Delta Blues

by Carolyn Haines

  Everyone was relieved to see Louise safe, but she was the only beautiful woman found in the swamps around Glitter Spring that evening. We all lay awake that night, wondering what had become of the biggest movie star for miles around.

  At sunrise, Carlotta was still missing. The sheriff and his deputies were puttering around as if they knew what they were doing. John, on the other hand, was stumped.

  “Do I keep filming? Or do I shut the movie down and send people home?” he asked me.

  He’d asked those questions all night long, seeking guidance from the bigwigs in Hollywood. He got helpful answers like, “No!!! Don’t keep filming! You can’t keep spending money on a film that’s lost its star,” and, “Of course you gotta keep filming!! Do you know how much it’s costing us to keep that crew in Florida??”

  John was an artist, even on a low budget. He’d had all night to develop a plan. “I’ve gotta presume Carlotta’s out in the swamp pouting and she’ll be back any minute, ready for her close-up. But if I’m wrong, I think I can save the movie. We shot the last of her close-ups yesterday. Debbie was going to do most of the remaining scenes, anyway. I might have to finesse a few shots … you know … put a hat on Debbie or shoot her from behind, but it should work.”

  “Debbie’s gonna want a raise,” I said, because I was her boyfriend and I felt like I should look out for her.

  “She’s already asked for it. Got it, too,” said John. It seemed that Debbie didn’t need her boyfriend all that much. Fortunately, I’ve always liked self-sufficient women.

  At John’s instruction, we boarded the boat that took us out to the calm lagoon where much of the movie had already been filmed. The empty monster suit lay on the deck where the crew always left it. This had seemed like a strange way to treat an expensive prop until I stopped to think: Who, in the middle of the Florida swamp, was going to take it? And what could possibly hurt the thing? It was made of rubber.

  We were silent and businesslike. We could probably have made the movie even more cheaply if we’d always been so focused on the movie. It felt far better to work than to wonder what happened to Carlotta.

  John planned to film some scenes with Louise in the monster suit, hauling a kicking-and-screaming Debbie deep into the lagoon. It was a good plan, until Louise started to get dressed. She was carefully unzipping the monster suit, ready to crawl in and be an actress, when she suddenly went off-script.

  Flinging her arms over her face and screaming, it took Louise three long-legged strides to run the length of the boat and throw herself into the lagoon. There may have been alligators in that still water, but Louise was always more comfortable with nature’s monsters than she was with the human kind.

  The rest of us hovered around the half-open monster suit. We all knew what was in there, but I was the wardrobe guy. This put me in charge of the suit, so I was the one who had to finish unzipping the thing.

  The fully open zipper exposed Carlotta’s bare back. A couple of bruises marred her creamy white flesh, but they were nothing compared to the wound on her head. Her glorious blonde curls, matted with blood and muddy sand, spilled out of the opening.

  The cameraman had been a seasoned newspaper photographer long before he got into pictures. Without even pausing to think, he swung the movie camera around and pointed it at Carlotta’s body and the crowd hovering over it.

  Nobody said anything. Since I was closest to the corpse, I felt some responsibility to respond to the ugliness at my feet. I had nothing to say except, “Somebody find the sheriff.”

  John, being a director, knew exactly what to say and do. He made eye contact with the cameraman and said simply, “Cut and wrap.”

  Later in my career, I worked on the set of The Andy Griffith Show. If only Andy had been the sheriff who investigated Carlotta’s murder …

  We could have used his homestyle, Southern-bred wisdom. Instead, we got a tobacco-chewing, Yankee-hating heap of ignorance named Sheriff Meany. (Really. That was his name.) He paced importantly across the hotel lobby, exuding all the warmth and charm of Ol’ Jack the stuffed alligator. We suspects loitered, waiting to be questioned. I saw in seconds that Sheriff Meany would not be solving Carlotta’s murder and that he might arrest someone … anyone … to get this job over and done with.

  Since I had ambitions of someday scripting a courtroom drama, I felt compelled to solve this crime myself. I also object strenuously to the prosecution of innocent people, particularly when I’m one of the innocents under scrutiny. So I took a clear-eyed look at the facts.

  Carlotta’s murderer was almost certainly a part of the movie crew or the hotel staff. Someone would have heard a car or boat motor if an outsider had slipped in. It was possible that someone had come in on foot or rowed upstream for more than a mile against the significant current of the Glitter River, but my money said the killer had been in the hotel that evening.

  That presumption still left several dozen possibilities, but few of those had anything to gain from Carlotta’s death. Quite a few had something to lose. I decided that my investigation would revolve around people who were personally affected by Carlotta. They could be affected for good or ill, but my deciding question was this: Who cared about what happened to Carlotta? Because people rarely die at the hands of people who just don’t care.

  Her manager Bradley cared. Whether he cared about Carlotta herself was open to question. Perhaps he was distraught that his primary source of income was now dead and stuffed into a rubber monster suit. The witless sheriff had finally called a doctor to sedate the weeping man, who now lay sprawled on a couch, one arm flung across his face.

  I didn’t like to admit it, but my girl Debbie cared. She’d bitterly resented Carlotta’s conceited airs. I couldn’t tell you how many times she’d told me, “I can do everything she does and more. I could carry this picture. And I’m a professional. You wouldn’t catch me whining about the heat or forgetting my lines. I just need a chance to show John what I can do.”

  Well, now Debbie had her chance. Fortunately, she was too dainty to stuff a hundred-and-twenty pounds of dead weight into a monster suit … but Louise wasn’t. And Louise was huddled in a chair with her head under a blanket, trying to hide the fact that she hadn’t stopped weeping since she was found alone in the swamp.

  That distress was probably going to send Louise to jail by lunchtime, because Sheriff Meany seemed to see her tears as proof of guilt. And Louise’s refusal to say why she’d been alone in a deer stand at midnight wasn’t helping.

  I myself had my eye on Vince, Carlotta’s so-called boyfriend. Displaying the reptilian heart of your average Hollywood citizen, he’d spent the morning on the phone, checking to see whether the movie was insured for the murder of its star. Once his insurance coverage was confirmed, he looked relaxed and almost happy.

  John, to his credit, had shed his own reptilian armor the instant Carlotta’s body was found. While there was a reasonable chance she was alive, he’d continued his cold-blooded efforts to get his movie made and to get it made within budget. Once she was unquestionably dead, he’d reverted to being a human being. There had been a tenderness in his tolerance for Carlotta’s silliness that made me believe he cared for her. I was also convinced by the pain in his eyes. Don’t forget that I made my living designing faces. I read them better than most people.

  John glanced in my direction and I shifted my eyes away. Bradley fell into my field of vision, which worked well for me. Unconscious on the couch, he was hardly likely to yell at me for staring at him.

  Bradley shifted in his sleep and his arm fell away from his face. The makeup artist in me was so startled that I quit sneaking glances and frankly stared. The whole right side of his face was pink and puffy. Yeah, he’d had his arm resting on his face for awhile, but not that long. And his arm would not have made the five separate welts extending from his cheek to his hairline.

  I spend a lot of my days repairing famous faces that have gotten themselves slapped. I recognized the pattern on Vi
nce’s face. Trust me.

  Men don’t ordinarily go around slapping other men, and I knew only one woman for miles around capable of inflicting that kind of damage with one strike. I was pretty sure I knew who had made Louise cry. The question was why.

  I was relieved to see that Louise had quit weeping. Tears aren’t any more tragic on a pretty face than on a homely one, but I’m a man, after all. I would have wrestled a gator for Louise’s entertainment, just to keep the tears off that lovely face.

  Sheriff Meany was not pleased to see me escort his prime suspect out of the lobby, but he let us leave. The man had deputies guarding the exits, the parking lot, and the dock. Louise and I weren’t going anywhere.

  Ignoring 1940s propriety, I hustled Louise into her room and closed the door.

  I patted her on the hand, then got straight to the point. “I know who you were with last night, and I don’t think you killed Carlotta. I just have one question: Why did you slap Bradley silly?”

  She looked at the palm of her hand as if it still stung. “Why do women usually slap men?”

  “Because they get fresh?”

  She laughed. “Oh, Bradley’s been trying to get fresh for weeks. I kinda like it, or I never would’ve agreed to meet him last night. No, I slapped him because of the lipstick on his collar. Some woman wiped her face on Bradley so well that I could see the smear in the dark, with just my flashlight.”

  Lipstick? I was a makeup artist. Now the woman was talking my language.

  “What color lipstick? I guess it wasn’t your color, or you wouldn’t have slapped him.”

  “Brownish-red,” she said in a mildly revolted tone of voice. I understood her revulsion. That color would have been ghastly against her blonde hair and golden complexion … which meant that it didn’t belong to Louise or Carlotta, either. If I’d smeared that color on the lips of any of the three blonde sirens making this movie, John would have confiscated my makeup bag and sent me back to Hollywood.

  Was Bradley’s lover on the hotel staff? Hardly. The cook was on the wrong side of seventy. I’d wager that the austere housekeeper’s pale skin had never made the acquaintance of any cosmetic beyond bar soap. And both waitresses were dark-skinned brunettes who favored cherry-red lips, because cheap, loud makeup attracts big-tipping men. Very few women could get away with lipstick the color of dried blood.

  Dried blood …

  What had Louise really seen on Bradley’s collar?

  Sheriff Meany didn’t like Bradley’s looks, so it wasn’t hard to convince him to ask the publicist to produce his shirt. Bradley had progressed quickly from his first response, “I can’t find it,” to his final response, “You’ll have to talk to my lawyer about that.”

  Sheriff Meany wasn’t completely stupid. He knew that a man who was unable to find a just-worn shirt in a small hotel room was a man who was hiding something. Looking at me with an expression approaching respect, he asked, “You got any more bright ideas?”

  “Have you found the murder weapon?”

  “From the looks of the wound and the mud around it, I’m thinking the killer used a rock. Unless he was an idiot, he killed her with it, then dropped it in the river. The whole river bed’s limestone. The murder weapon won’t look any different from any other rock, not after the river’s washed the blood off.”

  “Could you look for the spot where the killer got the rock?”

  The sheriff opened his mouth to call me an idiot, then closed it. Because if you thought about it, there were only a few places that made any sense at all. There were some good-sized rocks used for landscaping around the hotel grounds, and there were plenty of rocks along the riverside. That was about it. Why would anybody walk into the vermin-infested swamp and away from the river and its perfectly good rocks?

  It didn’t take long for Meany’s deputies to find a damp hole in the riverbank. The muddy sand at the bottom was the same pale color as the mud on poor Carlotta’s head. I was feeling very proud of my deductive prowess, until Meany mentioned another clue that I quite frankly never saw coming.

  Love is indeed blind, because it never occurred to me that the footprint in the muddy sand next to that damp hole would be dainty and feminine. It just never crossed my mind that this print would perfectly match my sweet Debbie’s shapely foot.

  When you spoon-fed Sheriff Meany a seamless sequence of clues, then led him patiently to their correct solution, he could be made to see the truth. Debbie and Bradley had been carrying on the kind of affair often seen in Hollywood. He was losing his hold on the client who served as his gravy train. She was pretty and ambitious as hell. Together, they’d planned to seize Hollywood attention and keep it.

  With Carlotta dead, Vince’s insurers would have made certain the picture got made. By killing Carlotta as soon as her close-ups were filmed, Debbie was set to walk right into the starring role for the remainder of filming. John already liked her work. The odds were good that he’d start to see her as leading lady material, and a star would be born. Or so Debbie and her ambitious new manager hoped.

  Bradley had been sleeping with Carlotta for years. It had been his price for taking her as a client in the first place. During our weeks in Florida, he’d taken Debbie on as a new client … and extracted the same price. The two of them must have been blessed with rare vigor, since their trysts had taken place after he left Carlotta’s bed and she left mine.

  At first, I thought that Bradley had been trying to add Louise to his stable of client/lovers. Taking on a woman as physically daunting as Louise on a night when he’d already visited Carlotta and Debbie would have been … impressive … so I was crediting Bradley with stupendous vigor until I saw the subtlety of what he’d done.

  He’d seduced Louise and taken her into the swamp by boat for their rendezvous. Carlotta was already dead by this time, because her blood on his collar had gotten him slapped. This fight with Louise had made it that much easier to do what he’d always intended … leave her in the deer stand with a burned-out flashlight and no safe way to get back to the hotel. No Florida girl would go wading alone through gator territory in the dark. When she was eventually found, not far from the murder site, she’d be an obvious suspect for Carlotta’s murder. She’d have been presumed to be as murderously jealous of Carlotta as Debbie was, and she was a lot more physically capable of murder.

  And how did the two conspirators actually commit the crime? The sheriff eventually found a faint smear of blood proving that the murder happened on the boat. I presume that Bradley used his stupendously vigorous charms to lure Carlotta into a passionate embrace and that Debbie sneaked up behind her and whammed a muddy rock onto her head. A bit of blood must have gotten onto Bradley’s collar, and probably a whole lot of gore got onto Debbie. We found one of the little teeny bathing suits I bought her, bloodstained and wrapped in Bradley’s shirt, buried under a cypress tree downstream from the hotel.

  When faced with that bundle of clothing, Bradley told us everything, hoping for mercy since he didn’t do the actual killing. Debbie never said a word.

  She didn’t need to speak. I knew the truth when I saw the dailies.

  It was not a good day for shooting a picture. We only got thirty seconds of film … but that half-minute tells a hell of a story. It begins with a blur as the quick-witted cameraman whipped around and caught the wordless horror on Louise’s face as she ran from the monster suit and its hideous contents. Proving that he was an artist with a lens, he pulled back just a bit and focused on our faces as the rest of us took a long dark look into the abyss.

  I can still see the scene he captured. It is etched on my retinas, my eyes, my heart. This moment, which will never shine down at an audience from a silver screen, is the moment when our low-budget monster flick reached the level of true art.

  John’s face is a study in heartbreak.

  Vince stares down at the bloody nothingness that had been his lover. He communicates no feeling. He just looks like he wants to be sick.

  Debbie
and Bradley aren’t looking at Carlotta at all, because they’ve already seen the monstrosity hiding in that pitiful rubber suit. They’re looking into each other’s faces. I’ve looked at that still shot a million times, and I still can’t tell whether their eyes are communicating love or fear or loathing. I’ve come to think that murderers aren’t capable of love or fear, not really. Every emotion for them is some form of loathing.

  And where did my gaze turn in that stomach-churning instant? My eyes aren’t focused on Carlotta or her killers. They’re not focused on anything in range of the camera. I’m looking past the cameraman, down the boat’s long deck where Louise just fled from the sight of death. I’m looking for the only woman I have ever loved.

  I did get my dream career as a screenwriter, though I can’t say it was completely on my own merits. It never hurts to be the spouse of a bankable star. Though Louise never displaced Esther Williams as queen of the movie mermaids, she was always bankable. And she was always lovable. When she turned those wide blue eyes on the camera, her sweet nature showed through, and movie audiences loved her almost as much as I did.

  Her acting coaches drummed the rural Florida accent out of her, but she can still turn it back on for me. She knows how much I like to hear her say, “Ah love yew, darlin’.”

  And I answer her, in my flat Tinseltown tones, saying, “I love you too, darling. And I always have … ever since I first saw you wearing that stupid rubber monster suit.”

  Read more of Florida Heatwave

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