Do Wah Diddy Die

by Pauline Baird Jones

  He blinked and let loose her hand. “Another one?”

  “I’m afraid so.” She gave a rueful shrug. “The police suspect my aunts. Because of Arsenic and Old Lace. You know the story?”

  He nodded. “Did they do it?”

  Luci looked thoughtful. “It’s hard to tell with my aunts.”

  Dante’s eyes narrowed. Definitely a thinly veiled threat. Behind him Cain slid his hand back into his jacket.

  “If that’s a problem for you,” Luci went on, “we can just forget everything.”

  He smiled wickedly. “I don’t think so.” Cain and Abel smiled, too. “I’m really looking forward to meeting your aunts. Now more than ever.” He held out his arm. “Why don’t I buy you lunch and you can tell me all about them—and all about you?”

  Her eyes were friendly but cool as she smiled and said, “I would love to, but I’m supposed to give a statement to the police. I don’t dare keep them waiting. Just make for more questions.”

  Dante smiled. “So it would. At least let me run you home.”

  Luci smiled back. “How kind.”

  The sarcasm went right over his head, just like she’d expected. He was a clever thug, but not a bright one.

  There were advantages this crime scene had over their last one.

  This one hadn’t been cleaned and disinfected before their arrival—just raked a bit. They had a possible ID. And they’d been able to keep the old ladies away.

  And then there were the disadvantages.

  The smell. The ribald commentary from the forensics boys. The fact that Reggie had surfaced as a corpse instead of a suspect. All the important and influential people who were going to be unhappy about this.

  “Captain did say he’d turn up.” Delaney looked as morose as he sounded. “You’re hot and pissed. These clowns can handle things here for half an hour. Let’s go get some lunch.”

  Mickey had no argument with this plan, so he nodded and followed Delaney through the garage courtyard to the side street where they’d parked Delaney’s car. They arrived at the street the same time as a long black limo. A rear door opened and Luci slid out. Behind her Dante, aka Harvey Mertz, was framed in the opening.

  “Until next time, sweet thing,” he purred, saluting her extended hand with a lascivious kiss. Then, with a mocking two-fingered salute to the slack-jawed detectives, he pulled the door closed so the limo could snake around the corner and out of sight.

  “Hi, guys. Did you finish digging up the rest of Reggie?” Luci asked cheerfully. Instead of joining them she headed for the Nash parked at the side of the road with the door hanging open, as if it were waiting just for her.

  “I’m going to kill her this time, Delaney. Don’t try to stop me.”

  “Now, Mick. Think of the paperwork.”

  “I don’t care. I want to know—”

  “Why don’t we just ask her? It might work.” Delaney kept a firm grip on Mickey’s arm. They got there as Luci was reaching for the key in the ignition.

  “Uh, Luci?” Delaney tapped her shoulder.

  “Hi, guys,” she sounded abstracted. “I’ve been trying to see if my thingamajig works, but I got abducted. I hate it when that happens.”

  “Abductions or failed thingamajigs?” Mickey asked, heavily sarcastic.

  Her smile was fast and lethal. “Both.”

  “Which thingamajig is giving you trouble?” Delaney asked hastily.

  “The one that makes the engine do stuff.”

  “Oh, the thingamajig. You know, Delaney—”

  “Yeah, I know. Why don’t you try it, then we’d like to ask you a few questions. Okay?” Delaney’s smile was hopeful, his eyes considerably less so.

  Luci’s lips twitched, despite her best control efforts.

  “Yeah.” Mickey crossed his arms over his chest. “We don’t mind halting our murder investigation while you try out your thingamajig.”

  Luci gave him a sunny smile. “Thanks. I’ve never worked on a Nash before. Not sure how good my intuition is with a strange car. Cross your fingers.”

  Both men held up crossed fingers.

  She turned the key, but instead of a smooth purr there was only a repeated clicking sound. She tried again.

  “I was afraid of that. It didn’t really feel right. Oh, well. You know a good auto parts store?”

  Delaney uncrossed his fingers and pulled the door open. “We’ll take you there after lunch.”

  “Wow, my second invite—”

  “Dante? You had lunch with that wise guy?” Mickey burst out. Arms akimbo, thumbs hooked in his belt, he glared at her.

  “No, but it was a good guess.” She studied him thoughtfully before adding, “He doesn’t seem to like you either.”

  “Ha!” Mickey almost choked on the word. “No surprise—”

  “Let’s all calm down, okay?” Delaney asked , looking at Mickey.

  “I’m always calm,” Luci pointed out.

  “Look.” Mickey shoved aside Delaney’s restraining arm to loom over her. “I’ve had a really bad couple of days and I’m not in the mood for any of your crap. If you’re as smart as I think you are, you’d better not say anything until I get some food. Or I won’t be responsible for the consequences. Got that?”

  Luci nodded, then immediately contradicted herself. “I need to powder my nose.”

  Mickey inhaled, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, but there was no good answer to this unanswerable euphemism. He gave a curt nod and stepped back.

  With movements both slow and cautious, she angled off the seat, sliding one leg from under the wheel and lowering it to the pavement. The slow drag gradually unveiled more and more leg as her skirt stayed put—until ground zero was reached, when it dropped like a curtain.

  Both men exhaled. Mickey tugged at his tie and said, “Hurry up. I’m hungry.”

  She saluted without speaking and headed through the driveway gate. Mickey watched until she was out of sight.

  He angrily rubbed his hot face. “She does it on purpose, Delaney!”

  “Yes, and she does it very well.” His voice was thick with laughter and lust. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I have no idea.” Mickey paced away from him, then back again.

  “Well, you’d better decide before you do kill her. It’s a real bitch getting strip-searched.”

  Fern was afraid to look at Donald. He’d been ominously quiet since they hit the tree. They’d managed to leave the area without attracting attention, but it had been a close call. She’d patched up the cut on his forehead but could do nothing for the bulging veins at his temples except exchange the damaged car for a sporty little Ford. He hadn’t even said anything when the goons brought the girl back and she’d climbed behind the wheel of the Nash. He’d choked when the cops came out and whimpered when the Nash wouldn’t start, then subsided back into a silent simmer when they all left again instead of getting blown up.

  A bead of sweat formed on her forehead, then ran down between her eyes, hovering on the end of her nose for a long moment before dropping into her lap. Even under the shade of an oak it was hot with the motor off. It was time to do something. She cleared her throat and looked at Donald, but whatever she was going to say died in her throat at the look in his eyes.

  Maybe it wasn’t quite time yet.

  Mickey was waiting for Luci when she started back downstairs, her nose presumably powdered. Delaney had spotted Gracie and abandoned Mickey to Luci’s caprice. Halfway down, Luci stopped, her brows rising in a question.

  “Delaney made other arrangements for lunch. So he won’t be here to protect you if you annoy me again,” he informed her. He’d used the time she was gone to lecture himself into a more rational frame of mind. It was ridiculous to let her keep pulling his chain. He was a trained officer of the law. A highly trained officer of the law. So she was annoying—and unexpected. He could handle both of those things. All he had to do was keep his cool. Think before he spoke—and after she
spoke. Count to ten if he must. Or a million. Whatever it took.

  Luci nodded, but a wary light crept into her green eyes as she let him steer her outside to the car.

  Good, Mickey thought as he held her door, then slid behind the wheel.

  “Delaney got a better offer for lunch, did he? Should I be insulted?”

  “Only if you prefer older men,” Mickey said, expertly swinging the car onto St. Charles, “and if you’re inclined to be jealous of your Aunt Gracie.”

  “She’s not my aunt,” Luci said, her voice oddly neutral. “She’s sort of a cousin. Delaney’s not interested in Gracie in a romantic way is he? He’s just questioning her again about the murders?”

  “Why shouldn’t he be interested in her? She’s a very charming lady. A very normal lady.”

  After a brief pause, she said, “Only in comparison with the rest of us.”

  Mickey’s eyes narrowed. Here it comes. Another one of her outrageous conversational roller coaster rides. He mentally braced himself. “What? You might as well tell me. What’s wrong with Gracie?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Gracie—except for being dead. And she’s kind of cold to be around when the temperature drops, but that doesn’t happen often here, thank goodness.”

  It was fortunate he had to stop at a traffic light. Because she’d done it again. He gripped the steering wheel. Hard. Counted to ten. And kept going. At one hundred and ten he managed to choke out, “Dead?”

  “Yes.” She hesitated, then added, “I really thought you’d notice—what with all your experience with dead people.”

  “You—” He choked a couple of times, then snapped out, “The dead people I deal with don’t walk and talk!”

  “You noticed right away she wasn’t like any living Seymour.”

  “I said she was normal!”

  “I suspect that dead is as normal as we can get.”

  He choked some more, then settled for glaring at her until honking interrupted him. The car jerked forward as he mentally fought back. “No way. Not this time—”

  “You can check if you don’t believe me. She’s buried at St. Mary’s not far from the house. The aunts put flowers on her grave the last Sunday of every month.”

  Mickey had the strangest urge to laugh. It was funny, in an insane sort of way.

  “She’s dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “She doesn’t look—dead.”

  “She likes to keep herself up.”

  This prompted another round of counting before he could say almost calmly, “Really?”

  “Yes, really. She’s dead. Not married.”

  A tense silence filled the car for a couple of blocks. When he turned the car into the parking lot of a Shoney’s restaurant, he finally looked at her.

  “All right. She’s dead. How did she die?”

  “She was killed by an irate suitor.”

  It was the first thing she’d ever said he could understand.

  Fern pulled in across the street from Shoney’s and watched Luci Seymour and the cop go inside. Only then did she look at Donald for direction. He was looking better now that they had something to do. His color was almost normal again, though she wasn’t sure his eyes would ever stop bulging out of the sockets.

  “What should we do now?” she asked.

  “Wait,” Donald said, like he was praying. Under cover, his hand stroked the Uzi like it was his best friend. “They can’t stay in there forever.”

  Inside Shoney’s, Mickey told Luci what to order for him, then retreated to regain his cool. Nothing like a urinal to put things in perspective. He leaned his aching head against cool tile and spent a few glorious moments mentally strangling Luci—until he started hurting himself. Then he pulled his clothing and his brain together and made a few decisions. First, he would check out her outrageous claim about Gracie. He stopped and used his cell phone to call in a request for any background info on Grace Seymour. He felt somewhat better, but wouldn’t be one hundred percent until he had food in his stomach. Only then would he question Luci about Dante. After that, well, he’d just have to see.

  His food was there when he joined Luci, and he could see that she had made a run at the salad bar. To his relief, she just smiled at him. Did she sense how close he was to losing it? He hoped so.

  Luci ate quietly, aware of how close Mickey was to losing it. She deflected his brooding looks with bland ones. When he wiped his mouth and hands and tossed his napkin aside, she knew the truce was over. The question was, how much of what she suspected about Dante should she share with him? Until she knew how far her aunts were involved in whatever was going on, did she dare let him start stomping around in things?

  The men in her family had not prepared her to trust in male finesse. The men she’d met outside her family had only re-enforced her conviction there was no such thing as male finesse.

  She met his determined gaze with a disingenuous one. He wasn’t going to be easy to sidetrack. Or to fool. But she’d never backed down from a challenge before. She wasn’t about to start now.

  “What were you doing with Dante, Luci?”

  “Looking at his enormous boobs?”

  “Don’t mess with me, Luci. I’m not in the mood. Just tell me what I want to know. Or I’ll arrest you for obstruction of justice. You ever been strip-searched?”

  “Not by a cop.”

  “You surprise me.”

  Luci gave a mock sigh. “And I thought I couldn’t anymore.”

  He glared at her, but instead of wilting Luci found herself thinking that even mad he was darn cute. Those little wrinkles fanning out from his eyes made the pads of her fingers tingle with a desire to trace them. And his mouth, well it was tantamount to carrying an unconcealed weapon.

  She realized he was picking up on her thoughts because his glare started filling with a different kind of heat. Heat, she was beginning to discover, could be caught. In the space of a heartbeat, a tidy blaze started in her mid section. It started to do an arc between them but got stopped by the waitress coming up to clear their table. Mickey waited until she was gone, then pulled his handcuffs out and dangled them in front of her. Somehow she didn’t think he had bedroom games in mind.

  “All you have to do is ask,” she said, not sure she was talking about Dante or the games.

  She saw him swallow. It seemed to take a long time. He had to do it again and shove his hands into his hair before he managed a hoarse, “Why were you with Dante?”

  Luci eyed the spiky ends he’d created in his hair, wanting to smooth them back in place, knowing it could lead to more than a better hairdo. Focus, she reminded herself. She felt a need for something to occupy her hands and picked up her discarded napkin, folding it once, then again as she said in the tones of one making a confession, “I don’t know, but I promise it wasn’t fun. The guy’s an octopus.”

  She gave a delicate shudder. “Yuck.”

  She couldn’t resist a peek to see how he took this news. His reaction was better than she expected. His hands clenched into fists and his eyes turned from a blue glare to something that was almost...green? Was it—jealousy? She couldn’t stop her smile anymore than Canute, whoever he was, could stop that flood.

  “An—” He stopped, cleared his throat. “Did he say why?”

  The glare turned blue again and irate. She refocused on the question. “Something about Benny and shoeboxes?”

  “That would be Benny the Book, but—” Mickey gave her that look again. “Shoeboxes?”

  Benny the Book. Gambling? And Unabelle? Her mind was getting boggled again. Must be some kind of record. Luci nodded, then studied the folded napkin. She began to tear it. “He told me he liked what was in them.”

  He blinked several times and sort of looked like he was...counting. “I don’t think so.”

  “He had his gun-toting henchmen looming over me. What was I supposed to do? Tell him he’s full of crap?” She made the last tear in the napkin and realized she’d made a question m
ark. Symbolic and possibly Freudian. Mickey was having a most unsettling effect on her. She fashioned a circle to add to it.

  “So what did you do?”

  She shrugged and smoothed her question mark. “I invited him to my aunt’s party on Sunday. It’s their shoeboxes he wants. I figure they can deal with him better than I can.”

  The thought of Luci’s aunts and Dante in the same room gave him a twitch next to his right eye. He stopped it with his hand and tried to think his way to sanity, but he was too close to her. She created, he decided morosely, a sanity-free zone for at least a yard or so around her.

  “I did some thinking while you were freshening up.”

  Mickey braced himself. “Oh?”

  For a long beat, Luci stared at him. With some effort, Mickey managed to meet her look without flinching or lusting.

  “You are,” he said, finally, “on the inside there.”

  “That’s true.” Luci picked up the pen the waitress had left for Mickey to use to sign the credit card receipt. “One thing I was thinking. I know we found Frosty the dead man first, but I think Reggie is really victim number one.”

  “There’s no forensic evidence to support it,” Mickey said, “but I happen to agree with you.”

  “Really?” Luci looked delighted, then bent to write “Reggie” and “Frosty” at the top of her question mark.

  “Is that all of your thinking?” Mickey asked in his most dampening tone.

  “By no means. There’s the weddings.” She frowned.

  “Weddings?” Mickey wasn’t ready and his stomach did a drop.

  “They seem to be a sort of theme that runs through this whole thing. That and naked bodies. Which sort of goes with weddings, too. At least the honeymoon part of weddings.”

  “Other than Eddie and Unabelle—” Mickey began.

  “And my neighbor, Helen. And while he was driving me back, that Dante person mentioned his aunt, the one he wants to bring to the party? Well, she got married not long ago, too. It ended badly, which is why he wants to bring her, but, still, it’s a wedding. And Velma. She wanted to marry Reggie.” Her look was loaded with see?