Killer in Crinolines

by Duffy Brown

  What I thought was, This is how God gets you when you lie to your auntie.

  Chapter Eleven

  “YOU!” Waynetta snarled at me when she opened the front door. “There’re no more packages to pick up here. Go away.”

  Undaunted, Auntie KiKi held out the Old Country Rose plate. “Oh, honey, we were wondering how you’re getting on these days?”

  “You brought me eggs?” Waynetta stared, her lip curling at the corner. Waynetta Waverly, the soul of gratitude and good manners.

  “We are mighty sorry for all that you and your dear daddy have suffered and wanted to pay our respects,” KiKi gushed, ignoring the curl and patting Waynetta’s cheek.

  Paying respects is one of those phrases that gets you automatic entry to any house in Savannah. Waynetta stepped aside and I followed Auntie KiKi into the living room. Summer curtains filtered the blasting sun’s rays to a soft glow, sparing the antiques and Oriental rug. I sat on the blue davenport, KiKi beside me, Waynetta in a chair with a gilded back and brocade seat that looked remarkably like a throne.

  “It’s been such a long ride,” Auntie KiKi said to Waynetta after she summoned Bessy May for tea. “Hot as the dickens even at this hour. I’d like to freshen up a bit if you don’t mind.”

  Waynetta gave directions. I racked my brain for something to talk about as KiKi disappeared down the hall. At least Simon and I had Rocky Road in common.

  “How are you?” I asked Waynetta. I did feel bad for her and all her troubles. She may sit on a throne, but she was a perfect example of how money can’t buy happiness.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not well at all.” Waynetta dabbed her tearing eyes. “Daddy told me the most dreadful news this morning and I just don’t know if I can bear it. I’m supposed to be in mourning for a year, a whole twelve months, can you imagine such a thing! That means no parties or social events till next August. Whatever will I do with myself? How will I survive? I’m in charge of the Christmas Cotillion, for heaven’s sake. Who made up this stupid mourning rule, anyway? Sounds like something out of the Dark Ages if you ask me.”

  “Well, you weren’t actually married to Simon; maybe six months would be long enough?”

  “You think so?” Waynetta’s eyes sparkled. “Maybe even three months since Simon was cheating on me. That should count for something. What a great idea, thank you kindly.” Waynetta gave me a quick once-over. “How did you resign yourself to your plight?”

  “Plight?”

  “After your divorce did it get easier to accept the fact that you’ll wind up a spinster? You are just precious, you know.”

  “Spinster?” Precious? I was still getting over plight.

  “You don’t have to take care of yourself any longer and that has to be a relief. You can just let yourself go, be free as a bird. I must say earthy is a fine look for you. Flip-flops, khaki pants, recycled blouse, mousy brown hair coming in nice and bushy. Next week I’m off to Atlanta for a new wardrobe. Now where can Bessy May be with that tea? All these problems have me parched as desert cactus. And where is Miss KiKi?”

  A crash sounded from upstairs followed by a scream. For a second I thought the scream came from me. After plight, spinster, and precious followed by earthy I had a right. A maid ran into the room wringing her hands. “You best come quick, Miss Waynetta. That dance teacher lady passed right out in the upstairs hallway.”

  According to Cher via Auntie KiKi there aren’t many scripts floating around for fifty-year-old chicks but my guess was KiKi just invented one. I took the steps behind Waynetta and found Reese Waverly helping KiKi to sit up.

  “I came around the corner,” Reese said, looking trim and rich in a hundred-dollar haircut and two-hundred-dollar slacks. “And there KiKi was in the hallway. She just sort of slowly sank to the floor right in front of me.” Reese looked to me. “Should I call the ambulance? Did she have a stroke? Has she been ill?”

  “Are you all right?” I asked KiKi, kneeling down beside her, patting her cheek.

  “Well, I do declare,” she said, eyes fluttering open, a little wink added for my benefit. “I think the heat got to me and then I was disoriented and flustered in this big, beautiful house. It was simply too much to take in. I’m fine as can be now. Maybe a martini to revive my spirits.”

  I gave KiKi the bug-eyed look and she added, “Or a glass of water would be fine, too.”

  The doorbell sounded downstairs and Waynetta let out a long-suffering sign. “Holy Moses and blessed Saint Mary, this place is busier than a stump full of ants. Must be more visitors, no doubt. I swear if I could kill Simon Ambrose all over again for what he’s put me though, I’d do it in a New York minute.”

  Kiki gulped some water the maid gave her then Reese assisted her down the steps. A contingency from the Daughters of the Confederacy filed into the living room, covered china dishes in hand. We all exchanged greetings then I charged up the Beemer and KiKi and I headed down the gravel drive.

  “Did you hear that?” I said to KiKi not having the patience to wait till we got off the property. “Waynetta said she wanted to kill Simon again, meaning she could have very well caused his demise the first time around. And there’s something else, last night I ran into Bridesmaid and she seemed to think Waynetta was more than capable of killing off Simon. What’s going on around here?”

  “Oh, honey, you bet your sweet tomato a lot’s going on but I’m not sure it has anything to do with Waynetta.” KiKi fished around in her cleavage as if she had a bad case of poison ivy in that most inconvenient spot. “Looky what I found in Reese Waverly’s office.”

  KiKi pulled out a black flash drive and held it up like she’d won first prize. “This here is why I had to faint like I did. I didn’t want Reese to suspect I filched this little old thing right off his computer, and you should see the man’s office. He must have just had it redone. Maybe I can get Putter up there for some ideas. His office needs an updating and—”

  I jammed on the breaks, leaving skid marks. “You stole that thing out of Reese’s office!”

  “Borrowed for an extended period of time.”

  “How do you know it has anything to do with Simon?”

  “SA written right here.” KiKi pointed to the letters on the flat side in red marker. “Simon Ambrose. I bet Reese found this in Simon’s stuff when packing it up. It had to be important for him to still have it connected to his computer like it was.”

  “KiKi, honey, think about this. You were upstairs by his office. Reese is going to know you took the flash drive. Simon could have died because of that information. Reese has guns, lots of guns, big guns and knows how to use them. I’ve seen him in action. This is not good.”

  KiKi tsked and waved her hand in the air. “I’m the little old dance teacher who goes around quoting Cher. No one will suspect me of anything. I’m harmless.”

  “You’re the dance teacher who gets into everyone’s knickers!”

  “There’s going to be people in and out of that there house all day long. Reese will think someone else took it. I’m telling you we’re home free.”

  Except I didn’t feel free, I felt like there was a big old bull’s-eye on my back and now one on KiKi’s back as well. I should have leveled with her about the stolen notebook, but I swear on a stack of Bibles I thought going out to Waverly Farms was safe as going to a church picnic.

  It was noon when I pulled into KiKi’s driveway. A few cars I didn’t recognize lined the curb out front of our houses along with one sweet-looking Harley. KiKi said she’d bring over her computer and the flash drive later on, but right now she had another dance lesson with Bernard Thayer. He’d been Mr. Weather on WSAV more years than I’d been alive and was determined to get on Dancing with the Stars or die trying. KiKi was close to granting him the latter option.

  The Fox was hopping with customers sorting through dresses and jackets and trying on shoes. A rack of newly consigned clothes hung off to the side ready to be tagged and put out. I savored the moment and stifl
ed the yippee alleluia squeal of joy creeping up my throat. Chantilly had great instincts when it came to business but not so much when it came to men. Not only did she hook up with Simon the sleaze of Savannah but next to her behind the checkout at this very moment was Mr. Pillsbury of Seventeenth Street fame and fortune.

  He had on True Religion jeans that had nothing to do with church on Sunday and everything to do with costing plenty. Only a hint of the piggy bank and dollar-sign tattoos on his biceps peeked out from the sleeve of a navy T-shirt. The customers didn’t seem to mind a little eye candy behind the counter. Fact is, every woman loves the bad boy and Pillsbury would never ever be taken for anything but.

  He gave Chantilly a friendly kiss on the cheek, BW a pat on the head, nodded to me, then sauntered out the front door and down the steps. The roar of his bike vibrated into the Fox. I wrote up a sale for a denim jacket and brown leather bag, then asked Chantilly, “Have you lost your ever-loving mind!”

  She giggled like a schoolgirl and turned red. “I do believe I have. He likes me.”

  I gripped her shoulders and looked into her starry eyes. “This is one of those times to think about what you’re doing. Your daddy’s retired police. Pillsbury’s working hood. Things could get messy.”

  “Look at me, Reagan. My life’s nothing but messy. I can trust Pillsbury, I know I can. He’d never hurt me like Simon did. He’d never betray me.”

  Oddly enough I agreed. The Seventeenth Street gang had issues to be sure. Ask anyone who’d had their car stolen, house broken into, was in need of untraceable firepower, bookie, or dealer for whatever purpose, but word had it the boys kept drugs, guns, and other nasty things away from schools, parks, and churches, which was a big chunk of Savannah real estate and something the cops never could pull off.

  “He gave me a present.”

  “A Mercedes with the VIN filed off?”

  Chantilly held out her hand sporting a lovely gold ring with a small sapphire. “It was his mamma’s. He wanted me to have it. We got to be friendly when I made UPS deliveries. I can’t help how I feel.”

  “Guess that’s not the worst I’ve heard today. Percy’s fallen for GracieAnn and she bakes dead-people cookies.”

  “Must be a full moon.”

  • • •

  Chantilly left and by six I had most of the newly consigned clothes priced and put out on the racks. I had better sales than all the previous week combined. I subtracted 10 percent for the cannon, wrote a check to the daughters that would go out in the morning mail, then stuffed the cash in the freezer. I turned around to KiKi coming through the back door, a jar of plump green olives balanced on her laptop, a sweaty pitcher of ice-cold martinis in her hand. Sometimes KiKi’s visits were a lot more enjoyable than others.

  “Figure we needed a little libation,” she said, kicking off her shoes. “My big toe barely survived Bernard and you’ve been entertaining the boys from the hood. The kudzu vine knows all.”

  “Chantilly has no man sense.”

  “Honey, when it comes to men, at one time or another none of us has any sense.” We shoved aside a display of jewelry on the dining room table and KiKi flipped open her laptop. We sat down, poured out the martinis, then plugged in the flash drive.

  “A golf course?” KiKi said, both of us staring at an architect’s drawing on the screen. “I don’t recognize the clubhouse and I’ve probably visited every single one of those things in the area with Putter for some benefit or another. Maybe this course is in the planning stage.”

  “Why would Simon be interested in a golf course? Was he into loan-sharking to build it?”

  KiKi sat back and sipped. “This sort of thing is way out of Simon’s league. Golf courses cost millions, they have investors and backers and sponsors and endorsements. Maybe Simon wanted to get Reese involved, get money from him to invest in it.” KiKi sat up, eyes wide. “Maybe Simon was out to swindle Reese and that’s how he wound up dead.”

  “He was going to marry Waynetta. Why double-cross her father?” I said to KiKi.

  “We’ve been assuming all along that Simon would fall into tons of money when he married Waynetta but what if he signed a prenup? If Simon did, he’d get nothing when Waynetta got tired of him and as we all know, Waynetta gets tired of everyone but herself sooner or later. This golf course hoax was one way for Simon to walk off with a chunk of Reese’s cash. That also explains why Simon kept Icy on the string too and others like Chantilly. He wasn’t going to be as well off as we thought, marrying Waynetta. He planned on marrying her to get to her daddy. Also, if Simon signed a prenup he looked all the more trustworthy to Reese and then could rope him in for the kill on the golf course.”

  “Except the kill part backfired. So you mean the golf course isn’t for real?” I said, trying to put this together from Simon’s viewpoint. “Reese Waverly then finds out he’s been taken to the cleaners by Simon and gets Sugar-Ray to kill him. No one scams Reese Waverly and gets away with it and Sugar-Ray needed the money.” I chewed an olive. “But there’s still the fact that Reese would get his attorneys to investigate the golf course before he laid out money.”

  “Simon worked at the bank.” KiKi added. “Setting up dummy accounts and making things look legit is something he knew how to do. That guy was one smooth operator and he was into the scam business. He told Reese this was a sweet deal he’d come across and Reese needed to get in on it right quick before it was too late.”

  I flipped through a few more screens on the computer. “It looks like a terrific country club. Best I can tell it’s supposed to be someplace between Savannah and Bluffton. It can draw from both locations and the Hilton Head group. No wonder Reese fell for it. Says here they have a five-star chef lined up from Atlanta for the restaurant and some golf pro guy from Florida. Look at the mockups for the décor. If I could afford it, I’d invest. It’s gorgeous. This is a lot of work just to scam Reese Waverly.”

  “Reese is no dummy. It had to look good. If we knew for sure that Simon signed a prenup, that would make our speculation about the scam and Reese wanting him dead a lot more believable. Right now we’re just guessing.” KiKi took a drink and looked at me out of the corner of her eyes. “Walker Boone would know.”

  “You’ll have to ask him. He never tells me anything.”

  “Bet if you showed up in that belly-dancing outfit, he’d tell you whatever you wanted to hear.”

  I put down the empty glass, my thinking powers severely compromised. “What does that mean?”

  “I’m just saying it had some effect on the old boy, is all.”

  KiKi headed back home for an evening of bachelorette bliss of chick-flick movies that Putter would hate and a tub of low-fat popcorn, taking the lose-a-few-pounds idea to heart. After a dinner of Cheerios I leashed up BW. Humidity hovered around 150 percent, making everyone a little shiny and coated with a fine layer of Savannah sweat.

  Going to see Boone was probably a big waste of time but he was my best shot on finding out if Simon had indeed signed a prenup other than asking Reese outright. That didn’t seem like a great idea if indeed Reese killed Simon or more accurately had him killed. Boone and Reese were in cahoots over something and a prenup with a conniving future son-in-law had to have come up at sometime.

  Not that Boone would tell me what was going on, but over the last few years I had learned to sort of read him. When I was way off base about something Boone was ready with a sarcastic comment. If he yawned, then sat back and looked bored I was getting closer to the truth, and if he had his blank lawyer face in place and said nothing, I’d hit pay dirt.

  Trying to ignore Kiki’s belly-dancing comment, I knew the powers of Angel’s pulled pork sandwich with Voodoo sauce and a side of mac and cheese. Boone would need the mac and cheese to put out the fire from the Voodoo sauce.

  Chapter Twelve

  ANGEL’S was up on West Oglethorpe, a long trot from East Gaston, but Bruce Willis seemed to be in a walking kind of mood and I needed to walk off that martini. A
fter we picked up our order from Angel’s we headed for the land of the rich and prosperous, also known as Madison Square. We passed the Green-Meldrim House, now part of the Episcopal church and a far better use of the place than the commandeered residence where Sherman set up shop.

  Boone’s house dated back to the 1880s and had a raised entrance to keep the place clean from back-in-the-day dirt streets. It was Federal-style beige and Savannah lovely with original black shutters and side verandas made for sitting a spell and chatting on a hot summer night. Not that I could see Boone doing much of either on any night.

  I took the stairs to the covered porch with lush green ferns and overflowing urns of red geraniums and white petunias. Either Boone had one heck of a green thumb or his gardener knew his stuff. My bet was on the gardener. It wasn’t the best of manners to come calling at night unannounced but manners weren’t Boone’s strong suit. Besides, I had food, some of Savannah’s most tasty, and that overrode manners any day of the week.

  I whammed the pineapple doorknocker a few times, waited, then gave it another try. “What?” Boone said, yanking open the front door. His eyes were red and bloodshot, chin lined with thick don’t-mess-with-me stubble. His feet were bare and he had on jeans and a gray T-shirt that was old and frayed.

  “You need to shop.”

  “Thank you, Christian Dior. Go bother someone else.” Boone gave BW a pat, started to close the door till I held up a brown bag, Angel’s scripted on the side. “I bring tidings of great joy.”