It was true and it shouldn’t have surprised me in the least. I knew darn well that Shreveport was two hours away. I’d been aware of that when I’d accepted the invitation, which was why I was glad that Nellie was keeping Sarah overnight. It would be late when I got home. But those two hours had passed so quickly that I hadn’t thought about it. We’d chatted about nothing and the time passed in a blur.
“I suppose we were. And yes, four hours isn’t a monster drive. It’s more that I was thinking you must have friends and family in New Orleans that you normally spend the holidays with.”
“I have family there, normally. This year my parents decided to spend Christmas in Germany.”
“Germany?”
“They wanted to see Berlin.”
“Who goes to Germany for Christmas?”
“My parents. For some unknown, or at least unexplained reason they decided it was time to see something of the world outside of Louisiana and they had to do it now. They got some kind of special travel deal and will fly into Berlin and go to Hannover as well.”
“That sounds different.”
“Normally I spend Christmas with them. I don’t see them much during the rest of the year. The didn’t give me any warning about this plan. I called to tell them when I’d be at their house and they said they would be gone. With no home to go home to, I felt the tug of the small town vibe of Knockemstiff — and it’s lovely citizens.”
“Whom you’ve only met when you’ve come to solve a murder.” I thought back on the two murder investigations. “You even tried to pin one of the murders on me. But you couldn’t nail me for it, copper.”
“Yes, you were always my favorite suspect, Savannah.” The way he said that word ‘favorite’ made my heart melt. “I wanted a chance to get to know you without the press of a murder.”
“And yet you arrive in the midst of another crime spree that I’m involved in. These Santa Hood robberies are puzzling.”
“Santa Hood?”
“Don’t criminals need exotic monikers when we don’t know their names?”
“I suppose it makes life more interesting, and I’ll agree that you do have a certain magnetic quality.” He tried, not very successfully to hide a smile. “Too bad that very quality seems to draw criminals to your little town—with or without exotic monikers.”
“And we have two separate cases to investigate.”
“We do?”
“Sure. There is the ever-popular spree of robberies—stealing Christmas items. The other is the suspicious circumstances surrounding the accident that Jerry Walters had.”
“I heard the gossip. He had the lead role in the annual play.”
“Right. But someone loosened a step and he fell and broke his leg. It was a stairway that went straight to his door, so it’s unlikely that anyone else was the intended victim.”
“Not nice, but…”
“Pete is suffering because people suspect him of doing it. He lives downstairs and he benefited from Jerry’s accident because he was the understudy for the lead.”
“And because no one is investigating what really happened the gossips become the judge and jury.”
“He is really hurt by the gossip and the dirty looks that go with it.”
“He strikes me as a thin-skinned guy.”
“We prefer to say he’s sensitive. But he is. Still…”
“And you are bringing this up to me, over our elegant French meal, as a subtle way of asking me to look into these heinous crimes?”
I had to grin. “You got me.”
“I have no official standing in this.”
I reached out and put a hand on his arm. It was warmer than an arm had any right to be, or maybe that was just my imagination. “They won’t know that. Everyone knows you are the law. At most someone will ask why you are investigating it.”
“I’d want to know that myself. I can’t very well tell people that Savannah Jefferies called for an investigation into the events leading up to an accident that caused a broken leg.”
“That’s quite simple, really. As a public servant you have to determine if there might be some maniacal serial accident creator on the loose. You couldn’t have it on your conscience if you ignored the evidence.”
“I see. By the way, Savannah… here we are out on the town and I’m wondering something: Does it strike you as strange that our conversation over dinner when there hasn’t been a murder is not much different from the chats we have when I’m working?”
I had to think about that. “On the surface of it, I suppose so. But it can also mean we are both intrigued by puzzles, by mysteries. It just happens to be your job as well as your inclination to investigate things.”
“I think I might have less of that sort of curiosity than you do. Maybe we should swap jobs.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t think you’d like what I do, and I couldn’t stand living in the city.”
Woodley gave my reply far more serious consideration than I thought it deserved. Then, after a moment, he forked an escargot and put it in his mouth, and chewed thoughtfully. He was a most deliberate and thoughtful man, in the sense that he didn’t act without thinking. He did things for a reason. That put an unsettling emphasis on the fact that he’d come to Knockemstiff for his holiday. For as much as Ellen Hart wanted to think our little town could become a prime destination for travelers and holidaymakers, as things stood there was only reason anyone ever came to our town—to see one of the less than 800 souls who lived in it. That meant, logically, that barring facts I didn’t know, Woodley had come to all this way, was spending his vacation in Knockemstiff, to see me.
That was something for me to take seriously. If he did like me…
He swallowed his escargot. “I didn’t mean to derail the conversation so dramatically,” he said. “I only meant that as an observation.”
“It’s my fault. I know you didn’t ask me out to talk about the dark criminal underside to Knockemstiff.”
Woodley stabbed another escargot and held it up. “Who says I didn’t? But now you need to eat your snails, woman. They’ll get cold.”
I looked down and realized I hadn’t eaten a bite. I took his sage advice and dug into the escargot. They were delicious and followed by a glass of red wine they even let me think about something other than crime and Investigator James Woodley for a few moments.
We managed to finish dinner without the Santa Hood robberies or Pete’s situation coming up again. I learned about James’ lifelong love of blues and jazz, which was strong enough that he’d refused a job offer from the FBI (“they don’t have decent jazz clubs in Washington, DC”) and that he’d once been married with the same disastrous result that my marriage had been. We’d both fallen in love with being in love and totally misread the person we’d married.
“She wanted me to be ambitious and I didn’t want me to be ambitious. Given that standoff we lasted a year before we both came to the realization that the other person had no interest in becoming what we’d thought they should be,” he said.
“That’s sort of how it went for me too. I wasn’t cut out to be a corporate wife.”
“I have to say that my wife was sincere and consistent. Rather than leaving for another mine, she left me and my rather plebeian blue-collar existence to go back to college and become a high-powered lawyer. Curiously, you left your corporate husband to open a hair salon and schmooze with the masses.”
“There’s a certain symmetry there. Perhaps we should introduce our exes to each other.”
“Let’s not. That would involve actually interacting with them.”
I raised my glass. “To wise counsel.”
On the way home James was the one who raised the issue of the crimes again. It tickled me to know that his brain had been working on the mysteries while we’d talked about other things. Mine sure had.
“I don’t mind poking around that accident a bit,” he said. “We can do it together. We could turn up something. And keep me in the l
oop on the Santa Hood crimes gossip. I’ll be interested to see if my theory holds water.”
“You already have a theory?”
“Based on nothing. There aren’t many facts, after all, so I’m speculating wildly.”
“Care to share?”
“Nope.”
“Nope?”
“How about a bet?”
“What sort of bet?”
“Since there isn’t any professional aspect to this crime spree for you and me, and because I’m sure you have your own theory about who is doing what, let’s let this play out a bit longer, then write down our guesses.”
“So you must think this will get solved soon.”
“I do. Before Christmas. The crimes are amateur and amateurs get caught when they keep committing crimes.”
“Okay. So we write down our guesses.”
“Let’s say on Friday. We write them down and give them to Betina to hold.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“With our reputations as crime solvers at stake? Of course not. I don’t trust anyone.”
“Why Betina?”
“Nellie would happily cheat for you, Pete is preoccupied, and Betina is totally indifferent.”
“Fair enough. What are the stakes?”
He grinned. “If I win, you have to come to New Orleans for a few days as my guest. Let me show you around. We’ll go to some clubs, and you can see the good side of city life, the things I like.”
“Trying to hook me on the advantages of the big city, are you?”
“Indeed. What prize do you want if you win?”
“I need to think. I’m pretty certain you had this bet planned and now you are springing it on me. So when we give Pete our guesses, I’ll tell you my prize.”
“Fair enough.” He glanced at me. “You won’t win anyway.”
He turned his attention back to driving and I looked at his profile in the shadowy light. He was grinning, happy. This was such a different face from his professional look. I liked it. A lot. And now that he’d named his prize I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to win this particular bet. Not at all sure of much of anything, once I thought about it.
“Woodley…”
He turned and looked at me. The smile he gave me was definitely different than the kind I was used to seeing from him. “What, Savannah?”
Hearing him say my name gave me a little tingle of pleasure. Like some silly schoolgirl. “Tomorrow night will you have dinner with Sarah and me. It would have to be at the Bacon Up, I’m afraid.”
“I’d be delighted. Claude’s cheeseburgers are fine and the company would be exceptional.”
My pulse raced a little and I was lightheaded. So I tried to convince myself it was the wine we’d had with dinner. Without paying much attention I’d had several glasses of that rich red wine. Of course I was lightheaded.
Right.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Tuesday, December 20th: Five days before Christmas
On a crisp Tuesday morning, Finnegan and I went straight to the salon to open up. With Nellie taking Sarah to school, all I had to this bright winter morning was unlock the door of the salon, get the register set up, start some coffee, and get my station ready. Of course, other than running with Sarah, Finnegan had all of his normal duties to attend to. He went around the salon, giving everything a good sniff, made certain I filled his water dish, stared disgustedly at his empty food dish until he was certain I couldn’t be conned into filling it, then he went to the old braided wool rug I’d put down under my sink and curled up on it for his first morning nap.
It was a dog’s life.
This morning everything seemed bright and shiny. I’d had a delightful dinner and evening. It was, by modern standards not a very eventful date, but an incredible pleasant interlude – a lovely change from my routine. As much as I enjoyed it, I’d found myself missing Sarah’s sparkling company… which had tweaked at the unpleasant thoughts that had been lurking deep in the darker parts of my brain lately.
Ugh.
Nellie came in, beaming. “You look happy,” I said, “and no visible wounds.”
“I’m delighted. As it turns out, four kids are less trouble than three. Who woulda guessed? Of course I think that depends completely on one of them being Sarah Jameson,” she told me. “She’s my new hero. No more than half an hour after we got there she had them organized them in some magical way.”
“Organized? Your boys? What does that even look like?”
“She got them doing things that, while they involved immense amount of dirt, were not things I object to them doing. Very few of the activities I saw involved any lethal implements, like knives and Rudy’s welding equipment. She even invented a way to play FIND DJANGO that didn’t entirely demolish the house. The kid’s a miracle worker.”
“I can rent her out to you on occasion.”
“No. After awhile it gets feeling too unnatural and I go around feeling uneasy, wondering when the bomb they planted when I wasn’t looking will go off. I’m not up to that much gentility on a regular basis. She has me thinking about the Django problem differently though. With it cooler and the boys less willing to play outside, Django is a distraction that doesn’t involve video games or online porn.”
“So the little guy has earned your badge of value.”
“I hold out the right to view him as emergency rations, however, in case the world falls on its… face.”
Betina arrived during the report on Sarah's evening. “Lucille is coming early for her color rinse,” she said. Then other clients began to wander in. A few innocent questions about my evening floated on the air and suddenly I knew it was my turn in the hot seat. Given the unrelenting nature of my inquisitors, I prepared myself to make them work for each morsel of information, each crumb of knowledge concerning the evening—my date.
They wanted to know everything—where we went, what we ate (and drank), and more important, what we talked about. And I certainly wasn't going to escape without answering some questions on what happened after dinner.
That was where I drew the line firmly in the floor of my salon. “Enough of that. You can't expect me to tell everything," I said. "A woman has the right to some privacy."
Nellie laughed. "Good luck with that.”
“We are curious and concerned,” Pauline Strickland said, speaking for the group.
Although they did mean well, for the most part, their curiosity was overwhelming. I was still sorting out the events, the emotions myself. I wasn’t really ready to talk about anything beyond the most trivial details, and certainly not how I felt about Woodley or what he said to me. But that was their nature and I think they would have turned my carcass on the conversational spit until it was charred beyond recognition but for Pete.
Unfortunately, Pete's news was distressing.
"I got this letter," he said, waving it in the air. It's from a law firm representing Jerry Walker. They are demanding that I pay for his medical expenses, including rehab."
“Based on what?”
“They claim they can prove I caused his accident.”
“Really?”
"Can I see the letter?” Nadine asked. “Lawyers have strange ways of putting things at times. You need to know how to read these.”
Pete handed it to her. She primly took her glasses out of her purse, parked them on her nose and read it carefully. “This is a routine scare letter," she said. “The law office just had a paralegal modify a standard threat."
"They say they'll sue me, I've never been sued."
“If they want to sue someone, why they aren't suing Widah Jenkins?" Nellie asked. “It was her rickety step and she's got liability insurance.”
“They usually do go after the ones with deep pockets,” Nadine said. “Pete, you don't have any money squirreled away do you?"
"Not much."
She snorted. “In that case they are fishing. I’d be willing to bet they’ve sent Widah Jenkins a similar letter. If they could find
out who made the stairway, or who approved the building permit, they’d sue them too. Anyone with a connection to the accident.”
“What a stupid and vicious thing to do,” Betina said.
“They must’ve found out that someone loosened the step. That would make it tough to sue Widah Jenkins." Nadine leaned back. "If it weren't for that you’d be in the clear, Pete.”
“So I’m going to be sued?”
“Not necessarily.”
“You weren’t charged with anything, Pete,” Betina said.
“He wouldn’t have to be for them to launch a civil suit.”
“How can they sue him if he didn’t do anything?”
Nadine grimaced. “The truth is that you can sue anyone for anything. If you don’t have grounds it will be dismissed, but it has to go to court. Right now they are just bluffing, hoping you’ll be scared and cough up the money.”
“That isn’t fair at all,” Betina said.
“Welcome to the legal world.” Nadine pointed to the letterhead. “It’s a law firm in Baton Rouge. It’s probably a lawyer who works for Jerry’s parents. He might not even know a thing about it. If it’s just a shakedown, there’s not much to worry about.”
“How do I know?”
“I’ll find out,” I told Pete. “Don’t panic until we know more.”
“How are you going to do that?” Nellie said. “How do you big city detectives get your hands on privileged information?”
I smiled. “I think that tomorrow I’ll go talk to Jerry Walker. I understand he’s back in town and recovering from the fall. Maybe he’ll fill me in if I ask nicely.”
“Ah, the famous direct approach.”
“Is there another approach? One that works better?”
“Not for Savannah Jefferies,” she grinned.
I shrugged. “It’s that or I have to hire Norris to hack the computer at the law firm.”
“He’d like that.”
“Tell him he’s my back up.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dinner at Bacon Up
That night James Woodley joined Sarah and me for dinner at the Bacon Up.
Holiday Hooligans: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 3) Page 10
