Who Killed Blanche DuBois?

by Carole Elizabeth Buggé

  They changed quickly—the best thing Meredith had to wear was a brown corduroy jumper—grabbed a cab, and were there by 12:55. Marshall was already seated at the bar.

  “Well, well, you made it,” he said, draining the last of his martini. “I wasn’t even sure if you were in town when I called.”

  They were seated at a corner table, and the staff treated Marshall in a way that indicated he was a regular.

  “Wow, this is cool,” said Meredith, looking around.

  “Yes, just try not to gape too hideously much, or I’ll lose the respect of the staff,” Marshall remarked dryly.

  Meredith laughed. “I’ll try not to act like a tourist from Connecticut.” Claire was glad to see her enjoying herself.

  “Order whatever you want,” Marshall said breezily. “I’m going to write this off as a business lunch. I came into town to keep an appointment with a dealer but he forgot about the meeting, so I’m entitled to enjoy myself.”

  “I didn’t know dentists had business lunches,” said Meredith.

  “I’m an oral surgeon, not a dentist,” Marshall said a little huffily. “The difference is three more years medical school and about fifty thousand dollars in student loans.” He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Anyway, today I missed seeing a Union canteen and ammunition box circa 1861, and so I shall drown my sorrows in béchamel sauce.”

  Claire ordered the turbot, Marshall ordered oysters, and Meredith had a steak sandwich.

  “You know, I thought of asking Cousin Sarah to join us, but there’s nothing like a meal with Sarah to spoil your appetite,” Marshall said as he speared an oyster from his plate.

  “What is it with you and Sarah?” said Meredith.

  Marshall laughed and removed the olive from his martini. His laugh was a thin needle of air, flat and dry as a gust of winter wind.

  “This new bartender they have doesn’t understand that olives belong in salads, not martinis,” he muttered, looking around the restaurant. “Have you ever heard Sarah mention anything about a—boyfriend?” he said, addressing his remark to Claire.

  “Um . . . no, I guess not,” she said.

  “Right. Neither have I. In fact, neither has anyone.” He paused to let the import of his comment sink in. Marshall had a sense of dramatic timing all his own.

  “What are you saying?” said Meredith.

  “Good Lord, surely it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out!”

  “Oh,” said Claire. “Oh.”

  “Right,” Marshall replied smugly.

  “Oh,” said Meredith. “So that’s it! That’s the Big Secret!” She shrugged. “Big deal. I wonder why she’s so sensitive about it.”

  “My dear,” Marshall replied dryly, “you have to realize that not all the world holds the same open views as yourself about homosexuality, especially when it comes to a woman of Sarah’s august social and professional standing. Can you imagine Arlene Lucien’s reaction if they were to learn that their precious head of marketing thinks more about dykes than dyes, that she’s a genuine lesbo? I imagine once they sensed the metaphorical pink triangle on her lapel, the very real pink slip would follow soon after.” He lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke straight up into the air.

  Claire was still stunned. “I can’t believe I never—I mean, I never really thought about it. I always saw Sarah as so—”

  “So remote, beyond the lure of base sensuality?” Marshall offered, smiling. “Oh, you’d be surprised. Of course, that was what she wanted people to think, but her official image as Southern Ice Princess hides a dark and deeply erotic nature.” His tone was sarcastic and flippant, and he settled back in his chair, cigarette held gracefully aloft, legs crossed, a sardonic smile on his face, like a character out of a Noël Coward play. Claire always believed that Marshall’s cynicism was partly a function of his life as a homosexual, and that his analysis of Sarah’s mask came easily because his own was so firmly in place. Well, I suppose we all wear a mask of some kind, she thought.

  “So Sarah likes girls?” said Meredith, trying to impress Marshall with her bluntness, Claire supposed.

  Marshall laughed.

  “Well, hardly,” he said. “I mean, she’s not a pedophile or anything like that . . . though I do sometimes wonder at her taste in women.”

  “Well, that could explain her undercover behavior,” Meredith said thoughtfully.

  “What?” asked Marshall.

  “Meredith thinks there’s something furtive about Sarah. She told me so after she first met her,” said Claire.

  “Oh,” said Marshall. “Yes, I suppose being ‘in the closet’ is a little like being undercover . . .”

  “How come you know about it but no one else does?” said Meredith.

  “Well, darling, it takes one to know one, doesn’t it? Actually”—he snuffed out his cigarette on his salad plate— “to be perfectly honest, I didn’t really know for sure until about a year ago. I mean, I had my suspicions, of course, but then I ducked into Henrietta Hudson for a lark one night and saw her. It’s an upscale lesbian hangout in the Village,” he added in response to Meredith’s blank look. “She tried to explain it away,” he continued, “but—well, it was quite clear, and the young thugette she was courting wouldn’t go away just because her dear cousin Marshall had arrived.”

  Marshall shuddered. “I always thought Sarah would go for the pearls-and-round-collar types, but I was dead wrong: she likes the East Village punks—you know, the ones who have mistaken their bodies for pin cushions. This particular one had a skull-and-crossbones leitmotif going on—very Wagnerian, blond braids and all.” He shrugged. “Well, you know what they say about accounting for taste and all that. Still, it was a bit of a shock to imagine Sarah and that refugee from Treasure Island.”

  “What type do you go for?” said Meredith.

  Marshall displayed his sunniest smile.

  “Pretty ones,” he said. “Plump and pretty. None of this iron-man thing—I like them soft and sweet. But enough about me,” he said, seeing the alarm in Claire’s eyes.

  “So is that why Sarah’s mad at you?” Meredith asked.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say she’s mad at me,” Marshall answered cheerfully. “Just frightened of me. She’s terrified I’ll spill the beans, and that puts her in a bad mood around me.” He sighed. “I suppose I have spilled the beans—but you won’t tell anyone, will you?”

  “No,” said Meredith, “why should I?”

  “I don’t know. No reason, but now if it gets out, it’ll be my fault. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I suppose I was getting tired of the responsibility . . . it’s a lot to carry around, you know.”

  “I can’t believe no one else at Arlene Lucien is gay,” Claire remarked.

  “Well, if they are, they ain’t talkin’, honey,” Marshall told her. “Either that or no one’s listening, and it amounts to the same thing. Of course, Sarah is certain that if she even hinted at it, she would be the center of a firestorm of controversy, and she’s probably right. Corporate image and everything, you know . . . How’s the investigation going, by the way?” he said to Meredith.

  “Well, we haven’t had that much luck so far.”

  “I’m sorry.” Marshall sounded sincere for once. “It’s really been hard on Sarah, you know. Her sister and her best friend . . .” He stared out the window, shaking his head. Claire suddenly realized that Marshall’s cynical persona had prevented her from really looking at him, but now as she studied him she saw what a good-looking man he was, his leonine face handsome and dignified in repose, the heavy eyelids lending him an air of gravity.

  “Well, I’ll see you later,” he said after he signed the check.

  “Thanks for lunch,” said Meredith.

  “My pleasure. Do me a favor, though—don’t take this detective thing too seriously, okay? Two people have already died.”

  “I know.” Meredith nodded.

  Marshall looked at her with a curious expression on his face.

>   “Don’t be the third,” he said, and then, nodding to Claire, turned and left the restaurant.

  “Hmm,” said Meredith, looking after him, “I wonder why he felt he had to warn me.”

  Claire was wondering the same thing.

  Chapter 21

  Later that afternoon Claire was sitting on her bed reading over the manuscript of Blanche’s Klan book while Meredith sat on the bedroom rug brushing Ralph. Meredith held him firmly pinned to the floor with one hand, hairbrush in the other; the cat miserably tolerated her grasp, waiting for the moment to escape. Claire looked down at them, and Ralph’s eyes pleaded with her for release.

  “Are you sure that cats need to be brushed?” Claire said.

  “Oh, yes. It’s good for them; it stimulates their hair follicles.” Meredith applied more energy to the task as if to prove her point.

  “Well, do his hair follicles really need stimulating?” Claire asked. “I mean, he sheds plenty as it is.”

  “Well, this will help with the shedding, because the excess hairs will end up on the brush instead of your rug.” Meredith held up the brush, which was full of white cat hairs. At that moment Ralph saw his opening and took it, squirming out from under her grasp and bounding toward the kitchen.

  “Damn!” Meredith got up to follow.

  “Oh, let him go. He’s had enough for tonight . . . and don’t swear.”

  “Do you really think bad language warps a young mind?” Meredith asked. “I mean, what difference could it possibly make, given all the trash that’s available on TV all the time?”

  “I don’t know,” Claire responded wearily, “but I’m sure your parents don’t want you to swear, and so I—”

  “My ‘parents,’ as you call them, don’t care much what I do, so long as it doesn’t interfere with their plans,” Meredith replied icily.

  “Oh, come on, Meredith, your father loves you; you know he does.”

  Just then the phone rang, and Claire picked it up. As if on cue, Ted Lawrence’s cultivated voice said, “Hello, Ms. Rawlings, it’s Ted Lawrence. I just thought I’d call.”

  “Hello,” said Claire, and almost added we were just talking about you, but decided against it.

  “How are you getting along?” he said, an edge of apprehension in his voice. He sounded as though he had been drinking. There was a softness around the edge of his consonants.

  “Oh, fine,” she said. “Do you want to talk to Meredith?”

  “Yes, thank you, if she’s there.”

  Where else would she be? Claire thought, and handed the phone to Meredith.

  “It’s your father.”

  Meredith sighed and took the phone.

  “Hi . . . oh, I’m fine; how are you?” Meredith pulled the phone across the bed and lay on her back on the floor. “Oh, nothing much,” she said, “just trying to solve a murder. Well, actually, there have been two now, though not everyone knows it. I mean, some of the police don’t know how to put two and two together . . .”

  There was a pause, and Meredith looked up at Claire.

  “The Wicked Witch is saying something to him. She always does that. She waits till he gets on the phone, and then she yells at him from the other room.” Meredith put her feet up in the air and swung them back and forth. “That’s okay, I’m still here,” she said into the receiver. “What was she saying to you?” There was another pause. “She’s talking again,” Meredith told Claire.

  Claire felt that the phone conversation was none of her business, so she left the bedroom and went into the living room. She was uncomfortable with Meredith’s attempt to pull her into a conspiracy against Jean Lawrence. She didn’t like the woman, who, it was clear, wasn’t the world’s best stepmother, but she didn’t want to join a cabal against her. She intended to remain as neutral as possible, at least in front of Meredith. She had left her manuscript in the bedroom, and rather than go back in and get it, she turned on the little television in the living room.

  Claire felt a little decadent owning two televisions. She’d had the little television for years, and then when it broke she found the big one on sale and bought it, intending to throw out the little one, but she hated throwing things out, so she went ahead and had it fixed anyway.

  When she turned on the set the screen flickered into life. She changed the channel to NBC, where Dateline had yet another set of spin doctors talking about the ongoing O. J. Simpson drama. The lawyers were going on and on about how racially divided the country was. The Goldmans had just made another statement regarding their upcoming civil suit, and the news media were already licking their chops over the coverage of yet another Simpson trial.

  Meredith walked into the room, the instrument of Ralph’s torture still in her hand.

  “Ugh,” she said, throwing herself dramatically on the couch.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, she’s just so—so icky, you know?”

  “What did she do?”

  “Oh, she didn’t do anything; she never does anything— except take drugs—it’s just her attitude.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, everything. She’s got this idea now that I shouldn’t be investigating the murders, and she’s got my father all worried about it.”

  “Worried about what?”

  “Oh, she’s telling him that something will happen to me. I don’t know . . .” Meredith rolled over on her back, her legs in the air, clutching a pillow to her chest. Just then Ralph entered the room tentatively; seeing Meredith, he backed out again.

  “They want me to come back up for Thanksgiving. My cousins will all be there.”

  “Well, maybe you should go.”

  Meredith flopped over onto her stomach.

  “I hate my cousins.”

  “Look, Meredith,” Claire said, “you can’t just turn your back on your family.”

  “I don’t see why not. They’re all stupid and boring.”

  Claire walked over to the couch and sat down next to the girl.

  “Sometimes you have to try to get along with people even if you think they’re stupid and boring.”

  “All right,” said Meredith. “I’ll go, if you insist.”

  “I don’t insist; it’s just that I’m sure they would like to have you there.”

  “All right, I get the picture. I’ll go, okay? Are you satisfied now?”

  Claire tried to think of something else to say, but Meredith buried her face in the pillow. Claire decided to leave her alone for a while, and went back into the bedroom. She knew that Meredith’s anger wasn’t really directed toward her.

  Claire picked up Blanche’s manuscript. She had been avoiding diving into the project of rewriting it, held back by a strange reluctance, but she was doing her best to fight it. She opened the manuscript to the chapter she had been reading. It was entitled “The Greensboro Massacre” and was about the killing of five people by Klansmen during a march in Greensboro in 1979. Claire had already left North Carolina when it happened, but she remembered reading about it. The incident had been a nasty example of police complicity: an armed convoy of Klansmen had fired, almost casually, into a group of civil rights marchers who were holding an anti-Klan rally in a residential neighborhood, fatally wounding five marchers, as the police looked on. Later, it became clear that one of the gunmen had somehow been able to elude arrest, in spite of the presence of many witnesses. As Claire read Blanche’s account her admiration for the woman grew; behind the silly pink-and-powdered Southem-belle facade had lurked a social conscience after all.

  On one of the pages, Claire noticed a number scribbled in the margin in pencil. It was faint and faded, but it looked like a phone number. She recognized the 919 area code: North Carolina. She reached for the bedside phone and then hesitated. There was no name next to the number; how would she know whom to ask for?

  She picked up the manuscript and looked at the number again. Then she lifted the receiver and dialed. It rang twice, then a machine answered. A man’s voice with a So
uthern accent said, “Hi. You have reached Jeff’s photographic studio. I’m in the darkroom right now with a hot little number, so leave your number and I’ll call you when I can.” Claire listened until she heard the beep, but then hung up abruptly. She didn’t even know who this person was, or why his phone number would be written in Blanche’s book.

  “Whatcha doing?” asked Meredith, appearing in the doorway. She was apparently over her snit.

  “Oh, just working on the manuscript,” Claire replied.

  “Who were you calling?”

  “I’m not really sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, look.” She showed the number to Meredith.

  Meredith took the manuscript and looked at the number.

  “Did anyone answer?”

  “I got a machine. It’s a photography studio of some kind.”

  “Did you leave a message?”

  “No. I don’t even know why Blanche has this number.”

  “Hmm . . . I wonder.” Meredith sat on the edge of the bed. She looked at the number again, then picked up the phone and handed it to Claire. “Call and leave your number, only say you’re Blanche DuBois.”

  “Why?”

  “I just have a feeling about this.”

  Claire didn’t know where Meredith was headed but she picked up the phone and dialed the number. To her surprise, a man answered this time.

  “Jeff’s Photos.” The voice was the same as the one on the machine—high and reedy, with a cultivated Southern accent.

  “Uh, hello,” Claire said.

  “What can I do for you?” the man asked, all business.

  “Well, I—I want to check on some photos,” Claire answered, feeling her way. Meredith stood beside her, watching tensely, coaching her with gestures.

  “Okay, what’s your last name?” said the man.

  “Uh, DuBois—Blanche DuBois.”

  Meredith nodded energetically.

  “Just a minute,” he said, and Claire heard the sound of paper rustling.

  “What’s he doing?” Meredith whispered.

  “He’s looking it up.”

  The man returned to the phone.