Do Wah Diddy Die

by Pauline Baird Jones

  Whatever else the newscaster had to say was drowned in Donald’s howl of rage as he kicked in the TV screen, pulling his hernia in the process.

  Dante was studying his Persephone when Max slid into the room.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “I think we got something solid on Miss Cloris’ husband, Mr. Dante.”

  Dante wheeled to look at his assistant. “Tell me, Max.”

  “Found a snitch that thinks he recognizes him from prison. Seems he’s a con artist, name of Arthur “Artie” Maxwell. Has a string of aka’s—and a penchant for preying on older ladies with cash.”

  There was a long pause as Dante assimilated this information. “Your snitch know where he is?”

  “I got everyone looking, but word is, he’s gone to ground. I don’t think you’re the only one looking for him.”

  “I want to be the one who finds him.”

  “Yes, Mr. Dante.”

  Dante resumed contemplation of his masterpiece.

  “I like the boobs the same.”

  “So do I, Mr. Dante.”

  The fire department came. And more police cars. The bomb squad, paramedics and the news media, both print and electronic.

  And Captain Henry Pryce—looking especially grim.

  “Can we be cashiered or are we gonna be shot at dawn?” Mickey watched the determined approach of the Captain, the clusters of official humanity falling back for their stern-faced leader.

  “If we’re lucky we’ll only be shot,” Delaney said. He examined the series of neat plaster strips the EMT had applied to his arm, voiced his thanks, and stood up. Rolling down his sleeves, he waited for Pryce while the same EMT as before turned his attention to Mickey.

  “You got a death wish, man?”

  There was no time to answer as Pryce stopped in front of them.

  “Gentlemen.” Pryce’s hooded gaze was as cold and green as his stare, long and unnerving. “Care to explain what happened here?”

  They didn’t, but had to anyway. When they finished, there was another nerve-wracking silence until Pryce said, “This has gotten completely out of hand. What’s the motive?”

  “No clue,” Delaney admitted. “Does seem like they have to be related to the murders, though.”

  “Thank you for stating the obvious, detective,” Pryce said.

  A distraction seemed in order, so Mickey jumped into the fray. “Speaking of the murders,” he asked, “has our autopsy come in yet on the John Doe from the freezer?”

  Pryce’s gaze swiveled to Mickey like big guns homing in on a small target. “Funny you should ask about the Coroner. He’s been asking about you.”

  “Really?” Mickey tugged at his tie.

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t expect any—favors—from them for quite a while. At least until they’ve had time to forget the riot. Always assuming that’s possible.”

  “Riot?” Mickey and Delaney looked at each other.

  “It seems a pair of our detectives gave a picture of the frozen corpse to some crazy psychic. Who made copies and handed them out for all her friends to show around. Which helped the TV people get hold of one and run it on the noon news. Seems like everyone in town thought it was a picture of someone they knew and came down to make sure it wasn’t. Now which detectives do you think would do something so stupid?”

  “I’ll check around, sir.” Mickey avoided looking at his Captain, but it didn’t help. He wished looks could kill so he’d be out of his misery, but knowing Pryce, he’d just set his eyes to maim.

  “You do that. In the meantime, your autopsy is at the bottom of the priority list.”

  “So—are we suspended?” Maybe it wasn’t a total loss.

  “Not—yet.”

  “The Seymours—” Delaney started to protest.

  Pryce cut him off at the knees. “…are the only reason I haven’t suspended you. I know, none better, how—difficult they can be. But if you keep your head, your perspective, you can handle a few eccentric old ladies.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mickey noticed a uniform approaching and turned to him with relief at the distraction he hoped he would provide.

  “Ross, Delaney, Miss Seymour said she was going to change, but she’d meet you in the garden—oh, sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to interrupt.” He looked like he meant it, if the jump of his Adam’s apple and the white showing around his eyes were any indication.

  “You have a message for these two?”

  He didn’t add “bozos,” but Mickey felt it was implied.

  The uniform, instead of delivering his message, stared at the Captain, a frown furrowing his young brow. “Are you...is she...?”

  “Spit it out. Is she what?”

  “A...relative, sir. She could be, well, your daughter.”

  Pryce stared at the uniform long enough to almost wither him where he stood. “Who could be my daugh—” He stopped, the color draining from his lean cheeks.

  Mickey felt the internal earthquake that comes when pieces fall into place. It was so obvious, he couldn’t believe he’d missed it. The line of the jaw, Pryce’s and Luci’s straight mouths. Blinded by the legs. And the eccentricity, he told himself as he braced for the sky of his Captain’s wrath to fall. Though it was kind of a relief to know that even the Captain hadn’t handled one particular Seymour woman as well as he thought he had.

  “I met Lila Seymour the summer before I shipped out for Nam.”

  Ross and Delaney hadn’t asked, but Pryce seemed to need to talk while they waited in the garden for Luci. It couldn’t be easy for him to discover in just under one minute that he had a daughter and that someone wanted to kill her. He’d aged twenty years in twenty seconds.

  “She’d stalled her car and I stopped to help. It was her battery. I tried to push her with my truck—that’s how we jump-started cars back then—but she couldn’t get the hang of what I wanted her to do. Hopeless with machines, but with legs like hers, well, she didn’t need to be skilled.” He stretched his legs out in front, his mind’s eye seeing a distant past instead of the azaleas. “I decided to switch places with her. Have her push her car with my truck. Told her to get going about thirty-five and then pull over when I got hers going.” A slight, reminiscent grin softened the line of his mouth.

  “What happened, sir?”

  Because, of course, they all knew something had happened. The Seymour apples didn’t fall far from the family tree.

  “She was going exactly thirty-five when she hit me.” He chuckled. “She’d backed it up so she could be up to speed. Saw her coming in the mirror. Barely had time to brace myself.” The smile turned wry. “Should’ve known then she was trouble and just walked away. But I didn’t.” He shrugged. “I would’ve married her before I shipped out. Never understood why she just took off.” The lines around his mouth deepened and his fists clenched. “Damn the woman. I could kill her—”

  They all heard the door to the patio slide open. Mickey watched his Captain turn to see his daughter for the first time.

  She walked toward them in the failing light, gone “gypsy” with some kind of loose wrap skirt and a soft blouse that drooped off her shoulders. She’d tucked a flower behind one ear and carried a tray of sandwiches and drink, despite the elastic wrapped around her left wrist. She didn’t look like someone in the sight line of killers as she lowered the tray with enough expertise to give credence to her claim of being a waitress. She looked—

  Things he didn’t dare think in the presence of his Captain and her father.

  “I know you’re primed to ask me scores of tiresome questions, but don’t until—”

  Luci stopped. The silence got long, the gravity of her presence pulling his gaze from the ground in time to see her studying them as intently as they were studying her. As always, her thoughts remained her own behind the calm reflection of her green eyes, but she had to see it, he thought. The likeness was practically neon now that they were together.

  Luci thought it was the humidity th
at was too thick to cut when she came out, but it was now obvious that the humidity was losing, big time, to something else. Mickey looked like he wished he were in a galaxy far, far away. Delaney was trying, without success, to blend into a hibiscus. And the third man?

  She turned toward him with an odd reluctance. Much of the tension emanating from the three men seemed to originate from him. Her first thought was that he looked ill. Her second, he looked...like she should know him.

  Despite the grayness to his lean cheeks, he had a strong presence. A man used to giving orders and expecting to have them obeyed. Not someone who could spend too much time in the Seymour zone without developing a twitch. She tried to imagine him in the same room with her aunts, but couldn’t. They were incapable of recognizing an order, let alone obeying one. His gaze burned her with its intensity. His hands were clenched as if he wanted to grab her and do—

  “What?” she asked, the single word falling like a stone into the weighted silence.

  They all looked away, shrugged and mumbled patently false denials, but within seconds they were all staring at her again. She felt like checking to see if she’d grown another head. Instead she crossed her arms over and said, “If you’re hungry, maybe you should eat the sandwiches.”

  “They look good, don’t they, Ross?” Delaney asked, his voice too hearty. He clumsily helped himself. Mickey followed suit, in his haste almost tipping over the tray. And why were they both being so careful not to look at the man eating her up with his eyes but without any sexual overtones?

  Something was up. They all looked like deer caught in headlights as they stared at their sandwiches like they didn’t know what to do with them.

  “You put them in your mouths and chew,” she prompted. “Or you could tell me what’s wrong?”

  Each man took a bite, chewing like it hurt. Swallowing dryly. Without speaking, she poured each of them a glass of lemonade and got a round of far too grateful smiles. She turned to Delaney. He was the mediator of the partnership and, as long as Gracie stayed out of sight, could be counted on to be coherent. She arched her brows.

  He kind of twitched a couple of times, then produced, “We think someone is trying to kill you.”

  “So you said.” She arched the other brow when he didn’t follow this up with anything else.

  The source of their discomfort cleared his throat and Delaney rushed to add, “This is the Captain of the Homicide Division, Henry Pryce. Captain.” For some reason, introducing her appeared to cause Delaney some pain because his voice got hoarse when he finished with, “This is Luci...Seymour.”

  Luci took the hand the captain extended, felt it close forcefully, painfully over hers, as if he wanted to hang on to her. She met his gaze, then freed herself because she needed the distance to ease the choking sensation clogging her throat. She sank into her usual, boneless recline on the slider swing. Could it be panic she was experiencing? How could she know? Panic wasn’t on the list of accepted Seymour emotions. That didn’t matter to her adrenalin gland. The hairs on her arms were so straight they could run as conservatives.

  She looked at Mickey. “How can you be so sure I’m the target?”

  “Your car just exploded all over the neighborhood,” he pointed out with grim relish. “And then there’s the two drive-by shootings—”

  “But why? I know I’m annoying—”

  “Your—” the Captain cleared the husky out of his voice, then finished, “safety is our first concern. The mother—”

  “Mother?” Luci prompted when he stopped.

  “Motive. I meant motive.”

  “Uh huh.” He looked so horrified, she added with outward calm, “I always mix up mother and motive.” Inside, small tremors of shock quaked through her insides as her mind resisted what her eyes and her heart tried to tell her.

  He gave her a far too grateful look. “The motive will become clear when we have the truth. The absolute, honest truth. With no more damn lies and running away.”

  He stood up, his fists clenched. Luci stood, too, unable—unable or unwilling—to have him towering over her. “Uh huh. What did you say your name is?”

  He tried twice before he got out, “Pryce.”

  “Our captain,” Mickey added quickly. “Of detectives.”

  It was hilarious. Like a bit in a sitcom, but she wasn’t laughing. She was, she realized, trying not to burst into tears. She hadn’t burst into tears since the day she’d left New Orleans. Crying was another of those un-Seymour things. Her eyes burned with it, but she wasn’t about to cry in front of— “Your captain?”

  “Of detectives,” Delaney said hoarsely.

  She let out the breath she’d been holding like a lifeline. “I feel safer already.”

  Safe. That was a laugh. She was free falling without rope or belay and she hadn’t been rock climbing in a couple of years. If only she could see what was at the bottom of the chasm, she’d know...what?

  Pryce looked both dazed and gratified. In a mirrored movement, they brushed hair back from their brows, froze and hastily dropped their hands to their sides. For a long, horrified moment he stared at her while she stared at him. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. She’d always known what to do with her hands. She’d been born knowing what to do with her hands, but now they just hung there twitching.

  Pryce frowned at the sight of the elastic bandage wrapped around her wounded wing. “What happened?”

  “I found out I can’t fly.” How calm I sound, she thought with distant awe. Amazing. Yet disturbing. I should sound different. It wasn’t natural. Except it was natural for a Seymour, wasn’t it? Maybe I’m having an out-of-Seymour body experience?

  “She did a header off an escalator,” Mickey interposed, sounding as far away as her Seymour-ness felt.

  “It’s all in the report we’re going to write when we get time,” Delaney added with equal haste.

  They both looked at Pryce. Since no one was looking at her, it seemed a good time to just leave. Her thoughts were jostling, bouncing, dodging inside her head, with one single disturbing thought at the center that she refused to deal with until she was alone.

  Mickey could tell Pryce didn’t give a damn about the report. As one, they turned to look at what he did care about and saw her walking toward the house. The seductive side-to-side of her hips stole the furtive cool from the shade provided by the trees and left his throat dry with want. Pryce choked, from a different kind of distress. It was left to Delaney to call, “Luci? Where are you going?”

  She stopped, the turn of her head done in graceful slow motion. “I need to feel safe from a safe distance.” She stared at them for a long beat, then added, “And you think we’re weird.”

  No one moved until she slid the terrace door closed, then they all exhaled as one. Pryce gave him a look that was fierce, even by his usual standards. “You keep her safe.”

  Mickey recoiled from the double responsibility of it. “Sir, we don’t—”

  “Don’t what? Protect citizens from bodily harm?”

  Delaney leapt figuratively into the breech. “We’re homicide—”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Pryce cut in, “but didn’t both your current investigations happen here?” Mickey and Delaney’s shoulders sagged. “So, how will staying here in this house interfere with your investigation?”

  “We might,” Mickey muttered, “need to go somewhere else.”

  Pryce stepped close, right in his face.

  “Anything happens to my daughter, it better happen to you, too.”

  Mickey waited until Pryce had stalked off in the opposite direction from Luci before saying, “We are so screwed.”

  “Any word on Maxwell?” Dante asked.

  “We’ve turned up a couple more wives. This guy’s a regular Casanova with older women, Mr. Dante. And clever in a stupid way. He never lets them get a good picture of him. We’ve had some wedding photos come in—he’s always moved or got something in front of his face.”

  �
��I don’t see where that matters, Max. I met the man. I know what the bastard looks like.”

  “I don’t think so, Mr. Dante. This guy’s got one of those anonymous faces—with a bit of chameleon thrown in. His wives—the number we’re turning up is climbing as we speak—can’t even agree on how tall he is.”

  “That’s ridiculous! He’s—” Dante stopped as the colorless, handsomely vague face of his aunt’s cheating husband eluded him. “Son-of-a-bitch, Max. You’re right. I have no clue how tall he is.” He turned to Max. “We gonna find him?”

  “No doubt about it, sir. We’re trying to turn up someone who did time in stir with him. We’ll get him.”

  Where was the third Arthur?

  Mickey opened his eyes to unfamiliar surroundings and this inscrutable question bouncing inexplicably around inside his aching head.

  It was dark, but a tracing of light penetrated from outside. Enough to clue him that he wasn’t at home in his own functional apartment. Faintly, from outside, he could hear the insistent beat of rock music. Disoriented, it took him a couple of minutes to trace his route from the Seymour garden and Luci’s intransigence, to this room in the Seymour house overseeing the protective detail guarding the Captain’s newly discovered daughter.

  He pushed back the sheets and swung his feet over the side of the bed, the smooth wood cool against the soles of his feet. He rubbed his aching head, wondering how serious the threat to Luci was, with its mix of the absurd and the serious apparently orchestrated by a couple of octogenarians with a taste for joke glasses? There seemed to be a plethora of elderly mucking about in this case. All except their naked John Doe.

  And a dearth of suspects since their prime one had turned up under a bush.

  Death was stalking the perimeters of the Seymour house and all he had for witnesses were three crazy old ladies, one presumed ghost, a couple of inarticulate faithful retainers, his uncle’s inanimate fiancée, and a partner who was in love with a ghost. With Velma and Luci for contrast.

  Whether he needed it or not.