about who this girl was—this girl named Kerry that Taylor said Hunt had treated really horribly.”
Eddie’s brain was starting to feel like spaghetti. “Slow down, Sherlock Holmes. Ya leavin’ the rest of us behind.”
“All I’m saying is, when Austin went over there, he reminded Hunt that Taylor had ratted him out about Kerry, and maybe that made him mad enough to go over and attack him.”
“And what would the significance of that be?”
She smiled at him. “Hunt’s dead, right?”
He looked at his watch. “I’d kinda like to know what this is all about sometime before lunch.”
“I figure the cops have probably talked to Taylor about Hunt, don’t you? Why don’t we just ask them if Taylor says they had a fight?”
Suddenly Eddie saw the point of the whole conversation. Ms. Wallis conducted her investigations as she thought best—until she hit a snag and needed him for something. “You mean, why don’t I call my buddy in Major Case Homicide.”
“I was kind of thinking that, yeah.” She was leaning back in her chair, all smug and smiling. It was annoying, being played this way, but on the other hand he thought she was onto something.
“I’ll think about it, Ms. Wallis.”
“I’d appreciate it.” She got up and eased out of the room, her ears pricked, he knew, for the sound of him reaching for the phone. He let her get too far away to hear before he called LaBauve. Waiting for a return call, he reflected that Rashad might have been onto something with that Gatsby thing. If Wayne Taylor was involved with Cassie, whom Eddie saw as the mistress character, Myrtle Wilson, then Taylor was the closest thing to a husband she had—which would make him the Wilson character, Gatsby’s murderer. Eddie liked that. As theories went, it was neater and more symmetrical than Hunt-as-murderer.
It took a couple of backs and forths, but he had what Ms. Wallis wanted by midmorning.
His associate, hunched over her computer, barely heard him when he entered her office. “Yeah, they fought,” he told her. “Over what ya said. Where ya goin’ with that?”
“Let’s try Rashad. He knows her.” She dialed her sister’s number.
Eddie stood and listened to the ensuing conversation for five or six minutes, but in the end, he couldn’t stick it out. So far as he could tell, Rashad had dumped Janessa, and Ms. Wallis was doing the Big Sis polka.
***
Rashad was back at Allyson’s, at Austin’s invitation, and Talba, for one, didn’t blame him. Janessa threw out a few phrases about giving him space, but she was much more into crying and moaning and accusing. Once again, without Rashad to cling to, she was all over Talba, nagging about being let into the family. It took twelve minutes to shake her off—Talba timed it.
She had a bad feeling about what Rashad and Austin might do, just the two of them, in what amounted to a bachelor pad—bad enough to make her pay a visit instead of cal
ling.
They were sitting around the pool in shorts, no shirts, no shoes, drinking Bloody Marys and smoking pot. Which made them extremely expansive and thrilled to see her. After hugs and “lookin’ goods” and could they get her a drink and would she like a toke, she finally joined Austin at the table on the patio and confronted Rashad while he sprawled on a chaise longue. “Rashad, who’s Kerry?”
The answer was less than dramatic. First he made a face. And then he blew out some smoke. Finally, he said, almost in a whisper, “Who?”
Damned if he was getting away with the innocent act. “You heard me. Who the hell’s Kerry?”
“Kerry,” he said. “This is weird.”
“Look, I know you’re stoned, but you’re not stupid—and by the way, neither am I. I know she was your girlfriend. What’s weird about asking about her?”
He shook his head. “Kerry wasn’t my girlfriend. She was jailbait, man. She’s just a girl I helped. Hunt put her through the wringer like nothin’ you ever saw. Jesus, he could be a bastard! Always good to me, though. Yep. Always good to me. See, what’s weird is, I hadn’t seen Kerry in a year. Until yesterday.” He pulled himself to a sitting position. “I went to pay my respects to Lynne, you know? At the house. And she was there. She’s some kind of relative of Lynne’s. I don’t think I ever knew that.” He took another toke, as if that were going to help him think. “Her niece, maybe?”
Austin raised an eyebrow at her, but she was too way too preoccupied to respond. She kept on Rashad. “That’s who Kerry is? Lynne’s niece? Jesus, man. His own wife’s niece.”
“Some kind of shit like that. Known that a few years ago, mighta killed Hunt myself. Now…” He didn’t even attempt to complete the sentence, but Talba knew all too well what he was trying to say. Something along the lines of “Now I’m just trying to forget.” She realized he probably didn’t even know about the fight between Hunt and Austin.
She stood up. “Exactly how early do I have to get up to find anyone sober enough to answer a simple question? Austin, what the hell’s going on here?”