Black & White & Dead All Over: A Lost Hat, Texas, Mystery (The Lost Hat, Texas, Mystery Series Book 1)

by Anna Castle

  “I’m fine,” she grumbled. “I guess I’m a better actor than we thought.”

  “Or not.” He kissed her on the nose and gently peeled away the remains of her moustache. He handed it to her and she put it in the watch pocket of her vest.

  “Mr. M.,” I said. “You have to tell us. Now that I’ve made a colossal ass of myself.”

  “No, Penny, it’s all right. You couldn’t have known. From a distance, I imagine it looked pretty nefarious. You were very brave.” He beamed at me: the A student.

  “We’re still waiting,” Krystle said.

  “I know, I know.” He sighed. “It’s been fun keeping my little secret. Locally, anyway.” He pulled the wig off and scratched his scalp. “This thing itches.”

  “You should use a helmet liner,” Tillie suggested. “I think you can get them at motorcycle stores.”

  Now he beamed at her. “Tillie! My other hero!”

  “Don’t I get to be a hero?” Krystle pouted.

  “You are all heroes. Now, let’s go up and have a beer and I’ll tell you my tale.”

  Mr. M. and Licha slipped inside to change into jeans and corduroy shirts. They came back out with five Shiner Bocks and a bag of tortilla chips. We gathered around the patio table to enjoy the warmth of the late afternoon sun.

  I had a feeling it was going to be a long story and I was not wrong. The gist of it was that Mr. M. had gotten tired of earning high praise and low royalties for his literary novels and decided to try his hand at steamy historical romances, which he published under the name Violet Seacourt.

  “Ohmigod!” Tillie shrieked, shocking us out of our seats and making me spill my beer. “I adore her! So does Mami! And my aunties! Her books are soooo hot!”

  “Thank you, thank you.” Mr. M. grinned. “I’ll make sure y’all get autographed copies of the next one.”

  His sales were rocketing to the stratosphere, which explained the fancy new toys. The tableaux we’d interrupted was a scene from his next book.

  “It’s hard to put myself in a woman’s shoes,” Mr. M. explained. “Or rather, into her dress and hairdo. That’s a lot of drapery to contend with. It changes the way you move and what kinds of strategies you look for in a tight spot.”

  Tillie and Krystle were ready to dive into that discussion. I had no objection, but I needed one question answered first. “So Greg never tried to blackmail you?”

  “Oh, he tried,” Mr. M. said. “He intercepted a letter from my agent. It had the word ‘rape’ in it; a metaphorical usage, but I suspect that’s what caught Greg’s eye.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I paid him once and then I decided to hell with it. I told him to publish and be damned. I wrote a blurb about my true identity and put it on Violet’s website along with a photo of the real me. My fan mail quadrupled and my sales went through the roof. Being blackmailed is the best thing that could have happened to my writing career.”

  Chapter 40

  “Another one crossed off the list,” I said. “Not that I’m complaining. I would have hated to lose Mr. M. as a neighbor.”

  “He’s gotten a lot cooler since he retired,” Krystle said.

  “I can’t believe he’s Violet Seacourt,” Tillie said. “My aunties are going to be camping out at his house.”

  We passed a sheriff’s department car. Krystle’s eyes followed it. “We should pack it in.”

  “One more,” I said. “I have to know what Robbie and Skip are up to.”

  “As long as we don’t get in trouble,” Tillie said, craning her neck to see if the deputies had turned to follow us. They hadn’t.

  “We’ll do one more,” Krystle said. “Then I vote we go back to your studio and regroup.”

  “Me, too,” Tillie said.

  “Me, three,” I said. “But first, the bad boys.”

  We found them jogging around the track behind the high school in their practice uniforms. We stood in front of the bleachers and waved. Skip nearly tripped over another kid in surprise. Robbie pointed furiously at the back of the stands, but I shook my head and pointed at the seats.

  We were not going to meet two high school boys under the bleachers after school. Everyone and his homeroom teacher would assume we were dealing drugs and I didn’t need any more rumors stinking up my reputation in this town.

  The boys jogged over to join us. Their uniforms made them look both larger and younger. They sat in the row below us and half-turned in our direction.

  “So what’d you find on those DVDs?” Skip asked Krystle. He tried to sound casual.

  “Haven’t looked yet.”

  “Dude, give them to us. We’ll check ’em out and then we’ll destroy them. We swear.”

  I shook my head. “No way. We are not giving Greg Alexander’s home DVD collection to a pair of teenage boys.”

  Robbie raised three fingers in the Boy Scout salute. “We promise to look at them with our eyes closed.”

  “What’s on the DVDs?” Tillie asked.

  “Pornography.”

  “Eew,” she said.

  That pretty much summed it up.

  “Robbie,” I said. “You need to tell me why Greg was blackmailing you.”

  “No way,” Skip said.

  “So he had both of you?” Krystle said.

  “Not me,” Skip said.

  “Oh, thanks,” Robbie said.

  “You might as well tell us,” Tillie said. “We already know most of it.”

  We did? Oh! She was bluffing. I was impressed. I didn’t know Tillie was capable of such deviousness.

  “Yeah,” Krystle said, playing along, “we heard y’all talking last night.”

  “In Greg’s house, remember?” I wanted to play bad cop, but these were the boys who had worked their butts off in my studio over Christmas. I crumbled. “Tell me, Robbie. I need to know y’all didn’t kill Greg.”

  “You’ll tell Mom.”

  “I will not. Besides, she probably already knows. Your mother knows everything.”

  Robbie heaved a tragedy-laden sigh. “She knows something’s up.” He and Skip consulted each other in a code consisting of eye rollings and facial shrugs.

  Skip said, “It’s worse if they think we killed that dude.”

  “Much worse,” I quickly agreed.

  Robbie ran his hand through his sweaty hair, making it stick up in back. “Things weren’t supposed to go this far. It started out as a joke, you know? To see if I could.”

  “If you could what?”

  “OK, OK. I was cruising around the web and I got into this chat room of, like, James Bond aficionados and they were talking about British cars and I started pretending I was like this big Jaguar dealer in Austin and then this woman flirted with me and I flirted back and the next thing you know, we’re in a private chat and it’s starting to get kind of heavy, you know?”

  “Jaguar dealer?” Krystle sounded incredulous.

  Robbie shrugged. “You can find out everything online. Specs and photos and everything.”

  “Wait a minute,” Tillie said. “Was the woman’s name Melanie, by any chance?”

  Robbie groaned. “What are the odds? There’s like the whole world out there and I have to hit on someone from my own hometown.”

  I had to sympathize with the guy.

  “You mean Melanie Matslar?” I asked Tillie. “The one you were telling me and Marion about?”

  “You mean my mom knows?” Robbie wailed.

  “What? Who? What?” Krystle was pulling on Tillie’s sleeve in her eagerness to get the full dish.

  Tillie filled her in. “Melanie was going on and on at Aunt Dolly’s salon, about this rich Jaguar dealer she was having an affair with and how she was going to leave her husband and move to Austin to live in style for a change.”

  “Oh, my God,” Krystle said. She shook her head at Robbie with a look that was more than half admiration. “You must be quite the actor.”

  He shook his head modestly, but had a proud grin
on his face. “Mostly I just echoed whatever she said. You know, like they told us in Social Studies? How to Be a Good Listener?”

  We laughed. “And kids think school is irrelevant,” I said.

  “Greg Alexander caught on to it before Rob did,” Skip told us. “That it was Mrs. Matslar, I mean. That’s when he started making Rob do stuff, you know, like yard work.”

  “I hated that son of a—” Robbie broke off. He wasn’t old enough to swear in front of adults yet.

  “Not enough to kill him, though,” I said.

  “No way!” Robbie’s brown eyes pleaded with me. “But if my mom finds out, she may kill me.”

  I thought back over that lunchtime conversation with Tillie and Marion. Had it only been two weeks ago? I remembered the worried frown that had suddenly crossed Marion’s face as Tillie was telling her story. “I think she already knows,” I said.

  The big question was, did she know about the blackmail? And if she did, how far would she go to protect her firstborn child?

  Chapter 41

  Marion’s SUV stood in the driveway of her well-tended house. I’d been hoping she’d be roaming around the county, teaching young mothers how to squeeze more nutrition out of their food budgets. I didn’t want to question her. What if she acted evasive?

  Marion could not have killed Greg. She was all about helping people. The universe could not contain such a contradiction without exploding. And yet, she’d had every opportunity. She’d been at the meeting where Jim had died. I flashed back to the memory of her telling Jim not to eat that pink cake. Had she known it was poisoned?

  She was in and out of my studio several times a week. She could have snagged that packet of developer anytime. She’d been at Greg’s office on Sunday, too, for that mini-meeting to which I had not been invited. Was that before or after Krystle had given him the mezcal? After, I thought. So she could have poisoned that, too.

  It was all possible. But it was also impossible, because it was Marion. Hence the rupture in the universe.

  Her youngest son let us in and pointed us toward the kitchen. We found Marion staring at a sink full of dirty dishes with her hands on her hips.

  “Hi, girls.” She cocked her head at us, surprised. “What brings you here on this sunny afternoon? Did you hear about the three helpless men who were left alone for two whole days and ran completely out of clean dishes?”

  “Not that.” I noticed other clues, like a spray of crumbs across the countertop and a smear of something purple on the refrigerator door. A muddy sweatshirt trailed from a bar stool onto the floor. “Have you been out of town?”

  “A conference in College Station. I just this minute got home and look at what I find.”

  College Station is the home of Texas A&M University, which is the source of county extension agents like Marion. Every now and then they return to the mothership for additional programming.

  “We can help you,” Tillie said, moving toward the sink. “We’ll have it clean as a whistle in no time.”

  “Oh no, but thank you, honey. A certain young man who I believe answered the door is going to do these dishes. If he ever wants to use his Xbox again, that is.” She started toward the living room.

  I cleared my throat. “Marion. We need to talk.”

  She turned back to us. “I heard about Greg Alexander. It’s horrible, but I can’t pretend I feel a loss. He was not a pleasant man.” She gave me a searching look. “I hope you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Hope! Thanks for the vote of confidence!” The outrage made it easier to say what I’d come to say. “I hope you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Me?” She sounded baffled.

  “Because of Greg blackmailing—” Krystle broke off.

  Then I realized what I should have realized before we came over here: that we couldn’t find out if Marion had killed Greg to defend Robbie without revealing to Marion that Robbie was being blackmailed.

  Krystle and Tillie and I exchanged a round of Now, what? looks.

  Luckily, Marion leapt immediately to the wrong conclusion. “I heard about your blackmail story, too. Burrie called me on my cell as I was driving home and gave me an earful of your shenanigans. She said you girls were going around asking everyone nosy questions about their Internet service. Obviously, you’re trying to find out who else has been blackmailed. And now you’re here to ask me.”

  “In a nutshell,” Krystle said with an apologetic grin.

  Marion held her hands wide, inviting us to take in the spectacle of her messy kitchen. “You want to know if I have secrets worth paying blackmail for? Look at this place! I have two teenage sons who consume food faster than I can bring it into the house and shed clothing wherever they happen to stop moving and a husband who, despite the fact that he is a licensed engineer, apparently does not know how to operate a dishwasher. I’ve been gone for barely two days and my voice mail is overflowing. I volunteered to co-author an article about global warming and home insulation, about which I know nothing. And I drove a third of the way across Texas in a pair of twisted panty hose because I didn’t have time to stop and change. When in the name of all that’s holy am I supposed to have time to have secrets?”

  Chapter 42

  Tillie and Krystle wore the stunned expressions of cartoon characters who have had anvils dropped on their heads. Apparently, they had never before been treated to a performance of Marion Blows Her Stack. I myself always found it cheering; no doubt the way Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane felt when they first found out about kryptonite. “Yes!” they whispered to each other. “Mr. SuperShorts has weaknesses, like us!”

  The good news: Marion had most likely not murdered Greg and tried to frame me for it. The bad news: We still had no clue who had. Being by nature an optimist, I struggled for a bright side and found a glimmer. Maybe we had picked up a clue, but we’d been so busy driving around we hadn’t noticed it yet. Time to review and regroup.

  “We gotta figure this thing out,” I said to my team of crack investigators as we walked into the studio.

  “I want to look at those DVDs,” Krystle said. “That dirtbag kept our files somewhere and they’re all we’ve got. Can I use one of your computers?”

  We hung our jackets on the hooks by the back door and collected chips and drinks on the way through the kitchen. I got Krystle set up at the Mac and sat myself at the big worktable with our list of Internet subscribers. Tillie went to collect the pile of mail under the slot in the front door.

  “Porn,” Krystle announced, popping out the first DVD and popping in another.

  I studied the list and found no cause for joy. “We got nothing here. Zip, zero, nada.”

  Tillie dumped a stack of objects on the table. “Look at all this mail. And also guess what?” She waved a thin plastic container. “Anyone want cookies?” she asked us in a spooky voice. We would never touch a pfeffernüsse again. She pried off the lid. Inside were a dozen sugar-dusted brown cookies. I could smell the nutmeg from where I sat. Krystle turned around so we could all three exchange significant looks.

  Tillie snapped the lid on the container with a shudder. “What should we do with it?”

  I snatched it from her. “We’re going to give that to the sheriff with the rest of our evidence, when we get some. If those cookies are drugged, maybe there’ll be fingerprints on the container.” I took it into the kitchen and set it carefully on top of the refrigerator. I returned to my seat and pulled some of the mail toward me. It was way more than I usually get. Usually, I get nothing.

  This was not your typical junk mail. One piece was an extra-large index card with the words “BURN IT ALL” written in block letters with a fat-point pen. Evidently a person we had missed with our flyer distribution. The next item was a sheet of paper folded many times with one tiny paragraph typed in the center: “I will pay you $236 in unmarked bills for those files. Bring the CD or whatever it is to the gazebo in Caine Park at midnight tonight.”

  I passed it a
round. “What do y’all think?”

  “Absolutely,” Krystle said, “let’s go meet this bozo. We could give him a blank CD and get two hundred and thirty-six smackers for our trouble.”

  “Or a smack up the side of the head,” I said. “This stuff is all going to the sheriff.”

  “It proves there really is a blackmail,” Tillie said. “Because otherwise these letters don’t make any sense.”

  The rest were in the same vein, although nobody topped the $236 offer. I stuffed everything into a big manila envelope and set it on top of the fridge with the cookies. “This whole town is going insane.”

  “We need to find those files,” Krystle said. She swapped in another DVD.

  “They’re in that online vault,” I said, “which we can’t get into.” I checked my phone for the umpteenth time. No call from Ty. I picked up our list again. “Don’t y’all remember anybody looking extra guilty today?”

  “Not really,” Tillie said.

  “Porn,” Krystle said. She rolled around so she could look at us, leaning back in her chair and resting her beer bottle on her taut belly. “What does guilty look like? As opposed to ticked off or clueless. Because those, we saw.”

  “OK, OK.” I sighed. “Let’s start again from the beginning.” Then I had another thought. “No, wait: not from the beginning. Let’s start at the end.” I waved my hands to erase the false start. “Greg died from drinking mezcal poisoned with developer chemicals on Monday afternoon. The chemicals were probably stolen from my darkroom during the wake, which was Saturday night. Also, Jason showed up with the mezcal on Saturday night. So, whoever killed Greg had to have put the chemicals in the mezcal sometime between late Saturday night and Monday afternoon.”

  Krystle’s eyes narrowed. “Sunday, you mean. Between Sunday after lunch when I gave that bottle to Greg and Monday afternoon when he died.” She turned her back on us again and loaded another DVD into the drive.

  “Sunday, fine,” I said, to keep the peace. Because I was having dark thoughts about my new second-best friend. She’d had as much opportunity to poison that bottle as I had. More. She could have stolen drugs from the dispensary where she worked and baked them into cookies. Maybe she had just been acting stoned, waiting for me to croak. Or maybe she liked the high. It had been the opposite of painful and afterward I’d slept like a baby.