Do Wah Diddy Die

by Pauline Baird Jones

She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table, and propped her chin on her hands. “You’re still miffed about the extra body thing, aren’t you?”

  The smooth columns of her arms only partially shielded the dipping curve of her tee shirt that exposed the shadowy slope of her breasts.

  Mickey swallowed dryly. “Miffed?” He shook his head. “The ‘extra body thing’ could get you charged with evidence tampering—”

  “I had no intention of tampering with anything. The drunken hallucinations of Boudreaux are hardly evidence, and since you haven’t found another body—”

  “We haven’t found one yet.” They had found an interesting variety of appliances, everything from the “I’m falling and I can’t get up” gizmo to an early model of an electric toothbrush. The “I’m falling and I can’t get up” gizmo still worked, to everyone’s surprise but the aunts, who had ordered it removed from their property. The aunts must be tough to shop for at Christmas, he decided.

  “You dug up most of the garden, Mickey.” She leaned back again. “Not that I’m complaining. Miss Hermi’s wildly excited about embarking on a new round of landscaping. It seems her—exposure—to the male physique has inspired her. She wants a fountain—complete with a statue of David—”

  “I’ll bet Delaney would appreciate your input in the garden—”

  “Do you really think so?” She rebuked him with her eyes.

  His fingers closed in fists. He looked down, saw the fists and deliberately straightened his fingers. He rifled a few papers. Picked up a pencil and made a mark on a page that didn’t need a mark.

  “Besides. Gracie’s fulfilling that function. I haven’t seen her so animated since—” She stopped.

  And he had to look up. Just in time to catch the full force of her smile. The lashes lifted just enough to give her eyes a sultry depth full of invitation that had the edges of his mouth curling before he was hardly aware of it. The ground beneath him shifted off center. The room grew unaccountably warm around him as she held his gaze.

  “Actually,” she said, her voice dropping to a husky, confidential level, “I’ve never seen her animated. But Miss Weena assures me she used to be before she died.”

  The smile got lost in the painful thump around his temples. He threw down his pencil and grabbed the bottle of aspirin. “What do you want?” It was almost a wail.

  “Information. If we pooled our resources—”

  “You don’t have resources—”

  “Not true.”

  “Oh?” He arched his brows as he looked at her. It was a mistake. Caught once more in the full force of her velvet-fisted gaze, coherence shattered like broken glass. And somewhere deep inside, in the place where honest thought meets honest emotion, he acknowledged that Luci Seymour did far more than drive him angry. But before honest thought could get out of hand he started a rear guard action with anger. “Damn it, Luci—”

  “I’m half- Seymour.” She marked each point with a raised finger. “I’ve played a sleuth on the stage. I have friends who are in law enforcement. And my aunt was a security guard—”

  She shrugged, leaned back and crossed her arms as if daring him to question her credentials. The movement rumpled the edge of her tee shirt, revealing more of her smooth, curving flesh. He forced his gaze away and chewed harder on his tablets, then remembered he had a glass of water and downed that. Used the surge of lust to fuel his anger as he groped for the pencil again. Work. Work would be his salvation from this unaccountable, bewildering temptation. His fingers closed over cool wood.

  “Those aren’t credentials! Those are—” He didn’t even know what to call them.

  “Face it. You need my inside information if you’re going to crack this case.” Luci’s voice was a siren call to pleasure with its sweetly offered entreaty to reason. “Be fair—”

  The pencil snapped in two. “Fair?” This time he didn’t try not to wail. He pushed his chair back, half-turning away from her. Was it fair for her to have this effect on him when he’d done nothing, nothing to provoke it?

  The room was too close, too warm, too full of her scent and her uncomfortable gaze. Too full of her. With her lean, graceful body and her slumberous eyes. He leaped up, tugging at his tie.

  “You’re leaving?” She straightened in her chair, giving him a heady view of the long, smooth angle of her neck and the fragile tracings of her shoulders and collar bone that naturally directed his gaze down—

  “I need some air—and I’ve got to talk to Delaney about—something.” He strode to the door, jerking at his tie and then ripping the top button from its mooring to allow air into his painfully constricted lungs.

  He didn’t slam the door behind him. But only because he lost his grip on it too soon.

  Luci looked at the closed door, her shoulders rising and falling in a sigh that fell somewhere between relieved and regretful. Gracie would be disappointed in her. She was disappointed in herself. She’d tried to be brave, to be bold. Instead she’d tripped over Seymour and fallen flat on her face.

  She picked up a folder, using it to fan away the heat Mickey had sent coursing through her body. “How’s a girl supposed to know what to do? Do I take advice from a ghost? Listen to my heart? Or just give in and follow the Seymour imperatives?”

  She dropped the file, leaning on the table while her fingers beat a reflective tattoo against the table. Her hand brushed against the discarded file. The tapping slowed, stopped. A distraction was good right now. She ran her finger along the edge and glanced towards the door. Surely he wouldn’t have left her alone with this stuff if he hadn’t meant for her to look at it.

  He wants my help, she decided, but he can’t bring himself to ask for it because of the other stuff. The lust stuff. She smiled slowly, then shook herself. Concentrate, girl. With another glance towards the door, she picked up a file. Nothing terrible happened, so she opened it.

  And still the day proceeded on its usual course.

  She started to read.

  “Interesting.” So Reggie had collected his bucks through some kind of a chain letter. She read the chain letter, once, then again, this time focusing on the list of names and addresses at the bottom. The letter directed the receiver to send one dollar bill to each of the twenty names on the bottom of the letter, then remove the top name and add their name to the bottom and send it out to a bunch of their friends. After a few weeks, they’d receive dollars in the mail.

  She’d done something similar with panties in high school. Not a pleasant memory. There were a lot of people out there with very strange taste in underwear. It had pretty much cured her of chain letters.

  Artie’s offering reaffirmed that conviction. What he’d failed to tell the people receiving the letter was that all twenty names were AKAs for Reggie. Mickey had also found phone books from cities across the country. Enterprising, Luci concluded, with a take small enough to operate under the radar of the Postal Police. Who was going to complain when they lost a couple of bucks on a scam they should have been too smart to fall for in the first place?

  Mickey had plenty of the chain letters, boxes of them, so she pocketed one to study later and picked up the next file.

  This belonged to Arthur Maxwell, who had been masquerading as Reggie. Luci studied his picture, then found the dead woman, Harriet’s picture. The snow in her head turned to a blizzard, but despite the debris of too much input, she had a feeling that the shadowy Truth would soon emerge from the drift. Or was she suffering from a massive attack of hubris? Only time would tell which.

  In another file were pictures taken at the party. The one of Dante and his aunt caught her eye. Luci frowned, the whirling snow dipping to let her get a peek at an interesting piece of the puzzle. She closed the file, her tapping fingers keeping time with her thoughts. Mickey and friends had a plan in the works, but would it take into account the Seymour Factor? Even as she asked the question, she knew the answer was a big negative. Mickey was working overtime to factor them all out. It had become hi
s primary goal in life.

  “I wonder—”

  The door opened and Pryce walked in. Though they had tacitly acknowledged their familial connection, she wasn’t yet comfortable calling him anything fatherly out loud or in her mind. Not yet. Maybe not ever. It felt so weird, like a pair of shoes that should have been the right size, but didn’t quite fit. Or maybe she was the one who didn’t fit?

  His preoccupied frown gave her time to distance herself from the files before he noticed her. The worry in his eyes deepened. His gaze did a quick survey of the room, then, reluctantly it seemed, returned to her.

  “I thought Ross was here.” He seemed like he wanted to say more. When he didn’t, Luci pushed her chair back and stood up.

  “He went outside to talk to Delaney.” She refrained from looking at the pile of folders. Perhaps she refrained too much.

  “Oh.” His gaze narrowed. He looked at the files, then at her.

  Luci tried to hold her innocent look, but she’d never tried to face down a father.

  “Been doing some reading, have you?”

  It was lucky for her he hadn’t been around when she was a teenager, she decided. The thought was followed by regret. It would have been nice to have someone around who cared what she did. She tilted her chin against the regret and the question. “No one said I couldn’t.”

  A smile flickered on his face as he gathered up the files, his expression unreadable. His long fingers, so like hers, hesitated over the last one, then he asked, his voice stilted, “Would... you—”

  The door popped open and Luci’s aunts flowed in like a babbling brook, engulfing Luci in their midst. Gentle, but irresistible, they pulled Luci toward the door.

  “...need your help, dear... “

  “...wedding plans to finish...”

  “...cement to buy...”

  He made an involuntary movement towards her and her heart jumped with hope, then fell when he stopped and let the aunts take her away.

  Did he regret her coming into his life now, she wondered, looking back at him as her aunts dragged her out the door? Was he sorry she’d found him? She couldn’t read his face any better than she could read her own heart. All she knew was that after years of going men-less, she had two of them seriously upsetting the paradigm of her existence.

  Out in the hall, her aunts talked fast and avoided making eye contact, but their babble faltered, then faded into the slight sounds of clearing throats and shuffling feet. Shuffling feet? What was going on with them?

  Luci opened her mouth to ask, but Miss Theo forestalled her by handing her a sheaf of papers.

  “We knew you wouldn’t mind doing these few things for us, dear girl. For the wedding.” Her smile was too bright, too anxious to be real.

  Luci looked at the “few things” that went on for at least four pages. “This should keep me busy,” she said, looking up just in time to see three sets of parchment pale cheeks turn pink. This was getting curiouser and curiouser.

  Delaney sat in the rubble of the garden on a bench, a droop to his broad shoulders that could have been exhaustion, discouragement or both.

  “I take it you still haven’t found anything?” Mickey handed him one of the glasses of water he’d gotten from the still speechless Louise. Judging by the glare in her eyes, they were lucky she was speechless.

  The misery in Delaney’s eyes as he emptied the glass in one long gulp made Mickey shift uncomfortably. And to wonder if his eyes were acquiring the same emotion. Attraction to the Seymour women, dead or alive, was an exercise in masochism.

  “There’s not a body here.” Delaney rubbed his unshaven chin. “I don’t know what Boudreaux saw that night. Or where it is. But it ain’t here.”

  “Captain arrived with our relief. We get four hours off, then he wants us back at headquarters. He wants us in position to move if either Dante or the perp makes a move. And to go over everything again. He thinks we’re missing something.”

  Delaney nodded morosely. Mickey sank down next to him, stretched his legs out and stared down into the empty glass—an appropriate metaphor for their case. “How can we have so much data and still not know anything?”

  “Yeah, I thought we’d really gotten a break when the Virginia Beach PD linked Harriet Maxwell to our frozen John Doe. Course they still might come up with a connection between her hiring a private dick to find her missing husband, and her and the private dick ending up here as corpses.” Delaney stretched before asking, “Anything more come in on PI Munn?”

  Mickey shook his head. “Not yet. Herman Munn wasn’t a high profile snoop. Most of his clientele appeared to have been middle-aged women with wandering husbands. Maxwell’s file only had minimal info in it. His secretary thinks he had most of it with him. Now that we know his name, we’re doing a check of local hotels, etc. See if we can scare up some luggage. At least we have a date to look around. Munn definitely flew to New Orleans a month and a half ago. Coroner thinks Munn was frozen at least two weeks. Possibly more.”

  “Seymour’s been dead at least a month,” Delaney said. “If Seymour killed him, that would place time of death shortly after he got here. But it’s more likely he was killed by Maxwell.” Delaney sighed. “We know Munn was tracking Arthur Maxwell for Harriet Maxwell, but not why he got killed.”

  “The VBPD says Munn wasn’t an upstanding member of the community. What if he somehow got onto the scam and wanted to be cut in—or to be paid off for not tipping off Harriet?” Mickey yawned so hard he almost fell off the bench.

  Delaney caught his yawn. “Let’s get out of here. I’m too hammered to think straight.”

  “Yeah.” It would be a relief to get away from the house, from the Seymours and even from Luci.

  As the two men walked towards the house, Delaney asked, “Everything in place here?”

  Mickey nodded. “We’ve put the money back where we found it.”

  “Captain Pryce is blanketing the neighborhood with middle-aged and elderly appearing officers,” Delaney said. “The news the case is solved has already showed up in the newspaper and should be on the twelve o’clock newscasts. We make a very visual withdrawal—”

  “And wait for the fly,” Mickey finished. “Pryce really think he’ll fall for it?”

  Delaney shrugged. “He’s a pretty cool customer. He’s already managed to kill two people under the noses of a house full of cops. And damn near killed Luci, too. Even if he isn’t buying our withdrawal, I think he’ll go for it. He has to be feeling pretty well invincible. That’s his weakness—and our strength.”

  “Yeah. If only the Seymour ladies—” Mickey stopped, sighed.

  “Yeah. If only.”

  Meeting Sarah was a piece of luck, Artie decided. What better place to hide and watch the Seymour house than from the respectable neighborhood itself and only a couple of blocks away? It didn’t get much better than that. Any closer and Sarah would have known him. But his luck had always been good.

  Except for that one time, when he’d met Reggie. Artie frowned—but jail was far behind him. And it had turned out for the good. Who’d have thought dumb old Reggie would come up with such a good scam? Old idiot didn’t have a clue how to really cash in on it, of course. A pity his vision was so…limited. He’d miss old Reg. A little. While he was living his life of wealth and ease in Butt Had with Helen with all the shoes in his closet he could need or want.

  Of course, there was still Dante to deal with. He wouldn’t be as easily duped as the police. And killing his man had raised the stakes. He’d seen Artie under his diguise, which the police hadn’t.

  “Look.” Sarah pulled him out of his plotting as she pointed to the television. “They’ve caught the couple that killed those people at that party.”

  “That’s not far from here, is it?” Artie asked, caressing the back of her neck and smiling with practiced charm.

  “Too close for comfort.” Sarah shuddered. “Not that I know them—except by reputation. Frankly, from what I’ve heard about the S
eymours I’m not surprised bodies are turning up all over!”

  Only somewhat aware of her burbling, Artie listened to the report. Did they think he’d fall for something so blatant as that? It was insulting.

  Good thing he already had a plan to get his money and finish off Luci. Now all he had to do was think of some way to get Dante off his ass. Well, he’d always been lucky, in an unlucky sort of way. Dante wouldn’t be bought off, so maybe he could be drawn off...maybe with Cloris’s help?

  21

  Mickey looked up as Delaney came back balancing two cups of hot coffee and four doughnuts. Another doughnut protruded from his mouth. All around them was the comforting clatter, chatter and ringing phones of other detectives following other leads in other homicides.

  He didn’t like admitting it, but he missed the quiet, phoneless, nearly people-less Seymour house. Of course, it didn’t help that he could feel Caroline’s glare boring a hole in his back. One date and he was in the dog house. Women were so unfair.! Mickey gave a half-twitch, half-shrug to shake it off. It didn’t work, but lucky for him, he saw her grab her purse and head out with her partner. Until now he wouldn’t be relieved there’d been yet another homicide added to their yearly tally, but he needed the hostility break.

  “Any movement yet?” Mickey asked Delaney. Ever since they’d driven away from the Seymour’s he’d had the feeling they were in the calm before the storm. He’d been a cop too long not to know when serious shit was about to hit the fan. He’d like the chance to duck when it did.

  “Nada.” Delaney put one cup and one doughnut in front of Mickey. “You know, he could have decided to cut his losses and booked on out of here.”

  “He didn’t,” Mickey said. “If he was gonna leave, he’d have done it before he started offing people. He’s in too deep to stop now.”

  Delaney nodded, studying the circle of fried dough like it held the answers to all the questions if he could just learn to speak doughnut. Mickey had never found any answers in food, up to and including tea leaves. Just got heartburn and a few extra pounds.