by ML Gamble
Elizabeth had more than enough to talk through with the judge and Miss Lou. He would give her some space.
He wheeled his pickup out onto the open highway. His face twitched and he resisted the urge to put his hand on his cheek to see if he could feel the shape of her lips.
You’re losing it, man, a voice inside his brain warned. Tommy Lee pressed down on the gas and sped away, wishing with his whole heart that he could stay.
INDIA AND BENNETT Heywood, along with their daughter Rosellen and Paul deAngelis, arrived at Luvey Rose’s house well after the bloom had worn off Luvey and Tammy’s party.
Which was par for the course, India thought. Paul and Rosellen had been fighting over something for two days. She hadn’t heard them, but her daughter had been walking around with the pinched look of someone who is about to withdraw into a sulk. To make things worse, Paul acted like he was ready to hit someone all through dinner, while her husband insisted on talking of nothing but “the sad state of affairs in Belle Fleur.”
Honestly, she concluded. With all the pressure of waiting to hear confirmation that Rosellen would be crowned Queen, one would think Bennett would refocus his attention on what really mattered. Such as getting Philip deAngelis to confirm what she knew in her heart had to be true.
Standing next to Bennett, she grabbed and downed in one gulp the champagne cocktail proffered to her by Luvey’s servant. “Four murders in two days, it’s a disgrace, Mayor,” the doctor intoned.
“It’s a real mess, Bennett. Though interest in the Pageant is at an all-time high!” Paris was rocking on his heels, nodding in agreement, but seemed to be listening as intently as he could to the conversation taking place right behind him, between Luvey and Paul deAngelis.
India snagged another glass of champagne and remembered someone had told her that the mayor had noted with glee at the luncheon a few days ago that Rosellen Heywood was looking anything but regal these days.
That was Paris for you, she thought, letting her own ears tune in to the twosome on the settee. Scratch whatever back was closest and hope they would return the favor. The little cow-pie.
“I understand my father was here earlier,” Paul was saying, downing his third shot of whiskey from the bottle on the coffee table. “Why didn’t you tell me you invited him?”
“Honestly, Paul,” Rosellen interrupted, “Luvey doesn’t have to clear her guest list with you.”
“Stay out of this, Rosellen,” he snarled. He stared hard at the redhead lounging across from him. “I want to talk to you about the dinner party tomorrow. You never told me for sure if you’re riding on my boat during the Parade of Lights party. I need to know right now.”
Luvey smiled brightly. “Let’s not bore everyone with your insecurities, darling. Call me later. I’ll be here.” She turned her green eyes toward Rosellen. “I saw a painting of your daddy’s mama, when she was queen. She was wearing the most gorgeous brooch. A big old diamond crown, with rubies pink-red as cherries in it. Do you ever wear that, darling? It would go so nice with your coloring. You brunettes always look great in red.”
“That pin was stolen years ago, Luvey.” Rosellen’s eyes were glassy and her face looked feverish. She kept staring at Paul, who ignored her.
“Talking about jewelry reminds me, has your mamma got her tiara all polished up, Rosellen?” Luvey asked.
India couldn’t play the silent observer anymore. Rosellen was like a baby mouse up against that shecat. India walked to stand behind her daughter. India laid her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Yes, yes, I have, Luvey, dear. Thank you for asking. I only wish the tiara was as gorgeous as the one your grandmother Antoine wore. It’s a shame that beautiful thing is locked up down at the bank these past thirty-odd years. No one has been able to fill her shoes and wear it again for your family. It’s such a shame!”
Luvey rose to the insult like a shark to chum. “Well, hopefully Tammy, here, will get to give you all a glimpse of it in a couple of weeks.” She smiled wickedly. “Although, of course, we all know she’s not the favorite this year. Rosellen, have you seen Elizabeth Monette since her terrible attack? I’m hearing from a very well-placed source that she is the oddson bet. Probably just a sympathy vote for being chased after by that riffraff, wouldn’t you say, India?”
India had the urge to crush her champagne flute into Luvey’s large, scarlet-colored mouth, but smiled sweetly. “Well, darling Luvey, if that’s the only pillow talk you’re getting from Philip deAngelis, I guess you’ll just have to be as surprised as everyone else on New Year’s Eve!”
“Mother, please,” Rosellen pleaded.
“So, you’re bedding my old man, too?” Paul demanded in a dead voice.
“Well, well,” India chortled. “Such a messy little end to your evening, isn’t it, dear?”
Paul continued to ignore Rosellen while turning a look of hatred on Luvey.
Luvey had the good grace to blush. “Paul, darling, this is so silly. Why don’t you take poor Rosellen home. I’m afraid her mama has upset her.”
Paul’s face went white while Rosellen looked like she couldn’t take a breath or she’d set off a trip wire. Tammy simply looked drunk.
Before India could reply with a coup de grace, Luvey’s maid rushed up to the sofa and announced, “That man’s on the phone again.”
Luvey gave India a smile full of daggers, then snapped at her servant, “What man?”
“That man what called before. I thought Louise told you.”
“Louise didn’t tell me anything, but I can’t talk to anyone now,” Luvey said sternly, waving her hand. “I still have guests.”
“Okay,” the maid said, but her mouth looked worried. “I’ll tell him, then.”
“A secret caller?” Paris asked.
“I don’t know who it is—” Luvey began.
The maid took that as her cue to speak up. “He won’t say his name, but he told me to tell you he’s a friend of Cracker’s.”
The silence was as thick as summer mist on the bayou, and just as sticky.
One woman inhaled sharply, while another felt as if she might faint.
“Tell him he has the wrong number,” Luvey ordered, her voice unsteady.
“Okay,” the maid murmured, walking from the room. She picked up the phone in the hallway and spoke into the receiver. “Sir, Miss Rose said you’ve got the wrong number. You want to leave a message?”
Silence.
“Sir?” the woman repeated.
But the line was dead.
Chapter Eleven
Tommy Lee had not slept well. His back was giving him fits and he kept dreaming stuff about graveyards and shotguns and women in white with their faces blown off.
To make matters worse, he was as stiff and tender as if he had been in a bar fight with two gorillas. He hoped it was only the aftereffect of his dive into the asphalt on Government Boulevard, but his mind offered up a worrisome doubt. The ounce of metal that was embedded in his back was something he didn’t like to think about.
But maybe he should, because whenever he turned a certain bit too much to the left, he got a jolt like an electrified snake bite down his spine.
Turning his head slowly, he read the clock beside his bed. Five thirty-five in the morning. He should go into the hospital and tell Katie Smiths about the pain, but she’d probably just make jokes about getting her funeral dress ready. Besides, he didn’t have time. When he’d arrived home last night at nine, there had been a message for him to call his FBI friend in New Orleans.
The guy had made an astounding discovery. The gun that had been used to kill Cracker Jackson and Lucille Thompkins had been involved in another murder.
The murder of a young woman, twenty years ago, in sleepy little Farquier County. The dead woman’s name was one Tommy Lee had just grown familiar with.
Marylynn Gibbs, Elizabeth’s mother.
He had debated going to Chief Foley right then with the news, but had decided that Elizabeth had been right last nig
ht when she’d said she needed to find out who her biological father was.
He was the key, Tommy Lee knew.
The devil of it was, he might also be a murderer.
The cop in New Orleans had promised to fax over the information to Dottie’s office by 10:00 a.m. So that left four hours and change to try and piece together a good plan to keep Elizabeth off the front page, ferret out the killer and track down her old man. He wasn’t looking forward to telling Elizabeth the news that her mother had been killed by someone who still owned the murder weapon and had no compunction about using it.
She was too smart not to jump to the same conclusion he had—that the guy she once called Daddy might be willing to kill her just to keep her quiet about the past.
Tommy Lee reached for the phone on the floor. He would call the station and see if Sergeant Bulow was on early watch. He was hoping to barter on their past friendship and find out any info Frank Foley might have gathered, but before he could pick up the receiver, the thing rang.
“Hello?” he answered.
“Tommy Lee, it’s Luvey. How are you, darling?”
His glamorous ex-wife was a notorious late riser. Breakfast before noon was not in Luvey’s known rituals. Which meant she had not been to bed.
Which could mean anything; none of it good. “What do you need, Luvey?” he answered.
“Now that’s something you learned a long time ago,” Luvey replied in a voice that could dry paint on a wall in a deep well. He grinned, liking the fact that nothing stirred in his mind or body even when she turned on the charm.
“I’m on my way out the door, Luvey.”
“At this hour? Come on, Tommy Lee. Are you afraid of dealing with little old me in the middle of the night? Worried you might be a little too vulnerable to some wonderful memories?”
“I could go a month without sleep and not be that vulnerable,” he said with a wolfish grin, enjoying the conversation more and more.
“Honestly,” Luvey whined, “I think the police force trains you boys to be rude.”
“Not rude. Direct. Saves all you taxpayers a lot of money. So there’s no need for you to pretend to want to seduce me. Now, this is my last time asking, but what do you want?”
“It’s not me, Tommy Lee. It’s a friend of mine. Philip deAngelis. He needs you.”
“Cops need lawyers sometimes, Luvey, but I’ve never heard of a lawyer needing a cop, unless one of his clients wanted to dispute a bill.”
“This is serious, Tommy Lee. And very, very sensitive. Can you be discreet?”
He made a face. That damn virtue was evidently a requirement now that he was off the force. “Talk, Luvey.”
“Well, Philip and I are good friends, so he turned to me for help. You see, he knows you and I used to be married, so he wanted me to ask if you could meet with him and advise him on a personal matter he wants to tell you about.”
“Take a shortcut, darlin’. You tell me exactly what the man’s ‘personal matter’ is. But I can’t fix parking tickets anymore.”
She blew her breath out in an effort to keep from losing her temper. “Tommy Lee, someone is threatening Philip’s life. They told him they would kill him if he didn’t change the votes for Queen of Midnight and announce a certain person as Queen.”
He sat up quickly—too quickly—in bed. The muscles in his shoulder were on fire. He moved the phone to his right hand and flexed his left shoulder again hesitantly. The pain got worse. “Who threatened him?”
“We don’t know that. Some man!”
“How did they threaten him?”
“Over the phone. They left a gruesome message on his private answering machine he got for me to call him at, well, and of course, some other friends. Anyway, they also left a letter,” she added hurriedly. “They left it inside his locked car!”
To Tommy Lee’s astonishment, Luvey appeared to be genuinely worried about someone other than herself. “Who did they want to be named Queen?” he asked, looking through the darkness for his service revolver. He found it under the bed. He slid it across the carpet and tucked it into his jeans.
She sucked in her breath. “This is the insane part. Philip said the girl the man demanded he change the votes to already won!”
“Who is it?”
Luvey gasped. “Philip would never tell me that!”
He grinned again. “The old man is cheating on his wife and sleeping with you, but he’d never break a promise to the Queen of Midnight Committee? Give me a break, Luvey. If the girl already won, what’s Philip’s problem?”
“Tommy Lee, don’t be thick. How would it look if someone thought they had pulled off a dirty trick like this? Poor Philip can’t be a part of anything that even looks like a rigged election. But he doesn’t know if he should just tell the man his choice already won, which of course is against his code of silence. He knows he should report all this to the police. But if he does that, there will be a huge investigation and then that girl probably won’t even get to be Queen because of the scan—”
Luvey’s voice was cut off with a tiny click.
“Luvey?” Tommy Lee said, standing and squinting into the darkness outside his window. It looked like snow; the sky was colorless where the sun was rising, as if painted with gray chalk.
He hung up the phone, then dialed Luvey’s home number from memory. He got a disconnect recording.
Savagely he hung up and pulled on his jeans. If he called 911, where would he send them? He didn’t know if Luvey was at home, or with Philip deAngelis in some cozy hideaway. And if he sent the cops to the attorney’s house, he would probably only find the old bastard’s wife.
Who would sue him.
“Damn it!” he said in frustration, stepping into his boots. If he called the station and had them call the phone company to trace Luvey’s new number, he still wouldn’t know if that was where she was calling from.
Gingerly he pulled a heavy woolen sweater over his sore shoulder and headed for the front door. He shoved his gun into the front of his jeans, then grabbed his jacket from the back of the couch where he’d thrown it. He walked softly so as to not wake up Sissy Lane, and reached for the doorknob.
The front bell rang and he jumped back as if he’d been stung by a wet bumblebee. Before he even took the time to check through the window to see who his unexpected visitor might be, he threw open the door.
Elizabeth was standing on his porch. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. “I’m sorry I’m here so early, Tommy Lee, but I need to talk to you.”
“What is it? Are you okay?” Instinctively he reached out and took her arm, scanning her head-to-toe for signs of a new injury.
“No, no. Nothing more like that has happened. I’ve just been up all night thinking this over, and I’ve come to the conclusion my father must be a doctor. Which means he probably still works in medicine, maybe even at—”
His mind ran ahead of her words. Could it be? Was her very own father right there in plain sight at Belle Fleur General? He put his arm around her shoulders, shut the door behind him and steered her toward the truck. “Let’s talk this over while I’m driving, Elizabeth. Something real serious has happened.”
“Where are we going?”
“To try and find Luvey and whoever she is with!”
“Luvey? Who do you think she is with?”
Tommy Lee inhaled and tugged on his mustache. “The killer.”
THE DRIVE BACK ACROSS the river to Belle Fleur took seventeen minutes.
Elizabeth listened in shocked silence to Tommy Lee’s summary of the events since she had last seen him. It was bad enough to hear the news about Luvey’s sudden end to the phone conversation as well as the attempted blackmail of Philip deAngelis, but his quiet recounting of his discovery that the gun that had killed Cracker Jackson and the woman at Baptist Haven had also taken her mother’s life was nearly too much to bear.
Even worse was the thought that immediately came into her mind—that the only probable link between her
mother and the other victims was herself.
“Do you think the murderer is my father?” Elizabeth asked in a small voice as the buildings of Belle Fleur’s business district came into view. The Christmas lights were shining, and seemed a world away in their gaiety.
“It entered my mind, darlin’. If he knew you were coming back to Belle Fleur and knew you were looking into your family history, he might have gotten scared you’d press for an investigation into your mother’s unsolved death. But I can’t work out a good reason why he would have hired Cracker and his cohorts.”
“To scare me off, I guess.” She turned and put her hand on his arm, wanting to touch him to make herself feel some warmth. She felt as if she were frozen solid. “He must still be here in Belle Fleur, Tommy Lee. He must be working somewhere to have heard that your sister was looking into things for me. She only called the courthouse and the hospital, right?”
“That’s what she said. But I think there was another message in her file on you.” He shook his head to clear it as the truck barreled down the off-ramp, two miles from Luvey Rose’s home. “Remember that slip I showed you? There was a phone number written down and the words ‘Check this’ penciled by it. We’ll call Dottie later and find out what that was all about”
Elizabeth didn’t appear to be listening to him. “If he had wanted them to kill me, they could have when I was still back in Maryland. Instead, he killed them after that guy attacked me in the hospital.”
Tommy Lee blew out a long breath and shook his head. “We’re making too many jumps here, Elizabeth. I agree he might be around here if he’s behind this, but I think we’re missing the obvious. Cracker Jackson and Ray Robinson were working together, probably with a third man. An unidentified bloodstain was found out at the scene by the school. Whoever the guy is might have killed the other two after some kind of fight.”