Morgan James - Promise McNeal 01 - Quiet the Dead

by Morgan James

  I did not like the way that conversation went. Being brushed off by my only son hurt. And who would call Luke “Bucko?” No, I didn’t like the conversation at all. But what could I do? I sighed and pitched the cell phone back into my purse, disappointed that I would not be seeing Luke, and wishing I’d gotten a frozen pizza at the grocery store. “Well girls,” I called to the cat family in the rear of the car, “I guess it’s a fish sandwich to go.” Pulling back into the main street, I headed for a local drive through and ordered fries and two sandwiches, one for me and one for Mamma cat. It had been a long day. She deserved a treat, and I deserved the comfort of French fries with lots of ketchup.

  Later I sat in Luke’s study where everything seemed to be organized and filed away alphabetically. Not a piece of junk mail or stray paperclip left on the desk, no old magazines strewn on the floor, in fact, as I looked around, the whole house was too neat, even for me. What was this? Susan was right. Who knows how kids will turn out? Luke was such a slob as a teen that I regularly discovered black banana peels and glasses of liquids spontaneously growing penicillin beneath his bed. Look at him now. His house didn’t look as though a person really lived there, maybe stopped by occasionally for a change of underwear, but no sign of a person nesting in and being at home. Work must be consuming too much of Luke’s life. I made a mental note to have a long talk with him.

  In thinking back over the past five years, much had changed for my son, in addition to buying this house. He was now a very grownup man, not a freshly graduated star student of the University of Georgia. He had responsibilities today not dreamed of five years ago, and flew all over the world for Acadian Oil… with someone who was calling him Bucko, of all things. What was that all about? My mother radar detected a worrisome pattern on the screen that I couldn’t identify. I yawned and told myself I could spend the rest of the night worrying about Luke, to no avail. Better force myself back to the question I’d called Luke about—who was Boo Turner? Once I answered that, maybe I’d know what Turner had to do with my uneasy feeling about Stella Tournay’s death? Another question kept pecking at me—what did a jazz musician and an art professor have in common that would keep them friends for so many years?

  Luke was correct. When I checked the bookshelf beside his desk, there were several books about jazz mixed among those he “inherited” from his dad when my ex-husband shed wife number three and lived for a short time aboard his sailboat, the Mambo Mamma. I pulled the three most promising looking titles from the shelf and tried to relax into the desk chair to read. What a stupid name for a sailboat, I thought, Mambo Mamma. Buried anger at the sheer immaturity of the man I thought, at one time, was the end all and be all of my young existence, soured my stomach. I had been divorced from Randall Barnes much longer than I had been married to him, but how could I not be angry all over again when his eight by ten glossy photograph, with a tanned arm draped across the shoulder of wife number four, stared at me from the top of Luke’s desk. What a jerk! Fatigue was winding me up like a toddler with a pound of chocolate in his tummy. Look at that girl! She is probably the same age as Luke. I suddenly realized the man’s wives are getting younger, thinner, and blonder with each one. Pretty soon, by wife number six, they would be baby, anorexic, flaxen-haired specters. Too spooky! What a waste! May he choke on a peach pit. I turned the photograph face down.

  How unlike my mother, the beautiful Rose Marie Fitzgerald McNeal, I am. Once I asked her how she could love my father after so many betrayals and disappointments. She replied, “Oh, Honey, when you love a man and he gives you all he has to give, there isn’t any more. How can you blame him for that?” How? Where should I start? I opened the top drawer of the desk, raked my ex’s photograph into the dark recess, and closed it securely.

  This is the same mother who told me, while in a less charitable mood, the story of my name. It would seem my father spent much of his time, when he was sober enough to do so, chasing the one ‘big’ poker game, the value of which, according to him, would rival today’s Georgia lottery winnings. On the day I was born, he was in a game in Ocilla, Florida, a very long way from Atlanta, Georgia, where my mother was in labor. Somehow they connected by phone and she extracted a tearful promise from him that this game would be his last. As a reminder of his oath, my parents named me Promise Fitzgerald McNeal. My father broke his promise countless times over the years, and my mother forgave him each and every time. I came to accept his indifferent attitude towards fatherhood, but forgiveness still eludes me. Right is right and wrong is wrong.

  My mind segued back to my ex-husband. Sure I blamed him for lacking loyalty, and not loving me as much as he loved himself; though I think the reason I finally divorced him was I just couldn’t endure the unhappiness of always coming up short-handed with him. Randall Barnes just wasn’t worth it. No man is, to me. I’d rather have nothing than the rollercoaster my mother rode for over forty-five years. I glanced over at Mamma Cat, snug and warm in her basket by the heat vent in the corner, just to see if she had an opinion on the matter. I took her loud purr and half shut eyes as a gentle suggestion that I was wallowing like a muddy pig in a deep hole of self-pity. Enough nostalgia. I needed to get back to work. Back to Boo Turner and the connection I could feel, though not yet see, between him and Stella Tournay’s death.

  Of Luke’s three Jazz books, the second I opened contained the most extensive information on Boo Turner: born Solomon Beaumont Turner on St. Helena Island, on the coast South Carolina, in nineteen twenty-two. He was nicknamed “Boo” by his grandmother Turner, whose family had lived on St. Helena since the 1700’s, first working the rice plantations as slaves, and then as fishermen, when slavery ended. Turner expressed no love of the sea, or fishing, and left home at sixteen to follow a dream of playing cornet. After drifting for couple of years around the clubs of New Orleans, at age eighteen, the successful jazz group, “Night Jazz Train” hired him. The article did not say how or when a fisherman’s son from rural South Carolina came to learn the cornet, or to own one, only that beginning in nineteen-forty, Boo Turner toured England and Europe with “Train” where he was billed as the “second” Louis Armstrong, even though, by that time, Armstrong had traded the cornet for his signature trumpet.

  The article went on to list locations Turner appeared and the accolades he received from critics and peers for the unique easy swing style he coaxed from the cornet. He was paired in several critiques with jazz giants Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis. The writer noted Boo Turner was cheated of similar stardom by the fact that he left the band in nineteen forty two when the United States entered the second world war, and Jazz Train returned to America. Turner remained in Europe during, and after, the war, thus perhaps missing his window of opportunity for major success in the U.S. He launched an American tour with his own group, The Blue Notes, in nineteen fifty-one. However, American jazz culture seemed to have had only enough room for a limited number of stellar personalities of his genre, and Boo Turner’s name never made it into the commercial universal mind. He finished out his career crisscrossing the Atlantic, and touring the United States and Canada in an endless string of short engagements, shows, and festivals. In nineteen sixty-two he was awarded the prestigious French prize, “Animer,” for his contribution to the jazz art form. Turner’s last appearance noted by the writer was a retrospective of the fifties, when he briefly came out of retirement for the nineteen-eighty New Port Jazz Festival. In closing, the writer opined “all of jazz owes a debt to Turner for the nuances in warm mellow tones he lured from his instrument.”

  I sat for a moment holding the closed book and thinking. Well, that was interesting. But what did I learn about Stella? The article confirmed Turner was probably in France at the same time as Stella and Paul Tournay. They could have met there—at best a tenuous connection. He was born in South Carolina in nineteen twenty-two, the book was printed in nineteen ninety-one. I had no idea if Turner was dead or alive. I opened the book again and flipped back to the beginning. The article
said Turner was born on St. Helena’s Island. I recalled St. Helena’s as one of the Sea Islands near Charleston and Beaufort, South Carolina. Becca said the awful doll was shipped from Charleston.

  Something niggled at the back of my mind. Why was St. Helena so familiar? What else is St. Helena known for, besides Boo Turner? I tried to reach back into my memory for something I knew about St. Helena, though I was sure I had never visited the island. In all the trips I’d made to the Charleston area my route had pretty much remained the same: enjoy the beach at Mt. Pleasant, walk around the old town to gawk at historical homes along the Battery and pricy antiques I could not afford, eat massive amounts of local seafood, and cruise through the open air shops at the downtown Charleston Market for local art and crafts.

  The Market, yes that was it. I’d seen sweetgrass baskets of all sizes and shapes woven by local artists at the Market, Gullah artists: men and women retaining a culture handed down from West African slaves brought to South Carolina to work the rice, indigo and cotton plantations along the coast. And, if my memory served me correctly, St. Helena was one of the places still inhabited by Gullah descendants. So, Boo Turner was possibly Gullah. How interesting. But how does that relate to Stella? Was Boo Turner’s birthplace and the origination of the doll a coincidence? I thought not. In my opinion, coincidences are, well, hardly ever coincidental. Though even if the two were connected, even if Turner were still alive and living back on St. Helena, why would he want to threaten Becca by sending the doll? The man would be over eighty years old by now. Sending voodoo dolls hardly seemed a likely pastime of the elderly. Besides, the doll didn’t even really have the originality of a West African voodoo doll. Not that I was on a first name basis with many voodoo dolls, but this one was more like a baby doll from the forties, made to look like Becca with the recognizable pink suit. Not very scary really, once you got past the crushed in face—sort of a wannabe voodoo thing. You certainly didn’t need to be a card carrying Gullah descendant to buy an old doll like that at a thousand flea markets around Charleston, or Atlanta, for that matter. Still, the Becca doll was shipped from Charleston.

  My mind was following a maze of disjointed thoughts, and whenever it turned a corner, I saw Stella Tournay hanging by a rope over Howell Creek. I felt in my bones Boo Turner knew something about, or had something to do with, her murder. I retrieved a yellow pad from my briefcase and began to organize what I knew. Filling one side of the page with information didn’t help with any conclusions. Next I drew one circle with Stella inside, another her grandson, another with Becca, one with Paul, Stella’s husband, and another with Boo Turner. Maybe, I considered, Stella’s death and Turner are connected; but the trust is another matter entirely, not related to Stella. After all, there wasn’t even a trust when Stella was killed, or when they probably knew each other during the war. The nagging question was the source of the trust. Had Tournay gotten lucky with the stock market? He certainly didn’t accumulate five million dollars by teaching at USC in Columbia; and it didn’t come from Stella’s family, since they suspected him in Stella’s death. Further more, I doubted the money came from Tournay’s family in France, because if they had money, Tournay would have run with it before the Germans occupied Paris. Ah, the Nazis. What a shameful gang of miscreants they were. My mind went round and round with possibilities.

  I studied my circles again, trying to focus on one issue at a time. Stella’s death was what had drawn me back to Atlanta, and it was the mystery of her death that I felt compelled to solve. I thought about what Sherlock Holmes might do under the circumstances. What would he tell Watson? He would probably say to stick with who had opportunity and the means to commit the crime, rule out the impossible and what is left, no matter how improbable it may be, is the solution. That advice wasn’t much help since hundreds of people had the opportunity to enter the Tournay house that day and kill Stella; after all, it was a hot summer day, no air conditioning, she had the windows and doors open…and even though the newspaper articles reported there was no sign of a struggle at the house, I knew in my gut she was killed there and moved to the creek.

  Looking again at the yellow pad of scribble, my circles screamed childish efforts and were less than helpful. I was in over my head and I knew it. I decided to focus on the more immediate issue of who sent Becca the quasi-voodoo doll. I could construct many more useful questions about the doll than Stella’s death. I turned to a fresh page and made a list of questions. Who knew Becca was in town, and at what hotel she could be found? If Turner were alive, could he know that? Who could tell him? If Turner doesn’t gain by Paul keeping the trust, who does? How about Mitchell Sanders? Paul told me Mitchell had asked him many times about the amount of the trust. Paul probably told him about his mother being in town. Could Mitchell have sent the doll? Another circle with Mitchell Sanders’ name inside was added to my pad. I needed to know what Paul and Mitchell fought about, why Paul had told him to leave. If Mitchell was trying to garner the trust for his own use, he probably would not have started an argument with Paul and stormed out of the house. That meant Paul must have initiated the confrontation with Sanders.

  Just because I had nothing to lose, I picked up my cell phone and called Paul. It was only nine-thirty. He was an actor, a night person; surely he would be awake. Drawing a swastika on the pad while my phone made annoying traveling sounds of locating my party out there somewhere in the great beyond, I fished deep into my memory bag of college European history to Paris during the Nazi occupation. As I recalled, the French Vichy government considered their options and cooperated with the Germans, agreeing to pay an enormous per diem to finance the German war effort. Paris’ glitzy nightlife went on as before, with more Germans than Frenchmen as customers, while ordinary citizens stood hungry in long food lines. Ninety thousand French Jews were exterminated; corruption and black market commerce was the order of the day. Paul finally answered on the fifth ring. His hello sounded irritated. “Oh, Paul, hello, this is Dr. McNeal. I’m sorry, I must have caught you are a bad time. Should I ring back tomorrow?”

  He cleared his throat a couple of times; making little choking noises as though he’d sucked a piece of dry peanut down the wrong way. Finally he spoke. “Dr. McNeal, yes, hello. Sorry. I mean no, no need to call back tomorrow. I was just on another call.” He paused, “…..with a friend. I’m finished now. It’s fine. Has something happened about my house? Don’t tell me you want to return the cats.”

  “No, no,” I replied cheerfully. “Nothing like that.” I could easily guess the identity of that “friend” and threw out my baited line. “Mitchell trying to kiss and make up, is he?”

  “Why Dr. McNeal,” he retorted sarcastically. “I do believe you must be psychic.”

  I ignored his remark and trolled a little deeper. “Doesn’t sound as though you are ready to make up. Too early to forgive and forget?”

  Paul jumped to the bait. “Pleaseeee! I will not do either for that man. Just let me tell you, today is Tuesday, right? Well, Sunday night, I stopped off at Lucky’s, down in midtown, with some actors from the theater for dinner—after a rehearsal mind you, I was working, not playing. One of the guys, Jack, came back from the men’s room and said to me, ever so catty-like, ‘Paul, leave that steak right where it is, you must take a potty break.’ I had no idea what he was talking about. So he gives me a nudge and says, ‘Go now. You will not believe it.’ Everyone at the table was looking at me, so what could I do except head towards the john. And who did I see, huddled off in a back booth, but Mitchell, head to head with some gorgeous lissome black girl with legs from Peachtree Street to heaven, and long hair all done up in those braid things with beads all twined through it. What are they called?”

  “Corn rolls, or rows, I think. How do you know Mitchell wasn’t there on business, just as you were?”

  “Business! Give me a break! I know when two people are lovers and when they are not. He was stroking her hand like it was a silk purse, for God’s sake. I have never been so humili
ated in my life. Jack and everyone else at my table sat in utter silence when I came back and sat down.

  “Anyway, I left the restaurant and came home. Mitchell came dragging in sometimes in the wee hours of the morning. I pretended I was asleep to give myself time to cool off. When I confronted him, he lied of course, at first, and then promised on his mother’s grave he didn’t care about that person and wouldn’t see her again. Can you believe that? On his mother’s grave! What a worthless pile of monkey pooh! We went round and round about it all day and last night. Finally, I told him to pack his things and leave. He still didn’t believe I was serious until this morning when I began packing for him. That’s when you arrived at the house. So no, in answer to your question, I am most certainly not going to forgive and forget. Do you know how humiliating it is to be cuckolded for a girl?”

  I wanted to tell him that yes, I did know, but it was Paul’s time to whine and not mine. “Predictably, he is now calling crying like a baby. God, I hate when grown men cry. Wants us to move to San Francisco so we can get married. Can you believe that? I told him I wasn’t buying his sorrow, sorrow wasn’t enough, and besides I believe he just wants to come back because he smells Grandfather’s money. He even asked me tonight if you were over here about the trust, so I told him you and I talked about it, and I’m giving it to Mother. Then he hung up. Gold digger!” Winding down from his anger, Paul’s voice returned to his normal lower range. “If a girl thing is what he wants, then he needs to take his show somewhere else.” He finished sadly, “I mean really, what would you do?”

  Poor Paul. I had a good idea of how he felt. I remembered when I had to face the reality of my ex’s infidelity I was so hurt I couldn’t even yell at him. All I could do was cry. Paul was silent on the other end of the line. He seemed to be waiting for an answer from me. For about two seconds I considered a professional counselor’s response, then thought, oh hell, I’m retired. So I said instead, “Sweetheart, been there, done that, and got the tee shirt to prove it. When I caught my ex-husband cheating, he actually tried to convince me it was really my problem because, as he maintained, men are not biologically designed to be monogamous.”