Sarah Booth Delaney

by Sarah Booth Delaney 01-06 (lit)

  "She said she didn't wear those shoes last night. Someone must have taken them from her closet. They were found, covered in mud, on a small back porch at The Gardens B&B, where she was staying."

  I didn't have to glance at Tinkie to see how she was reacting to that flimsy excuse. "Does Allison have an alibi?"

  He shook his head. "She was alone, reading a book."

  "What is Quentin and Allison's relationship?" Tinkie asked, cutting to the chase.

  "They were lovers," Humphrey said, without batting an eye. "Both families were scandalized by the idea of Lezzie-lous, of course, but Al never cared about anyone but herself. In fact, she and Quentin were planning some big wedding." He actually rolled his eyes.

  Tinkie leaned forward. "Sounds to me like both Allison and Quentin did their utmost to piss off their families." She gave it a ten-beat pause. "That makes me wonder why."

  Her implication was clear, and Humphrey smiled. "Quite clever, but why would I be hiring a private investigator if I wanted Al to go to prison? She's two-thirds of the way there without my help."

  He had a point, and I decided to try another tack. "Who do you think might want to murder Quentin?"

  "Pick up a copy of King Cotton Bleeds. I'd say there are at least a hundred people who have motive. A good number of them were at the local bookstore yesterday, so a lot of them were in town."

  Humphrey wasn't only handsome; he was smart. "Good leads," I said.

  “Just to be sure we're all on the same page," Tinkie said, "where were you last night?"

  Humphrey's smile was charming. "Patti Tierce." He reached across my desk and picked up a pen and wrote a number. "Call her. I think she'll remember our evening together quite vividly." He reached into the side pocket of his coat and brought out a checkbook and began to scribble.

  He rose and put the check in front of me. It was made out for ten thousand dollars. "I hope that will suffice."

  "For the first week," Tinkie said as she saw him to the door. "We'll be in touch."

  When he was gone, I arched an eyebrow at her and waited for an explanation. Tinkie was the classiest broad I knew, and she never acted rudely, or seldom ever.

  "Humphrey dated Eleanor Hinton."

  I remembered Eleanor, though I'd lost touch with her when she moved to Vicksburg. She was a pretty girl who grew into a pretty woman, yet she couldn't hang on to a man. Or at least that's how the Cult of Daddy's Girls would diagnose it. She'd never made it to the altar, sort of like me, so she was officially out of the DG Club. "So?"

  "He tied her up to the bed in some kind of sexual fantasy game. He put on a Superman costume and was going to leap from a tree into her second-floor bedroom window and rescue her."

  "That's outrageous, and if I were Eleanor, I wouldn't have repeated all of this."

  "It gets worse. He fell and struck his head and was knocked unconscious. One of the neighbors had to call 911." Tinkie walked around her desk, her boots clicking on the parquet floor. "The fire rescue squad had to untie Eleanor." She shook her head. "Eleanor was so humiliated, she had to move out of town."

  It wasn't the kind of rumor one was likely to live down, I supposed. "So why blame Humphrey? She obviously signed on for the game."

  "He never called her or even apologized. Once the rumors got out, he was too busy fielding all the date offers he got from curious women."

  I had to laugh. "Isn't that the way it always works. The guy gets all the glory, and the woman wears the scarlet A."

  "He's one of the most eligible bachelors in Mississippi, Sarah Booth, yet I can't try to fix any of my friends up with him!" She put her hands on her hips and stared at me. "Although, he might be perfect for you. Both of you are a little off."

  Her insult was good-natured, and I took it as such. "It's almost nine o'clock. We've already had breakfast. Maybe we should head over to the jail to see Allison."

  "Then we can go out to The Club for a mimosa," Tinkie said. "I'm sure we'll run into some people who will be more than willing to talk about Quentin's book."

  As Tinkie and I drove into Zinnia, I noticed several county prisoners in their green-and-white uniforms, planting poinsettias around the Bradford pear trees that marked Main Street. Tiny white fairy lights were already woven around the trunks and through the branches. Christmas would soon be upon us, a fact that left me depressed and melancholy.

  "I'm going to give Oscar a call," Tinkie said as she whipped out her new cell phone, a flip device with a suede carrying case. It matched her purse and boots. "I'm more than a little curious about the McGee and Tatum family finances."

  Tinkie had come to realize that most murders were about money. Money could buy sex and power, among other things.

  "Good idea."

  She pulled into a parking space along the empty courthouse square. I got out and walked up the courthouse steps and down the hall to the sheriff's department. It was going to be difficult to go in there and not see Coleman at his desk. He'd become such a big part of my life, both professional and personal. Since he'd taken an unpaid leave of absence and left for Jackson with Connie, I hadn't heard a word from him and didn't expect to. Whether it was vanity or deluded fantasy, I believed that it had cost Coleman a lot to walk away from a possible future with me and stick with his psycho wife. But I respected his decision. Coleman wasn't a man who gave his word lightly.

  My footsteps sounded hollow on the linoleum, and Deputy Walters met me with a carefully blank expression. "I hear you're working for the Tatums," he said.

  Word did travel fast in a small town. "Humphrey hired us. Can we see Allison? Tinkie's right behind me."

  He unlocked the door to the jail and escorted me between two rows of cells. Only a few weeks before, Sweetie Pie had been incarcerated on trumped-up charges of biting. Coleman and Gordon had been good to her. I could see that Gordon had done what he could to make Allison comfortable. She had four pillows and three blankets, though the temperature was comfortable. She was a pretty young woman with her brother's Nordic coloring and a petite but athletic figure.

  "Who are you?" she asked, rising to her feet. She came to the bars and grasped them to get a better look at me.

  'This is Ms. Delaney," Gordon said. "She's your private investigator. She was also at the crime scene and saw your footprints clear as day."

  I didn't dispute Gordon but merely waited until he was gone. While I was waiting, I took Allison's measure. Her hair was cut in a chin-length bob, and her blue eyes were without make-up. She didn't need any. Her long eyelashes were thick and dark, and her complexion as smooth as a child's, except for three angry-looking scratch marks across her left cheek.

  "Why did my brother hire you? He hates me," Allison said.

  "Why does he hate you?"

  She sighed. "I messed up his life. Quentin fell in love with me, instead of him."

  That was something to ponder, but I filed it away and got down to the basics. "Where were you last night, Allison?"

  "Quentin and I had a fight." She spoke softly and looked down, blinking her eyes rapidly. Her fingers drifted up to her cheek. When she looked back up at me, tears hung in her lashes. "We'd had a terrible fight. The first book was a tremendous success. Her publisher had already gone back to print another twenty thousand copies, and the book had only been out for a week. Quentin said she was going to write a second book. I didn't want her to."

  A good investigator learns there are always multiple ways to bend a motive. Allison had just handed me a gold-plated one. But somehow, I believed her when she said she'd had an argument with Quentin. That was a far cry from a desire to murder her. "So you argued. Where and when?"

  "We were having dinner at The Club. Several people overheard us. Quentin got rather loud." She frowned. "That was about eight o'clock last night."

  "What happened after that?"

  "Quentin stormed out of The Club. By the time I got the car from the valet, she'd disappeared. That was the last time I saw her." She wiped at her cheek. "I really loved
her. I hate that we parted with angry words."

  "Where did you go?"

  "I drove around Zinnia for a while. Then I drove to Tatum's Corner. I was so close to home, I thought I might see Mom and Dad."

  This was good news. "Did you see them?"

  She shook her head. "No. I didn't stop. There were things in Quentin's book that only I could have told her. I felt like a Judas, so I didn't stop." When she looked into my eyes, there wasn't a hint of self-pity in her gaze. "Quentin and I both believed that people who built their lives on lies should be exposed. That's what her book was about. Somewhere along the way, I guess I lost the taste for unadulterated truth. We hurt a lot of people."

  "Which brings me to a logical question. Who would want to hurt Quentin?"

  Allison's eyes filled, but she didn't cry. "Who wouldn't? Everyone hated us. I told Quentin that I just wanted to live our lives together. We could have moved to New York or London. We could have gone somewhere we'd be accepted, but she said we weren't going to run away. We were going to rub their noses in it."

  I'd learned one thing from Lawrence Ambrose, a truly famous literary figure who'd been murdered last Christmas: People will do a whole lot to keep their secrets out of print. "Can you give me some specific names?"

  "Lots of people were angry about the book. Yesterday afternoon at the book signing, Umbria, Quentin's sister, was saying horrible things. I think she bought all the books and burned them."

  I'd already planned to visit the McGee family members. "Anyone else?"

  "For the past six months someone had been sending Quentin threatening notes."

  I gripped the bars and leaned closer. "Who?"

  "They were anonymous. I thought they were creepy, but

  Quentin just laughed about it. She said we were getting someone's goat, and the book hadn't even come out yet." "Do you have any of those notes? Did she keep them?" "I'm not certain," Allison said. "Quentin might have saved them. You could look through her things at the B&B or maybe at our cottage in Oxford."

  2

  Tinkie was sitting on the courthouse steps when I finished my interview with Allison. To my surprise, my partner was deep in a phone conversation with someone who must have been distraught.

  "There's no point in making yourself sick," Tinkie said, and I knew she was talking to a man. In a well-trained Daddy's Girl, there's a tone that both soothes and strokes the ego of a MWP—Male With Potential. There was a pause and Tinkie continued. "Nothing can change it now. Sarah Booth and I will check it out, and I'm sure we'll find everything is okay." She looked up and blew her sun-glitzed bangs off her forehead in a gesture of impatience, but mere wasn't a hint of it in her voice. "I'm certain Sarah Booth doesn't think any such thing. She's always had great admiration for you."

  I arched my left eyebrow—the only one I could arch after months of practice—as she hung up the phone.

  "I'm sorry I didn't get into the jail to interview Allison, but I knew you had it covered, and I thought it best to talk to Harold out here."

  "Harold? What's wrong with him?" Tinkie was only half right. When Harold had tried to buy my affections with a four-carat diamond, I hadn't felt very warmly toward him, but he'd proved himself a good friend in the last eight months.

  "He's worried."

  "Is it about that book?"

  "Partly, but there's something else. He's in a real dither." She patted the step, and I took a seat beside her on the cold cement slab. The courthouse square was lined with white oaks, their limbs all bare. In one tree a murder of crows hunkered down against the wind. It was a bleak and dismal day.

  "What's wrong with Harold?" The faintest tingle in my thumb let me know that my appendage hadn't totally forgotten Harold and his attentions. I reminded myself that Harold Erkwell was the president of the Bank of Zinnia, the bank Tinkie's father owned and where her husband was chairman of the board of directors. I'd seen Harold in a fit of passion but never in a dither.

  "He had a run-in with Quentin McGee last night. Gordon has already been out to question him."

  "It's Allison who's locked up. Why is Harold worried?"

  "He doesn't believe Allison killed Quentin, and once she's released, he thinks he may be the prime suspect."

  "Why in the world would he think that?"

  "Because he threatened to kill Quentin in front of about eight people at The Club."

  My mouth made a silent little O. "That doesn't sound like Harold."

  "He'd been drinking. I gather he just broke up with Rachel Gaudel and was upset. Then that ass Marcus Kline started teasing him about the book and some dirt on the Erkwell family. About that time, Quentin bumped into him and spilled her drink all over him. That was the last straw."

  Harold normally was the most levelheaded person I'd ever met. It was hard to visualize him making rash death threats. "Did Harold say what time this happened?"

  "After nine and before ten, but he couldn't be more exact. He knows that because Rachel left at nine, and Harold said he went home around ten."

  That time frame put Harold talking to Quentin after Allison had left The Club. "Did Oscar have any information on the financial scene?" My butt was freezing off, so I stood and offered Tinkie my hand. She grasped it and rose.

  "He just said we'd better cash that check first thing in the morning and see if it clears."

  "Damn." I turned to face her. "I thought the Tatums were the wealthiest family in Crystal County."

  "That was before 2000. A lot has changed in this country.

  That was a vast understatement. "What about the McGees?" I asked.

  "Seems that Franklin and Caledonia McGee had much better financial advice. They bought low and sold high. They're one of the wealthiest families in the Southeast."

  "One thing about this case, we have plenty of suspects."

  "Most of them are Oscar's friends." Tinkie started toward the Cadillac. "Want to go check out a few leads at The Club?"

  "I think we should forgo the champagne and see what we can find at The Gardens."

  Tinkie sighed. "Harold is at The Club, and I think he could use a dose of your humor."

  "I'll catch him later today," I promised as we got in the Cadillac and headed the few blocks to the bed-and-breakfast run by one of the matrons of Sunflower County.

  When we pulled down the shell driveway, Tinkie slowed. Live oaks lined the way, some with magnificent limbs that crossed over the roadway and touched the ground on the other side. The place hadn't been named The Gardens without reason.

  Unfortunately, the owner of the place, Gertrude Stromm, bore no resemblance to the bounty and generous beauty of her establishment. Her pinched face held eyes that shifted left and right, as if she might miss some social faux pas. I'd heard from several people who'd spent the night at the B&B that she served breakfast at seven. If you were late, you didn't eat. It was only the beauty of the place that kept her in business.

  "Mrs. Stromm," Tinkie said as she stepped up to the front door. "It's good to see you. Oscar sends his regards."

  "You're here to poke your nose into that terrible business with Quentin McGee." She said this to me, not Tinkie.

  "Allison Tatum has asked us to pick up some things from her room," I said smoothly. In the sunlight Gertrude's red-tinted hair looked like tiny copper wires bent at the ends.

  "You'll need a court order to get in there," she said.

  "No, we don't," Tinkie said evenly. "Allison needs a change of clothes, and we're going to get it for her. We've been hired by her brother, Humphrey, to help her out."

  "The sheriff's department has already sent someone here, tromping mud all over my polished floors. I won't have this. I'm going to pack up all of their things and have them removed from the premises."

  "How far in advance did Quentin pay the room?" I asked.

  "That doesn't matter one bit. I don't have to have snoops and cops disturbing my other guests."

  "Mrs. Stromm, it looks as if you're going to need a new roof here before
long."

  Tinkie's observation was out of the blue, and it stopped both me and Gertrude in our tracks. It took only a few seconds for the meaning to register on each of us.

  "How dare you!" Mrs. Stromm was honestly shocked.

  "It's very easy." Tinkie laughed charmingly. 'This is called business. Now we'd like to see Allison's room, please."

  The B&B was run like an old-time hotel, with a registration book on the front counter and pigeonholes behind the desk, where keys with large room numbers attached were kept. Gertrude got the key to Room 18. "Just follow me." She started to stomp away, but I stopped her.

  "Who stays at the registration desk?"

  "I do. I have to check and be sure the people who stop by are quality folk. If I'd had any idea about Quentin McGee, I would never have rented her or her friend a room."

  I didn't doubt that for an instant, but it wasn't my point. "So when you're overseeing lunch or the gardens, who stays at the front desk?"

  She frowned, and her cool gray eyes grew even icier. "What are you implying?"

  "Is the desk left unattended?"

  "Perhaps."

  It was as much as I was going to get out of her without thumbscrews, but it was enough to tell me that anyone could have picked up a key and gone into Allison's room to steal her shoes. This was a point in our favor.

  The hallway was long and dark. The floor was polished pine with dark beaded board wainscoting edging the walls. The upper half was wallpapered with hunting scenes. Not my idea of great decor, but it was part of the planter tradition.

  When we got to Number 18, Gertrude unlocked the door and pushed it open. "I've made an inventory of every single thing in the room that belongs to me. If one thing is missing, I'll have both of you in a jail cell beside your client."

  "Do you think you'll go with shingles again or perhaps steel?" Tinkie's face was a careful blank.

  Gertrude made a sound like a dog choking on a bone and stomped down the hallway, leaving us alone.