The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Nothing. Pauline banged and called again, and again.

  Still nothing.

  “Well, I don’t usually do this,” Pauline said with a sigh, “but I guess I need to find out if she’s sick or drinkin’.” She located the key and stuck it in the lock. “We’re comin’ in, Miz Riggs,” she called cheerily. “Hope you’re decent.”

  “No!” a voice cried. “I’m not decent! Don’t come in. I—”

  But it was too late. Pauline pushed the door open and went in, Verna on her heels. Pauline stopped a few paces inside the door and put her hands on her hips.

  “Who the dickens are you?” she demanded brusquely. “You ain’t Miz Riggs. And she only paid for one!”

  FIFTEEN

  Texas Star Kidnapped

  on Eve of Air Show!

  Lizzy was looking around Miss Dare’s room, pondering the question of whether Mildred or Roger could have had a hand in her disappearance, when Mildred, still wearing a stunned and disbelieving expression, brought Charlie Dickens upstairs.

  He stood in the open doorway, glancing around, frowning. He was dressed casually, in an open-necked blue shirt—no tie—and slacks. He looked tired and rumpled, as if he hadn’t slept much, and there was a coffee stain on his shirt.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked. He looked at Angel Flame. “I thought you and Miss Dare wanted to get out to the airstrip early.”

  “We do!” Angel’s voice dropped. “That is, we did. Until—” She gestured dramatically. “You can see for yourself, Mr. Dickens. She’s not here. She’s . . . gone!”

  “Gone where?” Charlie asked, his frown deepening.

  “We wish we knew!” Mildred cried, clenching her fists. “Mr. Dickens, I promise you that the front door was locked all night long, until I unlocked it myself, first thing this morning. We’re hoping you can figure it out. Please, please help us!”

  Lizzy pointed to the scrap of sheer material caught on the sill. “That’s her nightgown,” she said. “If you’ll look out the window, you can see her mule, down there on the ground.”

  Charlie leaned on the sill, looking out. “Her mule?”

  “Her high-heeled slipper,” Mildred explained.

  “That proves it, as far as I’m concerned.” Angel Flame’s voice was thin and high. “She’s been kidnapped! I know it!”

  Charlie turned to Lizzy. “I thought you and Verna were supposed to keep an eye on her,” he said accusingly.

  “We did,” Lizzy said. “Sort of, that is. Until—” She glanced at Angel Flame, then at Mildred.

  Mildred got the point. “Miss Flame,” she said, “let’s go downstairs and get some coffee. Mr. Dickens and Miss Lacy want to talk.”

  “But I want to hear,” Angel objected. She stamped her foot. “I think we ought to call the cops. We have to find out what’s happened to Lily!”

  “We will,” Charlie replied grimly. “Just give us a few minutes to sort things out. We’ll join you shortly.”

  Mildred led Angel, still protesting, out the door and closed it behind her.

  “Now,” Charlie said, scowling. “What’s happened here, Liz?”

  “I don’t have the foggiest,” Lizzy confessed. “But it was a very eventful night, believe me.” Mr. Moseley had trained her to remember and report conversations in detail, since information from a client could be very important. So she told Charlie everything she could remember about the two angry encounters—Mildred and Roger, with Miss Dare—that she and Verna had overheard. She had to tell him about Roger’s relationship with Miss Dare, as well as the anonymous letters and the telegrams asking for money. But at this point, breaking a confidence seemed irrelevant. She also told him about her conversation, afterward, with Miss Dare.

  “She told me to get out and not to bother her again,” she said, “no matter what. So even if Verna and I had heard something—an argument or noises or something like that—we probably wouldn’t have rushed in here. By that time,” she added, “we were feeling pretty foolish about the whole thing. And this morning, we decided we wouldn’t sleep over here tonight. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

  “I guess I can understand that,” Charlie said, shaking his head over all she had told him. “But you didn’t hear anything? After you talked to her for the last time, I mean. Or outside—you didn’t hear a vehicle?”

  “No, not a sound,” Lizzy said. “Outdoors or in.” She glanced around. “I know it looks like there’s been a struggle, and I don’t see how we missed hearing it. It should have woken us up, don’t you think?”

  “If there was a struggle,” Charlie said in a skeptical tone. “But maybe there wasn’t.” Under his breath, he muttered, “Damn the woman, anyway.”

  “No struggle? What about all this?” Lizzy gestured helplessly. “Somebody knocked over all this stuff. But who? And why? I can’t believe that Roger . . . or Mildred—” She stopped. “It could have been somebody from the outside, I suppose. But how did he get into the house without being heard? Did he climb up the trellis and come in through the window?”

  Charlie threw out his hands. “Look, Liz, if this was anybody else but Lily Dare, I might see it differently, and I’d be the first to call in the law. But Lily—” His eyes were narrow, his voice gruff. “Do you remember what I said yesterday? She’s a schemer.”

  Lizzy stared at him. “I don’t understand.” She went to the window and looked out. “Are you suggesting that she . . . she staged this? But why? What possible reason could she have?”

  Charlie countered with his own question. “If you were sleeping in this room and somebody came in and pulled you out of bed and dragged you toward that window, you’d yell, wouldn’t you? Especially if you knew that there were two women in the adjacent room and another right across the hall? You’d scream at the top of your lungs, wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, definitely,” Lizzy said hotly. “I’d not only scream, I would scratch his eyes out!”

  “And if you couldn’t scream—if you were gagged, say, or somebody had his hand over your mouth—you’d kick the floor. You’d make enough noise to wake the dead. Wouldn’t you?”

  Lizzy nodded. “Of course I would. But maybe . . .” She thought of something she had read in one of the true crime magazines Verna was always loaning her. “Maybe the kidnapper hit her over the head and knocked her out, or used chloroform or something.”

  “Maybe. But if she was unconscious, there wouldn’t have been a struggle. We wouldn’t see the furniture knocked over.” Charlie went to the window. “But more important, Liz, just how do you think a kidnapper is going to get an unconscious woman out of this window? Is he going to throw her out? Let’s reconstruct this—hypothetically, that is.”

  Doubtfully, Lizzy looked out the window. It was only a ten-foot drop. “Maybe he lowered her?” she suggested. “By her arms, I mean. She’s not a very big woman. Around 120 pounds, maybe.”

  “Possible, I grant you. But if she’s unconscious, she’s a dead weight. The kidnapper would have to be strong enough, which lets out quite a few candidates. Angel Flame couldn’t have done it, for instance.”

  “Angel?” Lizzy asked, puzzled. “Why would she—”

  But Charlie was going on with his hypothetical reconstruction. “So this muscular kidnapper has lowered an unconscious Lily to the ground. And then what? Does he drag her into a waiting vehicle which is parked out front—and which nobody heard? I don’t think so, Liz.” He paused. “And who would have done this, anyway? Not Roger, although he might be strong enough. This is his house. He’d be at the top of the suspect list. And if he were going to kidnap her, there’d be none of this window nonsense. He’d take her out the front door.”

  “The same goes for Mildred,” Lizzy said thoughtfully. “She would never have wanted Miss Dare to disappear from her house. If nothing else, it’s a huge embarrassment.” She considered for a moment. “
How about Rex Hart? I know that you’ve been suspicious of him.”

  Charlie chuckled shortly. “Where do you think I’ve been all night? I was in the shed at the airstrip, keeping an eye on those planes—and on Hart. I wanted to make sure he didn’t have a chance to try any dirty tricks with Lily’s plane. He could have been behind the earlier sabotage, but I can swear that he didn’t leave the shed all night long. Same with the rest of the crew—the three guys who drove in yesterday afternoon in an old rattletrap truck.”

  “I see,” Lizzy said.

  “Right. So who are we looking for? Some mystery man—a strong guy—who has never shown his hand until now?” He shook his head. “Uh-uh, Liz. I don’t think anybody else was in this room after you left it last night. I think this is one of Lily Dare’s damned cockamamie schemes.”

  “I see what you’re saying,” Lizzy said. She looked around the room. “Which means that she did all this herself. She turned the furniture over—”

  “Quietly,” Charlie put in, “so you and Verna wouldn’t come running over here and stop her.”

  “Turned the furniture over quietly,” Lizzy continued. “She had to get dressed, because she wouldn’t want to go wandering around Darling in her nightgown. She ripped a piece off her nightgown and snagged it on the windowsill. And tossed her mule onto the ground and then climbed out the window and down the trellis. And she took her handbag.”

  “Her handbag?” Charlie asked.

  “Yes.” Lizzy went to the dresser. “It was right here, Charlie. A big leather handbag. I saw her take a cigar out of it. A woman would never go anywhere without her handbag—it has her wallet in it, her identification, her money, her smokes, everything. But a kidnapper likely wouldn’t think about such a thing. He wouldn’t need it, so he wouldn’t bother with it. He’d be too busy trying to handle her.”

  “Ah,” Charlie said, nodding. “Of course, Liz. You’re right. It’s something a man wouldn’t even think of.”

  “But that doesn’t answer the central question,” Lizzy replied. “Where did she go in the middle of the night? And why?”

  “I have no idea,” Charlie replied. “You said that both of the arguments last night were pretty awful. Some harsh words were said, punches thrown. Maybe she just couldn’t face Mildred or Roger this morning. Couldn’t look them in the eye—especially if theirs were as black as hers.” He shook his head. “So she skipped. Classic Lily Dare behavior.”

  “Maybe, but . . . Hang on a minute, Charlie.” Lizzy frowned, concentrating, trying to remember. “Miss Dare said something last night, as I was leaving the room. I asked her if she had any idea who might have written the letters to Mildred or sent those telegrams asking for money. She said she was ninety-nine percent sure that she knew who did it. Then she said she intended to ‘settle some hash’ over it. She sounded pretty angry, too.”

  Charlie nodded approvingly. “Sounds like Lily. She’s got some sort of plan.”

  “Maybe,” Lizzy replied. “But that doesn’t explain the faked struggle.”

  “Right.” Charlie pushed his lips in and out. “If you ask me, she’s playing for attention. Lily likes to be the star of the show. Something as dramatic as this—” He shrugged. “It would suit her. She’s always playing for attention, you know, with that airplane and those aerial stunts. A promoter. A self-promoter. She can probably read the headlines in her mind: Texas Star Kidnapped on Eve of Air Show!”

  “You’ve convinced me,” Lizzy said. “But you have to convince Angel Flame. She’s ready to phone the sheriff’s office. Now that we’ve come to this conclusion, it doesn’t seem like a very good idea—to me, anyway. I don’t want to answer questions about Roger Kilgore and Miss Dare. There are some things that are better kept private.”

  “Well, maybe,” Charlie said. “But blackmail is a crime, you know, and so is extortion. And it may have escalated into something else—like that sabotage.”

  Lizzy crinkled her nose. “You’re thinking that the same person—”

  “I am. But I agree that we don’t want the sheriff asking questions.” Charlie started for the door. “Come on. We’d better get downstairs and make sure that nobody makes that phone call.”

  But they were too late. As they came down the stairs, Deputy Buddy Norris was knocking at the front door in response to a telephone call from Angel Flame, which she’d made over Mildred’s strenuous objections.

  “It’s Miss Dare!” Angel informed him excitedly. “She’s been kidnapped!”

  “The Texas Star, kidnapped?” Buddy was incredulous. “Here in little ol’ Darlin’?”

  “Yes, oh, yes!” Angel grabbed Buddy’s arm. The freckles were standing out all over her pale face. “Please, Buddy! You’ve got to find Lily—before something terrible happens to her!”

  SIXTEEN

  “Hearts Full of Passion . . .”

  Verna looked over Pauline DuBerry’s shoulder. The motor court cottage was dim, since the cotton curtain was drawn across the only window. But enough daylight filtered into the small, low-ceilinged room to see that the walls were painted a dirty gray and the floor was covered with green linoleum. The furnishings were spartan: a pine chest of drawers with a wall mirror over it, a wooden straight chair, and two narrow single beds with a lamp table and a lamp between them. Both beds were unmade, and a dark-haired, good-looking woman was sitting on one of them, wearing a peach-colored, lace-trimmed nightgown with a raggedly torn hem. Her hair was mussed from sleep and her left eye was purpled and puffy. She was smoking a small cigar.

  “I said, ‘I’m not decent,’” the woman said in a testy voice. “I’m not dressed for company.”

  “And I’m askin’, who the dickens are you?” Pauline DuBerry repeated sternly, hands on hips. “Miz Riggs paid for one. If there’s goin’ to be two of you sleepin’ in this cottage, she’s goin’ to have to pay for two. Means more laundry, you know. Bed sheets and towels gotta be washed.”

  “Don’t nag, I’ll pay,” the woman said, reaching for her leather handbag. “And Raylene didn’t invite me, so don’t be mad at her. I knocked on her door in the middle of the night, looking for a place to stay, and she was sweet enough to let me in. How much do I owe you?” She put her cigar in the ashtray and took out her wallet. “And while we’re at it, could I book a cottage for myself? I’d like it for tonight and Saturday night.”

  “Oh, well,” Pauline said, mollified. “If you’re bookin’ for you, we’ll just forget last night. A dollar fifty. Seventy-five cents a night for two nights.”

  “Here’s two dollars,” the woman said, and handed over the bills. “Keep the change.”

  “Why, thank you.” Pauline smiled as she tucked the money into her apron pocket. “Stop by the office and get a key. I’ll put you in Number Five. The one with the red door.” She opened the door, then turned back. “If you want something for that shiner, I can brew up some sage tea and make you a compress. That’s what my mama did for us kids when we was little. Works, too.”

  “Thanks,” the woman said, and put her handbag on the floor beside her. “Maybe later. I have some things to do this morning.”

  “Later will be too late,” Pauline cautioned. “Black eyes—you gotta get to ’em quick, or they’ll be around for a while.”

  “I’ll risk it,” the woman said.

  Pauline shrugged and left but Verna stayed behind, now very puzzled. “Miss Lily Dare?” she asked tentatively. The cigar, the black eye, the sheer peach negligee—it had to be her, although as far as she knew, Miss Dare was either still asleep in Mildred Kilgore’s guest bedroom or sitting at Mildred’s breakfast table. So what was she doing here?

  “I don’t think we’ve met,” the woman said coolly. She picked up her cigar, saw that it had gone out, and laid it back in the ashtray. “Yeah, I’m Lily Dare. How’d you know? And just who the devil are you?”

  “Er, ah . . .” Verna was almost nev
er at a loss for words, but she was now. She didn’t want to confess that she had been playing amateur detective the night before and had intentionally eavesdropped on the unpleasant conversations in Miss Dare’s room. She doubted that Agatha Christie had ever let Miss Marple get cornered in such a sticky wicket.

  “I . . . I was at the movie last night and somebody pointed you out,” she lied. “Hell’s Angels. That was a really good flick—loved that air combat. I heard you were staying at the Kilgores’, so I’m a little surprised to see you here.”

  “I was staying at the Kilgores’,” Miss Dare said. “In fact, I was invited to spend the weekend. But I changed my mind. I’m staying here.” She gave Verna a pointed look. “Just what did you say your name was?”

  Verna stared at the woman, thinking that she had to have left the Kilgores’ after Liz talked to her—and how did she get all the way out to the Marigold Motor Court in the middle of the night? It must be at least a mile. Had she walked? In that see-through negligee she was wearing?

  “Your name?” Miss Dare asked again.

  “Oh, sorry,” Verna replied hastily. “I’m Verna Tidwell. Actually, I came here looking for Raylene Riggs. She didn’t show up at work this morning, and Miss Mosswell, her boss at the diner, is worried about her.”

  Miss Dare got up and went to the mirror over the dresser, touching her eye tenderly. “Raylene is on her way to work. We were up kind of late talking and we both overslept. But she got a lift into town. She should be at work by now.” She leaned toward the mirror, peering at her reflection. “Does this eye look very bad to you?”

  “Not too bad,” Verna said diplomatically. She paused. “How did it happen?”

  “I walked into a door,” Miss Dare said in a bored voice.

  Oh, right, Verna thought sarcastically. More like Mildred’s fist.

  Miss Dare opened her handbag and took out a little jar, deftly applying something to her face. She regarded herself in the mirror, added a few touchups, then turned around. “There. Does that look better?”