by Tamar Myers
“It sounds like you have enough good times without the Heavenly Hustlers.”
“Nah, it isn’t the same. These people are my friends. We have stuff to talk about. You don’t get that with a young piece of tail.”
“You’re disgusting, you know that?” I caught my breath as a frightening thought popped into mind. “You don’t hit on my mother, do you?”
He had the temerity to laugh. “I don’t bother with old gray mares—not when there’s plenty of fillies around.”
I turned heel and stamped out of the room. You can bet I slammed the door as hard as I could.
I found the Rob-Bobs examining a car in which a thousand pounds of heroin had been found by state troopers a year earlier. The vehicle had never been owned by a celebrity, at least not in the conventional sense, but it had made national news. The drugs, you see, had somehow been molded into the likenesses of people, and then dressed in clothes. A concerned citizen called the police when, at a roadside rest area, she noticed a car in which three of the passengers were staring straight ahead, as if in a trance.
“So how did it go?” my friends asked in unison.
“The man’s a creep. Turns out he was sleeping with Golda Feinstein when she was on the rebound.”
The Rob-Bobs shuddered. It was hard to say what they thought more repulsive, the thought of sleeping with Golda, or Hugh Riffle.
“Do you think she could have been blackmailing him?” Rob asked.
“I hadn’t thought of that! But you know, you could be right. Or she could have been doing it to get back at Chiz—for dumping her. That’s it. I’ve got to talk to Chiz Banncock next.”
“But you already spoke with him, Abby. This morning.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. We saw you go into his office.”
“But you couldn’t have! You stayed behind in the car, listening to classical music, because you didn’t want to get involved.”
“We only pretended we didn’t want to get involved,” Bob said in his comforting bass. “This may come as a surprise, Abby, but we care about you. We can’t sit by and watch you do something—uh—”
“Stupid?”
“Your word, Abby, not mine.”
“Thanks a lot! And for your information, guys, Chisholm Banncock IX was not in his office this morning.”
“But you came with C.J.’s pedigree.”
“His secretary was a pushover. She had a vain streak a mile long. So, can we swing by the Banncock homestead? I figure we have just enough time before Greg gets home from shrimping.”
“You know where Chiz lives?”
“No, but I’ll call C.J. She’s bound to know.”
“I know where he lives,” Rob said quietly.
That got Bob’s attention. Mine too.
“How do you know?” I demanded.
“Because I delivered an exquisite, and very expensive, pair of early Lalique vases to him myself. Bob, you remember me mentioning a run out there, don’t you?”
Bob grunted, and a bullfrog in a drainage ditch nearby answered.
“Well,” I said, in an upbeat tone, “why don’t we hustle our bustles back downtown so I can give the lad the third degree?”
Rob flushed. “He doesn’t live downtown, Abby.”
“Of course he does. He comes from an old Charleston family, doesn’t he?”
Rob nodded, “Older than God, but they’re not downtown—they’re even better.”
“Plantation people?”
“A rice plantation up near Awendaw, north of Mount Pleasant.
“What fun. I’ve always wanted to visit a rice plantation.”
“Of course, it isn’t a plantation now—hasn’t been since the slaves were freed. In fact—and this I got straight from the horse’s mouth—he plans to develop most of it into some kind of super golf-tennis community with deep water access. He’s marketing it to folks from New Jersey. In fact, I think you have to be from New Jersey to buy a lot. But of course he’s saved the nicest parcel for himself”
“What? Why, that hypocrite! He won’t sell a downtown property to a native Southerner without a sterling pedigree, but he’s chopping up the plantation and selling it to Yankees?”
“Abby, the lots with deep water access are going for more than a million dollars. You should see all the stretch limos driving up and down that dirt road.”
I shook my head. “We can’t possibly be talking about the same person. The Chisholm Banncock I know looks like a Greek god. He gets his nickname Chiz from his chiseled cheeks, not Chisholm. And did I mention he has dimples deep enough to hide olives in?”
“That’s him—a real stocking stuffer, eh?”
“He could stuff my socks any day—” I slapped my own mouth. I was a happily married woman.
“So when were you going to tell me this?” Bob bellowed. The bullfrog in the drainage ditch was not to be outdone.
“Tell you what, dear?”
“Not you, Abby. Rob. When was he going to tell me about this Greek god named Chiz?”
I could see Rob’s face muscles tense. “Robert,” he said sharply, “get a grip on it, will you? The man is as straight as Highway 17. You don’t think Abby would be drooling like a mastiff, would you, if he weren’t?”
“Hey!” I cried. “I resent that remark.”
“Give me a break, Abby. You’re standing on your tongue.”
“Can I help it if I’m short? Look guys, we better get a move on it. It’s four o’clock already, and rush hour traffic is fierce in Mount Pleasant, what with all the retired New Jerseyites—and New Yorkers too—who still haven’t gotten rush hour out of their blood.”
“Yeah,” Bob said, slipping into a better mood, “it’s funny how they hit the road every day between four-thirty and six, even when they have no place to go.”
“Home to Happy Hour?” Rob suggested.
We left it at that, and vamoosed before the traffic got worse.
The Mark Clark Expressway from North Charleston to Mount Pleasant passes over some spectacular bridges, and would be a pleasant ride were it not for the fumes from the paper plant sitting on the west bank of the Cooper River, and the constant threat of death from the myriad container trucks that rumble along at speeds meant for fighter-jet pilots. Between gasps—due to both the air and our narrow escapes—I contemplated life in the greater Charleston area.
One cannot find a more beautiful or hospitable city, but like an ice sculpture, the fragile beauty that gives Charleston County its charm might soon be its undoing. The bucolic Lowcountry scenery with its salt marshes dotted with hammocks of oak and palmetto, draws perspective residents like jam bread draws flies. The ice sculpture is melting fast. Massive homes rim the marshes and there is heated debate on the wisdom of expanding Charleston’s harbor, the fifth busiest in the nation. Most reasonable people see both sides of the issue, before coming down firmly on one side or the other. A larger harbor means an expanding economy, but a shrinking natural landscape. More people means a greater number of services—important ones like good shopping malls and theaters with stadium seating—but bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic on Highway 17.
By taking Long Point Road we were able to skirt most of the traffic, although going back into Charleston, across the Grace Memorial Bridge, would be another story. One thing for sure, Rob had not been exaggerating about the dirt road, or the line of limos creeping back and forth along its two-mile length. Who knew the Garden State had so many prosperous refugees? But on closer inspection I noticed a good number bore New York and Connecticut plates, and I even spied some South Carolina plates. The last might well have been rentals hired by wealthy Californians fleeing rolling blackouts.
We veered suddenly from the main dirt road on to what was the original, colonial drive. The arching oaks formed a complete tunnel, and their trailing skirts of moss brushed the top of Rob’s SUV. It was an enchanting world, one that recalled a world of carriages filled with fanning ladies and their attentive be
aus—as long as one could block out the fact that this world was built by the forced labor of kidnapped Africans and their descendants. This fact was impossible to ignore, when between the swooping branches I spotted the first in a long line of slave cabins.
Rob informed us that these buildings—crumbling wooden huts, really—were original. So was the main house. If that was the case, it seemed doubtful that the Banncock family had done any repairs to their manor since the end of the Late Unpleasantness.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “How can someone who lives in a ruin buy valuable antiques?”
“You’ll see,” Rob said. The last time I saw a grin that wide was back in fifth grade, when Tommy Hollingsworth hid a lizard in my lunch box.
The lane split when it encountered a circular bed of overgrown boxwood and we followed the left branch to the back of the house. Suddenly Bob and I gasped, depriving the vehicle of its oxygen.
“Ah, so you see it,” Rob said devilishly.
18
To tell you the truth, I wasn’t quit sure what my bug eyes were seeing. My first impression was that the National Enquirer had been right all along. Aliens had indeed landed on earth and established a colony at the rear of Chiz Banncock’s derelict rice plantation.
Reason, however, told me that I had already seen two structures similar to this one on nearby Sullivan’s Island. The rounded “flying saucer” houses on Sullivan’s Island were not inhabited by aliens—as far as I knew—and were given their odd shape to make them resistant to hurricane-force winds. They appeared to be single-family homes and made of concrete. Chiz’s house was more like a flying saucer hotel, and appeared to be metal. It could accommodate the Jetsons, all their friends and relatives, and still have room for a couple of summer rental units. Unlike the houses on Sullivan’s Island, which are a curiosity, Chisholm Banncock the IX’s version was a monstrosity. I tried to blink it away.
“Is it still there?” I asked in desperation.
“I’m afraid so,” Bob moaned. The bullfrog back in North Charleston moaned as well.
“It has ten bedrooms,” Rob said, “and nineteen bathrooms, just like Bill Gates’s house. Tell me, Abby, why the hell would somebody want that many bathrooms?”
“Beats me! That’s at least nineteen toilets to scrub. Possibly a few bidets as well.”
“You can bet this Chiz guy doesn’t clean his own johns,” Bob said. He poked Rob in the back. “How do you know he has ten bedrooms?”
Rob grimaced. “Because he told me—and no, I didn’t see any of them. I just dropped off the vases and left.”
Bob sniffed. “Well, you don’t have to get so huffy.”
We pulled to a stop in front of the behemoth saucer just in time. “Beam me up, Scotty,” I cried, as I stepped out into the muggy late afternoon air.
Rob laughed. He seemed glad to have a reason.
“He has an elevator. Actually two of them.”
“Where’s the doorbell?”
“There.” Rob pointed to a silver tube to the right of a short, flagstone path. A golf ball-size black button protruded from the end of the tube. “You press on that.”
“Yes? What is it?”
I practically sailed out of my sandals. I hadn’t seen the round speaker ball, which was partially embedded in the pine needles that covered the ground. When I’d pushed on the button, it rose from the soil on a tube of its own.
“Chiz—uh—Mr. Banncock, this is Abigail Washburn. We met at my friend Jane Cox’s house the night of Madame Woo-Woo’s séance.”
“The séance?” He seemed as blank as a bevy of bottle blonds.
“I flirted shamelessly with you, remember?”
“Ah yes, the feisty one in the hoop skirt.”
“The young feisty one in the hoop skirt. The other was my mama.”
“What can I do for you, Mrs. Washburn?”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”
“Are you alone?”
Was that a trick question? Surely he was checking me out through a window—or was that a portal? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a periscope rose up in front of my face. For all I knew, he’d already managed to probe me without my knowledge. Maybe even taken a DNA sample.
“I have two friends with me,” I yelled, although I’m sure my excess volume wasn’t necessary. “Two men friends. In fact, one of them you’ve already met—the big and burly Rob Goldburg.”
Rob beamed. Bob glowered.
“What am I, chopped liver?” he growled.
There followed a moment of silence. “Okay,” the voice from the speaker ball said. “Come on up and bring your friends. Use elevator two. It’s on the left.”
“Thanks. We’ll be right there.”
“Not me,” Rob said.
“What?” I cried. “But you have to!”
“I’d rather wander around the grounds, Abby. Bob can go with you.”
Bob mumbled something unintelligible. It was clearly meant to get Rob’s goat.
I stamped my foot. “You will wander around these grounds together, damn it. And if—I mean when—I return, you’ll have this worked out.”
There wasn’t an ice sculpture’s chance in a Charleston summer that they’d have the problem resolved, and I knew it. The problem, as I saw it, was that Bob was insecure—both about his looks and his origins. His best feature is his voice. Physically, he’s on the spindly side, with a disproportionately large head that was beginning to bald. Bob has admitted that, when he was a boy, neighborhood bullies would taunt him with the epithet “Monster Head.”
As far as his origins go—well, there’s nothing to be done about that either. Bob hails from Toledo, Ohio. I once caught him slurring the T word, hoping to make it sound like Tupelo, which is in Mississippi. When he says “daddy” it comes out in two syllables, instead of the proper three. Despite his claim to being a gourmet cook, he omits sugar from his iced tea, but puts it in his cornbread. Enough said.
The men trudged off, properly chastised, and I turned my attention back to the house from Mars.
It was a toss-up. My right eye couldn’t help but look at Chiz’s chiseled face, and since he was wearing a smoking jacket, with no shirt underneath, his chiseled chest as well. My left eye, meanwhile, strained to take in my bizarre surroundings.
The interior walls of the house were made of a substance that looked similar to that used on the outside shell. Much to my surprise the shiny silver backdrop was an effective foil for the traditional furnishings.
“You’re wondering if I get hot, aren’t you?”
I will admit to being startled, that’s all. “I beg your pardon?”
Chiz’s dimples deepened. “I meant the ambient temperature in here. The answer, by the way, is no. The exterior is made from a new kind of highly reflective steel that actually repels ninety-nine percent of the sun’s rays. It’s the winter temperatures I have to worry about, but I have a kick-ass furnace, and I figure what I spend in winter heating, I save on summer cooling. As for the interior walls—well, they’re actually just ordinary wallboard covered with industrial grade aluminum foil.”
I took my right eye off the chiseled chest to better admire the odd choice of wallpaper. In the unlikely event the house caught on fire, Chiz would bake like a nice Idaho potato.
“This really is fascinating,” I said.
“Would you like the full tour?”
I recoiled, as if he’d asked if I’d like the Full Monty. Yes, I know, I’m happily married, but my libido is alive and well, and occasionally requires a little extra effort to keep it in check.
“Some other time, maybe. For now I’ve got a ton of questions I need to ask—uh, if you’re amenable.”
“Ask away.” He smiled and pointed to a wing armchair with floral upholstery. Made in Boston, probably in the seventeen hundreds, there was nothing space age about it.
I took the proffered seat, while he took a matching one. “Mr. Banncock—”
“P
lease, call me Chiz. Folks who share a murder should be on a first-name basis, right?”
“Right. And you call me Abby.” I paused to reflect on what he’d said, which was surprisingly difficult given all the foil. “Uh—just to clarify something, Chiz. We didn’t share a murder.”
He laughed. “I guess that came out wrong. So, Abby, what would you like to know?”
“Well, for starters, did you happen to see anyone in the dining room—alone—before the séance that night?”
He cocked his head to think. “No, can’t say that I did. But there was good food in the kitchen and pretty ladies—so I can’t say that I paid the dining room a whole lot of attention. Not before the séance, at any rate.”
“Okay. Now my second question is a little more personal.”
“Eight inches,” he said deadpan.
“What?”
“Eight inches. That’s all the insulation I need between the steel shell and the interior framework.”
“Oh!” I took a deep breath. “It isn’t about insulation, I’m afraid. It’s about Golda Feinstein—AKA Madame Woo-Woo.”
The chiseled features darkened. It was like the sun setting on Mount Rushmore.
“I don’t discuss my love life with folks I hardly know.”
“But you did have one—with her, I mean?”
He jumped to his feet. “Abby, I’m afraid your interview is over.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way. I just want to help.”
“Who says I need help?”
“Well, if I was able to get ahold of this interesting bit of information, you can bet the police have as well. Hmm, let’s see…wealthy, well-connected boyfriend dumps girlfriend who demands too much. She has something on him, so he does her in.”
“I didn’t kill Golda!”
“Maybe you didn’t, but you have to admit that you being there that night looks mighty strange. You were the only one there, besides C.J., who wasn’t a Heavenly Hooker—I mean, Hustler!”
“What about you?”
“My mama’s a Hooker—I mean, Hustler! I was helping her with the food. Besides, I don’t have a motive.”
