by Joan Hess
“This is after the body was found in the dumpster?” Henbit said. “You didn’t have anything else to do, so you decided to stroll over to some nightclub to see if one of the fishier contestants happened to be there? You have fertile imaginations in the backwoods, don’t you?” Sighing, he stood up and straightened his tie. “If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to share it with me, Ms. Hanks. I would be most grateful.”
I could think of a couple of little things I’d omitted, but I smiled sweetly and watched him stomp away. Once he was gone, I said, “Gaylene’s not the only one I saw leave the hotel this morning, by the way. At one point, I characterized it as a damn parade.”
“Did you, now?” he murmured, then gave me a look that bordered on reproachful. “Did you happen to tell the lieutenant about what Ruby Bee claimed to discover in the kitchen very early this morning?”
“Don’t change the subject,” I snapped.
“It’s really much better if I do, Arly. The situation’s a bit more complex than what you’re accustomed to in Maggody. More complex, and more dangerous. It’s unfortunate that you went to the Xanadu and saw Brenda, but it can’t be helped now. Tell yourself she put on a nice blue dress and went to apply for a job. You’d better downplay your involvement for your mother’s sake, if for no other reason, and let the lieutenant investigate in his own way.”
I opened my mouth to offer a polite rebuttal when Henbit came to the door. His jaw was out as far as it could go, and his expression was noticeably less than genial. “I’ve had a call from the Xanadu. We don’t have a positive I.D., but we’re fairly certain that Craig Lisbon, who appears to be the manager, was shot and killed within the last hour. If you’re not willing to be candid with us, Ms. Hanks, we’ll book you as a material witness and let you cool your heels for a day or two. I’m sorry we can’t offer more luxurious accommodations, but we’re jammed and you’ll have to share a cell with hookers, derelicts, perverts, and whatever psychotics we’ve invited to join us.”
“Is Brenda there?” I asked, struggling not to envision his scenario.
“No, but when we pick her up, she’ll be held pending charges for first-degree murder. It may take a little longer, but we’ll probably get enough to book her for her husband’s death, too. This is in no way going to alleviate your responsibility to tell me the whole goddamn story. Understand, Ms. Hanks?”
“Not at all,” I admitted.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Refusing to be bullied, I stuck to my story that I had followed Gaylene to the Xanadu because I suspected her motives in entering the contest. I explained how I’d happened to meet Ruby Bee and Estelle while they were exploring the neighborhood, glossing over a few details and stressing that I’d left Mr. Lisbon in good health inside his club. Due in small part to Durmond’s bland gaze, and in large part to my real aversion to jail cells, I finally got around to the events of four o’clock in the morning.
Lieutenant Henbit seemed gratified by my candor, but mystified by my disclosure that the murder had most likely occurred in the kitchen and someone had gone to the trouble of removing the body to a dumpster and tidying up. I added that the cases of Krazy KoKo-Nut had also taken a trip, although they’d been returned some time between four and ten o’clock.
“Just what is this KoKo crap?” Henbit asked, scribbling a note.
“That pretty well describes it,” said Durmond. “A perverse sign of progress, I suppose. No doubt there’s a scientist out there who’s devising a scheme in which someday everything that passes our lips will be synthetic.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Henbit read through his notes for a moment. “What’s puzzling me is why your mother went to the kitchen.”
“You’ll have to ask her.”
“She have any kind of relationship with Appleton?” he continued ever so craftily. “They ever go off by themselves for a time, or have cozy conversations in the corner?”
I finished my coffee and stood up. “I really couldn’t say, but I’d be surprised if they’ve so much as exchanged nods since they arrived. He wasn’t polite to any of us, including his wife.” I thought about how he’d looked in the dumpster and shook my head. “Even so, it was a damn nasty trick to dispose of him like that. How was he killed?”
“Bullet in the neck,” Henbit said. “It destroyed the carotid artery, which was why it was so messy.”
“And the weapon?” Durmond asked quietly.
“We haven’t come up with it yet, but there’re some unhappy men out back sifting through garbage. We won’t see the ballistics report for a couple of weeks, much less the results of the autopsy. We pulled a stiff out of the river more than a week ago, and we’re still waiting to hear something on that, not that it’s gonna be any big surprise. Not that this one will, either. As for Lisbon, he was shot in the back of the head with enough caliber to take off his face. Real nasty, according to the first officer on the scene.”
I wished him luck with Ruby Bee and Estelle and went into the lobby. Mr. Cambria was back on duty, but I didn’t feel overly safe and secure in the hotel, even with cops in the kitchen and cops in the dining room and cops in the alley out back. Hell’s bells, I was a cop, and I sure wouldn’t have depended on me for anything more than a neatly written parking ticket.
I was under orders not to leave the hotel, which was fine with me. I lingered in the lobby, trying to overhear the conversation between Henbit and Durmond in the dining room, but one or the other had closed the doors. Thinking about my room upstairs was enough to give me claustrophobia, and I was reduced to sitting on a sofa in the lobby when Kyle and Geri came out of the office.
Her blotchy face and swollen eyes reminded me of Brenda’s grand exit from her bathroom. “This entire debacle is your fault, you know,” she said to him. “Right this minute I could be in the chaise lounge on the deck, but instead I’m going to have to deal with negative press. I hate negative press!”
“Speaking of the press,” I inserted politely, “did you confirm the credentials of those people at the reception?”
“Why would they lie?” she countered, making it clear they were likely to be the only unimpeachable souls in the entire city, if not the state.
“Ruby Bee and Estelle were interrupted in the middle of a conversation about how someone in the room resembled a plumber.”
“And I should know what a plumber looks like?” Geri said, then turned on Kyle. “I find it reprehensible that one of your contestants not only killed her husband, but also went to some seedy nightclub and killed the manager. If I’d had the slightest inkling that you were including homicidal maniacs on your list of finalists, I never would have set foot in this place.”
“I told you the names came from Interspace Investments,” he said sulkily.
“Which ones?” I asked.
“What difference does it make?” Geri said, but put her clipboard on the counter and flipped through the pages. “The two contestants from the original list are Ruby Bee and Catherine. We were supposed to have a cab driver from Brooklyn, a taxidermist from Boise, Idaho, and some hack mystery writer from Hansville, Washington. Instead, we get a hooker, a professor, and a homicidal maniac. It’s rather obvious that this sort of decision process should be left to professionals, isn’t it?”
She had a point. I thought for a minute (an increasingly alien activity), and said, “Why did the original three decline?”
“Ask him,” Geri said as she let the pages flutter down.
Kyle stared at the floor. “They all called the same morning. The cab driver fell and broke his leg, and the taxidermist accidentally severed a finger. The writer said he’d decided to take a three-month cruise to Alaska. Someone from Interspace called that afternoon and said they’d found alternates.”
“Lucky us. We got a hooker, a professor, and a homicidal maniac,” Geri added with a sneer.
“They didn’t phrase it quite that way,” he said. “I’d better call my father with the news that the contest is off. He’ll be
pissed, but there’s nothing we can do about it—except pray they find Brenda and arrest her without giving the media all the details about the purpose of her stay here.”
He started for the office. Geri stared for a minute, slammed down the clipboard, and took off after him. “Just a minute, buddy boy. If your father calls my boss again and tries to blame this mess on me, I’ll personally swim to the Cayman Islands and bury him up to his neck in the sand so the crabs can chew off his face!”
They continued their discussion in the office. Beyond the closed doors of the dining room, Lieutenant Henbit and Durmond sat with their backs toward me, intent on their conversation. On the counter not ten feet away, the clipboard lay abandoned on the counter, just begging to be given some attention and a few kind words.
Soft-hearted kid that I was, I sauntered over to the alcove, ducked beneath the counter, and removed the clipboard and myself to a shadowy corner. There were a lot of lists, some scratched into illegibility and others fresh with ill-fated optimism. I finally found the list of contestants and jotted down the addresses of the three replacements.
As I returned the clipboard, I glanced up. Mr. Cambria was regarding me from the sidewalk, not with his usual twinkly smile but with a cold impassivity that caused the hairs to rise on my arms and a lump to settle in my stomach. I felt like an animal on a stainless steel table in a laboratory.
The smile reappeared as he turned to speak to someone, and seconds later Gaylene came into view, laden with shopping bags, her purse, and yet another suitcase. I ducked back under the counter and hurried toward the stairs, not sure I’d interpreted his expression correctly but no longer in the mood to linger in the lobby. Nobody ever died of claustrophobia, for pete’s sake.
Once I was in my room with the door locked, I sat down on the bed and looked over what I had scribbled. Unsurprisingly, Gaylene had a local address. Brenda lived in Peabody, New York, which I seemed to remember was on Long Island. I called information and got her number, then took a deep breath and dialed it. A male voice answered.
“Is Brenda home?” I asked.
“Who’s calling?”
“Just one of the girls. I wanted to know if she wants to play bridge tomorrow at her house or at the club.”
“Who is this?”
“I’ll call back later,” I said and hung up, aware I’d been chatting with a cop. Brenda hadn’t gone home, apparently. If she’d murdered her husband and/or the nightclub owner, she might well have chosen a less obvious haven. But it was equally possible that she had no idea that either murder had taken place and was shopping at Saks or having a three-martini lunch in honor of Jerome’s departure (albeit for a destination noticeably farther than Rio).
I looked back at the list. Durmond Pilverman resided in Beaker Lake, Connecticut, and taught at Drakestone College. He taught something “Very obscure,” he’d said. The college might not be in the same town, but it was apt to be in the same area.
It turned out to be in the same area code. I first called his home number and was not amazed when no one answered, in that he’d told me his wife was deceased and implied he lived alone.
“How obscure is it?” I muttered as I dialed the number of the college. The switchboard operator refused to put me through to his office on the grounds that he didn’t have one and was not a member of the faculty. I insisted that he was. After a few rounds of “is too,” “is not,” I asked for the administration office.
“May I help you?” asked a bored young woman who did not sound dedicated to the proposition.
“I’m trying to get some information about Durmond Pilverman. I was under the impression he’s a professor there, but the switchboard operator seemed to disagree.”
“Yeah, hang on,” she said, then punched a button that allowed me to be entertained by a saccharinized Beatles’ medley. We were well into “Yesterday” when she returned. “He used to be here, but now he’s not anymore. That’s all I can tell you on account of our policy.”
“Can you at least tell me what department he was in?” I asked before she could cut me off.
“I dunno. It’s like we’ve got this really strict policy about not giving out information about faculty and students. I think there’s a law or something.”
I put on my smiliest voice. “There’s no law against naming his department. It’s in the old catalogues, which means it’s already in the public domain.”
“Yeah?” she said dubiously.
“You can tell me.”
We discussed the issue at length. After I’d defined “public domain” and assured her several times that I was merely tracking down a dear old friend, she told me he’d been in the sociology department. I went back through the switchboard and found myself speaking to the department secretary, a bored older woman. Her vocabulary was better, as was her attitude (when I explained that Durmond had inherited property in Idaho), and she suggested I speak to Dr. Ripley. I professed willingness to do so immediately and was told Dr. Ripley was conducting a graduate seminar and could not be reached the rest of the day.
All this had taken most of an hour. I now knew Durmond was no longer on the faculty of Drakestone College. I also knew he had a gun in the dresser and a peculiar affinity for disreputable friendships. Then again, I didn’t know how his mugging related to the murder, but I was convinced it did. He’d been shot in the stairwell by someone thoughtful enough to put him in a bed. Jerome had been shot in the kitchen by someone who’d felt the need to clean up afterward. Thoughtfulness and cleanliness were not traits I associated with the local criminal element.
I lay down on the bed and began at the beginning.
“I’ve just about had it with you,” Dahlia growled, not at her captor but at her husband, who was in a corner, tied up like a bale of cotton. Marvel had done a competent job of it, although he’d been careful not to cause any pain and had inquired solicitously throughout the process. Kevin had been real grateful, sort of.
“Now, honey bunny,” he said, his Adam’s apple rippling against the clothesline, “there’s no cause to get all upset again. We’ll get out of this somehow—I promise. And when we do, why, we’ll just go right to Niagara Falls like we planned. You’re really gonna like it.”
“I ought to drop you in the water while you’re still tied up so’s I could watch you bobble around like a cork.” Dahlia was going to elaborate, but Marvel came out of the kitchen and gave her a mean look. “What’s your problem?” she said to him, figuring she could get back to Kevin whenever she had a mind to. He sure wasn’t going any place farther than he could roll.
Marvel peeked out the front window. “My problem is two cops out back and about ten of them out front. Jesus, you’d think they had Al Pacino holed up in here.” He took another look, then glumly shook his head and sat down near the window. “You doing okay, man?”
“Yeah, I’m just fine,” Kevin said eagerly.
“Some honeymoon,” Dahlia sniffled. “I’ve been dreaming of our honeymoon since the day we got engaged. All this year I’ve been lying in my bed thinking of how romantic it sounded, and how I’d be Mrs. Kevin Buchanon and we could …” She snatched a napkin from the holder and blew her nose. “Aw, Kevvie, ’member when I was working at the Kwik-Screw, and we’d go back into the storeroom and it’d be like there was violin music playing and we were in heaven in each other’s arms?”
Kevvie gurgled in agreement, although he wasn’t thinking about her arms or fool violins.
Marvel was getting pretty damn bummed out by the situation—and with Big Mama and his main man. He hadn’t had more than a few minutes of sleep for several days, and although he’d washed up as best he could in the restroom, he was feeling dirty and sweaty and real tired of his hostages.
And there didn’t seem to be a solution, not with the battalion of trigger-happy cops outside. He knew damn well they’d turn him to Swiss cheese if he so much as came to the door and tried to give himself up. They sure as hell weren’t going to let him hustle the hostages ou
t to the station wagon so they could all go to Niagara Falls. No, somewhere along the line they were likely to get tired of sitting on their asses and blow up the diner like it was nothing but a target on the practice range.
He went back to the kitchen to make sure they weren’t pulling any tricks.
As Mrs. Jim Bob arrived at the rusty sign proclaiming the limits of Maggody, she slowed down, not out of respect for a sign telling her to do so, but out of a growing sense of dismay for what she’d done at Naughty Nights. Well, maybe not exactly dismay, since Jim Bob deserved to pay through the nose for the sin of having a charge account at a store that specialized in lasciviousness.
“One of our best customers,” the girl had said, just as if Mrs. Jim Bob looked like the sort of woman who’d be caught dead in a peekaboo bra and bikini-cut panties. He was buying presents for someone else, most likely a slut with brassy hair and makeup slathered on with a trowel.
The elegantly wrapped packages piled high in the backseat had a redolence of sinfulness that was beginning to suffocate her. She’d bought them in a rage, but what could she do with them now? Distribute them at the Missionary Society’s next meeting? Donate them as door prizes at Jim Bob’s SuperSaver Buy 4 Less? Hide them in a closet where her cleaning woman, Perkins’s eldest, might come across them and see those gold stickers? Perkins’s eldest was taciturn, but she might take a wicked pleasure in spreading the word around town.
Mrs. Jim Bob turned off the air conditioner and rolled down the window, but the sinfulness emanating from the back seat was worse than swamp gas. It was … Satan’s flatulence. Ruby Bee’s Bar & Grill was closed, which saved her from having to keep her chin up while she drove past a bunch of rednecks who could tell just from looking what was in the backseat. The police department was closed, too. If that smart-mouthed Arly Hanks ever found out, she’d laugh herself silly before settling down to needling Mrs. Jim Bob till the morning of Judgment Day. Roy Stiver was sitting in a rocking chair outside his antique store. Although he failed to do anything except keep whittling on a chunk of wood, she was sure there’d been a funny look on his face as she went by. The willowy hippie woman who owned the Emporium Hardware was on the porch, talking to disgusting Raz Buchanon. They both looked at her, as did Marjorie from the back of Raz’s pickup truck, and the hippie even smiled and waved—just like she could see right through the car door.