A Tiny Collierville Murder

by Abby L. Vandiver

  As I told the waiter what I wanted to eat, Liam looked surprised, but I couldn’t help notice the smile that crept across his face when I ordered the same thing.

  “A lot of couples split the Durango burger,” the waiter said.

  Liam looked at me askingly. “Nope.” I shook my head. “I want my own.”

  Liam stuck his hand out toward me. “Give the lady whatever she wants,” he told the waiter.

  After the waiter brought us our drinks – orange soda for him, a Coke for me – Liam still didn’t have much to say. I didn’t want to bring up all my Dedek’s sneaky suspicions, because, after all they were about Liam’s family, but he sure was taking a long time to get to it.

  “I would have thought you were a salad kind of girl,” he finally said when they brought the food over.

  “I work out a lot,” I said reaching for the ketchup. “I don’t have to worry too much about my metabolism.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said smiling, then pretended to wield nunchakus in lock and strike movements. “How could I forget?”

  “And . . .” I said and batted my eyes. “I saw they have Crème Brulèe Cheesecake. I love crème brulèe.”

  “You think you’re going to have room for dessert?” He pointed at the plate with the large burger and huge side of French fries the waiter had set in front of me.

  A silly grin and nod was all he got from me.

  “No problem,” he said. “Eat as much as you like.”

  “Didn’t we come to talk?” I asked and picked up my burger. I figured maybe I should get the conversation going. “You wanted to tell me something?” I took a big bite of my burger, and the juice from the meat ran down my hand.

  “Yeah,” he said and lowered his head. “I’d like to talk about it. About, you know, the other day. I just kind of need some answers, you know?”

  I took my napkin and wiped my mouth and hands. “What do you mean, some answers?” I asked. “Isn’t the police providing those? I mean, I know I can’t give them to you. I don’t know anything.”

  “Yeah, I know you don’t. But that’s what I was hoping we could do together.”

  I cocked my head to the side.

  “I need answers myself. Now,” he said. “I don’t want to wait on them.” He leaned in and lowered his voice. “This may sound crazy, but I want to investigate it myself.” He shook his head. “I gotta know what happened to my father. Who would do this?”

  I took a sip of my coke before I answered. “I don’t think it sounds crazy.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No because my grandfather thinks that I should do the same thing. He says I have to try and clear my name.”

  “What does he want you to do?”

  I hunched my shoulders. “Ask questions. Poke around. Basically do what you’re saying – investigate.”

  “Really?” He cracked a smile and picked up a French fry. “That’s exactly what I want to do. Ask questions.” He took a sip of his soda. “Where is your grandfather? In New York?”

  “Yep. Connors Grove to be exact,” I said.

  “Never heard of it. I would have thought you were from like New York City, or someplace like that.”

  “No one’s heard of Connors Grove,” I said. “It’s smaller than Collierville.”

  “So you’re a small town girl, huh?” He shook his head like he was digesting the information. “I never would’ve thunk it.”

  “And why is that?”

  He hunched his shoulders. “There is just nothing small town about you. I mean look at you. Designer everything.”

  “I tried to be a big town girl. That’s why I moved out to California. But life was expensive and I had to leave. Head back home to New York.”

  “How did you end up here? In Memphis?”

  “I don’t want to go back to small town life any sooner than I have to. So I’m seeing the country one big city at a time on my way back. Well, until my money runs out. Which won’t be much longer.”

  “Going broke?”

  “I’m nearly past broke now.”

  He laughed.

  “I wanted Cynthia’s life,” I said.

  “Cynthia? My stepmother?”

  “Yes. Cynthia is designer everything,” I said. “Heck, she’s got me beat by leaps and bounds and she’s small town.”

  “Cynthia is anything but small town even though that’s where she lives,” Liam said. “At least now. I think she married Big Willie for his money so she could spend it, but she won’t even spend it in Collierville. She shops in New York, Chicago, Rodeo Drive. Heck she’s even gone to France and Italy.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe she’s lasted as long as she has in Collierville. Probably only because Memphis is a hop, skip and a jump from the ranch.”

  “I wish I could shop like that.”

  “You do,” he said and pointed at me.

  “Yeah, but to the detriment of food and shelter,” I said. “Why’dya think I agreed to lunch with you?” I patted my stomach. “I can’t afford to feed myself.”

  Liam laughed. “No worries, Nixie, I gotcha.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Liam had turned out to be a sweet guy. I enjoyed his company, even when he wasn’t saying anything.

  We both eventually grew quiet and worked on eating our meals, until the waiter showed up. “Did you want to order dessert?” he asked.

  “Uhm . . . I think so.” Liam said and looked at me.

  “Yes, we do,” I assured both of them.

  “Okay,” Liam said. “She’ll have the Crème Brulee Cheesecake.”

  “The same for you?” the waiter asked.

  “Oh no,” Liam voiced boomed like his father’s had. He held up a hand. “Just bring me a cup a coffee.”

  “Coffee?” I asked.

  “It’s a staple on any ranch, even if it’s tiny houses that’s being built.” He looked up at the waiter. “And can you bring me another glass of water, please.”

  “Sure thing,” the waiter said. “I’ll be right back. He grabbed our plates and left.

  Liam pulled the sugar rack to him, and grabbed a few packs readying for service of his black brew. “So how does your grandfather know about what’s been going on here?” He fiddled with the packets.

  I pulled out my iPad and showed it to him. “We talk,” I said. “I taught him how to FaceTime.” I pushed the tablet back down in my bag.

  “Really? That’s cool. Couldn’t get Big Willie to use a computer to save his life.” The waiter came with our order and Liam waited until he left before he spoke again. “Did you tell your grandfather everything that happened?”

  “Of course I did. I tell my grandfather everything.” I gave him a sideway glance. “Well almost everything. I definitely told him about the murder and my subsequent lock down in Memphis. I mean I could end up in jail, I had to tell him.”

  “No one thinks that you did it, Nixie.”

  “You were there that night. I got a lot of suspicious looks and your brother even accused me outright.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been wondering about him,” he muttered. “Maybe he’s trying to project his guilt.”

  “Who Dale? The take charge kind of guy?” I sliced into the cheesecake and took in a mouthful. “Oh my, this is good.” I let my eyes roll up in my head. “So smooth and creamy. I could eat two of these.”

  Liam laughed. “You can have whatever you want.”

  “Be careful,” I said. “I may take you up on that.”

  Liam mixed the sugar and cream the waiter had brought over into his coffee. “Yeah so, I was saying. Dale.” He looked at me and fiddled with the spoon he had used for stirring. “I see you remembered him.”

  “I like to keep up with pertinent info on the people who say I’ve committed murder.”

  “I hate to say it,” Liam said. “But Dale, in my mind is a prime suspect.”

  “Your brother, Dale?”

  “My stepbrother, Dale,” he corrected. “Although I don’t know if that makes a d
ifference,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. So, did you know that Dale went out and bought a new car?”

  “How would I know that?” I said. “And how is that suspicious?”

  “He bought two cars,” Liam said, his forehead wrinkling up. “Matching ones for Courtney Lynne and himself.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe they needed new cars.”

  “Where did he suddenly get the money to do something like that?” Liam asked.

  “He works every day,” I said. I guessed I was supposed to act more suspicious of the purchases he’d made, but I didn’t see a connection that would lead to murder.

  “Dale doesn’t have any money,” Liam said. “That’s why he lived at the ranch. Big Willie was the only one with any money and he only doled it out one paycheck at a time.” Liam thought for a moment. “Jimmy, remember him? The guy who towed your car?”

  “Yeah, I remember him,” I said.

  “Well he told me that Dale paid cash for those cars.”

  “What kind of cars are they?”

  “Nissan 370Z Roadsters. A passion red one for him and pearl colored one for her.” I hunched my shoulders, his description didn’t mean much to me and he must have caught on to that. “Let me show you,” he said. He wiped his hands on his napkin and pulled out his cellphone from his back pants pocket. He swiped the face of it, punched in some info, and searched momentarily. Then he held up his phone up for me to see the image he’d found.

  “That’s pretty,” I said.

  “Yeah, and they start at around forty-two thousand.”

  “Wow.” I started nodding my head. “He bought two of them? And paid cash for them?”

  “Now you’re beginning to see what I mean. And this was after Big Willie was killed. It was like he knew he was coming into some money.”

  “You think he killed Big Willie for money?”

  “I don’t know what to think.” He picked up his coffee cup then put it back down. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, Big Willie paid us well, but he was trying to build an empire. All his money went back into the company. No way could my stepbrother have been banking that kind of money.”

  “What about his inheritance?” I asked. “Maybe that’s what he was counting on.”

  “We haven’t even had a reading of the will. If there is a will. Big Willie wasn’t thinking about dying, he might not have made one.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And I’m not sure Dale was going to get anything anyway. I mean my father loved him, I guess, he was always nice enough to him. Treated him like a son. But to give him enough to spend maybe close to a hundred thousand on cars?” Liam frowned. “Big Willie would have been thinking about the business not about giving us money to us for our personal accounts.”

  “He evidently got that money from somewhere,” I said.

  “I know,” Liam said and let his eyes drift off. “The only thing I could think of that could clear him, in my mind, was that maybe he signed an IOU at the dealership using Big Willie as his marker.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Sort of like credit based on Big Willie’s name and good reputation. Everyone around here knew my father and trusted him. If Dale said he was getting money from Big Willie that would have been good enough for some people to give him all kinds of credit.”

  I couldn’t ever get any kind of credit without a whole lot of info and documentation, which I usually couldn’t produce. I was finding it hard to believe that someone would just give that much credit based on a supposed inheritance.

  “Can you believe Jimmy?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I trust him. He worked for my father for a long time.” He took another sip of coffee. “He told me something about Jacob too that was kind of suspicious.”

  “Your brother, Jacob?”

  “Yep.” He nodded.

  “I remember you said he was your real brother, right?”

  “Yeah.” He added another packet of sugar to the half drank cup. “And I don’t want to believe that he killed my father.”

  “But what Jimmy told you makes you think he did?”

  “It makes me wonder. Money and greed can make a man do terrible things.”

  “But still,” I said. “Your brother? That means he killed his own father.”

  “They were known to have their differences.”

  I frowned at him.

  “I don’t want to believe it either, but you’ve got to face it Nixie, somebody at that house killed my father. I know I didn’t do it.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Did you do it?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, my eyes big.”

  “Okay,” then that don’t leave too many other people.

  “Maybe someone came up through the back of the property.”

  “It’s a possibility,” Liam said and took a sip of his coffee. “But not likely. Where did they go after they shot him? You saw our land – it’s flat.”

  “There’s a little wooded area back there.”

  He frowned at me. “Oh,” he said and looked as if the realization hit him. “Our property backs into Grant’s. It’s not public land. All of it’s private.”

  “So you’re saying no stranger would have come up?”

  “No. We would have seen him running off, or Grant would have seen him coming from his property. Grant showed up not too long after. He would have said it. I know that.”

  Yeah right, was what I was thinking.

  “The only possibility,” Liam was still talking, “is that it was one of us and we just blended in with the crowd at the scene. None of us would have had to hide. We belonged there.”

  “The police are looking for clues, right?”

  “They are.” Then he cocked his head and looked at me. “But I thought you said you wanted to figure this out. We could look for clues. Didn’t you say that?”

  I nodded. I stared down at empty dessert plate.

  “I mean I can find out stuff that the police can’t,” Liam said. “That’s my family and our family business. I need to know.”

  “Remember when I asked you those questions about Courtney Lynn and Dale?”

  “About if they were happy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah I remember. I said yes, they’re happy and I think so even more now, you know, with the new cars.” He dipped a French fry in his ketchup and pushed it into his mouth.

  “Right,” I answered. “So I asked because I’m a little suspicious of her.”

  “Courtney Lynne?”

  “Yes. Courtney Lynne,” I said and bucked my eyes. “Isn’t that who we’re talking about?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t get it. Why are you suspicious of her?”

  “Well, now that you’ve told me about the car, it makes even more sense.”

  “How? What?”

  “I was thinking maybe he bought her the car to make her love him again, you know to keep her with him, or at least to make her be more faithful.”

  “Why do say that?” Liam pushed his coffee cup back from him. Then he pulled the paper off the straw the waiter had left for him and stuck it in his glass of water.

  I paused before I spoke. “Two things,” I said. “One,” I tugged on my index finger, “she disappeared after we went back up to the house to talk to that detective.”

  He stopped sucking up the water, to say, “No she didn’t,” then went right back to drinking it

  “Yes. She did,” I said. I looked into his staring eyes, looking up at me while sipping from his straw. “She went with Dale to talk to Cynthia, but Dale got back long before she did and then he asked her where she’d been.”

  “How do you know that?” He sat up straight and looked at me.

  “I was there,” I said. I almost wanted to say, “Duh,” but knew that would have been insensitive.

  “And what’s the other thing?” Liam asked and took another drink of his water.

  “The other thing is I think that
Courtney Lynne might be having an affair with Grant Granville.”

  The water spewed from his nostrils and mouth at the same time. He grabbed a napkin and covered his mouth.

  “Why in the world would you say that?” he asked after he gained his composure.

  “She was at his house when we went to pick up your keys, or had just left.”

  He looked at me out the side of his eye. “How could you know that?”

  “Because she had been there smoking a cigarette and drinking wine. Which he washed as soon as we were in the same room.”

  “Again. How do you know that?”

  “I saw him wash them.”

  ‘No, not that,” he said. “About the lipstick.”

  “I remembered the color of lipstick she wears.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  I shook my head. “No. I’m not kidding. I think I even know the brand.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “So you think that Courtney Lynne killed Big Willie.” He shook his head. “She helped Dale?” He narrowed his eyes.

  “No.” I lowered my head and lifted my eyes to look at him. “I think she did it with Grant Granville.”

  “What?” He swiped his hand through his hair. “Now that’s just crazy. Grant would never hurt my father.”

  “Grant was the last person to see your father before he was killed.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “But I can’t see it.”

  “Well, when Big Willie was showing me the houses, Grant came up from out of the back woods. I couldn’t say whether he had a gun or not. But he could have escaped right back over to his property”

  He got quiet on me again. I played with my fork and waited for him to work out whatever it was that was going through his mind.

  “So what did happen?” he finally said.

  “You mean when Grant talked to your father?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well he didn’t shoot him, at least not in front of me.”

  He sat back on the bench and blew out a breath. “Could you be any more blunt?”

  I sucked my tongue. “Sorry.” I said. “I didn’t mean to sound crass.”