The Darling Dahlias and the Poinsettia Puzzle

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Earlynne chewed on her lip. “Well, then, scones. Tarts. And cinnamon buns and orange nut bread. Cookies are easy to make.” She brightened. “We could have a glass bowl of Christmas cookies on the counter and give one to every customer, free. That’ll get everybody into the Christmas spirit, don’t you think? Oh, and we need a Christmas tree, too, Mildred. Right over there.” She pointed to the front corner opposite the window. “Let’s get the tree up as soon as we can. People will love it!”

  “The tree, yes,” Mildred said. “But it should go in the other corner.” Cookies, she wrote impatiently, then tarts. “What kinds of tarts?”

  “Apple, I suppose. And peach.” Earlynne squared her shoulders. “And don’t rush me about the list. We can decide all that later. I’ll sit down and go through my recipes and—”

  “For heaven’s sake, Earlynne,” Mildred said testily. “Everybody has apples, and even I can bake a peach pie. And Raylene and Euphoria, over at the Diner, make the best pies in the world. If people are going to fork over good money, they want something they can’t make for themselves. And can’t get at the Diner.”

  Earlynne, who had forgotten all about Raylene and Euphoria, looked uncomfortable. “I said don’t rush me, Mildred.” She pressed her lips together. “Give me a little time, and I’ll make a list.”

  “Well, okay,” Mildred said. “But get me the list tomorrow. Put bread at the top, please. And put down what you think we ought to charge. How much for the bread, for the scones, etcetera.” Half under her breath, she added, “And the tree goes in the other corner.”

  Ah, the prices. Mildred thought that since people were paying nine cents for a loaf of Wonder Bread at Hancock’s Grocery, they should sell their bread for less. Otherwise, people would keep on buying cheap three- or four-day-old bread at Hancock’s.

  “We should sell for seven cents a loaf,” she had declared. “That makes our bread affordable as well as fresh.”

  Which seemed like a good idea—until she began figuring out how much it would cost to produce a loaf. She calculated that a pound of flour would make one loaf of bread. Mrs. Hancock was selling forty-eight pounds of King’s flour for $2.25, which came out to almost five cents a loaf—just for the flour!

  And flour was only the beginning. She also needed to figure in the cost of the rent on Mrs. LeRoy’s building. At twenty dollars a month, it sounded cheap enough, until you realized that twenty dollars a month came out to sixty-seven cents a day—and that you would have to sell ten loaves of seven-cent bread just to pay a single day’s rent! There was also the cost of the electric lights and the gas to run the oven and a once-aweek ad in the Dispatch and a telephone and the cash register to ring up the sales and paper bags to put the bread in.

  There was more. If Earlynne was going to bake tarts and cheesecakes and cookies, they would need sugar (twenty-five pounds for $1.25 at Hancock’s), brown sugar (fifteen cents for two pounds), shortening (forty-five cents for a three-pound can of Snowdrift), cream cheese (seventeen cents a pound), and eggs, fifteen cents a dozen. And they weren’t in the bakery business just for the fun of it. They wanted to make a profit, didn’t they?

  By the time Mildred finished adding up all the numbers, she had a rip-roaring headache. She could also see that they could not afford to buy their supplies retail. They had to find a wholesale source of flour and sugar, which meant driving to Mobile: eighty miles in each direction at twenty miles to a tencent gallon of gas, plus a day of her time. A whole darn day, just to buy flour!

  Mildred flung down her pencil and whooshed out a deep, despairing sigh. She had been stupid to invest her good money in Earlynne’s foolish dream without taking the time to figure out the real costs and the possibility of profit.

  No doubt about it, Roger was right. As the world’s most idiotic idea, their bakery really did take the cake.

  If they were to make a dime, it would take a miracle.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, IT DOESN’T MATCH?”

  Tuesday, December 18

  Just up the street from The Flour Shop, past Fannie Champaign’s Darling Chapeaux and the Darling Savings and Trust, across Ben Franklin Street and behind Snow’s Farm Supply, sits a four-room frame house. There are bushes in front and a battle-scarred tomcat, black as the ace of spades, guarding the sagging front porch. Miss Josephine Crumpler lived in this house for fifty-two years, until the Savings and Trust foreclosed and she went to live with her niece in Nashville.

  Now, Miss Crumpler’s house belongs to Cypress County and is the office of Sheriff Buddy Norris, Deputy Wayne Springer, and the cat. The jail is conveniently located next door, on the second floor of Snow’s Farm Supply, making it handy for the sheriff and his deputy to keep an eye on prisoners. There’s not much crime in Darling, but the jail’s twin cells are often occupied on weekends, when one or two of the town drunks are locked up to sleep off their overindulgence in Bodeen Pyle’s white lightning.

  In the room that served as his office (Miss Crumpler’s front bedroom, which still had her pink and green honeysuckle wallpaper), Sheriff Buddy Norris was sitting with his boots propped on his desk, trying to puzzle something out. At his elbow was a mug of black coffee, strong enough to stop a cougar in its tracks; that’s how Wayne made the coffee so that’s how Buddy drank it. He was reviewing the report of the late-October death of a prominent Darling businessman, Whitney Whitworth. A member of Darling’s acclaimed barbershop quartet, the Lucky Four Clovers, Mr. Whitworth was tragically killed when his Pierce-Arrow somersaulted off the Jericho Road and down an embankment at the bottom of Spook Hill, landing upside down on top of the unfortunate driver. The wreck had taken place on a quiet Sunday night, at an hour when most Darling folk were paying rapt attention to Wayne King’s Orchestra on their parlor radios, humming along with “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and “Goodnight, Sweetheart.”

  At first, it was thought that this was just an unlucky accident. But when Deputy Springer looked carefully at the wrecked automobile, he suspected that the crash had involved another car. There appeared to be no eyewitnesses, however, and both Buddy and Wayne judged that the chances for figuring out just how it had happened were slim to none.*

  And then they had some good old-fashioned luck. Miss Lacy—Liz Lacy, who worked in Mr. Moseley’s law office—had been contacted by somebody who knew somebody who had seen the crash and said it was no accident. Another car had deliberately struck the Pierce-Arrow in the rear. What’s more, this eyewitness was able to identify both the car and the driver. His tip took Buddy and Wayne to the Jericho State Prison Farm, where they intended to interrogate Jimmie Bragg, the assistant to Warden Burford.

  But they were too late. Not an hour before they got to the prison farm, Bragg had shot himself, leaving behind a typewritten note apologizing to Mr. Whitworth’s widow for accidentally running into her husband’s auto. While there was certainly a discrepancy between Bragg’s confession and the word of the eyewitness, the sheriff had to admit that the man’s suicide seemed to wrap up the case very tidily.

  Darling thought so, too. Lionel Noonan, of Noonan’s Funeral Parlor, outdid himself with Mr. Whitworth’s funeral. Every pew in the Presbyterian church was filled, and the polished bronze casket was almost buried under an avalanche of flowers. The Lucky Four Clovers (with Deputy Springer stepping in at bass for the unlucky Mr. Whitworth) provided appropriate music—“Life’s Railway to Heaven” and “When They Ring Those Golden Bells”—for the deceased’s journey to the afterworld. Mr. Whitworth was interred in the Darling Cemetery, with full military honors provided by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. (Mr. Whitworth’s daddy had worn the gray in the famous Alabama Brigade.)

  Mr. Bragg was shipped back to his mother in a plain pine box—the less said about him the better.

  The Darling Dispatch also seemed to think the confession wrapped up the case. Editor and publisher Charlie Dickens ran a front-page story on the tragic crash in the Dispatch, under the headline Prominent Darling Man Kill
ed in Accident. The story appeared with a human-interest sidebar by Ophelia Snow reporting that Mr. Whitworth’s widow, “fragile but lovely in her grief,” had generously agreed to honor her husband’s business commitments to the Darling Telephone Exchange for a badly needed new switchboard system. Frustrated Darling telephone subscribers enthusiastically welcomed this news. It had been a terrible nuisance to have every other call dropped, some calls not go through at all, and some go through but to the wrong person, which you might not realize until you’d said half of what you intended to say and then had to apologize, hang up, and feel like a fool for the rest of the day.

  On page three of the same issue of the Dispatch, under an advertisement for Ex-Lax (“Children love this delicious chocolate laxative!”), there was a brief paragraph about Mr. Bragg’s suicide.

  But it was the suicide—or rather, the apparent suicide—that was perplexing Sheriff Norris at the moment. To the Whitworth file, Deputy Springer had added another report that had just arrived. It had to do with the weapon that had been found with Bragg’s body. The old Colt single-action six-shooter had Bragg’s fingerprints on it, which for the ordinary person might have clinched the matter, especially when he read Bragg’s suicide note. But not for Deputy Springer, whose experience as a lawman had lent him a certain skepticism.

  A few words about the recent history of the Cypress County Sheriff’s Office may be helpful here. Earlier in the year, Darling’s beloved Sheriff Roy Burns had met his maker in the form of a bad-tempered rattlesnake down at the bottom of Horsetail Gorge, where the sheriff was spending a pleasant Sunday morning in the company of his trout rod. (Leona Ruth Adcock was heard to remark that the rattler wouldn’t have bit the sheriff if he’d been in church, but small-minded people always like to criticize.)

  Buddy Norris had been Roy Burns’ deputy for over two years and seemed to be his logical successor. But Buddy ran into a couple of problems when he was campaigning. He was in his late twenties but was a dead ringer for the boyish aviator Lucky Lindy, which is to say that he looked like he was about fifteen-and-a-half, so some folks said he was too young. Other folks said he was too cocky, especially after he arrested the visiting revival preacher for driving his 1926 Studebaker under the influence of something more intoxicating (and illegal) than communion wine. They felt he should have had the sense to show more deference to a man of God.

  But it all came out in the wash, as Buddy’s mother liked to say. His only opponent in the special sheriff’s election was Jake Pritchard, who owned the Standard Oil station on the Monroeville Highway. Jake had recently raised the price of gas from ten to fifteen cents a gallon, and some folks felt that making Jake sheriff was giving him too much of a monopoly. So they voted for Buddy instead.

  Once elected, the new sheriff hired himself a new deputy. Wayne Springer was pushing thirty-five, a tall, dark-haired man, string-bean lean but muscular, with the high cheekbones and bronzed skin that usually came with some Cherokee blood. He had five years of law enforcement experience over in Jefferson County and a reputation for being willing (if not eager) to use his .38 Special. What’s more, because he had come from a large sheriff’s department (Birmingham was the biggest city in Alabama), Wayne had been trained in modern police methods.

  It paid off. After they got Bragg in his coffin and on his way home to his mama, Wayne had looked carefully at the Colt sixshooter, the one with Bragg’s fingerprints. There was a .45-caliber round left in the gun. He had test-fired it, then examined the bullet under his microscope (his microscope; the sheriff’s office didn’t have one), comparing it to the slug Doc Roberts had dug out of Bragg’s body during the autopsy Buddy ordered.

  It didn’t match.

  Buddy scowled when Wayne gave him the news. “What do you mean, it doesn’t match?”

  “It’s not the same caliber.” Wayne put both bullets on his worktable, side by side. “The one left in the Colt is a .45.” He pointed to the bullet on the left. “The slug that killed Bragg is a .44.”

  Buddy wished he knew more about guns. “Could that Colt have fired a .44?”

  “It could have,” Wayne said. “But there’s something else, Buddy. When you fire a six-shooter, the spent cartridges stay in the gun. So when Bragg shot himself and dropped the gun, there should have been a spent cartridge in the chamber.”

  “Yeah.” Buddy knew that much, anyway. “So what’s your point?”

  “My point is that there was no cartridge in the chamber.”

  “Hmm.” Buddy let out a long breath, seeing the implications. “So we’ve got ourselves a problem. Right?”

  “Right,” Wayne said briskly. “What we need is a real expert. A ballistics expert.” He picked up the bullets, juggled them for a moment, and put them down again. “Remember Goddard?”

  “Goddard?” Buddy asked uncertainly.

  “Yeah. Calvin Goddard. Remember that article in Popular Science I showed you not long ago? The one on ballistics? Calvin Goddard wrote it.”

  “Oh, that one,” Buddy said. “Yeah, I remember.” Apologetically, he added, “Not in detail, though. Remind me.”

  “Goddard says that every gun leaves a fingerprint on every bullet it fires. Not a real fingerprint—that’s just a manner of speaking. He’s talking about the impression left on the bullet by the grooves inside the gun barrel. Some guns have five grooves, others have six. Some grooves give the bullet a right-hand spin; others, a left-hand spin. That’s called rifling, and it’s specific to a given maker and model. But bottom line, every gun is unique.” He glanced at Buddy with a raised eyebrow.

  Buddy nodded, although he hoped there wasn’t going to be a quiz.

  Wayne pointed to the two bullets on his work table. “Judging from the rifling on the two bullets, I’m pretty sure—maybe about eighty percent sure—that they weren’t fired from the same gun. So even though Bragg’s prints are on that Colt and it had been recently fired, it isn’t the weapon that killed him.”

  “Ah,” Buddy said. He wasn’t surprised. From the beginning, something had told him that Bragg had not died by his own hand. But he was surprised that two bullets could tell a story like that. And that Wayne could figure it out just by looking through that microscope. When he looked through it, all he saw were his eyelashes.

  “But I’m no expert,” Wayne went on, “You’d never want me to testify on ballistics in front of a jury. These slugs ought to be examined—and photographed—under Goddard’s fancy new comparison microscope. He runs a crime lab for the police department in Chicago. I’ll bet he’d be glad to do the testing for us. He might not even charge us for it.”

  A crime lab. Buddy wasn’t sure what that was, but it sounded like what they were looking for. He glanced down at the two bullets, thought of the consequences, and nodded slowly.

  “I reckon we ought to do that. Ask Goddard if he’ll write up something that we can include in the report when we get those bullets back. It sounds like we’ve got more work to do.”

  Wayne had nodded. “Yeah. If Bragg wasn’t killed by that Colt, there’s another gun out there somewhere—the one that did kill him.” He paused. “And the killer.”

  That conversation had taken place a day or two after Bragg was buried. Now, some seven or eight weeks later, Goddard had returned the bullets, along with magnified photographs, a description of his testing procedures, and his findings, all impressively typed up on the letterhead of the Chicago Police Department’s crime lab. Goddard’s final two sentences endorsed Wayne’s earlier observation.

  The rifling patterns evident on the two bullets are distinct and substantially different. The examiner could find no points of comparison. It can be said with near 100% certainty that the .44 caliber test bullet fired from the Colt revolver and the .45 caliber bullet removed from the victim’s body were fired from two different guns.

  Buddy tossed the file on his desk, picked up his coffee, and leaned back in his chair. Two bullets, fired from two different guns. The Colt was locked in the safe on the other s
ide of the room. Where was the gun that killed Bragg?

  Who had fired it? Why? Was this killing just a random act—maybe even an accident, covered up to look like a suicide?

  Or was it part of something bigger?

  And how in the hell was he supposed to come up with answers to these questions?

  He put his feet on the desk, took a swig of coffee, and began to think.

  * * *

  *You can read about that accident, the investigation, and its aftermath in The Darling Dahlias and the Unlucky Clover.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “SHE’S CUTER THAN SHIRLEY TEMPLE!”

  Wednesday, December 19

  Over at the Darling Diner, Myra May Mosswell and Violet Sims are finally getting the hang of the new Kellogg switchboard that had been recently installed in the Darling Telephone Exchange, in the Diner’s back room. The money for the switchboard was generously contributed by the widow of their former partner, Whitney Whitworth, who had opposed the new equipment. Mrs. Whitworth had not only given them enough to purchase the new switchboard, she actually gave them her share in the business, which she inherited from her deceased husband.

  Myra May (who has a square jaw, a strong mouth, heavy brows, and a cynical gaze) had trouble believing that this was actually happening until the week before Thanksgiving, when the Kellogg Switchboard Company sent a man from their Chicago plant to install the new equipment. Violet (brownhaired, petite, pretty, and cheerfully optimistic) and her team of switchboard operators got busy learning to manage it. In the very same week, the paperwork on the transfer of Mrs. Whitworth’s share of the business was completed. Incredibly, the Exchange now belonged entirely to them! At Thanksgiving, they had a great deal to be thankful for.