Lethal in Old Lace

by Duffy Brown

  “We’ll fix it,” I blurted before a barrage of “Don’t shop the Prissy Fox because they’re a bunch of grave robbers” tweets and messages flooded the media. “My Auntie KiKi here had a weak moment is all. Hey, we’ve all had weak chocolate moments at one time or another where we just couldn’t help ourselves, haven’t we?”

  “I don’t much like chocolate,” Willie Junior sniffed.

  “Okay, but I bet you like computer games and maybe you’ve gone a little crazy to get a new one that just came out and … and…” I was getting nowhere with this tactic. “What if my auntie and I put the Snickers back in your grandpa’s pocket tonight? Then he’ll have it for tomorrow.” I added an angelic smile.

  A customer came to the counter. “Is everything okay here?” she asked the teen. “You look so sad.”

  “He can’t find a tux for the prom,” I lied with a smile. “And there’s a twenty-percent discount on those boots you’ve got in your hand.” Nothing distracted like a nice discount.

  I made the sale, then turned back to Willie. “So, are we okay here? We make the Snickers drop and all is good?”

  The kid ran the back of his hand across his runny nose. “How do I know you’re not lying to me, huh? Anyone who’s a no-good Snickers stealer is a no-good Snickers liar.”

  I snapped a white straw flower off a purse headed for the donate bin. “We’ll put this flower in that spray of white roses across your grandpa’s casket. When you see it tomorrow you’ll know we’ve been there and the Snickers is safe inside just like you want. Is it a deal?”

  Junior gave me a hard look head to toe. “There’s something else. I know who you are and not just from the funeral. I saw your picture on Facebook with your dog and the cops.” He pointed down at BW napping at the foot of the steps. “You’re that lady who helped get the person who killed that rich dude they found naked in the bathtub a couple weeks ago. I want you to find out who killed Grandpa.”

  “Look, I know you’re hurting,” I soothed in my mommy voice that I usually reserved for BW. “But your grandpa had an asthma attack. He was old.” And he was cranky and obnoxious and if mean-to-the-bone caused death, he would have bought the farm years ago.

  “It wasn’t asthma. His skin was blotchy. I could see it under all that makeup they had caked on him. Grandpa had bad allergies like me. I tried to talk to the cops, but they just said I was overwrought, whatever that is. My mom won’t even listen because she just wants his money, so she’s glad he’s gone.”

  Junior held up his phone, his eyes more steely than sad. “Put the candy back and find who killed Grandpa Willie or I hit ‘Send’ to your favorite social media outlet.”

  “But your grandpa is getting buried tomorrow. The candy’s doable but the other part takes time.”

  “Well, you better hurry up or else.” Willie Junior turned and ran out the door.

  “Sweet Jesus in heaven,” KiKi gasped. “We’re being blackmailed by Justin Bieber.”

  “How could you get us into this mess?” I growled under my breath, trying not to draw attention. “If this gets out, my business is ruined … again!”

  “You? What about me? I’ll be kicked out of the country club and the Daughters of the South will start a rumor that I have relatives in Ohio or one of those Yankee places. And Putter will blow a gasket that I’m eating sugar. If we don’t come up with something right quick, that little pipsqueak will hit the send button like he said and we’ll both be mincemeat. I hate mincemeat. I say we steal his phone.”

  “A teen and his phone are never parted. They sleep with the things under their pillow.”

  “Then we’ll just have to call Mercedes.” KiKi’s eyes brightened. “She does all the makeup at the Slumber and that makes her a dead-person professional. We get her to write a note to Junior that it was asthma that killed Grandpa and not some allergy. ‘To whom it may concern: Willie croaked ’cause he had it coming’?”

  “KiKi!”

  “Well, something like that. This is almost enough to make me give up chocolate.” A sly grin slowly made its way across KiKi’s lips, her gaze drifting to the Snickers on the counter. “Almost.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Honey, unless it has to do with family I’m never serious. Mostly I just drink martinis and have fun.” Then my dear auntie snagged the Snickers on the counter, gave me a wink, and danced her way out the door.

  Chapter Six

  “Where are you going?” Boone mumbled as I slid out from under his warm protective arm into the cold loneliness of my bedroom. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “It’s just going on ten.” I nudged Bruce Willis at the end of the bed and he let out a sleepy groan. “I need to walk BW. I think he’s having bad doggy dreams.” Mostly bad dreams of me kicking him out of bed. I pulled on the jeans I’d dropped in my frantic haste to get into bed two hours ago … not that there was any sleep being had.

  Boone pried open one eye. “I’ll come with.”

  “You worked all day fixing my roof, thank you very much.”

  The moonlight shining in through the window caught the twinkle in his eyes. “You already thanked me for that.”

  “I’ll bring back sweet potato pound cake from Mate Factors. They’re open late tonight. Then I can thank you all over again.”

  “Don’t be gone long. I’m a hungry man and I’m not just talking about cake.” Boone let out a soft sleepy laugh and rolled over. I got BW’s leash off the dresser, hooked him up, and dragged him off the bed. We started down the hall, heading for the steps with doggy nails tapping against the worn hardwood floor.

  “Trust me, this isn’t what I want to be doing either, and you can thank your auntie with a Snickers fetish for this late-night disturbance. I know I didn’t exactly tell your daddy the whole truth about this walk we’re taking, but I’m kind of in a tight spot here. If I said I had an appointment with a corpse he’d insist on coming, and how many dead bodies can a guy take before he gets tired of it all?”

  BW snorted.

  “This is my last dead-person gig, no matter what. I have no idea where the heck Bonnie Sue is and that’s fine by me, and maybe Mercedes really can convince Willie the Second his granddad died of natural causes. After tonight this dead-people thing is over and I’ll go wedding dress shopping like a normal bride-to-be and all will be right with the world. How do you feel about being ring bearer?”

  I snagged my denim jacket from the closet and closed the white paint-chipped door behind me. BW led the way down the sidewalk scented with cherry blossoms in full bloom as a breeze tousled the branches, sending white petals swirling around us in the silvery moonlight. In my very biased opinion, Savannah was always lovely, but a spring night like this was pure magic. “It smells like heaven out here,” I said to BW.

  “Talking to a dog?” Auntie KiKi drew up beside me.

  “He’s a very wise dog.” I gave KiKi a quick once-over. “And why are you wearing your pink robe?”

  With a flourish, she whipped off the terry cloth, tossed it into the bushes, and flung her arms in the air. “Ta-da! Now I’m badass-in-black girl with Putter’s golf jacket and the yoga pants that his size-two sister gave me for Christmas. I gave her two pounds of pralines, so we’re even. The robe’s camouflage in case Putter caught me being up and about and started asking questions, though I got to say there isn’t much chance of that happening. The man’s off to a golf outing over in Augusta tomorrow, and to gear himself up for the occasion he’s sawing logs to Golf Is a Many Splendored Thing blaring in his headphones.”

  “He really sleeps with headphones?”

  “It’s golf, honey; the reality ship sailed years ago.” KiKi nodded at the street. “The Batmobile’s gassed and ready for action. We can pick up a replacement Snickers on our way to the Slumber—and don’t you be giving me that superior look. You know if I hadn’t snagged the Snickers off the counter this afternoon, you would have done it yourself.”

  I sat BW in the back seat of th
e Beemer with the window down so he could stick his head out and look totally adorable in case we drove by the poodle’s house. I took shotgun.

  “I guess Walker isn’t coming along?” KiKi asked as I closed the door. “You didn’t tell him about Willie or the blackmail?”

  Another burst of guilt slithered up my spine. “Do you see Boone sitting between us? Because that’s exactly where Savannah’s version of John Wayne rescuing the damsel would be if he got wind of yet another body. And if he knew about the blackmail…” KiKi and I exchanged “God help us” looks and made the sign of the cross.

  “But I’ve decided this is it on the dead-body front. I’m going cold turkey. Blue Hat Lady has vanished, getting the sisters off the hook, and that’s fine by me. After the Snickers drop tonight and the dead-from-asthma letter from Mercedes gets delivered to Junior, I’m out. If any other lifeless remains flop across my path for any reason, I’m shutting my eyes and stepping right over the prone carcass and not looking back. I’m getting married, and I’m living happily every ever with the man I love!”

  “We’ll die of boredom.”

  “There is that.”

  KiKi pulled the Beemer to the curb in front of Mates. It was one of those local Savannah hole-in-the-wall places with a green door, cute yellow ruffled curtains in the windows, and food to die for. We got three helpings of sweet potato cake to go and picked up the Snickers and a chew toy for BW at the twenty-four-hour CVS. Then we did the stop-and-go thing, hitting every traffic light all the way up Broad Street.

  “Not much action tonight,” KiKi said while pulling into the Slumber’s parking lot, empty except for Mercedes’s pink Caddy next to the building. “Least there are a few lights on so the place doesn’t look so … dead.”

  “Funeral humor? Really? Do you have to?”

  “Like Cher says, ‘Honesty makes me feel powerful in a difficult world,’ and there’s nothing more honest than being dead. We can all learn from the book of Cher.”

  Right after college Auntie KiKi had been a roadie for Cher; she’d never quite left the stage and had been spouting unsolicited Cher-isms to the rest of Savannah ever since. KiKi, BW, and I headed for the back door marked “Deliveries,” and I turned the brass handle.

  “Mercedes said she’d be working on a customer and that we should come on in. And can you please refrain from dead-people humor? It’s been a long day.”

  KiKi did the zip-across-the-lips thing and gave a little two-finger promise salute. We went inside, leaving the traffic noise behind us. Beige carpet cushioned the floor, and dimmed recessed lighting dotted the ceiling down the long hall. “Gives a whole new meaning to dead quiet,” KiKi whispered. She held up her hands in surrender. “Not my fault; it just slipped out all by itself. And besides, we all need to realize death is a part of life and not get so freaked out about it like we—”

  “Hey, ladies,” Mercedes said, sticking her head out a doorway. KiKi screamed, tripped over BW, and sank against the wall, sliding down into a limp puddle. BW licked KiKi’s face and Mercedes hustled over, her white official-looking smock flapping behind her. She knelt down next to KiKi. “What happened?”

  I patted KiKi’s cheek. “Comedy Central took a turn for the real.”

  “I think she’s coming around.” Mercedes smiled my way. “And she’s not the only one who’s come around. I hear tell you’re marrying Mr. Boone. You done landed yourself the white whale, and with there being no whale in sight, my guess is you sort of forgot to tell him you were stopping by to drop off candy to a dead person?”

  “I don’t want Boone to worry.”

  “Or for him to go hiring bodyguards to protect your skinny self?” Mercedes was a great friend and sometimes my breaking-and-entering buddy. Back in the day she’d run a house of questionable reputation that was more dating service than the other kind of service. Now she was a respectable housekeeper by day, mortician beautician by night, and she had half of Savannah fighting over her for both reasons. Mercedes was a woman of many talents.

  I steadied KiKi with one hand and fished the Snickers out of Old Yeller with the other. “Here’s the deal,” I said to Mercedes. “Willie’s grandson made a video of KiKi and Grand Theft Snickers, and he’s threatening to YouTube the performance if we don’t get Grandpa’s candy back in his pocket. You don’t look surprised.”

  Mercedes rolled her shoulders. “Girl, you’d be plumb blown away by the stuff people want to be buried with around here. Hunting rifles, fishing gear … last week Sally Jacobs at the ripe old age of ninety-two was buried with a can of whipped cream and a picture of George Clooney. I don’t even want to be thinking about it.”

  Mercedes nodded at the hallway. “You’re lucky that old Willie’s in one of our cheapo non-sealing caskets. The family laid him out in an expensive one; then they went and took a kickback to get him buried in the cheaper model. It happens. The moral of the story is, don’t tick off your family or they get back at you in the end, one way or the other. Willie’s in what we call the limbo room where we keep caskets between hearse and heaven, if you know what I mean. A little funeral levity.”

  KiKi wobbled to her feet and managed to give me a superior look. “See there, even the pros do it. Dark humor is the sign of an intellectual mind.”

  “Or a demented one,” I said under my breath.

  The three of us followed Mercedes down another dim hall, and I pushed open the door at the end. It was cooler here, the AC cranked low and the floor not carpeted. Streetlight slipped in through the blinds, casting the whole room in stripes of grays and black.

  “We need a flashlight,” Mercedes said. “The windows here face the street, and we don’t need to be drawing attention at midnight to overhead lights flashing on at the mortuary. It gives people passing by the creeps, and they go calling the cops thinking we got the Walking Dead going on for real.”

  Before my days of tripping across bodies, I’d never had a flashlight, but lately there always seemed to be a need. I reached in Old Yeller, grabbed the light, and clicked it on. The beam reflected off the stone floor, walls, and the casket waiting to get loaded up the next day. Mercedes slid the spray of white roses with a gold Styrofoam cross off the top of the casket, and I added the straw rose I’d brought along. “It’s a sign,” I said to Mercedes. “To prove to the kid that the Snickers is inside like we promised. He didn’t trust us.”

  “And people say kids these days aren’t smart.” Mercedes grinned, her teeth white against her dark skin and the night around us.

  I nodded at KiKi. “Okay, let’s get this over with. Open it up.”

  “With my arthritis setting in like it is…” KiKi rubbed her shoulder and hunched over, though she’d never hunched a day in her life. “How can you ask your dear old auntie to do such a thing as lift a big heavy coffin lid?”

  “You rumba,” I grumbled. “You tango, do the tarantella with the greatest of ease. You can open a blasted box and you’re the one who got us into this.”

  KiKi folded her arms and tapped her foot. I turned to Mercedes.

  “Uh-uh. Don’t go looking at me, no way. Once I close ’em up inside, my job is done and over with. Besides, everyone knows it’s bad juju to go opening up a casket. Ever think of how DeeDee McCormak got to be called old prune face? Word has it she wanted one last look at her Tommy, opened the lid, and went totally gray right there on the spot. That woman shriveled up like a worm on a hot stove. Count me out.”

  “Well, that coffin isn’t going to open itself, so it’s rock, paper, scissors,” KiKi said. “Like it or not, we’re here now, and that makes us all in this together. On three.”

  I held out my right hand, KiKi and Mercedes doing the same. I counted, and since rock beat scissors and scissors beat paper, I was totally screwed.

  “This is not fair.” I stared at the long amber box with the flashlight reflecting off the shiny surface. “A shriveled bride? What will Boone think?”

  Mercedes wrestled the gold cross off the spray of roses and wedg
ed it into the front of my half-zipped jacket. “There you are, honey. You’re done protected by plastic and the good Lord above. Nothing can beat that.” She slapped me on the back. “Go get ’em.”

  I handed KiKi the flashlight, tucked my fingers under the lip of the lid, and pried up. “It’s … really … heavy.”

  “That’s so they can’t get out,” Mercedes said with a straight face. The lid creaked open, the flashlight exposing prone Willie bit by bit.

  “He looks kind of sick,” Auntie KiKi said to Mercedes.

  “And that would be a vast improvement over his present situation. I had a devil of a time spiffing him up and trying to smooth out some of those wrinkles. Face like a road map.”

  KiKi handed me the Snickers. I held it between a shaky thumb and forefinger, plucked the Clif bar from the breast pocket of Willie’s blue poly suit, then slid in the good stuff. “We should say a prayer. It just doesn’t seem right to shut him back up and do nothing.”

  “Fine.” KiKi cleared her throat. “Lord,” KiKi started, eyes closed and head bowed. “Old Willie’s your problem now and not ours. Amen and thank you very much for taking him off our hands like you did, but we sure wish you’d made it sooner rather than later as the man was a big old pimple on our backsides to be sure.” KiKi cut her eyes from me to Mercedes, both of us staring at her in disbelief. “I said amen and thank you.”

  Mercedes shivered. “Heaven sakes, just close the lid before we get struck dead where we stand and there’s nothing but a pile of ashes.”