Iced Chiffon

by Duffy Brown

  “Of course not,” KiKi added in a rush. “I was just thinking out loud is all.” She took another swallow of water. “I mean, the man’s full of himself and an ornery jackass, but he’s not a you-know-what.” She couldn’t say the m–word any more than I could. “You think they’ll arrest Hollis?”

  My brain hadn’t jumped that far ahead. My thoughts were limping around in circles, wondering how this day got so bad so fast. “Maybe I should tell Hollis what’s going on. It’s the least I can do after borrowing his car and having all this happen. Think the police will mind if I leave?”

  KiKi slumped against the front of the house, and I eased her down to the porch floor. She looked up at me, her eyes sort of rolling around in their sockets. “You’re driving a car with a dead person in it. If the cops want you, honey, they’ll find you.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think I’ll cancel the waltz lesson.”

  KiKi downed more water, and I backed off the porch, then ran for the real-estate office. Pumping my arms, I tried to look like a jogger and not someone in a state of pure panic, though I suspected the white skirt and flip-flops sort of blew my cover. I felt as if everything was happening in slow motion, and I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs.

  I stumbled through the office door of the real-estate office, and IdaMae glanced up from her computer. “Oh dear me, you look plumb awful. Did something happen to the car?”

  I crumpled into a chair and put my head between my legs so I wouldn’t pass out. Why couldn’t I be more of a kick-butt kind of woman, like Lara Croft or Xena or even Kim Kardashian? Kim wouldn’t have to put her head between her legs so she wouldn’t pass out. “Hollis!” My shout was more of a squeal.

  “Where’s the Lexus?” IdaMae asked, a bit frantic.

  “It’s at my place.” I couldn’t do anything except remember to breathe and stare at the green carpet with little white flecks in it. Good thing I hadn’t had breakfast or there would be more on the carpet than flecks.

  “What’s going on?” Hollis’s footsteps came my way. I could see the tips of his Top-Siders out of the corner of my eye.

  I rolled my head to look at him. “It’s about your car. Janelle’s in it.”

  He held out his hands in a so–what fashion and gave me a so–what look to go with it. If Hollis was the killer, he wouldn’t be standing there all ticked off that I interrupted his meeting; he’d be freaking out and heading for the border when he heard I had the Lexus. “She’s dead, Hollis.”

  “She doesn’t think much of you either, Reagan.”

  The front opened, and two police officers and Detective Something–or–Other entered. “I’m Detective Aldeen Ross,” she said, and flashed her badge.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Hollis whispered in a strangled voice, his face white. He plopped down in IdaMae’s vacated chair. “Janelle really is…dead?”

  Reverend Franklin came to the doorway. “Janelle? Dear God. What happened?” He put his arms around a sobbing IdaMae, who looked worse than any of us.

  “There’s more,” I added in a rush. “I borrowed the Lexus and found Janelle’s body in the trunk.”

  Detective Ross gave me a nasty look for giving Hollis a heads–up. “We need to talk to both of you at the police station,” she said.

  “Me?” My head snapped around so fast I pulled a muscle in my neck. “Why me?”

  IdaMae gasped between sobs. “Now just a minute here. These two very fine people would never take part in a murder, of all things. I can vouch for them. They happen to be dear friends. Family.”

  IdaMae’s vouching apparently didn’t carry much weight because Ross pointed a stiff finger toward the door. Rubbing my neck, I followed Hollis to the cruiser, chain-gang style. We sat side by side in silence, Hollis sweating like a mule in the field, his eyes straight ahead. That he wasn’t pitching a holy fit I’d taken the Lexus proved just how scared he truly was.

  At the Bull Street Police Station, Hollis got ushered across the hall, and I wound up in a putrid blue room with rusted bars on the windows and metal chairs and a sticky table. I didn’t want to know what the sticky was. Another detective, with a shaved head and full mustache, asked me questions, and after two hours, he said I could go.

  I know zip about police procedure except for all the misinformation on TV shows, but I didn’t think I was much of a suspect. Putting the victim on full display in front of my own house with the trunk wide open for all the world to see didn’t smack of master criminal. The bald cop knew Raylene, so he believed the fountain story. We both agreed it would be a crying shame if the old battle–ax won Best of Show again this year.

  By the time I left the station, I had a brain-melting headache. No food, finding a dead body, and being out seven hundred desperately needed dollars might have had something to do with it. That Hollis’s devil-incarnate lawyer, Walker Boone, was waiting on the sidewalk didn’t make me feel one lick better.

  Boone was tall, thirty-three, with black hair and dangerous black eyes. Word had it he was once a member of the Seventeenth Street gang over on the West Side and had the “17” tattooed on his arm to prove it. Hollis got Boone a sweet deal on a Federal-style historic home right on Madison Square, and Boone got Hollis a sweet deal in our divorce. I hoped they both rotted in hell for all eternity. Today Boone wore faded jeans and a blue sport shirt, and women were staring and salivating.

  “What?” I asked as he approached.

  “Why did you take the Lexus?”

  “I needed to move a fountain that I recently sold because my fine Southern ex–husband and his fine attorney left me penniless.”

  “You were the one dumb enough to sign a prenup,” Boone said in a flat lawyerly voice while writing something on a legal pad. If I strangled him dead in front of the police station, I probably wouldn’t get away with it, but it was darn tempting all the same. Hollis came out of the station and walked over to us, looking scared spitless.

  “So they didn’t book you?” I asked. Hollis would not fare well in jail. He was rich, a mamma’s boy, and liked expensive things. I had a bad feeling he’d be the expensive thing everyone wanted in jail.

  “They’ll book him soon enough.” Boone wrote something else on his pad.

  “Aren’t you a little ray of sunshine today,” I couldn’t help but say.

  Boone ignored me. He had done a lot of that during the divorce proceedings as well. “Hollis is the main suspect, and there’s solid evidence stacked against him. The police are getting more to make sure they can hold him.”

  Hollis shoved his hands deep in his pockets. “I didn’t kill Janelle. I might have felt like it, but—”

  “Not here,” Boone interrupted with enough steel in his voice to make the hair on my arms stand straight up. I’d never heard the steel before, even during all the divorce arguing. I suddenly believed the Seventeenth Street gang rumor.

  “Go home,” Boone ordered Hollis. “Take a shower, and be at my office in an hour, and don’t talk to anyone.”

  Boone left in a rush, and I said to Hollis, “I know you didn’t do this. Boone will get you off.” Hollis’s shoulders slumped, and I patted him on the back in an it’ll–be–okay kind of way.

  “Look,” he said, making my stomach clench into a hard knot. Nothing good ever started with look. “I know I said I’d give you Cherry House, but I can’t do that now. I’ll have to sell it to pay Boone. This is going to be expensive, Reagan, really expensive.”

  I yanked my hand away. “You…You bought Janelle an engagement ring—big, huge, and sparkly. Sell it.” When I married Hollis, I got a ruby heirloom that I gave back to his mother after the divorce because she wanted to keep it in the family. I’m sure if I looked in the mirror I had “stupid” written on my forehead somewhere.

  “Janelle had a pricey manicure, Hollis. She had a Gucci handbag, of all things. Do you have any idea how much they cost? You have enough money to buy my dress for her, and you live in a ritzy town house. Sell the place. Get your money
that way.”

  “The town house is mortgaged to the hilt, and the rest is all on credit. You know what the real-estate market’s been like. I’m hanging on by a thread here till things turn around.”

  “Your parents? What about hitting them up for a loan?” Desperation raised my voice a few octaves.

  “They lost a ton in the market, and since Dad’s heart attack, he hasn’t been working—”

  “You promised, Hollis.” My voice was shrill and uncontrolled now. Heads turned in my direction.

  “Hey, I didn’t plan on getting charged for a murder I didn’t commit. We got Cherry House for next to nothing because the Victorian District was just taking off when we bought in, and the house was a total disaster. There’s nice equity there, Reagan.”

  “My hard-work equity, and I used my inheritance from Grandma Harris as part of the down payment.” I punched his arm and hoped it hurt. “You got the Lexus, the business, the Cupcake. I won’t sell. I refuse. I won’t sign anything.”

  Hollis’s eyes cleared, and he tipped his chin in that infuriating know–it–all Beaumont way. “You’ll sell. You’re the good girl; you’re not Janelle.”

  His voice hardened when he said Janelle’s name. Something sparked in his eyes, and it wasn’t sadness. For sure it hadn’t been there yesterday when I saw the two of them in my hallway doing the lovebird routine. “If you turn your back on me, you’ll be the vindictive witch, and that’s not you at all.”

  “I’m learning real fast.”

  “You’re your mother’s daughter, Reagan. She does things by the book, and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Letting me go to jail for something I didn’t do isn’t right, and you know it. Cherry House is all that’s between me and jail,” he ground out.

  “But…But…”

  But Hollis walked off because he didn’t give a rat’s ass what I had to say. The cold, hard truth was that he could go to prison for his whole life…or worse, and in the great state of Georgia there was indeed worse.

  Cold sweat slithered down my back at the thought.

  Hollis wanted to sell the house I’d renovated to save his miserable, worthless, arrogant hide. He and Walker Boone were back in my life, and the two of them were screwing me all over again.

  Chapter Three

  APRIL in Savannah is my favorite time of year. The twenty-three parklike squares with humongous pink, purple, and white azalea bushes and giant magnolias everywhere turn the city into one big Impressionist painting. Palmetto bugs are still at a minimum, temperatures linger below steam-bath levels, and the live oaks draped in Spanish moss haven’t wilted from the blasts of summer sun.

  Spring in Savannah is as close to paradise as one gets on this here earth, but not this year. Cupcake was dead, and she was messing up my life even from the grave.

  “How are things at the police station these days?” Auntie KiKi asked as I plodded up to the front porch of my house after taking the bus home. KiKi sat alone on the top porch step. No cops, no cruisers, no neighbors; Lord be praised for that. The downside was that any chance of customers coming to shop vanished, too. Not that it mattered much with Hollis threatening to reclaim my house. “The gossips are having a field day,” KiKi went on. “They’re mighty appreciative. It’s been a quiet couple of weeks out there.”

  “Always glad to do my part.” With a messy divorce and now Cupcake in the trunk, I’d done more than my part. KiKi held up two martini glasses, a silver shaker at her side. She sipped from one glass and handed another, with three olives skewered on a toothpick, to me. It was a three-olive kind of day. I took a sip, letting the cool liquid slide down my throat. “The police aren’t thrilled about the body in Hollis’s car, so he’s going to sell Cherry House right out from under me to pay Boone to get him off.”

  “The bastard.” KiKi hiccupped. “Like Cher says, ‘Don’t take your toys inside just because it’s raining.’”

  “I don’t get it.” I sat and took another sip of martini. On an empty stomach, this would do me in, and right now that was a good thing. Numb was welcome. “I have no idea what it means.”

  KiKi hiccupped. “You won’t care either once you finish off that drink.” She bit the olives from her toothpick one by one and munched.

  “Where’s the Lexus and the…passenger?” I asked.

  “Coroner came out himself and took care of things,” KiKi said around a mouthful, a bit of olive juice dribbling down her chin. Auntie KiKi was feeling no pain; Auntie KiKi wasn’t feeling much of anything. “He had a body bag and one of those gurneys.”

  Auntie got a little pale at the body-bag reference. She refilled her glass and downed half of it. A little alcohol-induced color returned to her cheeks. “James Hewlett plays golf with Putter. James is the coroner here in Savannah; did you know that? He usually sends some underling to mop up…That’s what he called it, mop up. He came himself today.”

  She knocked back the rest of the drink and licked her lips to catch every drop. “He recognized the address and made me the martinis before he left.” She held up the shaker, Savannah’s answer to Prozac. “They towed the Lexus off on one of those flatbed trucks for processing. I have no idea what processing is, and I don’t want to ever find out. James said Cupcake appeared to have suffered blunt-force trauma to the head, though he couldn’t be sure because of the plastic wrap. I’m never watching another CSI TV show as long as I live, and I’m giving up plastic wrap.”

  “Walker Boone says they’ll charge Hollis for sure; it’s just a matter of time.” I took a swallow of booze, and East Gaston started to spin. “What do you think Hollis and Cupcake fought over last night? Hollis didn’t seem all that broken up that Cupcake was…gone. He wasn’t dancing in the streets, but neither was he tearing up, sniffing, or blowing his nose like when his uncle Cletus died.”

  “Uncle Cletus left him his gun collection and his antique slat-top secretary. Cupcake left him a boatload of trouble,” KiKi slurred. “It’s possible he finally found out she had something going on with Urston Russell.”

  I fought the beginning buzz in my brain and put down the mostly unfinished glass. “Urston? The guy who judges the Homes and Gardens Tour? Cupcake doesn’t know a petunia from a pansy. You should see the window boxes at the real-estate office. Why would Cupcake have anything to do with Urston Russell?”

  KiKi gave a dopey smile, her eyes unfocused. “Cupcake volunteered to head up promotions for the tour this year. Guess she and Urston got involved. Last night I saw them together, and he was giving her money.”

  KiKi brought the glass to her lips, and I snatched it from her fingers. “How much money?”

  “They didn’t invite me to count it.” Glaring, KiKi grabbed back the glass. “I was coming out of the little girls’ room when I felt a draft all the way up my backside. My dress was stuck in my girdle. Don’t you hate when that happens? I ducked into a back hallway to fix myself, and lo and behold, there was Urston handing off a wad of bills to Cupcake. At first I thought he was paying for you-know-what, but he didn’t look like a man getting you-know-what ’cause he was whispering angry stuff and looked kind of pissed. Not ’xactly pillow talk.”

  “The man’s sixty-three with a paunch. He wears a red bow tie and passes wind in public. Good grief.” I waved my hand in front of my nose at the memory. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  KiKi plunked the martini glass down on the porch with a solid thud, her eyes little slits, her lips tight together. “If you recall, it’s been a whopper of a morning—moving a fountain, finding a dead body—and this alcohol is for medicinal reasons. I forgot about Urston till you mentioned the argument with Hollis. Putter said I should butt out. He also said Urston’s got a love affair with the ponies.”

  “Cupcake was a lot of things, but I doubt she was a bookie.” A ray of hope warmed me all over. “But I do believe she was up to something, and so was Urston. Oh, this is good, really good. I should tell Boone. It gives him another suspect to focus on and takes the heat off H
ollis.”

  I stood, then sat right back down, suddenly feeling depressed. “Except the minute I walk into Boone’s office the clock starts ticking, and I start paying. Bet he bills by the hour, and I have five minutes of information to hand over. The rat-bastard should be paying me if I’m giving him clues.”

  “I don’t think that’s how the rat-bastard works.” KiKi’s eyes closed, and she leaned back against the porch railing. She kicked off her left dance shoe, then the right one, and stretched out her legs. She tipped her face to the sun. “Don’t you love this time of year?” If she were a cat she’d have purred. Bless the healing powers of a good martini.

  “Maybe I should find out what Urston and Cupcake were up to. The more information I get, the less time Boone has to spend on the case, and the lower my bill. If I find out who really killed Cupcake before Hollis goes to trial, I can save a bundle. It’s court time that costs, and with your connections to the local gossips and all the dirt the Abbott sisters pick up at the wakes, I bet I can find out a bunch of stuff, maybe even who the killer is, and I work for free and—”

  KiKi bolted straight up as if stuck by lightning. She grabbed my shoulders and held tight, looking me dead in the eyes. “Are you out of your ever-loving mind?” She shook me, and I bit my tongue. “Someone’s murdering people and stuffing them in trunks. Then there’s the problem of you snooping around in a city where firepower outnumbers citizens, and the citizens don’t care much for snooping. We have no idea why Cupcake wound up where she did. Whoever happens to be responsible has done the deed once, so a second time around is a piece of cake. Just take the Urston information to Boone, okay?”

  KiKi flopped back against the railing. “Lordy, that plumb wore me out. I need a nap.”

  “Do you realize that after five years of trial and error and reading every blessed how–to book in the freaking library, I now know how to rewire a house; install faucets, sinks, and bathtubs; and tear off ten layers of wallpaper in one fell swoop?” I pointed to the flaking white paint on the front door, which still had its original glass and brass hardware. “I love that front door. I love this house. I’m selling all sorts of my stuff and everyone else’s to keep it. What if you had to give up Rose Gate, huh? How would you feel about that?” I nodded to her perfect house, which was painted blue and green and had a corbelled chimney, an oversized parlor that served as a dance studio, and an ironwork fence with a rose-patterned gate.