by Brown, Duffy
“Well Jeez Louise, you must be little ol’ Reagan I’ve been hearing so much about.” Mercedes jumped up and flung her arms around me bear-hug style. She was about as big as KiKi and Uncle Putter put together and had the personality of a Golden Retriever. She looked me over, head to toe, like a long-lost relative. “Well goodness me, aren’t you just as cute as a bug’s ear? I can fix those roots you got going on and then hook you up with Mr. Boone. He could do with a nice woman in his life.”
“You . . . you know Boone?”
Mercedes sat down and using KiKi’s sterling silver tongs carefully selected a cinnamon doughnut and put it on one of Grandma Summerside’s blue china plates. “I’ve been cleaning Mr. Boone’s house for the last six months, what there is of it. The man’s in fearful need of furniture; he rattles around in that big old place like a BB in a box. Can’t imagine why he bought it in the first place.”
Without the benefit of high-octane caffeine it was hard to fight through my morning brain cobwebs and make sense of how this all came together. “Why were you in jail with Mamma and KiKi?”
KiKi gave me the auntie kick under the table and the how rude stare. Mercedes broke off a piece of doughnut and took a dainty nibble. “Mr. Boone agreed to pay me double if I’d spend a few hours in that barred establishment and make friends with two ladies who had no business being there in the first place. Said I’d know right off who they were. Seems the police were more then happy to oblige. Your mamma has some fine friends on her side.”
“Boone set this up?”
“Said he owed the judge and wanted to keep her safe, and I was good for that. No one messes with Mercedes.” Mercedes dabbed her lips with the napkin and stirred her tea. “Honey, you best sit down for a spell and take a load off. I declare you’re the color of pea soup.”
I took the chair, and KiKi handed me the blue china teapot, older than the house we sat in, and asked, “So you have a beauty salon?”
Mercedes took another nibble. “Once upon a time I was owner and operator of Mercedes’s Mane Event over on Green Street. It was also the main event for some of our male customers when business got kind of slow, if you get my drift. The police didn’t exactly cotton to my business diversification plan. The good part is two of the girls are marrying their acquaintances this very month; don’t that beat all? The way I see it, Mercedes’s Mane Event was sort of a Match.com with a little pizzazz. Nowadays I just do house calls.”
KiKi’s eyes shot wide open, and she dropped her doughnut in her cup, splashing tea everywhere. Mercedes added, “You know how all those ladies and gents look fine as can be when laid out for their final viewing on this here earth? That’s my doing.”
“You mean you fix people up at the funeral homes?” I asked. “Do their hair?”
“And makeup. Pays good, and they sit real still.” Mercedes laughed. “A little funeral home humor.”
“Well, I certainly do appreciate you watching out for Mamma and KiKi.”
“Mighty glad to do it, honey, mighty glad indeed. None of my customers at the Event cared for Seymour at all, I can tell you that. More than once Dozer came in spitting nails over something Seymour did. Seems he was always pulling a fast one on Dozer to make a buck.”
“Dozer?”
Mercedes took a sip of tea. “Dozer Delany. Short for Bulldozer. He runs a construction company. When Seymour outbid Dozer for building that library addition, it was the last straw. Dozer’s blood pressure went haywire right there in the shop, and we had to go and call in 911. One of the paramedics was a regular customer, so they knew right where to come; otherwise, I think Dozer would have been a goner.”
Mercedes picked up her pink tote and said to KiKi, “We best be getting to those highlights so you can squeeze in the rumba lesson. I always wanted to learn how to rumba. At noon I’m due over at House of Eternal Slumber to give Seymour himself a little spiff-up. If you like, I could nose around and see if anyone has unflattering things to say about the old boy. Your mamma didn’t do him in, but somebody sure did, and not speaking ill of the dead is a big old fat myth. When a no-good rotten creep bites the dust, everyone who kept their mouth shut when he was alive and kicking comes out of the woodwork to give their two cents why he deserves to be dead and buried.”
I took Mercedes’s hand. “I would really appreciate that, but you can’t tell Boone. He thinks snooping is man’s work and wants me to stay out of looking for the real killer. But this is my mamma we’re talking about.”
“Honey, I know hair and I know men, and best I can tell, men are good for two things in this world, and one of them is opening a door for a lady. The other, well, I’m going to leave that one to your imagination.”
Chapter Six
BY ten sharp the pearl-girls were brewing up lattes and cappuccinos, and pestering the heck out of everyone who answered a phone or was plugged into some type of social network. I braced for another day of no sales and grinding fax machines as Lolly’s green and red trolley bus festooned with bouquets of plastic chrysanthemums and streaming ribbons pulled to the curb in front of the Fox.
Lolly climbed out, her flowered Lolly’s Trolley hat dancing in the breeze. “I’m on my way to pick up a tour group over at the Olde Harbor Inn,” she said, coming in the front door. “But first I need a black dress. I’m going to wear it once and burn the thing in celebration. Seymour’s wake is tonight, and I plan on seeing for myself that the piece of dog excrement is dead and out of my life for good. I’m packing Cazy’s .38 to put a bullet through Seymour’s heart just in case.”
“He’s embalmed, honey. I think all the bases are covered. Besides there might be a law against shooting a dead man.”
“Don’t much care. I’ll sleep better knowing I did my part and maybe do a little celebrating.” Lolly sauntered over to the little-black-dress selection hanging on a painted-white broom handle suspended between matching stepladders. I was going for the shabby-chic look and hoping it didn’t fall into the bargain-basement look.
“Now this is a dress,” Lolly said, a smile breaking across her face as she ambled over to another dress rack. She held up a red silk with sequins at the neck and a little flounce at the bottom.
“What happened to black and burn?”
“The .38 and celebrating have more appeal if I have a red dress to do it in. What do you think?” Lolly held it against her front and propped her hand on her hip. “Red’s my color more than black, don’t you agree?” She thrust the dress at me. “I like it, ring me up.”
“Don’t you want to try it on?” I nodded at the cute yellow and white dressing room that was once my kitchen pantry. Considering that the most the pantry ever held was a box of mac and cheese and a can of SpaghettiOs, losing the kitchen space wasn’t much of a hardship.
“It’s a size four,” Lolly said reading off the tag. “I’m an eight. My boobs will puff over the top and my behind can stick out the back. I’ll look downright slutty. Seymour messed up my life; I can mess up his demise. It’s perfect.” Lolly opened her wallet and pulled out her American Express. Far be it from me to come between good taste, a woman’s scorn, and the first sale of the day.
“Bet you’re not going to the wake,” Lolly said to me as I ran her credit card through the machine. “The daughter of Seymour’s accused killer showing up at the funeral would not be good for Gloria’s campaign or her reputation.” Lolly picked up her bag and gave me a wink. “Mighty sorry you’re going to miss it. I intend to make a big fat old scene, be embarrassing as all get out. I’ll give you a blow-by-blow tomorrow. Keep your eye on YouTube; it’s bound to pop up.”
I propped open the front door to let a few hours of warm sun in and BW and the campaign racket out as AnnieFritz and Elsie Abbott ambled up the sidewalk, their flowered dresses swaying, sprayed hair not daring to budge, their steps slowing the closer they got to the house.
“Lord have mercy, what’s going on in that there place of yours, Reagan honey?” AnnieFritz asked, her face pulled into a frown. “Usua
lly we come over here and shop a bit, sit a spell, and have ourselves a chat and a nice cup of tea. We can’t shop and chat with all that racket.”
The sisters were retired school teachers and came to live next to me three years ago when their uncle Willie told Dr. Oz to take a long walk off a short pier, cancelled the subscription to Cooking Light, bought a Fry Daddy at Walmart, and six months later went to that great cream-gravy gathering in the sky. The upside was he left his pristine Greek revival to his two nieces. They supplemented their pensions and social security checks as professional mourners. No one got a room sniffing and sobbing like the Abbott sisters, and every mortuary in Savannah knew it and paid dearly for the privilege.
They turned to leave, the unpaid water bill on the steps catching my eye, the threat of no hot water giving me the willies. I rushed out onto the porch. “Today’s twenty percent off day,” I blurted. “Lots of good deals on fall clothes. Mamma’s campaign is sharing the house till the election’s over is all.”
“Well now, twenty percent, you say?” Elsie exchanged looks with AnnieFritz. “Sister and I are in desperate need of new attire for the Seymour wake. We’ll be front and center tonight. If we don’t have new duds, it’ll be bad for business. We have to keep up appearances, you know. Everyone’s going to be there. Should be a real wingding affair with the burial tomorrow being for family only. This here event is everyone’s last chance to get a good look before Seymour gets shipped off to that great campaign in the hereafter.”
We all made the sign of the cross, and AnnieFritz added, “I suppose we can put up with a little racket for twenty percent. ’Course 25 percent would be better.”
The sisters climbed the steps and headed for the dresses, Butler Haber coming up the walk behind them. Butler owned Haber Lumber LLC out on Old River Road. Butler made it big back in the ’90s when building houses was king and bought the Philbrick-Eastman House over on Chippewa Square. I had the feeling when the housing market tanked, it took the Habers right along with it. The Philbrick-Eastman House was looking a little dodgy these days, and Butler’s Buick was far from new with something dripping from the bottom. “I need to speak to Marigold,” Butler said to me.
I stepped aside. “It’s a consignment shop and campaign headquarters all rolled into one. Take your pick.”
Butler ran his hand over his head, messing up his carefully arranged, dyed comb-over. He looked pale, gaunt. “Just give Marigold a message. She won’t pick up her blasted phone. Don’t know why she has the thing if she isn’t going to use it. Cost a bundle. Tell her she needs to get herself home in time for that wake tonight. This will be the last of it. It’s done now. Over. We need to keep up appearances.” He added the last part as if talking to himself as much as me. “She’ll know what I mean. Don’t forget, you hear? It’s important.”
I gave a little two-fingered soldier salute instead of the one-fingered salute I really wanted to give him. No wonder Marigold didn’t like going home; who would like to have that waiting for them? Butler turned on his heel and stormed off, and I headed inside enjoying my economically challenged single status more than usual.
The volunteers chatted on phones and stuffed envelopes. Dottie handed me a box of Nice ’N Easy champagne blonde along with another lecture on appearances, and Marigold sat off to the side stretching Gloria-Summerside-for-alderman plastic sleeves over wire frames that would get stuck in front yards.
“These are the last ones,” Marigold said to me as I came over to deliver Butler’s message. “Donations are scarce as deviled eggs at a church picnic, and we are now fresh out of funds.”
“When we get the real killer, things will pick right back up, just you wait,” I said in my best Little Miss Cheerful voice. Not that I actually believed it, but the volunteers had put in too much time and effort for me to rain on their parade, and Mamma had put in too much time and effort not to win. But the ugly truth was that the campaign couldn’t go on with Mamma’s tainted reputation, making Archie Lee a shoo-in.
“Butler stopped by,” I added. “Said you have to go to the wake tonight and this is the last of it and it’s all over or something close to that. What’s over?”
“Me! I am so over him!”
The office stopped dead, and the Abbott sisters did the wide-eyed stare from the dining room. Marigold pulled off one shoe and flung it against the wall, then the other, and did the stomping-tantrum routine right there in the office. It was pretty much the same routine I did when I found Hollis playing hide the salami with Cupcake. Men have that effect on women sometimes.
“Fine! I’ll be there,” she spluttered, shoving tangled hair off her flushed face. “And it better be the last time or else, I can tell you that.”
I took a step back and slapped on a smile. “Wanna shop for a little black dress? Twenty percent off?”
• • •
BY SIX THE PEARL-GIRLS HAD LEFT, AND I TOOK UP roost on the front steps in celebration. KiKi slunk across the yard barefoot, martinis in hand, and dropped down beside me. She handed off a glass, downed hers in one gulp, then switched drinks with me. “Three teen dance classes this afternoon to get ready for the Christmas cotillion. Next week I’m bringing in a whip and a chair. Maybe a cattle prod.”
KiKi rolled her eyes upward toward her hairline. “This morning I looked fantastic after Mercedes worked her magic. You wouldn’t have recognized me, ten years younger and twenty pounds thinner.”
“All that from hair?”
“I was adorable.” She plucked up a limp strand. “Now I’m a big old rat’s nest and look ten years older and ten pounds heavier. When kids get to twelve, they should do everyone a big favor and skip right to twenty.” She nodded to the open front door. “How’s business and the campaign going?”
“Had a nice run on black dresses, at least Scumbucket’s good for something, but the campaign’s belly up. No one’s interested in backing a murder suspect. I don’t have a lot of ideas on how to fix that situation, but I sure enough can’t let Mamma lose to Archie Lee. Right now he’s my prime suspect for knocking off Scummy, and that’s based on a banner hanging over a bar. Lolly Ledbetter’s wearing red tonight, so something’s going on there with her and Scummy, and I bet that Dozer guy Mercedes told us about will show up, and I’d like to get a look at him and find out who he is. For sure the kudzu vine will be on super-charge all night with gossip. You know how tongues wag over a casket. ‘Did you like the jerk? Neither did I. Tell me your Scumbucket story, and I’ll tell you mine.’ I need to be at the wake.”
KiKi patted my leg. “Not unless you want to add Savannah’s riot squad to the list of attendees. We can talk to Lolly any old time, and I bet the only way Dozer shows up is if he’s wearing glasses and a black mustache with a plastic nose.” KiKi cut her eyes my way. “Uh-oh. What are you thinking? You ate your olives and then went and ate mine, too. What now?”
“Is Uncle Putter home tonight?”
“He’s at the senior center talking heart attack avoidance, and we can’t do anything. The man hasn’t fully adjusted to the jail incident.”
“This has nothing to do with jail, and it’s completely safe.” I ignored the KiKi eye roll. “I’ve got two ugly black dresses left. I intended to cover the dining room chairs with them for a kind of black-and-white sophisticated look. Instead we can pad them up, add hats, sniffle into hankies all night like the Abbott sisters do, and listen to what’s going on at the wake. Do you still have those Cher-in-the-70s wigs?”
“Maybe.”
I jumped up. “See, it’s a sign. We’re two little old ladies with wild hair stuffed under big hats. We’ll blend into the sea of black clothes, hushed voices, music to die by. They’ll have cookies.”
“I have cookies.”
“I need some leads, and I’m not leaving this all up to Boone. What if he overlooks something? What if he takes too long? Sooner or later the real killer will be exposed, but we have to do it sooner. You know we can’t let Mamma lose this election to Archie Lee, and the lo
nger she’s a suspect the worse it looks for her. She wants to be an alderman, and she’ll be great at it. What kind of daughter would I be if I let Archie Lee win instead of Mamma?” I gave Auntie KiKi the raised eyebrow look. “What kind of sister would you be?”
“Lord have mercy, you’re playing the guilt card.”
“You always play the guilt card; it’s my turn. I’ll even teach one of your teen dance classes.”
“You can do two classes, and I’ll bring the hankies.”
• • •
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER I TOLD KIKI TO PULL the Beemer to the curb. “We can’t park here,” she said to me. “It’s two blocks to Eternal Slumber. We need to get closer. I can’t walk that far, or my butt will fall off. It’s only got two pins holding it in place.”
“Take small steps. We can’t park in the Eternal Slumber lot; your Foxtrot license plate is a dead giveaway.” I checked the mirror on the visor and shoved a few more curly black strands of my Cher-hair—the Brillo-Pad-on-steroids era—under my black hat left from Grandma Summerside. I got out of the car and smoothed my black dress over my 38Ds. So this is what it felt like to have boobs. I jutted my chest a bit, feeling sort of powerful with my new tissue-enhanced womanliness.
Dusk faded to night, the soft glow of wrought iron streetlights marking the way for two old ladies hobbling their way along the sidewalk. We passed Walls’ BBQ, the spicy aroma of sauce and grilled meat straight from heaven wafting out onto the street.
“Maybe we should grab some ribs,” KiKi said, her footsteps drifting off course toward Walls’ green front door. “We didn’t do dinner, and I’m starved. We need sustenance to get us through the night.”
“We just can’t buy a slab of ribs and eat it on the hoof. Barbecue dribbled down our fronts isn’t very little-old-ladylike at all.” I cupped her elbow. “On the way back we’ll get takeout with a side of slaw. We have to hurry. You don’t want Uncle Putter to beat you home, do you?”