by Joan Hess
“Tell ya what, Arly—you look like you need to hunker in the bunker for a spell. Go over to the barroom and have yourself a cup of coffee. We’ll use that as a command post for the time bein’, so you might want to get back to the dispatcher and give her the telephone number. I’ll send somebody else to fetch the Hollywood folks. We’ll just tell them there’s been a little accident.”
“A little accident, Harve?”
“Then again, I could send a deputy up there with the siren blaring and the lights flashing. He could jump out of the car, flip on the bullhorn, and broadcast to everybody east of Cotter’s Ridge that a woman was brutally murdered in #5 of the Flamingo Motel. He could tell them how she was all cut up and that her husband mysteriously disappeared before the police showed up. No, let’s make that before Chief of Police Arly Hanks showed up. Then he can invite everybody down to look for themselves, and we make a bundle selling tickets at the door.”
“You’ve got undeniable talent, Harve. I’ll see if I can arrange for you to appear at the Stump County Improv.”
He gave me a sober look. “It’s gonna be a gawdawful mess, no matter how much we try to clamp a lid on it.”
“It’s already a gawdawful mess,” I said as I headed for Ruby Bee’s.
“This is outrageous,” Mrs. Jim Bob said to Perkins’s eldest, who was running the vacuum cleaner around the living-room carpet and couldn’t hear a word over the roar. “Jim Bob was quite sure they intended to utilize the house this very morning, despite the fact Carlotta told me that they wouldn’t be here until tomorrow, or even the next day. Carlotta’s the assistant director, for your information, and she seemed very efficient—in a brusque fashion. I did my charitable best not to be offended that the real director didn’t call on me, but she said he was in his room doing revisions on the script. She said he works in creative spurts and was real sorry he couldn’t come by.”
Perkins’s eldest zeroed in on a ball of lint behind the divan.
Mrs. Jim Bob looked at her watch for not the first time in the last five minutes. The house was reasonably cool, but she was beginning to feel a bit damp, dressed as she was in her blue satin dress, modest slip, girdle, and stockings (pantyhose being the work of the Devil). She took off her white gloves and placed them on the coffee table, where she could get to them real quick when the movie crew arrived.
“What’s more irritating,” she continued over the noise of the vacuum cleaning, “is that every last soul in town is out gallivanting around. Lottie didn’t say one word to me about having errands, but it’s possible she has an appointment with some doctor and didn’t want to mention it.”
She graciously lifted her feet as Perkins’s eldest worked her way around the front of the divan. “I must say I’m surprised Brother Verber is not in the rectory. He usually devotes his mornings to his sermons, which I think is a very Christian thing to do, don’t you? That way he’s also available should any sinners feel the need for a counseling session, or even for a dose of prayer for the wickedness of their ways. I must say, some folks in this town are courting eternal damnation, including some in this room who miss church on a regular basis.”
She settled her feet back down and frowned at Perkins’s eldest’s backside. “But he doesn’t answer the telephone, which is vexing. Where do you suppose he’s at? Never mind, I think I’ll have a cup of tea.” She headed for the kitchen, the gloves in her hand just in case.
Perkins’s eldest finished, unplugged the vacuum cleaner, and carried it toward the hall closet, wondering (but only vaguely) what all Mrs. Jim Bob had been shouting about.
Darla Jean McIlhaney took the sheet off the line and folded it carefully, despite the fact that she was thinking hard about the previous evening—which had stretched well past midnight. If her parents had caught her sneaking up the stairs, she’d have been grounded until her hair turned gray and her teeth fell out.
But her pa had been snoring like a brush hog, and her ma hadn’t popped out into the hall, carrying the alarm clock and acting like Darla Jean was a naughty little kid. Thank God.
She knew Heather was pissed at her, but she didn’t give a rat’s ass ’cause she had more important things to worry about. Like what had happened between her and Frederick Marland. And if there was any way anybody could find out, as long as the two of them didn’t tell.
Short of someone noticing her ma’s car at the motel, she felt pretty sure she was safe. Maybe. She dropped the sheet in the basket and sat down in the grass to sniffle and sigh.
I called the dispatcher, and then took coffee to Carlotta and Anderson, both of whom were too stunned to do anything except stare at the scarred Formica.
“The sheriff sent a deputy to bring back the others,” I said.
“This is going to turn into a media circus,” Carlotta said with a grimace. “Once it gets out that the formerly renowned Miss Kitty Kaye has been murdered on location by a knife-wielding maniac, we’ll have a parking lot full of reporters. Those tabloid leeches love this kind of thing; they’ll suck everyone in town dry.”
Anderson’s hand shook as he took a sip of coffee. “And what a wonderful time they’ll have once it’s known I was in the next room. I don’t think I can handle it, Carlotta. If I knew where Buddy was, I’d do my damndest to join him.” His voice was no longer melodious; it was flat. His features seemed less sculpted, and his perfect hair was mussed, most likely because he was running his fingers through it every other word.
“There won’t be any way to finish the movie,” Carlotta said in an equally flat voice. “We might as well donate the money to the town to erect a statue of Hal. And we’re not talking a couple of thou—”
“Damn it! What about me?”
I frowned at him. “What about you?”
The two looked at each other. I couldn’t tap into this unspoken conversation, but I was picking up on mutual wariness and a great deal of calculation. “Well?” I said irritably.
“Go ahead and tell her,” Carlotta said. “Odds are we’ll make the nightly news, and they won’t mind digging through the old files to see what they can find about every one of us. I’m going to get a beer before all hell breaks loose.”
Anderson took his sweet time selecting his words, but eventually he looked up and said, “It happened a year ago. I was on location doing a movie, a Glittertown epic that sank more quickly than the Andrea Doria. After the wrap, I drove home with a bottle of champagne. My wife’s body was in the bathroom. She’d been slashed to ribbons, and there were profanities on the wall—written in her blood.”
For the second time in less than an hour, I felt as though I’d been clipped by a chicken truck. “I didn’t see anything about it in the newspapers,” I managed to say. “I’m sorry, Anderson.”
“The police decided to keep the gorier details from the media. They were concerned that it might give our resident loonies ideas. Southern California has a lot of them, some of whom are always on the lookout for inspiration. One of the tabloids picked it up, but the police insisted it was a simple burglary gone awry. A Charlie Manson-style murder is newsworthy; a housewife who interrupts a burglar is fairly standard stuff in L.A. It was buried in the back of the newspaper, alongside the usual quota of gang shootings and domestic fatalities.”
“Did they ever arrest anyone?”
“They pulled in a few of their favorite psychotics, but they never found the guy. After a couple of weeks, they told me they doubted they’d find him unless he killed again.”
“There was only one person?”
“That’s what they thought. He did a very thorough job all by himself.”
“And you found the body? That must have been—”
“It certainly was,” he said with a thin attempt at a smile. “Pamela and I had been married for a long time. Things weren’t always blissful, but we were working on it.”
I was searching for something to say when the door opened and Hal Desmond strode into the room. “Yo, Carlotta, make a note. We’re going to r
ewrite twenty-four, and then use this fat guy as comic relief later in the woods scene. You are going to expire when you see the footage. It’s like we’ve added the clown in that Shakespearean play with all the faggots. Now, what’s this shit about an accident? Somebody break a fingernail?”
All sorts of other people came in, sparing Carlotta from an answer, although I did see her obediently make a note on her clipboard. Plover barked at Hal to sit down and shut up, and when he had everybody settled in adjoining booths, gave them a terse explanation of what we’d found in #5.
Gwenneth shrieked and collapsed against Frederick, who put his arm around her and muttered a few curse words. Hal glared at Carlotta as if she were responsible for any delays that might occur. The only one of the company who seemed unperturbed was Fuzzy, who took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt, then settled them back into place and waited with an unfocused expression.
Hal was the first to recover. “Jesus, I hate this! This is friggin’ terrible. Poor Kitty and I have been close, close friends for years. God knows I loved that woman, I really did. I was the one who brought her out of retirement and put her back on the screen where she belonged. Where’s Buddy? How’s he taking it?”
“We don’t know where he is,” Plover said. “We’re hoping one of you might have a suggestion. As far as we know, he’s on foot. We would like very much to locate him so we can inform him about his wife.”
“You don’t think he had anything to do with it?” Carlotta said. “They were devoted. She refused to do any films that didn’t have a part for Buddy.”
“Yeah, they really were a great couple,” Gwenneth added, having regained consciousness nicely. “Just yesterday Kitty and I were sunbathing out there, and she was—”
“Right,” Hal interrupted. “Look, officer, we’re all really shook up about this. She and all the members of our team are like family, if you know what I mean. As the father figure, I’ve encouraged them to bring their problems to me, and lemme tell you—nothing was ever too large or too small for Hal Desmond to take care of, from parking tickets to DWI’s.” He wiped his eyes and gave us a mournful look. “Kitty was one classy dame, maybe the classiest I’ve ever met. I know she’d want us to continue shooting Wild Cherry Wine as a tribute to her, so if we’re finished here, Carlotta and I have some heavy-duty revisions to do on the script.”
Plover’s jaw dropped, and behind him the other officers gaped as if Hal had sprouted horns. Having been exposed to the man, I wasn’t nearly as shocked. Appalled might be a more apt description.
“I don’t think we’re finished, Hal,” Carlotta murmured.
Hal shrugged, his palms turned up as if to check for rain. “Hey, no problem. We do need to get a handle on what’s likely to be a media madhouse. There’s no way we can make the film if we’ve got reporters crawling on us like—like—I don’t know, fleas or something. We chose this town because we didn’t want a lot of publicity during the shooting. Glittertown prides itself on being on the road home before anyone notices we’ve even arrived.”
“We noticed,” Plover said weakly. I could see he was struggling to be a stainless steel cop, but was not succeeding in the face of Hal’s outlandish behavior.
Taking pity on him, I stood up and said, “Harve, why don’t you send out whatever patrol cars you’ve got to search for Meredith? Carlotta may have photographs of him. Sergeant Plover and I will take the initial statements, and I’ll report to you when we’re done.”
Harve recoiled as if I’d pulled my .38 on him. “To me? Hell, Arly, I ain’t got the time nor the expertise to deal with this. I had a Grab ’n’ Go robbery about an hour ago, the clerk and two customers shot. Last night we had a nasty domestic spat that landed the poor woman in the hospital, a stabbing out behind a bar, and a report of Nazis in some widow’s attic. You and Plover can have this one all for yourselves.” He avoided looking at me as he fired up a cigar butt. “But I’m gonna do everything I can to help. I’ll send everybody I can out to look for the missing person, and maybe I can ease the burden by putting a man on the arson case—for a day or two.”
“Arson?” Gwenneth squealed. “If we’re not stabbed in the bathroom, are we going to be burned to death in our beds?”
Frederick patted her arm. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and you certainly smoke in bed.”
“Didn’t know you smoked,” Fuzzy said, then hiccuped and grinned at me like a drunken leprechaun.
Carlotta offered to fetch a photograph of our missing person. Anderson was drawing circles on the tabletop with his finger, and Gwenneth was hissing at her leading man.
I wanted to apply my foot to Harve’s fanny, but I doubted it would do anything more than bruise my toes. “All right,” I growled, “a man on the arson case for three days. More if I need him.”
“You bet,” he said blandly. He shooed his men out the door and kept on going.
Plover was still on the dance floor, studying the Hollywood people as if they were members of a new and potentially dangerous species. I went over to him and said, “Shall we interview them as a group, or drag them off to the dungeon one at a time?”
“Beats me. These people are unreal, and nothing in my training’s going to help. Two of my men are dusting for prints, the photographer’s taking shots of the body—and that guy wants to know if we’re finished so he can revise his script! Does this sort of thing happen on a regular basis when he makes a movie? Seems like the actors might be reluctant to work for him—”
“Calm down,” I said. “Is the coroner here?”
“Yeah. He took a preliminary look at the body and, with some prodding, said it’s likely she’s been dead for as long as twelve hours.”
“She and Meredith were here until ten o’clock, and then left for their room. So we’re talking between then and midnight, more or less. Station a man in the motel parking lot, and we can take statements in my office.” When he didn’t answer, I glanced up at him and realized he was staring over my shoulder, an unfathomable expression on his face. “What’s wrong? Do you have an idea about this mess?”
“No,” he said slowly, “I was just trying to sort out these characters. Let’s start with the girl in the shorts, shall we?”
He wasn’t referring to Carlotta.
“Where do you get off saying I can’t go inside my own establishment?” Ruby Bee demanded, her cheeks the color of the exterior walls and getting rosier by the word. “I own the building and I pay taxes every year like a law-abidin’ citizen.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” the trooper said. Because of the mirrored sunglasses, she couldn’t judge his eyes, but he didn’t sound like he was aiming to burst into tears anytime soon.
“Then you can just tell me what all’s going on at the motel. I own that, too, and I have a right to know why all those police cars are back there. And if that’s not an ambulance, then I’m not standing here in the parking lot being denied admission to my own establishment!”
“The area stays blocked off until I’m told otherwise,” the trooper countered. “I’m under orders not to divulge anything else, ma’am.”
Despite his disguise, Ruby Bee pegged him. “You come by on Fridays at noon, don’t you? You and that man with the unfortunate warts on his hands, both of you real fond of having a couple of beers and the blue-plate special?”
“Yes, ma’am. Don’t tell my wife, but you make the best fried chicken in the whole damn county.”
“You planning to come next Friday?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“For chicken, scalloped potatoes, butterball beans, okra, biscuits and gravy, and a wedge of peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream?”
He nodded, looking downright miserable for someone in such a fine uniform and mirrored sunglasses.
“Well, then,” Ruby Bee said, bearing down on him, “I think you’d better tell me what’s going on inside my establishment and out back in the motel. Otherwise, come Friday you can have yourself a burrito in a cellophane wrapper at t
he supermarket.”
Kevin was sorely disappointed when all the Hollywood folks packed up and left, as if they’d finished the movie without allowing his betrothed to be a star. From the grim look on her face and the rumbling deep in her throat, he could tell she wasn’t entertaining happy thoughts, herself.
They were sitting on her porch, watching everybody straggle down the road with their picnic baskets and coolers, most of them subdued, since no one had a clue why the deputy had sent the Hollywood folks away. Lottie Estes had gone so far as to knock on Raz’s door to ask him, but he didn’t answer. As she and Eula walked toward her car, they’d agreed that thus far watching a movie bein’ made was on the boring side. Well, the girl had been dressed like Daisy Mae, and the director had used a lot of un-Christian-like language, but for the most part, they’d wasted half the morning staring at the front of Raz’s shack.
Heather and Traci were disappointed, too. They’d been hoping there would be a crowd scene requiring teenage girls, which is why they’d both gotten up early to spend more than an hour spraying and moussing their hair. The light breeze stirred nary a hair on either head; a hailstorm would have met with an equal lack of success.
“You wanna see if Darla Jean wants to go to the Dee-Lishus?” asked Traci.
“She could have taken down all the laundry in the county by now,” Heather said. “Now, let’s not jump on her and demand to know what happened between her and that hunk. We’ll be real casual about it. Don’t even mention Frederick Marland’s name—okay?”
Traci solemnly vowed not to say a word.
Millicent McIlhaney was having to drag her husband back to the car, in that he was still overwhelmed by being in the presence of Hollywood folks. As they caught up with the girls, she tapped Heather on the shoulder. “Did you and Darla Jean enjoy the picture show last night?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Heather said promptly.
“What time did y’all get back from Farberville?”
Heather glanced at Traci, who was being no help whatsoever. “I dunno. We went for ice cream and ended up sitting there for the longest time, talking about the upcoming junior class picnic.”
