I walked around to the parlor side of the house and up the steps to the covered porch. The floor-to-ceiling windows were all closed and fastened securely, the drapes pulled tight. Obviously, whoever was running the sale didn’t intend to give any previews. I followed the porch around to the front of the house, stumbling now and then over a rocking chair or a stray garden tool. A quick flicker of my flashlight showed the porch had been packed with the kind of thing I usually find in garages at estate sales; yard tools, gardening equipment, old folding wooden chairs, galvanized tubs, wooden buckets of nails, dozens and dozens of flowerpots. One stack of flowerpots caught my eye. I bent down. They were pastel glazed, with playful patterns of tulips and bluebirds and sunflowers. I turned the top one over. Bingo. It was really the real McCoy. Pottery, that is. I sorted through the stack quickly. There were six McCoy flowerpots, two Roseville, all of them marked ten cents. Antique shops in Buckhead sold plain McCoy for thirty to fifty dollars apiece; Roseville like these would go for at least sixty dollars. Score one for Weezie.
But where to hide them? I looked around, saw a huge, overgrown boxwood at the edge of the porch. I took the stack of pots, lay down on my belly, and slid them underneath the shrub.
Now I really did have to pee. I did a kind of quickstep around to the porch on the other side of the house. The windows to the dining room were closed tight, drapes drawn. Double damn. This side of the house was in total darkness. A malevolent old magnolia towered over the porch; its topmost branches leaning up against and nearly covering the wall. I played the flashlight against the side of the house. A second-story window was nearly level with one of the branches. And it had been left open maybe six inches.
As a kid, magnolias had been my favorite climbing trees. The branches were thick and low and the foliage so dense you could never see a kid at the top of the tree throwing water balloons at kids riding by on their bikes.
I leaned down and got right in Jethro’s face. “Stay,” I said sternly. He yawned and lay down. I shoved my flashlight in the waistband at the back of my jeans, hitched a leg over the lowest branch, pulled myself up, and kept on going.
At ten feet in the air, the view of the branch nearest the window looked a lot thinner and scarier than it had from the ground. But the threat of wetting my pants—in public—and having to stay in said pants during the sale of the century kept me moving.
I shinnied out to the end of the limb, swung my left leg over, and leaned precariously in toward the wall of the house. Steadying myself on the branch with one hand, I reached out and pushed upward on the window. Stuck. I gritted my teeth, put both hands on the rotted window sash, and gave it a shove.
Slowly, it inched upward. When it was halfway open, I leaned my torso into the window and slithered through, tumbling in a heap onto the floor.
I was in! I snapped on my flashlight. I was in a small bedroom dominated by a massive carved four-poster bed heaped with stacks of old clothing and linens. Water-stained rose-trellised wallpaper covered the walls. But for the first time in at least twenty years I paid absolutely no attention to the stacks of junk piled nearly ceiling-high in the bedroom. Never mind the antiques. I needed to find a bathroom.
There were two doors in the room. One was narrow, painted white. I opened it, and a stack of hatboxes fell on my head. A closet. It was jammed with clothes. Faded cotton housedresses, drifts of netting and chiffon, silk and brocades. Reluctantly, I went to the other door. It led out into the hallway.
I didn’t dare turn on a light. I played the flashlight around the wide hall. Four more doors. Lock-kneed and cross-eyed with agony, I opened two doors, found two more bedrooms. On the third try I found the loo.
High-ceilinged with yellowed tiles, a clawfoot bathtub and yes!—an ancient, but apparently working, commode.
Afterward, I stood in the hallway, listening. Had anyone heard the groan of the cast-iron pipes, the gurgle of water? The old house was still except for the creaking of floorboards under my feet and faint, skittering noises in the walls. Roaches. This was Savannah, after all. Everybody has roaches, except my parents. Pest control is one of my father’s hobbies.
Well, I was in, wasn’t I? No alarms had sounded. No harm in checking around. I headed down the stairs, clinging fast to the handrail, which teetered at every touch.
At the bottom of the stairs I paused again, trying to get my bearings. The people organizing the sale had been busy. Long tables lined the walls of the hallway, heaped with a hundred years’ worth of bric-a-brac.
My hand came to rest on a mismatched pair of chunky Georgian silver candlesticks. One stick’s base was squared-off, the other round. They were tarnished and dented, and the tape that bound them together said ten dollars. It was too dark to see the hallmark, but they were still a steal. I took the plastic bag out of my hip pocket and stashed the candlesticks there. My hip brushed against the table and I grabbed to catch the bibelot I’d knocked over. Holding my flashlight on it, I saw it was a Staffordshire porcelain shepherdess grouping. Without thinking, I scooped it up and checked for a price sticker. It was marked twenty-five dollars. Not dirt cheap, but I knew I could turn it at half a dozen shops right here in town. I took a dish towel from a stack of linens and wrapped it around the shepherdess, adding it to my stash.
The bag was getting heavy. It was time to go. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a glint of metal amongst the linens. I bent down closer. A beautifully worked wooden box lay open on top of the linens. The box was fitted with faded purple velvet. Nested inside were two small, exquisitely inlaid pearl-handled revolvers.
I frowned. Firearms are not my specialty. There were too many knowledgeable gun dealers in south Georgia, and I knew too little about them to take a risk. But even my untrained eye could see that these were something special. I picked up the box for a closer look. A heavily chased silver plate adorned the lid. I squinted, but couldn’t read the worn engraving. It didn’t matter. From what little I could tell, these were probably Civil War presentation pistols. There was no price sticker. They went into the bag with the candlesticks and the china shepherdess.
Squaring my shoulders, I headed for the front parlor. I held my breath as the flashlight flickered over the far corner, the one where the cupboard had been.
It was there. I exhaled. The cupboard had been cleared of the china and its doors were flung wide. I tiptoed over, felt the satin-smooth patina of the wood. An index card was taped to the inside back. In block printing were the words “Elm corner cupboard, original to Beaulieu plantation. Signed, dated 1858, authenticated.” The next line on the card made me gasp. $15,000.
I snapped off the flashlight, stuffed it in my back pocket. The adrenaline rush was suddenly gone. The price of the Moses Weed cupboard was fair, but it might as well have been $150,000. I’d come to Beaulieu ready to gamble, but somebody had raised the table stakes way over my limit.
It was time to go. I felt limp with fatigue and disappointment. I’d lost my heart and my nerve. No more death-defying tree climbs for me. I’d just go out the back door and slink back to my truck.
But what to do with my booty? Now that the Weed cupboard was out of my grasp, I might as well make a go of the other treasures. I needed a place to hide the bag, someplace off-limits, where prying hands and eyes wouldn’t scoop them up before I came in at the legal starting time. Someplace as far away as possible from the card table near the front door where the checkout stand would surely be located.
Upstairs. There was a narrow closet in the bathroom. A linen closet, no doubt. I could hide the bag under the inevitable sheets and pillowcases. My knees wobbled as I climbed the stairs.
I went into the bathroom, shut the door, pressed the push-button light switch. I was too tired now for caution. Holding the bag with my left hand, I jerked at the closet door with my right. Stuck. Heat and moisture had made the wooden door swell and warp. I set the bag down on the tile floor, grasped the doorknob with both hands, and tugged. It gave a little but still wouldn’t open. I stood b
ack a little, bent my knees, and pulled again.
The door flew open and I heard something. Not the skittering of renegade roaches. Something heavy, sliding onto the tile floor. I looked down. Caroline DeSantos looked up at me, her head crimped unnaturally to the side, legs stuck straight forward. She was still wearing the three-thousand-dollar Briaggi dress. Only now the cream silk bore a huge crimson blossom in the middle of her chest. Caroline DeSantos wouldn’t have been caught dead in red. Only now she was.
Chapter 14
Jethro barked.
“My God, no,” I said aloud. But I knew that bark. It was high-pitched, anxious. “Weezie, come back to me,” it seemed to say. Or maybe it was just his “Weezie, I’m bored and I’ve got a squirrel treed” bark. We were still working on communication skills.
I stood, rooted to the spot, looking down at Caroline. I felt dizzy, but I kept looking. Jethro kept barking. A horn beeped somewhere outside. That did it. I ran into the bedroom and stuck my head out the window.
“Hush,” I called. “Hush, puppy.” The magnolia leaves made a thick, nearly impenetrable canopy over the lawn below. The hot humid air was perfectly still. Jethro whimpered, and I heard his tail thump against the grass.
Then a beam of light sliced through the syrupy softness of the night. I put my hand up to shield my eyes, but the beam was relentless. Jethro whimpered again. I felt like joining in.
“Ma’am?” The voice below was loud, but not deep. “Ma’am? I’m from Paragon Security. An alarm went off. Are you the owner of this home?”
“She’s dead.” I meant Anna Ruby Mullinax, but I was thinking of that corpse on the bathroom floor too.
He cleared his throat. “Ma’am? Could you come down, please? And, uh, I think you should know, I’m an armed response officer. You’re, uh, under arrest.”
Under the circumstances, I decided to hide my bag of loot under the bed.
The magnolia tree suddenly looked threatening, the ground seemed miles away. “How about I come downstairs and meet you at the front door?” I tried.
“Come down the way you came in, please,” he said. He shone the flashlight up into the treetop again. I took my time climbing, putting one foot gingerly beneath the other, not looking down. From below, I could hear the buzz and drone of a radio. He was talking into it. Calling in reinforcements, probably.
When I was about four feet off the ground, I saw a car with flashing blue lights speeding down Beaulieu’s front drive.
“That’s fine,” the security guard said. “Jump on down, please, ma’am.”
My foot slipped, and I fell in a heap, rolling away from the base of the tree, scraping a long patch of skin from my right thigh and my right hand when I tried to cushion my fall. Jethro trotted over and licked my face.
“Stay right there,” the guard said. I got the impression of youth, of a tan uniform, and of a big gun barrel, pointed politely, but resolutely, in my direction.
Jethro started in to howling when he heard the police siren. One by one, lights flickered on around the darkened grounds of Beaulieu. The first police car was followed by a Paragon Security Armed Response vehicle, which was really just a battered tan Chevy Blazer with a gun rack in the rear window.
“I was just looking for a bathroom,” I told the skinny young guard. It sounded lame, even to me. “I saw a window open, and I went in the house, and I used the facility, but then I needed something to dry my hands on, and I opened the closet.” I paused and took a gulp of soupy air. A gnat flew into my mouth. It was that kind of night. “Officer? You might want to call the real police.”
A beefy older guy grabbed me by the arm. “Ma’am? We’re as real as it gets. And we’re gonna swear out a real honest-to-God warrant against you for breaking and entering.”
I winced and tried to twist out of his grasp, but he held on tighter. There was no good way to bring up the subject of a dead body for somebody in my predicament. Still, I’d been raised Catholic. Confession seemed only natural.
I swatted at the gnat cloud around my face. “Officer? There’s a dead woman in the bathroom closet upstairs.”
“Oh.” A vein throbbed in the skinny guy’s neck. The beefy guy produced a set of rinky-dink handcuffs that looked like he’d gotten them with cereal box tops.
You could hear the police sirens coming from a long way away. People around the grounds began to stir. A crowd gathered there around us, at the base of the magnolia tree. People whispered and pointed at me. My head was pounding. I needed coffee and ibuprofen because I was not thinking clearly. I should have been thinking about a lawyer, about who put that big ugly bloodstain on Caroline’s chest. Instead, I was wondering whether or not they’d postpone the estate sale until after I got out of this messy little jam.
Chapter 15
The redbrick police barracks was at the corner of Habersham and Oglethorpe. James made it there in under ten minutes.
He was worried about his niece. On the phone, she’d said something about finding a body, out at Beaulieu, and about being arrested and charged for breaking and entering. Oh yes, and possibly homicide. She was hysterical and, he fervently hoped, overreacting. Although it wasn’t like Weezie to overreact.
He pushed the heavy plate-glass doors open. A sleepy-eyed black woman looked up from her perch behind the front counter. At one time, this had been a high varnished-mahogany desk, and the face behind the desk would have been one of the meaty-faced Finnegans, or maybe BoBo Kuniansky. But the Finnegans had gotten out of police work, and the last he’d heard, BoBo Kuniansky was selling real estate at Hilton Head Island. This woman was someone he’d never seen before. And she was separated from the world by an inch-thick shield of bullet-proof glass. James sighed. This was not the Savannah of his youth.
The black woman told him he needed to see Detective Bradley. Upstairs. The elevator took a long time. A heavyset man in a brown short-sleeved shirt seemed to be the only person in the detective’s office.
“Are you Detective Bradley?” James asked.
“I’m Jay Bradley. You Father Foley?”
“Just James, if you don’t mind.”
“I had you for freshman English. At Benedictine,” Bradley said. “Class of eighty. I guess you don’t remember.”
“It was a long time ago,” James said apologetically. “And I only taught the two years. Were you good at English?”
“Nah, I sucked,” Bradley said. “You wanta see Eloise?”
“I do,” James said quickly.
Bradley gestured toward the door opposite where he was standing. “She’s in there. Kinda shook up.”
“Weezie would never kill anyone,” James said, his voice sharp, authoritarian, like the former English teacher.
“Yeah,” Bradley said. “Whatever. In a little while, we’re gonna book her, and I’m gonna go home and get some sleep. I’m wiped out.”
“Book her?” James could not keep the alarm from his voice. “Weezie’s not a murderer. You can’t keep her overnight.”
Bradley shrugged. “We keep her until a judge says otherwise,” he said. “You’re a lawyer, right? You know all this stuff.”
Actually, he didn’t. But he knew somebody who knew criminal law backward and forward. Did he dare call Jonathan at this hour? Their friendship was still so new, so tentative. He winced. But this was Weezie. And blood was thicker than water.
His niece was huddled in a chair in the corner of what looked like a conference room. It was Savannah, midsummer, which meant every public building in town had the mean average temperature of a meat locker. This room was freezing, and she had her arms wrapped around her chest, her knees drawn up in a fetal position. Her face was red and blotchy from crying, and her arms were covered in red welts.
“Uncle James!” It was a whisper, really. She stood up, and he folded her into his arms, the way he’d done when she was six and had scraped her knee riding her bike.
“Weezer,” he said, rubbing her arms. They were like ice. “It’s all right, Weezer. I’m h
ere. I’m here.”
He got her calmed down finally. Went to the break room, got her a cup of coffee and a package of Little Debbie snack cakes. The Little Debbies were actually for him. Terrible habit.
James draped his windbreaker around Weezie’s shoulders. She was pale and shivering. “Tell me what happened,” he said, once she’d warmed up a little.
“Caroline’s dead,” Weezie said. “They think I killed her.”
“I know,” he said.
She covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh my God!”
“What?” James leaned over, alarmed. “What?”
“BeBe,” Weezie said. “I just left her there. At Beaulieu. And Jethro. And the truck. They made me get in the police cruiser. BeBe was sound asleep. My God. She’ll think I was kidnapped.”
“No, she won’t,” James said, relieved that this particular crisis could be averted. “She called me right after you did. She saw the cops putting you in the cruiser, and one of your dealer buddies told her what had happened. Or, at least, what they thought had happened.”
“That I’d broken into Beaulieu, stolen a bunch of stuff, and shot Caroline,” Weezie said. “That’s what everybody thinks.”
“BeBe knows you didn’t do anything like that,” James said, patting Weezie’s hand. “She drove the truck home. Jethro’s with her. She just wanted to make sure I knew what had happened.”
The door opened all the way. Bradley poked his head in. Coughed officiously. “Time to go.”
Savannah Blues Page 9