Your Killin' Heart

by Peggy O'Neal Peden

  Detective Davis nodded, watching. “What did you see exactly?”

  “In the room, you mean?”

  He nodded. “Or on the way, in the dining room, in the hallway? Any other people?”

  I shook my head and thought. “No other people, definitely. Nothing in the hallway, nothing to notice. I didn’t see anybody else. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “And when you opened the door?” he prompted.

  I looked away, trying to concentrate on the memory. “The room was very dim. I had an impression of lots of chintzy fabric, you know, ruffles, florals, bed skirt, drapes, and curtains. Like it had been done expensively, but not recently. It seemed too still, but maybe that’s because I was scared.” I looked back at the detective and shrugged. “Maybe because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there and didn’t want to disturb her. I just knew I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.” I stopped, but he didn’t speak; he waited. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m remembering something that wasn’t there, but it was still, too still, and stale. But I think a curtain moved on the other side of the room. I don’t know if I mentioned that before, but I’ve been thinking abut it ever since I heard that Hazel died. I was in such a hurry to back out of the room at the time.” Did I see more than I realized? I concentrated, but that was all I could come up with. “I don’t know.”

  “Can you draw it for me?”

  “Draw it?”

  “Sure,” he said, pushing a yellow legal pad and a pen across his desk. “Just a sketch. I’m not an art critic.”

  I eyed him.

  He smiled and shrugged. “Just give it a try.”

  I took the pad and pen. I sketched the bed with a small lump where a head might rest on a pillow, ruffles on the bed skirt, a round table, I think, on the near side of the bed. Was there a phone there?

  Beyond the bed, a wall of windows, long windows, French doors, maybe? The rest of the room, to my left as I stood at the door, was dark, shadowed. I hadn’t looked in that direction. But the windows. There were liners, pulled shut, that dimmed the light, with drapes swagged back, and it was there behind the thicker, solid drapes, that something wasn’t right. Had it moved? It couldn’t have been the wind, and the air was too still for it to have been central air-conditioning. Was there a bulge? Had someone been standing there, slipping behind a drape as I opened the door? I don’t know.

  I looked up. “That’s the best I can do.”

  He picked up my sketch and studied it. “Well, you were in Hazel’s bedroom, all right.” He nodded to himself. “There are French doors that open to the back of the house, but they weren’t open, not when I got there, at least, and air-conditioning wouldn’t have moved those heavy drapes. Lewis called us when he found her dead. Or he called nine-one-one. The first responders wouldn’t have opened the doors. I have their report detailing everything they did on the call. I’ve stood in the room while the air-conditioning came on and off. Could there have been somebody standing behind the drapes?”

  “I don’t know.” I wanted to remember seeing someone there. I was beginning to understand why witnesses were so unreliable.

  He smiled. “I guess this makes you either the last person to see Hazel alive or the first one who saw the body. Let’s get you down to Fingerprint.”

  If his purpose had been to get more information, I couldn’t see how anything I had told him would help. If his purpose had been to scare me, then he had been incredibly successful. I held my hands together as I followed him down the hall.

  He stopped in front of a door near the front desk. A camera ominously faced a scaled background on the opposite wall.

  “Well, Miss Hale”—he smiled—“I’m sure I’ll be in touch.” That sinking feeling in my stomach told me I was sure he would, too. He started back toward his office, then stopped and pulled a card out of his pocket to hand me. “You’ll call me if you remember anything else, right?”

  I nodded and tried to smile.

  Inside the room, Marie with badly overbleached hair and the too-tight uniform didn’t seem to think I was a dangerous suspect. She seemed bored as she aligned my fingers on a glass surface attached to a computer monitor. “Right, roll it. We want a nice, clean print. Hey, Gary, you doin’ all right?” She brightened when a young uniformed policeman walked in. My fingerprints appeared in green swirls and red dots on the screen.

  “Not as right as I could be,” he leered.

  “Now, Gary, you askin’ me out or just sexually harassin’?”

  “You decide, Marie. Your call.”

  I had the impression Gary and Marie had this conversation often.

  “You got some residue on your fingers,” Marie accused. She tore open a small packet and wiped my fingertips with an alcohol swab. Krispy Kreme residue. Marie started over and got through with me quickly.

  Now The Man had my prints. I didn’t like it.

  Chapter Eight

  On my way home that afternoon I drove by Hazel Miller’s house. It wasn’t exactly on my way, and I was sure neither Detective Davis nor Doug would approve, but I was curious. I slowed the Spider, and its old engine almost stalled. Time for a tune-up. Maybe it was time to rebuild the carburetor. Vans from two local television stations were parked in front of the estate’s locked gates. One reporter was talking while his cameraman filmed, small satellite dishes feeding the footage to the networks. It wouldn’t be big news nationally, but it would add a minute or two of human interest between international crises.

  On an impulse, I took the next right, heading west off Franklin Road, then turned right again so that I was behind the Miller estate. A lot of these places have alleys behind them. When I thought I’d gone far enough, I turned up a small, unmarked gravel drive. Thick hedge and trees lined it, so I couldn’t see anything until I rounded a sharp curve and found myself at a small, white guardhouse. The gate was unlocked and standing open; the guardhouse was unoccupied. I stopped and idled the car for a minute or two.

  Nothing happened. I couldn’t see anyone or any movement. Slowly, I drove through the opening.

  I was at the back of a long lawn. I followed the drive to a large garage, designed to hold six cars. Two overhead doors were open. The drive continued around the house, presumably to the front where Doug and I had parked.

  I had stopped the car and stepped out onto the drive before I saw anyone. Hazel’s personal assistant, George Lewis, approached from the nearest garage door. A thin glaze of politeness covered the anger in his face.

  “You’ll have to leave. This is private property, and you’re trespassing. If you don’t leave immediately, I will call the police.” He sounded as if he’d given this speech more than once today. Just then he recognized me.

  “Oh, Miss Hale, right? Sorry. There’ve been so many reporters and busybodies today. Is there something you need?”

  What could I say? I was just a busybody, myself. “I heard the police have decided Mrs. Miller’s death wasn’t an accident,” I said.

  “Not an accident,” Lewis repeated. “That’s a very diplomatic way to describe murder to a suspect.”

  “I suppose I could be one myself. But what could you have had to gain?” Unless, of course, Lewis was being paid by someone else, someone who did have something to gain from Hazel’s death. “You had a good job, couldn’t have been too hard.”

  “Exactly. That’s what I told them. I had everything to lose and nothing to gain from Hazel’s death.” Lewis was wearing jeans and a work shirt and peeling dirty outdoor gloves off his hands. He dropped something and quickly retrieved it, stuffing the dirty plastic object in his pocket. A pill bottle? I couldn’t tell; he had moved too fast.

  “Surely you don’t take care of all the grounds, too?” I asked.

  A wary look crossed Lewis’s face. “No, no, of course not. I just needed to work off some stress. There are a couple of flower beds that were Hazel’s favorites. I wanted to be sure they were mulched. Who knows what’s going to happen to the place now?”

&n
bsp; “So why do the police think you would have done it?”

  “Who knows? Because I was here. Because it’s easier to pin it on me than to do the work to find out who really killed her. Because she left me a crummy little legacy that probably won’t even exist when all her debts are paid.” He was angry now.

  “Who do you think killed her?”

  “You were here. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The kid. He wanted money, and the only way to get it was to sell off the assets of the estate. And that couldn’t happen as long as Hazel was alive.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Everybody knows. It was all in Jake’s will. The whole family knows it. There’s barely been enough money to scrape by for years, and as long as Hazel was alive, there was nothing anybody could do—except maybe release one more greatest-hits CD.”

  “But how did he do it? Did he go inside after we left?”

  “He must have. He left, sped off mad as a hornet because I wouldn’t let him in to harass Hazel. But then I went to run some errands. He knows his way around here. He wouldn’t have had any trouble getting in.”

  “What about the housekeeper?”

  “How long did you ring the bell when you came?”

  “I don’t know, several times. It did seem that we waited a long time. I remember we talked about it.”

  “She can’t hear, at least not well. Jay could have been in and out without her even knowing. And besides, that was her evening off. She was gone when I got back.”

  “Was that normal, for you all to leave Hazel here alone?”

  “Sure. She wasn’t an invalid or senile.”

  “And you didn’t go in to check on Hazel immediately when you got back?” I suddenly saw that still, gray face propped awkwardly against pillows. I was feeling worse and worse about this. Had she already been dead when I opened that door?

  “No, not right away. I was putting things away, watching the six o’clock news, having a drink. The housekeeper had left supper ready, so I put it on the tray to take in to Hazel.”

  “Did she always eat in her room?”

  “No, but that day she had stayed in bed all day. She wasn’t really sick. Sometimes she would say she had a headache and stay in bed, popping pills and drinking. It’s a wonder she hadn’t died before from some interaction. Nobody could make her stop. When she stayed in her room all day like that, she generally had supper there, too, if she ate at all.”

  “Did you tell the police all this?”

  “Of course, but they know I was here in the house. I don’t have a lot of money or friends with power. They want this cleared up. I’m an easy target.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “I don’t know. For now, I guess things will just go on as they are. At least until the estate’s settled. Until Jacqueline decides about selling the house, somebody has to take care of things. I’ll find something.”

  “Did anybody see you while you were gone?

  “What?”

  “When you were gone, running errands. That afternoon.”

  Sudden anger replaced the bewilderment on his face. “What are you insinuating? I don’t have to defend myself to you! You’d better leave. Now!”

  I realized suddenly what a vulnerable position I was in and decided to take his advice and get out of there.

  As I drove away, I passed a plain, dark sedan parked on the grass just outside the rear entrance. One man was in the car. It might have been the detective, but I couldn’t be sure. Had he followed me, or was I just being paranoid?

  * * *

  My excursion meant that I was right in the middle of peak rush-hour congestion on the way home. I knew better than to get on 440 at that hour, so I headed across Harding Place. There was a wreck on the bridge over I-65, though, so I was stuck with nothing to do but listen to lame drive-time radio jokes and think.

  Who knew about that back entrance to the Miller grounds? Everyone who lived there, of course. Jacqueline, Jay, probably anyone who had been around the house much. Delivery people. The delivery men Kenneth Elliott used, for instance. And, of course, I found it without much trouble, so how hard would it be if you were intent on robbery or murder? The problem with the robbery motive, though, was that nothing seemed to have been taken. As far as I knew, the only things taken from the Miller house that day were the paintings Doug and I had reclaimed for Kenneth’s gallery.

  By the time I had passed Harding Mall, I had decided that the Spider definitely needed a tune-up.

  There were too many possibilities involved in Hazel’s death. They couldn’t be systematically eliminated. The thing to do would be to concentrate on the probabilities. It was probable that whoever killed Hazel had reasonable access to the house, knew Hazel and her habits, and had something to gain.

  Who had access? George Lewis, Jacqueline, the housekeeper, Jay, regular tradespeople. I supposed I would have to include Doug’s brother, Kenneth. Who would have something to gain? Jacqueline and Jay, of course. Lewis? Not much that I could see. Ditto for the housekeeper. Kenneth? All he wanted was to get the paintings back, and Doug and I had seen to that.

  * * *

  The next day, Friday, I was too busy to think about anybody’s murder except maybe the wholesaler who had told me he had forty-seven seats to Tegucigalpa confirmed when he really only had them requested. I had quoted the price to my client in good faith, and now the seats might not be available. I checked other airlines, other wholesalers for a backup, but I couldn’t find as good a price. I decided to give him another two days and crossed my fingers that the seats would come through.

  About lunchtime, I tried to call Kenneth at the gallery. There was no answer, so I left a message on his voice mail: “Kenneth. This is Campbell. Did you get my messages? Call me, please.” I stayed busy the rest of the day; we all did. Kenneth probably couldn’t have gotten through the busy phone lines if he’d tried. By the time we closed I was tired, ready to go home and forget about travel for the weekend.

  Stick and Randy played a nine o’clock set at the Bluebird that night. I got there just before they started and listened from a seat in the corner. Since I didn’t know anyone else there, I didn’t have to try to make conversation over the noise. I could focus on the music and only the music. This was why I like living in Nashville. Any night of the week you could go somewhere and hear live music. It’s not about drinking or eating; it’s not even about production and costumes. It’s about the pure goodness of the music.

  During their break, Stick and Randy headed my way, distracted by fans wanting autographs and musicians wanting to talk, ask questions, feel that they belonged in the same world with these two successful musicians, wanting the magic to rub off.

  “You sound great,” I told them when they finally made it over to my table.

  Paul Gregg from Restless Heart was across the room, and the rumor was that Restless Heart was looking for material for a new album. He nodded and raised a hand. Stick waved back and started toward him.

  Randy sat. “Well, I take it as a good sign that you haven’t run out of the room yet,” he said. The table was tiny, and the room was crowded. Our knees touched.

  “It’s early yet.”

  He laughed. A waitress brought him a drink. “Thanks.” He nodded. “You want something?” he asked me.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Hey, Randy.” A brunette with big hair stopped in front of the table. “Dallas Ray. We met backstage at the Ryman last month. The breast-cancer benefit.”

  “Oh, yeah, how you doing?”

  “Great, great. You?”

  “Plugging along. Good to see you.”

  It sounded to me like he was just being polite, trying to dismiss her, but she wasn’t going anywhere. And maybe it was all in my head.

  Silence. Well, silence except for the deafening noise all around us.

  “Well, hey, I’ve got a CD I’d like to drop off for you,” she said.

  “Well, sure, but I don’t—”

  “I
just thought you might need a girl singing some harmony next time you’re playing a benefit like that. I love your stuff. I’d love to do it.”

  “Yeah, I guess. I mean, I usually just get up there on my own or with a few of the guys. Just leave me a card. I’ll lose a CD.”

  “Sure.” She pulled a card out of a skintight pocket like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. “There. Call me anytime. I’ll send you a CD, too.”

  She glanced at me as she left, the first time she’d seemed to notice I existed.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  I nodded. I’d been around Stick enough to witness that kind of scene before. Competition in the music business is tough. Who knows what contact might be the one? And the girl had to know that people, the right people, listened to Randy’s songs. So if they were listening to Randy and heard her … People had done far more bizarre things than interrupt a conversation to get noticed in this town.

  Stick reappeared. “Time to get back to work.”

  Randy smiled an apology and shrugged as he stood up.

  Oh, well, it was nice while it lasted.

  * * *

  It was after eleven and smoke was hanging low in the room when the boys finished their set. They packed up the equipment; I helped with the light and less-fragile stuff.

  “Okay,” Stick said. “Jay Miller’s playing tonight at 328. As soon as we get this stuff packed up, we’ll all go over there.” Good. Randy was coming, too.

  “Really? Thanks. You think he’ll still be there?”

  “Should be. They do a late set on weekends.”

  The drive from Green Hills to 328 Performance Hall took less than ten minutes on the nearly empty late-night streets. The club was about half full, and the three of us found seats near the back.

  It wasn’t my favorite style of music, but they weren’t bad. You could hear the words, and the words made sense. Jay Miller, so unimpressive offstage, had an onstage presence that convinced me that Jake Miller really was his biological grandfather. Under the lights, his face had something of the haunted quality of early Jake Miller photographs. And even in music so different from songs like “Last Lonesome Train,” there was something special about his voice that reminded me of Jake.