Cover-Up Story

by Marian Babson

  The Cousins were growing noisier now. It didn’t really matter. If the noise was picked up by the microphones, new sound could be dubbed in later. But it was rattling Lou-Ann considerably.

  I glanced across at them and, suddenly I was considerably rattled myself.

  Cousin Homer started to sit down. Cousin Ezra whipped the chair out from under him, and danced with glee as Cousin Homer sprawled on the floor.

  ‘You bastard!’ Cousin Homer howled.

  The others laughed heartily – another of Ezra’s merry little japes. But Homer was still lying there, eyes closed, and the laughter died away. He’d hit the floor pretty hard, he might be hurt.

  ‘Homer? You all right, Homer?’ Cousin Ezra bent over him uncertainly. ‘I was only funning, Homer.’

  Lou-Ann faltered to a stop, and turned to watch anxiously. The cameraman stopped filming.

  Suddenly, Cousin Homer’s hands shot up and grabbed Ezra’s shirt front, pulling him off balance and down on top of him. ‘Gotcha, you bastard!’ he shouted, enthusiastically trying to put his knee through Ezra’s stomach. They rolled about, the wrestling match deteriorating as both of them began to shake with laughter.

  Good old Cousin Ezra – who could stay mad at him? The licensed jester of the Troupe, with his famous practical jokes. Everybody was laughing now, even Lou-Ann, as she turned back to the cameras and went on with her act.

  Cousin Ezra – a bastard I had overlooked. A minor bastard, and easily overlooked in the presence of such a major bastard as Black Bart. For that reason, perhaps, more dangerous. Cousin Ezra – whose ‘jokes’ had been known to have had serious consequences before. Serious, but not deadly – so far as we knew.

  But it was the sort of thing that would be just down Cousin Ezra’s street. ‘That bastard pushed me!’ Not any old bastard, but a particular one. One who would think it funny to push someone out into the line of moving traffic. Give him his due – he probably intended to pull her back again before anything happened. Catch her and haul her back on the pavement, while brakes shrieked all around them, and perhaps a couple of those funny, teeny English cars bumped into each other, while drivers cursed and mopped their brows. Yes, it would be a real good joke – just the job to give everyone a good, laughable, heart-stopping scare.

  But the joke had failed. Perhaps because Maw Cooney had stumbled and twisted out of his grasp. Or perhaps because he had depended too much on the reflexes of an unknown driver, and the brakes of an unknown car. Ezra came from a country where cars had to be inspected every six months to retain their Road Licence. How could he dream that the English laws were so much less demanding? It was unimaginable to a citizen of a more mobile country.

  And so, the spontaneous horse-play had gone wrong. Like Ezra’s other failure, when a woman had landed in hospital. But this woman didn’t recover. He couldn’t laugh that off. Nor could he admit it.

  Yes, Cousin Ezra was a very good bet as that murdering bastard. But again, there was no evidence.

  I saw Penny, carefully balancing a brimming cup of black coffee, moving towards me, but was so absorbed in my own brooding that the fact didn’t really register. I stood aside automatically to let her enter the dressing-room, and continued brooding. Perhaps I could get a nice quiet job with IBM ...

  About ten seconds later I heard a muffled shriek and the crash and splash of the coffee cup hitting the floor. I charged through the doorway in time to see Penny twist away from Bart’s grasp, leaving a jagged piece of her blouse in his hands.

  ‘You keep away from me,’ she gasped, ‘or I’ll –’

  ‘Come on, honey, don’t be like that.’ He was grinning. It was obvious that he enjoyed a good unequal fight.

  ‘Leave her alone!’ I snapped.

  ‘You again, boy?’ He turned on me slowly. ‘I told you – I’ve had enough of you. You git the hell outa here and mind your own business. You don’t give me orders – get that straight.’

  ‘Bart, cut it out! ’ Sam was behind me in the doorway.

  Bart told us both what we could do, and returned to stalking Penny. She was panicky and edging herself into a corner. I tried to signal her to get over towards the door.

  Bart caught the signal out of the corner of his eye, and half-turned towards me.

  It was then that Penny snatched up the bourbon bottle and brought it down over his head. The blow should have knocked him senseless, but he merely shook his head groggily, and completed the turn until he was facing me with a nasty light in his eye.

  ‘You hit me, boy,’ he said. ‘Now we are really going to tangle, and I’ll teach you some manners like your momma shoulda done. If’n she hadn’t’a been too busy trying to figure out who your daddy mighta been.’

  Where does chivalry begin and end? It was scarcely the moment to tell him that it was little Penny who had hit him. Not that he would have believed it, anyway. He’d been looking for an excuse to fight with me for days now. He was three inches taller than I was, and about a stone and a half heavier. All I could do was brace myself and hope that Penny’s blow had weakened him.

  We circled each other warily and, just as he made a sudden lunge towards me, Penny hit him again. This time he swayed visibly for a moment, then sagged to the floor between us. Penny looked a bit startled at what she had accomplished.

  ‘Nice work,’ I complimented her. ‘And he certainly had it coming to him.’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t so much that,’ she said. ‘I simply couldn’t let him hit you.’

  It occurred to me that Penny had all the makings of a really Faithful Old Retainer. And I must encourage her along this line. It would be a pity to lose her.

  ‘Well –’ Sam moved forward and looked down at Bart glumly – ‘I guess that finishes filming for today.’

  ‘Bart! Bart, honey!’ Lou-Ann hurtled through the doorway and flung herself to her knees beside him. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He slipped,’ I said quickly, motioning to Penny to dispose of the cracked bourbon bottle. She nodded, and quietly replaced it under the makeshift dressing-table.

  ‘Don’t y’all jest stand there!’ Lou-Ann tugged at Bart’s shoulders. ‘Help me pick him up and get him back to the hotel. We gotta get him a doctor. He coulda hurt himself.’

  Sam ground his teeth almost audibly and stooped to lift Bart by the shoulders. Ready to show willing, I picked up his feet and we lurched forward with him, while Lou-Ann fluttered along beside him. It was a pity we didn’t have any stairs to negotiate – with a little careful manoeuvring, we could have managed to drop him and made it look like another of those accidents.

  Gerry had gone to Penny and put his jacket around her, hiding her torn blouse. ‘I’ll see her home,’ he said quietly to me.

  ‘He slipped,’ Lou-Ann said, as we went through the studio, ‘and hit his head on the edge of the make-up table.’ It was a detail I didn’t remember telling her, but it fitted in very well.

  I saw the Cousins grin and nudge each other, and knew they had heard the beginning of the scuffle. They’d keep quiet, though, their jobs depended on it. And it wasn’t the first time they’d kept quiet about Bart.

  ‘Reckon we’ll come along.’ Crystal and Uncle No’ccount joined us. ‘Might be something we can do.’ Her eyes were on Lou-Ann as she spoke. It was obvious that she was more worried about her sister in-law than her brother. With a brother like that, it was understandable.

  There was no signal given that I could discern but, by the time we had reached the exit, the Cousins had packed up their instruments and were following along behind us. The hired cars were waiting at the kerb, and we all piled into them.

  By the time we pulled up in front of the hotel, Bart was conscious enough to go through the lobby upright, supported by Sam and me. He still wasn’t bright enough to navigate on his own, or take much notice of anything, though. I wondered if Lou-Ann were right and there might be some sort of damage. But I dismissed the thought – the devil looks after his own, and it was far more likely that Bart was shammin
g for some purpose of his own.

  We all crowded into the lift, leaving no room for anyone else. I began to see the advantages of travelling in entourage. In a curious sort of way, it provided privacy. We reached Bart’s suite without being approached by anyone.

  Inside, the Cousins deployed themselves around the room, leaning on the furniture and swapping meaning grins.

  ‘Like them old musicians always say.’ Cousin Zeke put down his guitar. ‘When a band is goin’ good, and the music is loud an’ sweet an’ lifting you up – why, it’s the next-best thing to a woman.’

  ‘Tell that to Bart,’ Cousin Homer said. ‘That ain’t what he thinks.’

  ‘Damn tootin’,’ Cousin Ezra joined in. ‘Bart thinks a woman is the next-best thing – to a little girl! ’

  They exploded with laughter. It was obviously one of their long-standing private in-jokes. Only Uncle No’ccount wasn’t laughing. He was looking unusually tight-lipped and moody, but perhaps that was the effect of being without teeth.

  Lou-Ann and Crystal had gone ahead into Bart’s bedroom and turned down the covers. We followed and dumped Bart on the bed with no unnecessary gentleness. He groaned and seemed to pass out again. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it or not.

  Lou-Ann had no doubt. ‘Get the doctor,’ she said wildly. ‘Get that doctor up here quick. Bart’s real bad.’

  Crystal stared down at him with something less than sisterly concern, and it was Sam who moved to the telephone and put in the call for the doctor.

  ‘He can’t have a doctor see him like that.” Lou-Ann was fussing around Bart, tugging at his boots, unbuttoning his shirt. ‘He gotta be undressed, so’s he can be examined proper.’ She looked at us hesitantly, loath to admit how much Bart would hate being undressed by herself.

  ‘Yeah.’ Sam moved again, reluctantly. ‘Yeah, maybe you’d better get his pyjamas – you know where they’re kept.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ She moved away eagerly. At least she knew that much. ‘Bart, now, he wouldn’t like being seen in nothing but his best.’ She pulled open a drawer.

  ‘He got a real pretty pair he bought in Savannah last year.’ She rummaged through the drawer – awkwardly, as she did everything. ‘It’s dark red, with gold dragons embroidered on it. Now, that’s the sorta thing it would be good for his image for the public to see him in. Maybe you could take some pictures –’ She tossed things about in the drawer frantically.

  ‘I jest know they’re here somewhere. I’m sure of it. I saw him put them there when he unpacked. Oh, here they are.’ She started to pull them out of the drawer. I was watching her and saw her slowly freeze.

  She stood there, the dark red pyjamas spilling like blood from her hands, and gave that funny little squawk of hers. Which wasn’t really funny – especially this time.

  We were all drawn across the room to her, and stood looking down into the drawer, as she was looking down. Mesmerized, as she was, by what we saw.

  Suddenly, there was evidence.

  CHAPTER XVII

  ‘THERE MUST BE some mistake,’ Lou-Ann said desperately. ‘There’s got to be.’

  Maw Cooney’s handbag lay at the bottom of the drawer. We had all seen it too often, been made too aware of it, to mistake it.

  Not one of us said anything. It was as though voicing our identification would be too positive, too final.

  ‘But, what is it doing here?’ Having admitted it to herself, Lou-Ann struggled with the next point. The police said somebody must’ve stolen it at the time of the accident. What is it doing in with Bart’s things?’

  It was a question no one wished to answer. The Cousins, drawn like vultures to the scene of catastrophe, came into the room, followed by Uncle No’ccount. Their grins fell away as they looked down into the drawer. For once, they seemed to recognize that some situations were beyond sniggering at.

  ‘Maybe it ain’t really hers,’ Cousin Homer suggested tentatively. ‘Maybe it jest looks the same.’

  ‘You think I don’t know my own Maw’s bag?’ Galvanized by the idea, Lou-Ann snatched up the bag and opened it.

  ‘Looky here.’ She began pulling out the contents, tossing them on the dressing-table top. ‘That’s her wallet, her notebook, her set of publicity pictures of me, her –’ Lou-Ann broke off, staring in puzzlement at the little bottle of pills she found in her hand.

  ‘That’s funny,’ she said, ‘these ain’t hers.’ She dropped them on the dressing-table.

  ‘They sure ain’t!’ Cousin Zeke moved forward and picked up the bottle. ‘They’s mine! They’s what Bart took away from me on the boat. He told me he threw them overboard.’

  Not all of them caught the implications at the same time. I saw Crystal move closer to Uncle No’ccount and receive his sheltering arm – they had had more experience of Bart’s malice than the others. They were under no illusions as to his capabilities.

  ‘Your sleeping pills.’ Sam came to it reluctantly, but inescapably, almost with relief. It meant goodbye to the big plans the Agency had had for Bart – this meant he was too much dynamite even for them to handle. But it also meant Lou-Ann had been telling the truth when she swore she hadn’t attempted suicide.

  ‘For sure, they’re mine. Jest you look at the label on that bottle – Dr H. D. Cadwallader, of Macon, Georgia. You remember.’ He turned to the other Cousins for confirmation. ‘We was playing a split week there when I was took so bad. He gave me some of those, and they helped so much I got him to do me a prescription for this tour. Ain’t that so?’

  They nodded agreement. Whatever else was murky, that much was clear. They remembered that split week in Macon, they remembered Dr H. D. Cadwallader – and the pills were definitely Zeke’s.

  ‘HYE! ’ The blurred, enraged voice from the bed startled us. ‘You damn trash – what you doin’ with my things?’ Bart stumbled out of bed and towards us. ‘You leave my things alone – you hear me?’

  ‘They ain’t your things, Bart.’ Lou-Ann faced him calmly, but her voice quavered. ‘They’re Maw’s.’

  ‘And mine,’ Zeke said, then retreated before Bart’s furious glare.

  ‘Give me that! ’ Bart snatched at the handbag. Lou-Ann did not retreat. She held the bag tightly. ‘It’s Maw’s, Bart. She always had it with her. It’s the one the police couldn’t find after she’d been hit by that car.’

  Bart may have been groggy, but his sense of self preservation was still operating. Intimidation hadn’t worked, so he switched on his most charming smile. ‘You’re upset, honey,’ he said tenderly. ‘Jest give me that now, and we’ll talk about it later.’

  Perhaps that smile had done something to Lou-Ann once, but the magic wasn’t working any more. ‘We can talk about it now,’ she said.

  The smile slowly faded from his face, but he kept a pleasant expression, the smile ready to make a comeback if there were any chance of it doing any good. He shook his head groggily and put a hand up to rub it; but, if that was a bid for sympathy, it failed, too. Lou-Ann regarded him impassively.

  ‘The police told us it must’ve been stolen,’ she said. ‘So how come you’ve got it, Bart?’

  We were all watching him, but it was Lou-Ann he must face and try to answer. He wasn’t doing so well.

  ‘Honey.’ He rubbed his forehead again, touched the back of his head gingerly, and winced. ‘Honey, I feel so awful. You got the doctor comin’ for me?’

  ‘He’ll come.’ There was a quality in her tone that said someone else might come for Bart, too. In fact, there was a new quality about her entirely – a steely coldness, coupled with a rigid control. She was changing before our eyes, and what we could see was only part of what was happening deep inside her. Perhaps she was growing up.

  ‘It was like this,’ Bart tried again. ‘After the police told us what happened – and everything – I went down to sorta have a look around where it happened. And I found this flung off in the bushes, like, and –’

  It wasn’t good enough, and he knew it. But he went on tryin
g.

  ‘So naturally I brought it back, and I was afeared it might upset you, if you saw it, so I didn’t –’

  ‘Why didn’t you give it to the police?’ Lou-Ann asked.

  ‘Why, I couldn’t do that, honey.’ He sounded surprised. ‘I mean, there mighta been something in it we wouldn’t want for them to see.’

  That, at least, had a ring of truth. The first truth in the whole farrago. Maw Cooney had been ruling his life by blackmail. When he killed her, he had to take her handbag away to obtain any evidence she might have been carrying. Whether there had been anything or not, we would never know.

  ‘After you checked, then why didn’t you give it to the police? You knew they were looking for it.’

  ‘Aw, honey, I couldn’t do a thing like that to you. It would’ve jest started them coming back around again, asking lots more questions, stirring it all up again. You don’t realize jest how upset you was. I couldn’t have you bothered no more.’

  ‘I know how upset I was, Bart,’ Lou-Ann said quietly. ‘I was mighty upset. But I wasn’t near so crazy with it as you tried to make out to everybody. Now, why was that, I wonder?’

  ‘Honey, I swear to you, you was that upset. Why, I was truly afeared –’ But he had gone too far into another danger zone. He saw that, and stopped abruptly.

  ‘No, Bart,’ Lou-Ann said sadly. ‘I wasn’t that upset. Maw wouldn’t have wanted for me to be. And I know how many pills I took that night, too. I only took one. And I hid the bottle so’s you couldn’t find it and throw them away, like you done Zeke’s.’ She paused, and corrected herself. ‘Like we thought you done Zeke’s.’

  ‘Honey.’ He was shaking his head, still protesting, but the verdict was going against him. The watching faces had closed against him.

  ‘Zeke –’ Lou-Ann gestured to the bottle – ‘you said you had enough pills for the tour. You know jest how many you had left?’