Rick wondered what made her think he was gay. Was it the cat? He was about to open the door but stopped and said, “Wait a second. Are you implying that you don’t think I could get a boyfriend? I mean, if I was gay?”
“No,” she said. “No. I’m sure you’d find somebody.” She smiled, trying to make it all better or hoping to make it all go away, like if she showed enough charm and teeth, time itself would go backward. Then she thought maybe she should just grab him and kiss him right there on the landing and say, My point is, you’ve been looking at me and I’ve been looking at you, so let’s forget our professional relationship for a moment and just have sex and get it over with. But instead she held up the grocery sack she was carrying and said, “Boy, these sure smell good. Are they pork or beef?”
“Pork,” Rick said, trying to sound as heterosexual as possible. He opened the door, picked up Crusty’s carrier, then followed Lollie inside. As she led the way down the hall, Rick admired the swing of her slim hips. Truth was, he’d been infatuated with Lollie ever since he’d regained consciousness after she’d punched him in the head. Still, he didn’t want to make any moves based on a misconstrued signal. Given her brown belt and her willingness to use it, he thought he should be careful. Then again, aside from the gay question, he was pretty sure she was flirting with him, so when they reached the door to his office, he said, “No real reason.”
Lollie was still kicking herself over the gay thing, so she wasn’t sure what Rick meant. “Reason for what?”
“For why I’m not seeing anybody, who, if I was seeing, would be a girl. Woman.” Then, thinking maybe he’d put too fine a point on it, he pointed at the sack and said, “We better eat those before they get cold.”
“Good idea.” They went in and sat on either side of his desk. Lollie pulled two large coffee cans from the grocery bag. They were packed with steaming-hot tamales. Rick folded the bag and set it on the table between them, like a place mat. Lollie thumped one of the cans with a finger and asked how he’d found the place that made them. He said a listener had turned him on to the joint after he’d said something on the air about his preference for local restaurants over franchised food places.
Lollie unfolded a corn husk, then leaned over to take in the aroma. “You know why they sell these things all over the Delta?”
“World War Two,” Rick said. “The workforce joined the army, and Mexican labor came to fill the gap, brought their food.”
“That’s what I heard too,” Lollie said, glad that they’d found something else to talk about. “So how come nobody sells burritos?” She made a sweeping gesture with her tamale hand. “Why don’t you see taco stands anywhere? Why just tamales?”
“Don’t know. I’m just repeating what I heard.”
While they ate, Rick tried not to think about her flirtations and her hips. Instead, he talked about the databases they would search for Henry LeFleur and members of the Doogan clan.
At one point, Lollie glanced up and saw Rick licking his fingers. His lips were glistening with oil and pork broth, red from the chili powder, and she couldn’t take it anymore. She said, “Oh, what the hell.” She dropped her tamale, stood up, and leaned across the table. “I just have to get this out of the way.” Then she kissed him. It was a long, spicy, hot-tamale kiss, their mouths warm with garlic, bay leaf, and corn. Finally she pulled back, sat down, and smacked her lips. “There. Much better. Thanks.”
Rick blinked a couple of times and said, “You’re welcome. At Rockin’ Vestigations, we’ll do whatever it takes to keep our clients happy.”
She arched her eyebrows and said, “Whatever it takes?” She unwrapped the last tamale and gave a lecherous smile. “Well, maybe we should get back to work and save that for later.”
17
NOW THERE WERE three things Rick knew about her: karate, French, and French kissing. Based on how good she was at these, Rick assumed Lollie was a pretty good specialed teacher. So that was four things. He wondered how long the list was. And how long would it be until he learned more? As he wiped the last bits of grease from his fingers, Rick said, “You any good with computers?”
She wiggled in her seat and said, “Try me,” like she was Mae West.
“I thought we were saving that for later.”
“Down, boy,” she said, pointing at the monitor. “Databases. How to search. Try to focus.”
“You started it,” he said. He showed her the basics, gave her his Web site passwords, and turned it over to her. “I’ve gotta feed Puff Kitty. Holler if you need help.”
“Puff Kitty?”
“That’s his rap name. When he gets scared, his tail puffs up like a gang member.” Rick was about to go when an e-mail pinged in. It was from Smitty Chisholm. He’d talked to a professor at Ole Miss who had done research on minor figures of the Delta blues. He had a phone number and an address for Crippled Willie Jefferson, just outside Greenville. The professor also said he was trying to track one down for Earl Tate. Lollie hit the print button.
With this little bit of good news, Rick went into the reception area to medicate and feed Crusty. As he applied the ointments and pills, he could hear Lollie typing at a fever pitch. A few minutes later, he heard the printer spooling up. Then more typing, some disgruntled noises, then more typing, and so on. Rick took a minute to trim Crusty’s claws. “How’s it going in there?”
“So far so good,” she said.
As Rick picked Crusty’s nose, he heard the printer going again. A minute later she said, “All done.”
“What?” He couldn’t believe it. He walked back into the office with a flat toothpick in one hand and a boogery cat in the other. She waved a few sheets of paper in the air as Rick stared in disbelief. He traded Crusty for the papers and started reading. The first thing was a newspaper article with a grainy photograph, the others pages looked like part of a complaint or a deposition from a lawsuit entitled Sunflower Retirement Village v. Good Move Transit Group, the parent company for several large moving firms. The summary indicated that the retirement community had relocated recently and had hired one of Good Move’s subsidiary companies to do the heavy lifting. When it came time to unload, the drivers said they couldn’t until the residents paid for some unexpected expenses, which amounted to several thousand dollars apiece above the contracted price. Rick looked at the plaintiffs’ names, but there were no LeFleurs or Doogans. He said, “Okay, they’re bad guys, but what’s it got to do with the price of tamales in Vicksburg?”
“Maybe nothing,” she said. “Maybe something.”
“Maybe you want to explain.”
“Okay.” Lollie put Crusty on the floor and rubbed her hands together excitedly. “First I found Hamp Doogan’s death certificate on file with the state,” she said. “At the bottom they list a next of kin, a woman named Ruby Finch. So I did a search and found her name in this lawsuit.” She pointed at the date on the document. “And she was alive as of two months ago.”
“Yeah, but in a nursing home.”
“That’s why I checked the master death file. She’s still not there.”
“Okay, score one for you.” Rick turned his attention to the newspaper article and said, “Ow! Dammit.” Crusty shot out of the room with his tail puffed. “He bit my ankle.”
“Yeah,” Lollie said. “He’ll do that every now and then.”
Rick returned his attention to the document. It was from a recent issue of the Delta Democrat Times. The accompanying photo had been taken at the Olde River Country Club. According to the story, Shelby LeFleur Jr. had just celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday with friends and family. The birthday boy was in the middle of the picture, in a wheelchair, staring at his lap. Flanking him was his son Henry and Henry’s wife, Lettie, neither of whom were exactly spring chickens. Also present was grandson Monroe LeFleur and his wife, Hannah. There were a couple of litters of great-grandchildren packed around the fringes of the picture and, according to the caption, one of them was Cuffie LeFleur. But the name meant n
othing to Rick, and though he might have recognized her in a clean shot, the photo was grainy and Cuffie was standing behind a tall cousin with big hair, so her face was obscured.
“Well now, we’re just lousy with options,” Rick said. “Who do you think we should talk to first?”
“Given everybody’s age, I think we should split up and talk toeverybody as fast as we can get to them. You want Ruby, Crippled Willie, or Henry LeFleur?”
“I’ll take Crippled Willie,” Rick said. “That way I can drop by the Delta Democrat Times to do some research on the LeFleur clan before we visit Henry.”
“Fine. I’ll take Ruby Finch.”
THE WOMEN AT the Sunflower Retirement Village formed a sort of blue-rinse-and-sweatsuit mafia, armed with walkers and canes and a certain amount of surrender. Among this crowd Ruby Finch stood out like a sparkler in a dark room. She was tall and maintained an elegant finishing-school posture, as though refusing to stoop to age or arthritis. Silver hair that would have tumbled past her shoulders was pulled into a bun at the back of her head, anchored by a distinctive pair of hand-carved chopsticks.
The man at the reception desk told Lollie to look for the woman wearing the tailored linen suit. She was sitting in the sun-room, reading Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins. “Mrs. Finch?”
Ruby marked her place on the page with a manicured fingertip and looked up. “It’s Ms.”
“Oh.” Not exactly the sort of thing Lollie expected to hear from a seventy-year-old at a retirement home in Sunflower County, Mississippi. “I’m sorry.”
“No need for that, I’m just saying.” She moved her bookmark to the page and closed the book, settling it on her lap and folding her hands over the top.
“Ms. Finch, my name’s Lollie Woolfolk.”
“Yes?” Her tone was guarded.
“I hate to interrupt your reading, but I was hoping we could talk for a moment.”
“Were you?” As Lollie moved to sit down, Ruby said, “I haven’t invited you to join me, young lady. Simply because you know my name and you’ve told me yours, that doesn’t make us friends.” She sat up even straighter than she had been. “You haven’t stated your business, but I suspect I know what it is. So you needn’t bother getting comfortable.”
“Well, ma’am, I—”
“Don’t interrupt when I’m talking, please. It’s rude. Honestly. Now, Miss Woolfolk, you can just return to your office and tell them that neither I nor any of the other residents here have any intention of withdrawing from the lawsuit, and it doesn’t matter how many young lawyers they send out to try to buy us off, and on Sunday, no less.” She cast a withering glance Lollie’s way and said, “We are going to see this through to the end.”
“Ohhh,” Lollie said as she took a seat.
The temerity of the move pushed Ruby’s head backward. “Oh? What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’ve mistaken me for someone else, Ms. Finch.” She smiled sweetly, hoping to break the barrier Ruby had thrown up. “I’m not a lawyer and I’m not here about the lawsuit. In fact, I hope you win.”
“Oh.” Ruby looked down at the book in her lap and gave it an embarrassed pat. “Well, in that case, I apologize. They sent a man out here last week trying to intimidate a few of the older residents and I just assumed they’d switched tactics by sending a woman this time.”
“I understand,” Lollie said. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
“So you said.” She set her book on the coffee table, then looked back at Lollie. “But you still haven’t stated your business. What did you want to see me about?”
“A relative of yours.”
“Who?”
“Hamp Doogan.”
“Oh my.” Ruby’s face changed completely and, in a dreamy voice, she said, “Hamp Doogan.” His name seemed to transform her. Lollie had never seen anything quite like it. Ruby glanced around the room before saying, “Hamp and I weren’t related, dear.” She was shaking her head as she leaned toward Lollie with an almost devilish smile. “We were lovers.” She put her hand to her face as if she’d said something she knew a proper lady shouldn’t, though it also served to hide the smile of guilty pleasure that threatened to split her face in half. She scooted closer to Lollie. “What on earth made you think we were related?”
“You signed his death certificate as next of kin.” Lollie glanced out the window as two blue-rinsed heads floated by, apparently attached to bodies in a golf cart.
“Oh, that. Hamp didn’t have any family down here, so …” She shrugged. “They needed someone to sign the thing and the sheriff knew I knew Hamp well enough, so I signed it, much to my parents’ dismay.”
“Why dismay?”
“Well, Hamp had a … reputation.” Her inflection made it a bad word. “He wasn’t welcome among pra-pah society,” she said, mocking the word. “He was an artist, more bohemian than they approved of. Worse, he was from Boston. And he was a charmer like you’ve never seen. Handsome and smooth, ohh, he was all that and more.”
“The sheriff was Henry LeFleur?”
“That’s right.” Ruby’s wistful demeanor drifted toward suspicion. “What’s all this about?”
Lollie told her the whole story, including the part about Pigfoot Morgan’s release from Parchman two days before her grandfather was killed. When she finished she said, “Do you know why he killed Hamp?”
“Oh, I don’t know that that poor man did it at all,” Ruby said. “They probably just didn’t have a good suspect and he somehow ended up being their scapegoat.” A sadness passed over her face and she looked away. “So many awful things happened in those days.”
“Did you attend the trial?”
She waved a hand at Lollie like she was crazy. “No, my parents would never allow anything like that. I had shamed them enough by then,” she said with a small laugh.
“Were you called to testify about anything?”
“Well, I was subpoenaed, of course. But, after a meeting with my father, the prosecutor just had me into his office so he could record my testimony.”
“What did you say?”
“What could I say? I hadn’t seen anything. I’d only heard a secondhand account of what had happened, so that’s all I could tell him.”
“What had you heard?”
“Well, there was this friend of Hamp’s, a black gambler by the name of Shorty Parker. He was in the jail that night, arrested for stabbing a man with an ice pick, but he said it was in self-defense and I never had any reason to doubt him about that. Anyway, Shorty was in the jail when they brought those men in, those musicians? And he overheard their conversations in the next cell.”
Lollie asked if Buddy, Willie, and Earl were the men who had been brought to the jail.
“Those names sound right,” Ruby said. “But I can’t be a hundred percent sure.”
“How about Pigfoot Morgan?”
“No,” she said. “I think Shorty said he had escaped.”
“What did Mr. Parker tell you had happened?”
“Well, Shorty said he didn’t know what had happened so much as he had an idea of what hadn’t happened.”
“Which was?”
“Well, as I said, I don’t believe that Mr. Morgan killed Hamp. It was somebody else. So that’s what I said in my testimony.”
“Do you know if the defense brought that up at the trial?”
Ruby shook her head. “How much of a defense do you think that man got?”
Lollie understood her point so she didn’t press it. “Why’d the prosecutor let you testify in his office instead of the courtroom?”
“He was a friend of the family. And my father told him I wasn’t going to be available at the time of the trial.”
“Why was that?”
Ruby allowed herself another small laugh before saying, “I was being sent away to avoid embarrassing my poor family any further.”
“Where did you go?”
“New York City.” Ruby nodded at the nove
l she’d been reading. “My parents were close friends with the Percy family and of course Walker had attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia. So they sent me to New York before the trial started. I studied art and literature and looked for a husband among Walker’s old crowd.” Her eyes sparkled, back to her youth. “Moved into the Barbizon Hotel for Young Women, classes during the day, dancing at night. It was glorious. At one point I even did some modeling for Claire McCardell, which was a big thing. It was all wonderful, but I never did find a husband, and after a couple of years, my father got sick and I moved back to Mississippi. And let me tell you, New York may have been the center of everything, all the lights and the bustle, but the Mississippi Delta wasn’t all church meetings and lazy Sunday afternoon picnics. It was a pretty lively place.”
“So I gathered,” Lollie said with a smile. “I’ve heard stories about some wild times in Leland and the joints where Mr. Doogan used to take photos.”
Ruby seemed startled by Lollie’s words. She paused. Then, with a certain amount of caution, she said, “Have you seen any of his work?”
“Just a few, pictures of Blind Buddy Cotton and some others at a juke joint.”
Ruby looked into Lollie’s eyes as if measuring something. She hesitated before she said, “You know, he took my picture.” She paused a moment, as if wrestling with a decision. Then she said, “Would you like to see?”
Lollie said sure and followed Ruby down the hallway. They went to her room and Ruby closed the door behind them. She opened a closet and pointed into a dark corner and asked Lollie to pull out the big box in the back. “I haven’t shown these to anyone in years,” she said. “But they are such lovely memories.” Lollie took a heavy banker’s box from the closet and put it on the bed. Ruby lifted off the top and pulled out several old folios made of a soft brown cardboard. “Hamp Doogan Photography” was embossed in the upper-left corner. Ruby brushed her palm over the front of the top folio and said, “He took this in 1950, when I was, well, when I was younguh.” This time she was mocking herself instead of the word. She handed the folio to Lollie and watched, keen to see her reaction.
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