It seemed to me that Dally had sensed it as well and had determined to talk to the guy so that I could observe. Or maybe I was reading something into that. I was left wondering what had happened to my good old intuition. Seemed out of whack, or maybe it was just that I hadn’t had my morning pot of espresso.
Dally pointed, and we all sat at the kitchen table. “So what is the actual purpose of this visit, then, do you think?”
He breathed out. “I partly wanted to see if you were all right. Joepye said he scared you last night.”
She kept a steady eye on him. “It wasn’t that bad.”
He couldn’t keep up his stare and looked over in the direction of the noise from the espresso machine. “It wasn’t just that.” He started to talk, then stopped, then looked at me. “The kid we found last night? The stiff? The victim?”
I nodded, staring pretty hard at him myself. “I remember.”
He nodded a little. “Well …” he looked back at Dally “… she was your neighbor. She lived upstairs in the other half of this house.”
11. Strange Fruit
There were only three apartments in the old house. We knew who he was talking about.
Dally took it hard. “Minnie?”
Minnie Moran was just a kid, in school studying to be an artist. She was somebody you’d notice on the street — a blond knockout who was always singing old jazz tunes, smiling at strangers, addicted to espresso and good cheer.
I stifled my impulse to take Dally’s hand in front of Huyne and looked at him instead. “You’re certain about this?”
He nodded my way. “And then what with Joepye creeping around and you being here — to the untrained observer, this could all look very suspicious.”
I sat back. “But you see through all that.”
“I do, but you don’t understand the pressure I can get from my captain. Not to mention that this mess is starting to attract the media. I mean, national media. It’s a hell of a story, I guess.”
Dally still hadn’t gotten past the shock of the news. “Minnie was just in this kitchen yesterday. I lent her twenty bucks to buy charcoal for her second life class over at the college.”
I tried to smile at Huyne. “Don’t you think it would be best if somebody — some squad car — could hang around this general area for a while, kind of keep an eye on things. I don’t much care for the coincidence …”
But I didn’t have to finish. Huyne knew exactly what coincidence I was talking about, and just exactly what to do. “Already have a twenty-four watch.”
I nodded. “Whole neighborhood.”
“Right.”
I looked at Dally. “Okay, let me slam down a little of that espresso and be off. I have errands.”
She knew what I meant. “Okay.” She got up, still not herself. “Thanks for staying last night, by the way. That sofa’s not the most comfortable.”
And yet again, was she saying that to apologize to me for the condition of the couch or to assure Huyne that I had rested my bones downstairs? I took in a slow, deep breath, thinking how I needed my psyche adjusted, and me without the number of a good psychic chiropractor.
She’d filled a demitasse, nearly to the rim after dumping in two good lumps of brown sugar. I took the cup from her hand. She looked me in the eye. And there it was: the look I’d been hoping for. It was the look that said, “I know what you’ve got to do and where you’re going now, and I’ll keep this rube occupied while you do it.” Good. Made the espresso go down a lot smoother.
So I drained the cup, set it down delicately, and stood. “Okay, I’m off.”
Huyne was a little skeptical of my sudden departure. “Where’re you off to all of a sudden?”
I smiled at him. “You don’t seem to understand what a busy, busy man I am. I currently have two clients, and I have not done one whit of work on their behalf. I must away.”
He gave me the steel stare, but he let it go. “Nothing out of town, I hope.”
I straightened my tie. “Subtle.” I turned to Dally. “Don’t bother seeing me to the door.”
She widened her eyes for a split second, and I skimmed the floor of the kitchen in two steps.
The sun was dodging behind some hefty dark clouds. I knew that I ought to dash homeward for an umbrella and a shave — not to mention a change and a shower — but I was suddenly feeling urgent about my work. Gets like that sometimes; you can’t be bothered with hygiene when the wheels of the world are turning.
As I got in the car, I glanced up at the window that looked out from Minnie’s living room. I hadn’t been up there since a party the previous summer, but I remembered the swell self-portrait on the wall and the tasty spinach and water chestnut dip. Minnie had been a senior at the Atlanta College of Art, a photographer. Her big show, which Dally and I had seen just the past Christmas, had been a series of staged images from songs by Billie Holiday — very clever. Each photo had a small CD player in front of it, softly playing the song that the image had come from. The speakers had been remarkably directional, so you could hear the song only when you were standing right in front of the picture it pertained to, which had made it all seem very intimate.
The series had included one of the few songs Billie had written herself, “Strange Fruit”, about lynchings. A classic. The image for that song in Minnie’s show had been a picture of the artist herself, dressed like Christ, hanging by the neck from a blooming dogwood tree.
12. Rat Heaven
Less than ten minutes later I was pounding on Dane’s front door. He came, finally, dressed in a serious burgundy house coat, like the kind you might see older gentlemen in Victorian England wear around the parlor.
He seemed surprised to see me. “Mr. Tucker?”
I brushed past him and walked into his foyer. “Your niece is now officially part of a trend.”
“What?” He closed the door.
“We found another body last night. Same deal.”
“Same deal?” His head was cocked at what looked to be a painful angle.
I chose my words. “Joepye Adder and I found another girl, about the same age as your niece, hanging from another lamppost in the park just a few hours ago, and she was hanging by an apron string — again.”
His face was white. “How can this be true?”
“We know who the girl was too. Not a prostitute. An art student. She lived upstairs from Ms. Oglethorpe.”
“She lived …” But he couldn’t seem to finish the sentence.
So I did it for him. “Upstairs from Ms. Oglethorpe. I’m not going to waste your time telling you how increasingly personal that makes this mess. But make your retainer check out to Flap Tucker in the amount of twenty-five hundred bucks.”
He looked toward the kitchen. “I think I need more coffee.”
I nodded. “I could do with a glass of water.”
We made it to the kitchen.
Before he was even in his seat, I pressed on. “I’d like to get into your niece’s apartment or room or whatever. I think now would be a good time for me to admit I’m actually working on this situation with you and get to the discovery of what they sometimes call clues in the genre.”
“What are you talking about?” He stared.
“I want to get into your niece’s place. Do you have the address? Do you have a key? Could you come along with me, as nearest of kin, and go through her stuff?” I blinked. “These, I believe, are my questions at the moment.”
“I know the address.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Or I have the address. I don’t have a key. But I’d be happy to go with you.” He sipped again. “Or at least I’d be willing to go.” He set the cup down. “You want to go now.”
I nodded. “I want to go yesterday.”
“I’ll be a moment. I have to get out of the computer, and I need to put on some clothes.”
Without another word, he was gone up the stairs.
I took my time, looked about the place. It was what they like to call well appointed. I cou
ldn’t be certain because it was up high on the wall, but I thought the Picasso might have been a signed original instead of a print.
When he came back downstairs, Dane had on an obviously expensive sweater, dress slacks, and some painful-looking loafers.
He handed me a check. “Shall we?”
I nodded and pocketed the retainer.
The drive to Hepzibah’s place didn’t take long. She lived on a dead-end street off Eleventh. The sign was missing, so I had no idea what we might call the street where she lived. I only knew that it was so much less fashionable than Dane’s address that it might as well have been in another city.
Barely out of the car, Dane pointed up to a window. “That’s her place, up there. Everything in the building is locked up tightly.” He shot me a look. “But I assume a man of your occupation has a way with locked doors.”
As if in answer to his comment, I produced a barely visible hex wrench, fiddled with the front door for exactly three seconds, and opened the door for him.
He smiled and went in first.
Up the stairs, the kid’s door still had a plastic Christmas wreath on it and yellow police tape across the frame. As it turned out, that door was trickier. The doorknob turned easily enough, but the door was clearly locked somehow from the inside.
I turned to Dane. “Would anybody else be here, do you know?”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t think she had a roommate.”
I shrugged and tapped the door with a fair amount of authority. No answer.
“Another way in?” I asked.
“I don’t think so, but then, once again …”
“Wait here then, would you?” I pushed past him in the narrow corridor.
Outside I shoved through some fairly difficult ivy and a rat’s heaven of garbage to the back of the house. There was an old-fashioned trellis, just like they have in the movies, covered with kudzu.
I took only a second to consider the little spot, but it occurred to me that it had likely been a pretty nice old house in its day — probably the twenties — and that trellis might once have held roses or even bougainvillaea that someone had cared about. But by the end of the twentieth century it was just another midtown litter-strewn hooker barn. I wondered if the ghosts of the people whose garden it had been were ever abroad of a midnight hour, visiting the old neighborhood, staring, like me, up at the kudzu.
The moment passed, and I vaulted up the trellis, just close enough to the back window of the kid’s apartment to make it tantalizing. I made quite a racket getting up. If there had been anybody home in the building, he would doubtless have heard me, but nobody appeared, so I assumed the whole place was vacant.
The window was locked, but that was no challenge; you just slide a sturdy piece of thin metal between the upper and lower parts and turn the crank. Easy to unlock — and lock — from the outside, if you think of it. Only took a little effort because the frame was warped. I got the window open and flung myself in.
The apartment was dark. The room into which I had fallen was the bathroom. I added to the general noise I had already made by tumbling over everything on the toilet back and the sink. It was the smallest bathroom I’d ever been in, and black as a dungeon.
“Hello?” Thought I ought to check again. “It’s the Fuller Brush Man.” Like anybody her age would even know what that was.
I peered through the bathroom door. It opened into her bedroom. The bed was a mess, and the room was a little stuffy, but nothing was really amiss. I took a few steps into the room, cast my eye about. Only one thing on the wall caught my eye: a framed photograph. I was about to look closer, because I had the feeling I’d seen it before, when someone cleared his throat.
It was Dane shuffling around, so I gathered that the hallway was right outside the next room, which, as it turned out, was the only other room in the apartment.
The shades were up in there, so I could see better. There was a television on top of another television, a kitchen alcove with a poster for The Wizard of Oz up over the stove, a wooden table with three legs and a mannequin’s arm for the fourth. On the table were the barely recognizable remains of a breakfast someone had fixed maybe a month before, and plenty of roaches still taking advantage of their good fortune. They were crawling all over some charcoal sketches of nudes that were lying on the table to get to the cereal.
In fact the roaches barely took any notice of me at all. No scurrying away because some giant human had come crashing into the room. These were roaches with confidence of ownership. Just ignore the big man. He’s only a visitor.
I made it to the front door and saw immediately the access problem: It was padlocked from the inside.
“Dane?”
“You’re inside.”
“Right. Hang on a second.” I slipped another little metal gizmo into the padlock, fiddled a little, and the thing gave up.
I opened the door. “Won’t you come in?”
He didn’t smile. He just stepped past the police tape and gave a glancing examination of the whole place. Then he made his pronouncement.
“God in heaven.”
I shrugged. “I’ve seen worse. Lots worse.”
“I suppose. But did your favorite niece live there?”
Not having a niece of any sort, except unless you count Dally’s little niece up in Black Pine Mountain, Georgia, or a couple of hayseed namesakes of ours down Tifton way, I kept my mouth shut.
“What am I here for, again?” He sounded irritated.
“To see what you can see.” I looked around. “Like, for instance …” I paused just long enough for a kind of dramatic effect I suddenly wanted to have on the guy. “I didn’t notice, as I passed through the bedroom, the Raggedy Ann doll you mentioned the other day.” I watched his face for signs of anything strange. “Wouldn’t she have it sitting on her bed? Isn’t that the way kids do?”
“Well,” he began, his voice betraying nothing, “I’d like to think she loved it as much as that, but it is possible, of course, that it didn’t mean as much to her as I thought it did.”
“Let’s look anyway.”
He nodded. We went into the bedroom, flipped on the light, and gave it a good once-over. Depressing primarily in its minimalism, the room gave up no clues about anything — except that life can be fairly tough on some kids when it wants to be. No mystery there.
And no doll.
I turned to him. “No doll at all.”
He didn’t look at me. I pressed. “Would she have hocked it, do you think?”
He raised his head a little. “What pawnshop would offer her any money for a flimsy old rag doll?”
“Don’t reckon they’d know its value?”
He shook his head. “Not likely, would you say? Sotheby’s maybe, but not a pawnbroker.”
“I think you’re right.” I smiled at him, then let the full import of my suspicions flood my tone of voice. “I just wanted to know what you thought.”
“What I thought?” He finally looked me in the eye. Then, as if he’d heard me on a three-second delay: “Oh.”
“Oh” — I looked at him sideways — “what?”
“Oh, this: You had it in your mind that I might have come over here before now and looked for the doll or even gotten the doll — something of that sort.”
“Not exactly.” I kept my gaze evenly locked with his. “I just thought it was a little, how shall we say, obvious that you mentioned the doll the other day at Mary Mac’s. It seemed to be — I don’t know — pointed or leading or … something.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean that when someone hires me or wants to hire me to find something, they hardly ever go right to the specifics. They start with the big picture, and the details are things I have to pry out, like gold from the mountainside. You gave me a little chunk of gold without my even having to ask. I was worried about it because it was too easy. I was also a little worried about your whimsical ‘I want to know why’ speech.”
His voice was calm. “Why were you worried about that?”
“Because it sounded too much like something I might say.”
“I see.” He sat down on his niece’s bed, his voice changed completely. “Well, you’ll have to make up your mind. Either you’re disturbed by my being too specific, or you’re worried by my being too academic. You can’t have your Kate and Edith too.”
I stared for a second. “Well, you certainly are one strange old bird, wouldn’t you say?”
“I am.”
“Okay, since it’s all out in the open, what’s the deal with the doll?”
“Absolutely nothing — if it were here.”
“Now you’re just being obtuse. Or is that isosceles?”
“Do you know,” he said, “why I’m the best bass player in the region?”
“Practice?”
“Everyone practices. I prepare. I order scores months before a concert, study them, find inconsistencies in the notation, ask questions about the composer. What time of day was he born? What were his eating habits? Same for the conductor, any new guest conductor — what are his quirks? I anticipate them.”
“So” — I thought I knew where he was going — “you mean you were trying to anticipate something about your niece’s … situation. Something about the doll. But what would it mean if the doll weren’t here?”
“It’s not here.”
“Thanks for reminding us of the obvious. Question stands: So what?”
“It’s the only thing she owned of any value whatsoever,” he told me impatiently. “Naturally it’s a pivotal issue, a motive. One of her slummy friends saw it and killed her for it.”
Rich people. They think everything pivots on dough. So naturally Dane would think the scratch was the issue. I felt I ought, strictly as a public service, to set him straight.
“Let me just count the ways you’re wrong. First, despite your worldview, a thing like this is never about money; second, money — while being in fact the root of all evil — is not at the root of all things, and by the way, didn’t we just decide that most people wouldn’t recognize the value of the thing anyway? And three, murder and suicide are both generally emotional issues. Passion, not cash. You have taken yourself on something of a wild goose chase. You have caught yourself something of a red herring.”
Dancing Made Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 4) Page 7