by Eva Shaw
“Sure, sure, finish with Diamond. Gramps said he’d be with Babes for a while. Nica, be careful. I’ve got a weird feeling about the things that go on with that family.”
“Me, too.”
At the mansion, I left the car right in front of the grand entrance. Of course, Mr. Everett instantly opened the door.
“I got your message,” I said. “Is she in the library again?” In my wedge sandals, I’m close to six foot, but just to make myself a bigger presence, I puffed out what was left after the surgery of my breasts and extended my elbow from my torso.
It must have worked as he stepped aside while saying, “Yes, madam, she is in the library. And then he dashed in the opposite direction.
I threw open the heavy koa wood doors and there she sat. Waiting. Frowning. If a Category Five hurricane had a face, then it would look just like Auntie Evil. Yes, then it dawned on me that she was the Miss Dupris who had summoned me. I scanned the chilly, dark room half expecting to see Diamond sitting next to the window like a penniless relation straight from a Jane Austin novel, terrified to speak for fear she’d be thrown out on the moors.
“Good, you’re here, too,” I said, loud enough for Auntie to gasp, but that could have been the sound of her oxygen hose. “Where is your niece?”
“I do not want you to bother, Diamond. She said she needed to rest and let me make myself perfectly clear because apparently you are too dense to have understood my previous warning. You will not speak with her or disturb her now or ever again. I thought, looking at you, that you understood English. Apparently, that is not the case. I told you not to poke your nose in family issues, not to interfere.” Her scratchy voice throbbed with anger. It wasn’t the choking back kind that you see when people are passionately violent, but more of the disturbing, deadly version from someone who is considering committing a horrendous act.
Victoria snapped her hand and pointed a quivering index finger at me. “Oh, sit and be quiet. I have quite few more things to tell you, you interfering and intrusive young woman.”
I sat on the matching white brocade sofa, straightened my spine, to give me more confidence and then said, “I need some answers, Miss Dupris, from you and your niece.”
She wheezed, reaching for the oxygen mask that lay on the sofa next to her. “Do not interrupt me, you impertinent busybody. Now listen because I do not plan to repeat myself. Ever.”
My instinct told me to run like the wind. But I couldn’t. I had to know what she was about to tell me. So I folded my hands in my lap and crossed my ankles, although I knew I could spring up and get out if I needed to.
“You have interfered in business, family business, which does not concern you. You are a meddlesome, prying troublemaker.”
“And a friend to your niece,” I added.
“A friend? Oh my goodness. That is ridiculous. Diamond has no qualities that could be considered friendly. She is ineffectual and worthless. She is devoid of personality and dull-witted. But you know that, is that not true, Mrs. Wainwright-Dobson?”
I’d already been called a busybody, meddlesome, prying, and impertinent. Now she was telling me I wasn’t qualified to be a friend. I had a sneaky suspicion the elderly woman could come up with some adjectives about my inquisitive personality that would have made me blush.
I’d learned, and apparently retained the information, how when someone is ruthlessly angry, if we can sit back and appear relaxed, the combatant will sometimes spill whatever beans needed to be brought out in the open. Oh, geez, I thought, I’m rambling like Cousin Jane. Nonetheless, I willed my breath to slow and plastered a calm smile on my lips.
Auntie Evil’s voice got louder. “If Diamond was smart enough to have friends, she would not be associated with someone who lies to get entry into a secure nursing home and pretend she is the niece of Babes Waller.” She shivered. “Oh, even thinking of him and this conniving ways curdles my stomach.”
“I liked him a lot, Miss Dupris,” I snapped. Although the guy was out to lunch in a far more benign way than Auntie Evil, I preferred Babes hands down.
“It is time you knew the truth about Mr. Waller, missy. That man tried to extort money from me, saying he’d smear our family name from here to New York City. Blackmail me? Well, you can be certain that I stopped that.” Her mouth screwed up as if she was going to spit. “And you say you are a friend of Diamond’s, but I also know how you frequent nightclubs filled with musicians and criminals.”
“Have you been following me?” Well, duh, of course she had or she wouldn’t have this information.
“My employee George reported it all,” she snapped and then the flicker in her eyes revealed she’d played a trump card.
“Ah, I get it. So that’s how you knew about where I was going and what I was doing. George Stratford? On your payroll?”
“Why, you hussy. How dare you demand answers and question me about my staff.” She sucked in a long breath of oxygen, but this time rather than helping, she swayed a bit and coughed deeply, a mucus-filled one that made me turn my head away.
And while Auntie Evil was sucking on the mask and coughing, it all came together. George delivered the flowers with that ugly note which of course had been dictated by Miss Dupris. He probably drove the black car with orders to stop me from being a busybody. And when I saw him outside Carlton Villas? Sure, he was there on behalf of Victoria to make sure that Babes wasn’t in a position to tell me anything. Would George have killed Babes if he was lucid? Victoria was certainly used to getting her way, regardless of the circumstances, but thank heavens, I knew that Babes was still okay, since he was chatting it up with Henry.
As I finished putting two and two together, I realized she was still lecturing my wanton behavior. Then she barked, “Those bars are filled with hoodlums and now you, you call yourself a friend? Oh, please. As for Diamond? She does not have the sense she was born with and will turn out just like her mother. A woman without scruples. I am not surprised. The rotten apple does not fall far from the tree. I thought Elaine had learned a lesson with all the sorrow she brought on the family. Shame that is what she caused. She shamed us and I’m still attempting to live that shame down.”
“I think perhaps if you answer a few questions, I can help,” I interrupted. Yes, like call the EMTs and place the fruitcake into a psych lockdown ward for a few days, under heavy meds and have her evaluated by a team of psychiatrists who study sociopaths.
“Be quiet. Here is her illegitimate daughter following in her disgusting footsteps. Like mother like daughter.” Victoria inhaled even more deeply as if she couldn’t get enough oxygen. She fixed her dark eyes on me and the whistle of the machine echoed in the cavernous room. Suddenly, she sprung up and dropped the apparatus to the tea table between us. Clunk.
I flinched.
The cane that had been resting on her knee was now pointed at me. “Stop fidgeting. I have not finished with you yet.” She punctuated that sentence with thrusting the cane over the tea table and at me.
Did I really need yet more proof that Auntie Evil was off her rocker?
Just let her loathing run its course, though I quickly amended my first silent comment with, She’s got a lot of years of disgust saved up. I leaned against the stark white brocade sofa and faced the deranged lady. From the depths of my purse, my phone ring. There was no way I was going to reach for it, not with the hold Victoria Dupris had on that silver tipped cane and the fact that she was standing over me whipping her cane through the air.
“I’ve warned you at our last meeting. You do not belong in this world. You have, however, dragged my dim-witted niece into your filthy, depraved cesspool of rock and roll, honky-tonk singers, taverns, and musicians. What is next? Will she start carousing with novelists and writers? Humph. All degenerate and loathsome people. They only want one thing—”
I might still be, according to my doc
tors, a bit tired from the treatments, but right then, adrenaline was my champion and in that split second I knew everything. “Why did you kill Jimmy March? Tell me.”
Much later, I would wonder where that thought had come from and how I had the courage to ask it, but the words tumbled out of my mouth of their own volition. I’m a baby Christian as far as Christians go, but it had to be the Holy Spirit talking through me. I was surprised, let me tell you, when that came out.
“Humph, so what do you know? And for how long?” She swayed slightly, but looked stronger than before. Her face showed I’d hit on the truth. Instead of making her angrier, she actually smiled, if a twist of her pinched lips was a smile.
Directly in back of Victoria Dupris, a cabinet filled with dozens of fussy little statues was the answer. It was there all along in a gilded, nineteenth century oval picture frame. It was a photo of a beautiful, softly plump young woman, round and full of smiles. She looked like she was giggling. Encircled in her arm was a dour figure, a tiny, dark haired woman whose deep frown matched a much-younger Victoria Dupris. Sibling rivalry gone very much astray. “You envied her and her relationship with Jimmy,” I said.
“Relationship? Don’t even make it sound like love. It was sex, sex, and even more sex. She had no heart. One must have a heart to give it to another in a so-called relationship,” she spat the words. “One must be able to love to feel that way. Elaine could never experience real love, I will have you know. She was too shallow for that. She had to be the star. Had to steal whatever glory might come to me. She murdered our mother. You knew that, is that not correct?”
“What?”
“If she had not been a huge baby, our mother would have survived childbirth. I know that to be true. I was with the midwife and the doctor when Elaine was delivered. There was so much screaming and blood, but I refused to leave Mother to those strangers. Elaine killed Mama.”
“Terrible things happen in childbirth,” I started to say, but Victoria Dupris was way past being able to connect with logic.
“Then? Our father turned his back on me. He ignored me. He showered her with everything she ever even hinted that she wanted. She was exquisite and smart and with curly hair and oh, so very clever to get what she wanted from anyone she wanted. I was wise to her. I hated how she used her voluptuous body to twist any man around her finger, including our brainless father.” Victoria reached in her pocket and pulled out a lace-edge hanky. I expected her blot to the spittle that had formed on her mouth. Instead she ripped the edge right off it. We both watched as the lace dropped to the carpet and she stomped it with her orthopedic loafer, grinding and grinding it into the pile.
“You were tired of seeing her happy?” Okay, I’m a glutton for punishment, but I wanted the whole story.
With a plunk, she dropped the cane on the table. “You are laughable in your stupidity.” She fumbled again into the pocket, but this time no hanky appeared. Instead she held a tiny silver-handled gun. It looked like a toy, but the way Victoria Dupris cradled it, it was meant to frighten or kill me. She turned it around in her hands, and for a long moment, studied the barrel like an appraiser on Antiques Road Show.
If it were in a museum display, I might have admired the inlay of pearl and the delicacy of the silver-scroll work, but since it was currently pointing at me, it was tough to enjoy its workmanship.
“I have made a decision. I am going to kill you. Therefore it cannot hurt to tell you the truth. I am sick and tired of you, Mrs. Wainwright-Dobson. If it is true that you worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which I find unfathomable, you will discover my reasoning to be sound and intelligent. Elaine not only killed our mother, but she murdered my only reason for living when she stole the one man I ever loved and who truly loved me. He told me we were going to be married and the baby that Elaine swore was his? It certainly was not. I was the only woman he was romantically and sexually connected with. He told me so. Elaine was a tramp, he told me. How would she know who impregnated her? He loved me.”
I laughed. It was crazy and the timing was awful, but I did it. “You’re going to kill me? I’ve done nothing.” Could I make it to the door? The old woman was frail, on oxygen, and used a cane. I inched to the edge of the sofa, ready to spring. My cell rang again. At least it was on, which would make it easier when I dialed nine-one-one. Of course, I could only call the police if I was alive.
“Yes, because when you are dead, the secrets will die with you. Diamond has the intelligence of a gnat, so she will not go against my word. I will tell people you came here to rob me.” She swept her hand around the room, indicating the priceless antiques. “I am old, some say senile. They will say I did not know what I was doing. Insanity? Perhaps, but those of us with breeding will never be incarcerated.”
She looked down at the oxygen mask. If she went for it, I’d go for her gun. But she didn’t.
The words can out in a pant. “Now I suppose Mil Finger will need even more money. She and that lout she married.” Her hand shook and the gun sagged.
“Mil Finger? And Pinkie, too?” I couldn’t move if I wanted to.
“Mildred was my personal maid. She came to work here just before Elaine caused Jimmy’s death. That overbearing fool is an expensive tool.”
The barrel of the gun dropped an inch. Now I would be shot in the stomach rather than the face, if she pulled the trigger. Oh, joy. “I can understand having your heart broken, Miss Dupris. But why Jimmy? Why did you kill him?”
The gun snapped back and Victoria’s hand became steady as the barrel pointed once more at my eyes. There was a time the Old Me would have dashed over the table, wrestled the old gal to the ground, and come out with a commendation from my supervisor. But now, the New Me could not stir from the sofa. I was afraid and I knew I was afraid, which made it worse.
“You are one of those know-it-alls. You cannot even imagine what I had been through before Jimmy and I became a couple. You are beautiful. You are elegant. I have always been plain and born with this stupid limp. I never measured up to anyone’s idea of a debutant. Then my little sister took Jimmy away from me and turned up pregnant, swearing she was carrying my own lover’s child. She murdered our mother, turned our father against me, and took every good thing in life that I valued away. Once she was dead, Jimmy and I would be free. I went to the theater that night to kill her.”
“You wanted to kill Lanie?”
“You stupid woman. Must I continue to repeat myself? Yes, I had always thought of killing her, always planned it, even when we were children, so that Daddy would pay attention to me, to know I existed. You do not know what it is like to have to put up with a Daddy’s girl who got everything. I had always planned to kill my sister.”
I’ve heard about siblings not getting along, but if you’re blinking now with the hatred Victoria Dupris had against her sister, join the club. I was too.
“I followed her to the theater. Jimmy was about to go on stage. But she waltzed right into his dressing room. I calmly told her why I had to kill her. Jimmy was there and nodded, at least I think he did. I had it planned. I had my own money. We would disappear and people in our social set would never know that Jimmy and I were living in Brazil. Then that idiot Babes burst in to the room. He tripped and knocked my hand just as I pulled the trigger.”
Her face became harder, if that were possible as she said, “I killed Jimmy March. I killed him.” She gasped, flopped down on the sofa, but somehow her hand remained steady. “I saw him on the floor with blood all over his shirt and the hole near his heart. There was blood everywhere and on me, too.”
Her eyes closed for a second, as if remembering that day. “Do you know what Lanie did then? Answer me, you impertinent hussy,” she ordered.
“Ah, she cried?”
Victoria snickered and coughed. “She laughed at me. She did not even bend down toward her lover. She looked at me and
laughed.” The words came in labored puffs, but she continued, “I swore right then that I would never forgive her. Now she is dead and I am dying and I have discovered that I cannot carry the hatred I felt for her on to Diamond. I do feel sorry, I want you to know. For myself. Now, when I am gone, Diamond will get everything. My own lover’s child, yes, I have come to realize that Elaine did tell the truth on that one thing. Diamond does look like Jimmy if you really need to know. She will inherit my fortune.”
She started sobbing but managed to get to her feet. Then looked at me with eyes of steel and asked, “What will people think?”
The gun was now at eye level and I could actually see straight into the barrel. “Wait, Miss Dupris, think this through. Don’t you want to tell Diamond all this yourself? Would you like to tell Diamond how you feel before you fire that gun? You didn’t mean to kill Jimmy. Everybody will agree to that. The authorities understand things like this. They always understand the truth. It was just an accident, a horrible accident.”
“I have thought about options. What you cannot understand, I am certain, is that this is a question of breeding. If Jimmy and I had left Hawaii, perhaps I would not have been troubled by the scandal of someone of my status marrying a ner-do-well. However, that was not the case. I could not tell Diamond and the authorities that I was in love with Jimmy March, because what would people in our circle think? Consequently, you must die.”
Chapter 18
Have you ever thought of where you’d like to be when your earthy life ends? I hadn’t either and yet there I was in the library of a grand mansion in Honolulu and as they say in detective fiction, “staring in the barrel of a loaded gun,” thanks to Victoria “the fruitcake” Dupris. Whatever courage I had had as a consultant with the bureau was gone. I tasted fear in my mouth and it was bitter.
Her arm quivered but then straightened. I knew without a doubt that the toy gun could pop a hole straight through me. Of that I was sure. Death could either be painful as I quickly lost blood all over the ancient Persian carpet or quick. If I have a choice, God please, make it fast, I prayed and squeezed my eyes shut.