Lavender Lies

by Susan Wittig Albert

  But there’s no peeling stone on our local courthouse, which attracts tourists from far and wide. A chattering flock of them—blue-rinsed ladies and balding men with cameras around their necks—were gathered in front of it today, being instructed by Vera Hooper, the town docent. Twice a day during tourist season, Vera meets groups at the Chamber of Commerce office on Pecan Street and leads them on a walking tour of the historic buildings around the square, including the Sophie Briggs Historical Museum, which houses Miss Briggs’s famous collection of ceramic frogs, the boots Burt Reynolds wore in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and a four by five-foot bronze casting of a fire ant nest, made near Dime Box, Texas. (If you don’t believe me, come and see for yourself.)

  I, however, was headed in the other direction, to the county clerk’s office, which is on the second floor of the courthouse, up the creaky staircase and down the hall to the far end. I counted myself lucky to find Melva Joy Stryker behind the marble-topped counter upon which generations of Adams County couples have leaned their elbows while they got licensed to marry. If Roseann Tice had been there, I probably wouldn’t have dared to make my request. Roseann, a transplant from Missouri, is narrow and nervous and never breaks a rule for fear that the bureaucratic gods will frown at her. But Melva Joy is a plump, pleasant third-generation Texan with tight brown curls and a generous personality, the sort who offers to take care of your cats and water your African violets while you are on vacation. We worked together last year on the Myra Merryweather Herb Guild bazaar committee, so we consider ourselves friends.

  I started off by reminding her that I still had the large potted marjoram that I’d promised her some weeks before, whenever she wanted to stop by the shop and pick it up. Then I gave her my request.

  “You want to take the license where?” she asked, startled.

  “I’d like to take it to the police station for my fiancé to sign,” I said meekly. “He’s the temporary chief of police, and he’s on a case. I really wouldn’t ask, but it’s pretty hard for him to get away just now and the wedding is coming up on Sunday.”

  “Oh, it’s Mike you’re marrying,” she exclaimed. “Well, why didn’t you say so? He’s cute.” She paused. “I hope he won’t have to use those canes forever.”

  “We hope not too,” I said. “But we’re glad he’s improved as much as he has. There for a while it was touch and go.” It wouldn’t hurt to play on her sympathies, with which Melva Joy is abundantly supplied.

  She pulled her brows down in a frown. “The case Mike’s on. It’s that Coleman business, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And now that Letty Coleman is dead too, I’m afraid we may have to be married by proxy.” I chuckled, to show her I was only joking.

  Melva Joy stared at me. “Letty’s dead?” Her eyes widened, her eyebrows went up, and her jaw dropped, registering dramatic surprise and shock. “Holy smoke! How’d it happen? Car wreck or something?”

  I gave her a bare outline of the events of the morning.

  “Well, my goodness,” Melva Joy said sorrowfully. Her substantial bosom rose and fell under her floral-print dress. “A broken neck. Would you believe? That is just too sad for words.” She tilted her head, giving me a sharp look. “She wasn’t pushed, was she? I mean, with her husband gettin’ shot and all, it makes you wonder.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The police are looking into it.” I leaned on the counter. “You knew her?”

  The brown curls bobbed. “Oh my, yes. Letty was a very sweet person. My heart went out to her, all that trouble she had with that tomcat husband of hers.” Melva Joy paused and gave me a look that inquired whether I knew about Edgar’s philandering. I gave her a look back that said I did, and she went on, a little more confidentially, “We sang together, y’know. In the Sweet Adelines. Soprano.”

  “No, I didn’t know,” I said. “I’m glad she had something to do—to keep her mind off ... well, things.”

  “That Letty,” Melva Joy said, “she had perfect pitch. Which is awfully important when it comes to sopranos. You got one standing next to you who sings flat, it’ll pull you both down.”

  “I can imagine.” Somehow, I was touched by the thought of Letty having perfect pitch. I was glad that something had been right in her life.

  Melva Joy reached beneath the counter and took out a form. “Roseann would say it’s against the rules, but I’m doing it anyway. A man’s got a murder case to solve, he don’t need to be over here doing paperwork.” She sat down at an IBM typewriter and expertly rolled in the form. “You get close to a person when you’re both sopranos. Letty and me, we’d go for ice-cream cones afterwards, over to the Baskin and Robbins. She always had chocolate chip.” She looked up. “Names?”

  I gave her mine and McQuaid’s, and added, “Did Letty talk much about her husband?”

  “Only when she was feeling low,” Melva Joy said. She attacked the keyboard with energy, recording our names in a staccato burst. “Iris Powell I could understand. But I never could feature Pauline Perkins, somehow. Date and place of birth? I wouldn’t mention Pauline,” she added, “if it wasn’t common talk.”

  I told her our dates. I was born in Houston, McQuaid in San Antonio. “Just out of curiosity, did Letty ever mention anybody named Jean?”

  “Well, yes.” She frowned, backed up and hit the correction key. “But she didn’t know who Jean was—just her name, is all.” She looked down at the dates she had just typed and grinned. “Younger than you, is he? Roseann says that’s the kiss of death in a marriage, but I like to see it. Shows we don’t get older, we just get better.” She sighed heavily. “It didn’t work out just real well for Letty. He was younger than her, you know. But I expect you’ll do better.”

  “I expect so too,” I said firmly. We went through the remaining items and I handed over the blood test forms we’d gotten back from the doctor the week before. “How much?” I asked, reaching for a pen and thinking of the symbolism of my writing and signing the check for our marriage license. This was not an indicator of things to come, I hoped.

  “Thirty-five.” Melva Joy made an apologetic face. “It went up five dollars last month. Seems like everything is going up.”

  I gave her my check. She turned it over, stamped it smartly, and put it in her desk drawer, then pushed the form across the counter. “When you come back with it all signed, be sure you give it straight to me,” she said. “Don’t let on to Roseann that I let you take it out of the office, or she’ll have a hissy at both of us.” She closed the drawer, shaking her head regretfully. “I really hate it about Letty getting killed. I mean really. It’s hard to find anybody with perfect pitch anymore, let alone a soprano.”

  When I left the county clerk’s office, it was just past twelve-thirty. If I was going to get any lunch, it had better be quick. I walked over to the police station to see if McQuaid was back. Dorrie the dispatcher said I’d just missed him, but he’d told her to tell me he’d be at the Nueces Street Diner, catching a quick bite. That’s where I found him, sitting at the end of the red Formica counter with Hark Hibler.

  The Nueces Street Diner is owned by Lila Jennings and her daughter, Docia, who recently came down from Dallas to take over the kitchen. The menu isn’t likely to be reviewed in Texas Monthly. Today’s comfort-food special, posted on a blackboard out front, was fried okra, meatloaf and garlic mashed potatoes, coleslaw, and apple pie. But the diner itself is a sight for sore eyes. Lila and her husband, Ralph (gone from this world after succumbing to a two-pack-a-day habit), bought an old Missouri and Pacific dining car and furnished it with post-World War Two collectibles: chrome-and-red chairs and red Formica-topped tables, a Wurlitzer jukebox, postwar light fixtures and ceiling fans, old soda pop signs, and framed newspaper clippings from a time when Tom Dewey was touted to beat Harry Truman and Texas hadn’t discovered air-conditioning. Even Lila’s gotten into the act. She got Bobby Rae to give her bleached blond hair a do that makes her look like one of the Andrews Sisters, and her gr
een nylon uniform, ruffled apron, and little white hat are pure fifties.

  I sat down on the empty stool next to McQuaid and pulled the license out of my purse. “The mountain comes to Mohammed,” I remarked. I took out a pen and pointed to the designated space. “Sign here.”

  “What am I signing?” McQuaid asked, past a mouthful of apple pie.

  “Your license to marry me,” I said. “Lucky you.”

  “Well, well,” McQuaid said. “Hand-delivered, no less, by the light of my life.” He put down his fork, picked up my pen, and signed with a flourish. “How’d you get Roseann to let you take this official piece of paper out of the county clerk’s office?”

  “What Roseann doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” I said primly, and put the license in my purse.

  Hark leaned forward to peer around McQuaid. “Speaking of delivering, am I going to get next Thursday’s Home and Garden page before you fly off on your honeymoon?” Hark, who lost something like forty pounds last year, looks the way a small-town newspaper editor ought to look: wrinkled white shirt with collar unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up, rumpled slacks, a half-day’s growth of dark beard, dark hair in need of a trim. There’s something real and comfortable about him, though. What you see is what you get, no frills, no psychodrama, just plain Hark.

  “The page is done,” I replied, “all but the piece on lavender. I’ll get it to you this afternoon. Tomorrow morning at the latest. Do you want it on disk, or hard copy?”

  Hark grunted. “What do you think we are, some backwater weekly that still turns out copy on typewriters? I’ll take it on disk.” He frowned at me. “What did you do to yourself? Face lift?”

  Lila approached and set a glass of ice water on the counter in front of me. “Hark don’t have room to put good stuff in the paper anymore,” she said sourly. “He’s too busy coverin’ crime and murders. He’s hopin’ to get a Putzer prize to hang on his wall.”

  “A Pulitzer,” Hark said, and slid his iced tea glass suggestively in her direction. He was still looking at me. “You lose some weight?”

  “That’s whut I said,” Lila replied with a dark look. “Don’t we git enough murders on tee vee without readin’ about ’em in the paper? Arnold Seidensticker must be turnin’ in his grave like a whistlin’ dervish, seein’ whut’s happened to his newspaper.”

  “Nothing’s happened to his newspaper, Lila,” Hark said, “except that the circulation’s gone up.”

  Lila laughed scornfully. “Oh, yeah? When it was a weekly, there was plenty of good news to fill it, family reunions and parades and beauty contests and stuff. Now it comes out every day, there’s nothin’ but crime. Can’t you find anything good to write about?”

  Hark shrugged. “We cover the news, Lila, we don’t cover it up. Pecan Springs isn’t the sleepy little town it was when Arnold ran the paper. The college is big, Walmart’s moved in, there’s a lot more traffic up and down the Interstate. We print the news we’ve got, and what we’ve got is crime. Which includes vandalism, drugs, and a couple murders every now and again.” He gave his glass another nudge. “Now, how about some more iced tea?” He glanced back at me, light dawning. “I know. You got your hair cut. It’s shorter. Looks real nice.”

  “Thank you,” I said modestly. I turned to McQuaid. “How do you like it?”

  McQuaid didn’t hear me. “One murder, Hark. There’s no evidence that Letty Coleman was pushed down those stairs, and don’t you go saying anything else. We’ve got enough problems without the newspaper complicating the situation.”

  “So you didn’t find anything,” I said, feeling regretful and ambivalent. I didn’t want to hear that Letty had been murdered, but I agreed with Ruby that an accident seemed like a too-easy explanation. What’s more, I couldn’t help feeling that Letty’s death ought to mean something—at the least, that it should give us a clue as to who killed her husband. But an accident was a dead end. As far as Edgar Coleman’s murder was concerned, it took us nowhere.

  “Miz Coleman?” Lila asked in alarm. “Pushed down what stairs? Whut’s happened to her?”

  “She fell down the steps behind her house,” McQuaid said briefly. “Broke her neck.”

  “Omigawd,” Lila whispered, shocked. “Why, she was just in here this morning!”

  “This morning?” McQuaid asked. “What time?”

  Lila shook her head. “Sittin’ right there where you are, on that very stool, talkin’ to Doc Jackson. She had a cheese and mushroom omelet and biscuits and—”

  “What time, Lila?” McQuaid pressed. “This is important.”

  “This is your chief talkin’, Lila,” Hark said in a theatrical growl. “Tell him what time.”

  “Whut time?” Lila twiddled a strand of blond hair that was falling down in front of her ear. “Well, let’s see. It had to have been after the first pan of biscuits, ‘cause the oven wasn’t set right and Docia burned ’em on the bottom and Miz Coleman had to wait for the second pan to get hers. Which she did without complainin’, unlike some folks I know who pitch a fit when they don’t get whut they want right when they want it.” She threw a baleful look at Hark. “Make it, oh, seven. Pretty early for her to be out.” She swiveled her attention to me. “You decide what you’re gonna have?”

  Seven. So Letty had been here even before we talked on the phone this morning, which meant that Billie Jean was still in the running as far as opportunity was concerned. I sighed. Quite apart from any personal feelings I might have for Letty, I agreed with Melva Joy when she said it was a pity to lose a soprano with perfect pitch. I would hate to lose somebody who knew how to cut my hair. I looked up. Lila was still waiting, her mouth pursed, her head held to one side.

  “The special looks pretty good,” I said.

  “You come in at the tail end of the lunch hour, you got to take potluck,” Lila replied. “We got plenty okra and meatloaf and mashed potatoes, but the last piece of pie is gone. On desserts, we’re down to tapioca pudding and green Jell-O.” She sighed. “Lord, I just plain don’t believe it about Miz Coleman. I don’t.”

  Green Jell-O. I suppressed a shudder. “I’ll take the meat loaf and okra and pass on dessert. And a double helping of mashed potatoes.” Lila mashes potatoes with garlic. Very tasty. Good for you, too.

  “Still got to charge you,” Lila said. “You don’t like Jell-O, have some tapioca.” She eyed McQuaid. “Fell down the steps, did she? Just like that?”

  “Far as we can tell,” McQuaid said blandly. “Nobody saw or heard anything that would suggest otherwise.”

  “Make it tapioca,” I said, choosing the lesser of two evils. I turned to McQuaid, thinking of those three waiting glasses on the patio table. “Did you check around the phone?”

  He gave me a rebuking look. “Of course we checked around the phone. All the phones, in fact. We found a pad with numbers for the guy who mows the lawn, the dentist, and Pauley’s Funeral Home. They’re handling Edgar’s cremation. Guess now they’ll make it a double funeral.”

  “A double funeral,” Hark said. “Now, that’s a human interest story.” He tapped his empty glass with a fork. “Lila, ain’t you ever goin’ to get me some tea?”

  “There he goes, pitchin’ that fit,” Lila said darkly, and stalked off, muttering under her breath. She was back in a minute with a pitcher of tea and my plate. The fried okra, which I have never in my life managed to do just right, looked wonderful. The meat loaf could have used a little more tomato sauce and some thyme and basil would have worked wonders, but you can’t have everything. She put the plate down in front of me. “You lettin’ your hair grow for the weddin’?” she asked. “I gotta say, long hair looks good on you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. When she had gone, I lowered my voice and spoke to McQuaid. “Did you turn up anything on the gun?”

  “Yeah,” McQuaid said. “I got the report right after I got back from the Colemans’. The ballistics checked out. It was the gun that killed Edgar Coleman, all right.”

  “Prints?” I aske
d.

  “One. They’re still looking for a match in the FBI file. Marvin is hauling our suspects back in to get their prints.”

  “That’s the gun that the kids found at the creek?” Hark asked.

  “That’s it,” McQuaid said. “Piece of luck, their stumbling on it. That area is wild and weedy. It might never have been found.” He frowned. “How’d you hear about that?”

  Hark looked shocked. “You don’t expect me to reveal my sources, do you?” He paused. “If you’ve got a fingerprint, you oughta have your man pretty quick.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” McQuaid said. He finished his pie and pushed his plate away.

  “What about the registration?” I asked. I picked up the crust McQuaid had left on his plate and nibbled it. He never eats the crust, which for me is the best part.

  “According to the manufacturer’s records, the gun was originally purchased about ten years ago by some guy in Miami, Florida. No current address, so that’s a dead end, at least for now.” McQuaid leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek, signaling that he was ready to go back to work. “Okay if I leave you with this sex maniac?”

  “Hey,” Hark said, offended, “who you callin’ a sex maniac?”

  “Listen, McQuaid,” I said, “I’ve got a couple of things I need to tell you. Sheila and I are going to see Iris Powell this afternoon. Her sister seems to think she might have some information. Is that okay?”