Literary Tour 01 - Frankly My Dear I'm Dead

by Washburn, Livia

  a small revolver. His eyes were wide, bugged out, staring

  without seeing anything. Blood hadn’t just splattered on the

  lampshade and the wall, it had pooled under Riley’s head, too.

  I knew without seeing it—I didn’t want to see it—that the

  back of his head was probably a real mess, and he didn’t even

  have his toupee to help cover it because the rug was on a stand

  on the dresser across the room.

  Elliott Riley had blown his brains out.

  CHAPTER 21

  W

  ell, I pretty much had two choices right then. I could get the fantods at the sight of the dead man and run screaming from the room … or I could suck it up and stay where I was and try to figure this out.

  I managed not to scream and run. It was a few moments, though, before I could move on to the figuring-it-out part. I had to stuff my heart back down my throat first and wait for the anvil chorus in my head to settle down.

  Will brought me back to something resembling coherent thought by saying, “He killed himself. Put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. That’s why we didn’t hear a shot. It was muffled by …by…”

  Will looked about as sick as I felt. I swallowed hard and said, “By his head. I reckon you’re right. But why would he do it?”

  Will shook his head. “I don’t know. Guilt?”

  “Over being a thief?” Even knowing Riley as little as I did, that didn’t seem very likely to me.

  “Over killing Steven Kelley. You said that as far as you’re concerned, he was the leading suspect.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” I was still too shocked by this discovery to be thinking straight.

  “He went to bed, but he couldn’t sleep.” Will gestured toward the tangled bedding. “He couldn’t forget how he stabbed Kelley, and it gnawed at him until he got up and … well, did away with himself.”

  I looked around the room. “In that case, wouldn’t there be a note?” I didn’t see any pieces of paper on the bed or the table or anywhere else.

  Will shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. People who commit suicide don’t always leave notes. Most do, I think, but not all.”

  He was probably right about that. Everything that had happened had gotten me in the habit of looking for complications where there might not really be any. It was pretty obvious that the gun was in Riley’s hand and that it had been in his mouth when it went off. That spelled suicide, plain as day.

  And being a murderer was sure a good enough reason for somebody to kill themselves. I wouldn’t have been able to live with it, if it had been me.

  Besides, this was what I’d been hoping for all evening: a solution to the case. Something that would let me call an end to this unmitigated disaster of a tour and hope that there wouldn’t be a bunch of lawsuits that would put me out of business. Something that would let us all go home.

  “By the way,” Will went on, and his voice sounded a little pained now, “you might, uh, let go of my arm if you could.”

  I realized I was still latched onto his arm, with both hands now. I must have grabbed him with the other one when we found the body. I forced my fingers to straighten out and let go, but it wasn’t easy.

  “We’d better go find Lieutenant Farraday,” I said as I turned toward the doorway.

  “You won’t have to.” The voice was hard and angry. “I’m right here.”

  I gasped as I saw the lieutenant standing there, just outside Riley’s room. I wondered how long he had been there and how much of the conversation between Will and I he had heard.

  Not much, evidently, because he continued, “What are you two doing out of your room? What’s going on here?” His eyes went to the bare feet sticking out into view at the foot of the bed. “And who’s that?”

  As Farraday stalked forward so that he could see the body, I said, “That’s Elliott Riley. You must remember him from earlier.”

  “Of course I remember him,” Farraday practically growled at me. “What’s he doing dead?” He motioned Will and me back away from the body and hunkered next to Riley. He didn’t touch the body, but his eyes roved intently over it, taking in everything there was to see. After a few moments, he grunted and said, “Suicide.”

  “That’s what we thought, too,” Will said.

  “The medical examiner will make the official determination. But with that blood spatter”—he gestured toward the stain—“and with the gun in his hand like that, there’s not much doubt.” With a groan of middle-aged effort, Farraday straightened from his crouching position and then ushered us back around to the other side of the bed, away from the body. “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing out of your rooms.”

  “We were about to come lookin’ for you,” I said, “to tell you about Riley.”

  “What happened? Did you hear the gunshot? If you did, you should have called one of the deputies.”

  “No, we didn’t hear the shot,” Will said, “but speaking of that, what happened to all the deputies? I thought they were going to be up here on guard duty all night.”

  “I pulled them off to help with the search of the garden,” Farraday explained, confirming the guess I’d made earlier. His tone was caustic as he added, “I didn’t know people were going to disregard my orders and start wandering around the halls.”

  “Did you find anything in the garden?” I asked. “Like all the stuff that was stolen earlier in the evening?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. It was hidden in a tool shed that the gardeners use—Wait just a minute! You two are supposed to be answering the questions here, not me. If you didn’t hear the shot that killed Riley, what are you doing in his room?”

  I glanced at Will. With Riley dead, I wasn’t sure there was any point in telling Farraday what we had learned about Janice Ralston having an affair with Steven Kelley, or about the way Janice’s father had said that whoever killed Kelley had done Janice a favor. That didn’t amount to anything now except an argument between father and daughter, because for the life of me I couldn’t see any reason for Riley to kill himself unless he was the murderer.

  “I still thought Riley must’ve stolen all that stuff,” I said. “I was going to try to get him to admit it. Will just came with me so I wouldn’t have to confront Riley by myself.”

  Farraday looked from me to Will and back again. It was impossible to miss the fact that we were wearing pajamas and robes. “Are you two …” He held a hand out flat in front of him and wobbled it back and forth. “Like that?”

  “What?” Will said in a tone of disbelief, at the same time as I exclaimed, “No! Not at all.”

  Will glanced over at me, and I wondered fleetingly if he was offended by my emphatic denial—or if, being an English professor, he thought maybe I doth protest too much.

  “Ms. Dickinson’s right, Lieutenant,” he said. “We just met this evening. But I was happy to help her out with Riley. This has been quite an ordeal for her, you know.”

  Farraday looked like he wasn’t sure if he believed Will or not, but he didn’t press the issue. Instead he said, “So the two of you came over here and … what? Knocked on Riley’s door?”

  I was about to lie and say that we had, when I realized that if I kept piling on the untruths, our story was going to get so complicated that I couldn’t keep up with it. So I said, “No, when we got here, the door was already open a couple of inches.”

  Farraday frowned. “Really? What did you do then?”

  “Pushed it open and looked in.”

  “You didn’t knock, or call out to see if Riley was here?”

  Again I told the truth. “I thought that if he wasn’t here for some reason, I’d take a look around and see if I could find anything to prove that he stole all those things.”

  “Then we saw the feet on the other side of the bed and smelled gunpowder,” Will said.

  “You should have gone for help right then.”

  “Probably,” I agreed, “but whatev
er had happened in here was already over and done with. We didn’t figure it would hurt anything to take a quick look around.” I had to swallow again. “It nearly made me sick to my stomach, but that’s all. We didn’t touch anything, Lieutenant. Riley is just like we found him, and so is everything else in the room.”

  Farraday looked at us for a long moment and then finally nodded. “I’ll get the ME and the crime scene people back out here, but I don’t think they’re going to find anything that isn’t pretty obvious already. Scanlon’s fingerprints were on some of those things hidden in the shed, so we know he put them there.”

  “Scanlon?” I repeated. “Who’s Scanlon?”

  Farraday waved a hand toward the body on the other side of the bed. “Ernest Scanlon, aka Elliott Riley, aka Peter Carlin, aka Jason Wilbur … you get the idea. The real Elliott Riley died of pneumonia at the age of seven in South Bend, Indiana, in 1959.”

  “So this Riley stole his identity!” Will said.

  Farraday nodded. “That’s right. It took us a while to wade through all the aliases and match up this guy’s fingerprints with Ernest Scanlon, who had a record as a pickpocket and petty thief and low-level drug dealer in California back in the seventies. Then he dropped out of sight, and nobody knew whether he’d been killed or what had happened to him. Now we know. He continued being a professional thief; he just got better at it and started stealing people’s identities, too. But he never broke the habit of picking pockets, looks like.”

  “He was hiding the loot in that tool shed,” I said, “when Kelley came across him. Riley went after him, caught up to him closer to the house, and stabbed him.”

  Farraday nodded. “That’s the way it looks to me. You had pretty much the same idea all along, didn’t you, Ms. Dickinson?”

  “It occurred to me,” I admitted.

  “I guess you have a detective’s instincts, then. Don’t know how much good that’ll do you in the travel business, but I guess it can’t hurt.”

  I still wondered about the knife, but Farraday could figure that one out. Or not. I supposed that in a lot of crimes, a few unanswered questions remained.

  What was important was that this ordeal was over, and now I could get started on the important job of minimizing the damage it was going to do to my reputation.

  Farraday shooed us out of the room and came out into the corridor himself. He pulled the door up but didn’t close it all the way, gripping the edge of the door instead of the knob. I guess he wanted to make sure it could be dusted for prints, or whatever they do these days to check for fingerprints. Something occurred to me, and I risked annoying the detective by asking, “Why were you coming up here, Lieutenant? To question Riley about those things y’all found in the shed?”

  Farraday nodded. “Yeah, once I got the report linking Riley to Ernest Scanlon and all those other phony IDs, I figured I might be able to break him down on the murder, too. Too bad it didn’t work out that way.”

  “You clear the case either way, though,” Will said.

  “Not the way I like to,” Farraday said.

  “Can we get out of here now?” I asked.

  “Soon. When we get everything nailed down.”

  That wasn’t the answer I’d been hoping to hear. “If the investigation is over, there’s no real reason to keep us here, is there?”

  “The investigation isn’t over,” Farraday said. “I have to get the medical examiner and the crime scene people back out here. There’s still work to be done before we can close everything out.

  Anyway, since most of the people here are in bed asleep, except the ones out wandering in the hallways”—he gave us a hard look as he said that—“we might as well not disturb them. Besides, you can’t get all your clients back to Atlanta until morning anyway, because you’ll have to get a bus out here to transport them.”

  I tried not to wince as I realized that he was right. Mr. Cobb was going to have to return to Atlanta, pick up the bus, and bring it back out here to the plantation. It did make more sense to let people get their rest, give them breakfast in the morning, and then take them back to Atlanta the way we would have if the murder had never happened. Summoning up a vestige of normalcy like that might even make folks a little less inclined to sue me later on.

  I could hope, anyway.

  “All right, Lieutenant,” I said. “You need us for anything else right now?”

  Farraday shook his head. “No, you can go back to your rooms. In fact, I’d appreciate it. The more everybody stays out of our way, the faster we can wrap this up.”

  He used his radio to summon some deputies and then planted himself in front of the door to Riley’s room. Obviously he wasn’t going to let anybody else in there until he was good and ready, and I had no desire to enter the room again. I didn’t need to look at Riley’s body again. I had seen two corpses already tonight, and that was two too many, as far as I was concerned. I wasn’t sure I would ever get those sights out of my brain.

  Will walked with me to the room I was sharing with Augusta and Amelia. We paused in front of the door, and he said, “Well, that didn’t work out exactly like we expected it to.”

  “This night’s been so crazy, nothin’ surprises me anymore,” I said.

  “Do you still want to discuss doing some more of these literary tours sometime?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know, I just thought maybe all the trouble had convinced you to forget the whole thing.”

  I thought about it for a second, then said, “No, I still think it’s a good idea. Can I get in touch with you through the college?”

  “Sure, but I’ll give you my phone number and e-mail address in the morning before you leave, just to make sure you can contact me whenever you’re ready.”

  “Thanks. That’s a good idea. I’ll give you my info, too.”

  He looked hesitant and uncomfortable, like he wanted to say or do something else, and suddenly my mind flashed all the way back to the time when I was a teenager, because at that moment Will Burke looked for all the world like a boy on a first date who couldn’t decide whether he wanted to kiss the girl or not—or if he had the courage to do so, even if he wanted to.

  But then he just smiled a little, lifted a hand in farewell, and said, “Well, good night … what’s left of it, anyway.”

  He turned and started along the hall toward his own room. I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. I decided on relieved. It really hadn’t been long enough since the divorce to be thinking about getting involved with somebody. If I did, I would always wonder if it was real or just one of those rebound things.

  I opened the door and slipped into the darkened room. The two sets of deep, regular breathing from the nearer of the beds told me that the girls had slept peacefully through the whole thing. I was glad of that. When they woke up in the morning, which was just a few hours away now, it would be to the welcome news that we could all go home.

  I felt my way to my bed, took off the robe and dropped it on the foot, and crawled gratefully between the covers again. This time I was determined to go right to sleep and salvage what rest I could.

  So wouldn’t you know it? A little voice piped up in the back of my head, yammering insistently at me.

  What it was saying was that something was still wrong. Something didn’t make sense.

  It wasn’t over, no matter what Lieutenant Farraday said. No matter what Elliott Riley had done. Something didn’t tie together just right.

  And at that moment, I began to wonder if I was ever going to sleep again.

  CHAPTER 22

  I

  forced myself to close my eyes, but when I did I saw Bugs Bunny in a hoop skirt and a Scarlett O’Hara wig. I shook my head and tried to force that image out. Then I thought about the doors Will and I had heard opening and closing as we came down the stairs from the third floor. One of those doors could have been Riley’s.

  But Riley’s door had been open when we found it
, not closed. So that didn’t work. I tried to reconstruct the sounds.

  It was possible that someone had left one of the other rooms, opened Riley’s door, seen the body, and then left without closing the door. I’d been wondering why the door was open and was leaning toward the explanation that Riley himself had left it open so that his body would be discovered sooner … but the theory that was forming in my head was just as plausible, maybe even more so. Anybody finding a body like that with the back of its head blown off might be so shaken that they would rush out and not pull the door all the way closed behind them.

  It didn’t matter, I told myself. Riley was dead either way, and it seemed obvious that he had killed himself because of guilt over Kelley’s murder. Farraday was convinced of that.

  But suddenly, I wasn’t.

  If we assumed that Kelley had discovered Riley hiding those stolen items in the gardener’s shed, then there was a reasonable motive for Riley to kill him. Unfortunately, there was no way to know that was what had happened, because Riley and Kelley were both dead.

  If that wasn’t the case, then we were right back where we started, with numerous suspects under the roof of the plantation house who wouldn’t have minded seeing Steven Kelley dead. We were worse off, actually, because now Elliott Riley’s suicide complicated everything. If it was a suicide …

  I rolled over, buried my face in the pillow, and tried not to groan in despair. Why couldn’t I stop thinking about all of this? Why couldn’t I just accept Riley as the murderer, as Lieutenant Farraday had done, and let it go at that? I wanted to get back to Atlanta with the tour group and not even think about plantations and Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara for a while. I could think about it tomorrow, because after all, tomorrow was another—

  Crap. The rug. That was what wasn’t right.

  I’d never seen Elliott Riley without his toupee. It was an expensive hairpiece, the kind that a man who was vain about his appearance would buy and wear. If he was going to kill himself, knowing that his body was going to be found, wouldn’t he have taken the time to put on his toupee?