Savannah Blues

by Mary Kay Andrews

  I bit my lip. Sarah Donnellen’s son Ricky had been in my class at Blessed Sacrament School. He was famous for hanging around the jungle gym on the playground, hoping to get a glimpse of a girl’s underpants. Any woman who’d married that pervert couldn’t have too much on the ball, lawyer or not.

  “Mama,” I said quietly, “they are not going to charge me with murder, because I did not kill Caroline DeSantos. I never touched her. I went in that house to use the bathroom, and that’s the truth.”

  She gave a prolonged sigh. “How many times have I told you not to use public bathrooms? And I still don’t understand what you were doing out there at that time of night.”

  “I wanted to get into the estate sale as early as possible,” I said, trying to be patient.

  “It surely doesn’t look very good,” Mama said. “Everybody was staring at us in mass yesterday. I could hardly hold my head up. Even Father Morrison looked at me funny, when I went up for Communion.”

  “Father Morrison looks at everybody funny,” I said, starting to lose it. “He’s cross-eyed, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Don’t you take the Lord’s name in vain to me, young lady,” Mama said. “I have to go now. I’m getting one of my migraines. But your daddy would like to speak to you.”

  I rolled my eyes to the heavens.

  “Eloise?” Daddy grunted.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” I said, getting it out of the way.

  “You need any money?”

  Good old Daddy.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Your mother’s pretty upset,” he said.

  “I know. But Uncle James is going to get it all straightened out. It was just a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

  “What about that dead gal?”

  “I didn’t kill her,” I said.

  “Good,” he said, as though that settled it. “You be sweet, you hear?”

  The phone rang as soon as I put it down. I looked at the caller ID screen and didn’t recognize the number, so I let the machine pick up. Good thinking. It was Ira Stein, the police reporter for the Morning News. “Please call me immediately,” he said. “I understand the police have found your fingerprints on the gun believed to be the murder weapon in the Caroline DeSantos homicide. And I also understand Ms. DeSantos was engaged to be married to your ex-husband, and that you’d been overheard making threats against her.”

  God. I found the ibuprofen bottle and swallowed four capsules with another cup of coffee.

  The phone rang off and on for the next hour. The doorbell rang too. Instead of answering, I ran upstairs and looked out and saw two different television satellite trucks set up in the lane behind the carriage house.

  I was massaging my temples and wishing for a straight shot of morphine when there was another rap at the front door. Jethro ran to the hall and started barking. He’d been racing up and down the stairs all morning, barking like crazy with all the phones and doorbells ringing. He was as stressed as I was. I started wondering if they made doggy Valium.

  “Good,” I muttered, setting the coffee cup down. “Sic ’em, boy.”

  “Don’t sic that dog on me,” called a voice from the other side of the door.

  BeBe.

  “Tie him up or something, would you? I’m wearing white and you know how he loves to jump up on me.”

  I took Jethro by the collar and coaxed him into the kitchen. “Good boy,” I said. “Stay here and I’ll let you jump up on the very next reporter.”

  BeBe was in rare form. She was, as advertised, dressed in a simple white linen sheath, with white sling-back sandals. Her hair was glossy and twisted on top of her head in something like a chignon. She was clutching a tote bag full of groceries.

  “You look like death,” she said, holding me at arm’s length. “What have you done to yourself?”

  “I got drunk on cheap chardonnay last night,” I said. “People have been calling all morning. My father has started making novenas for me.”

  BeBe shook her head in disapproval. “How many times do I have to tell you, life is too short to drink bad wine.”

  “Easy for you to say. You never pay retail.”

  “True,” she said, sitting down in an armchair near the window. “But it’s not like you to go get drunk all by yourself. Why the toot?”

  “I was depressed,” I said. “You know, just getting out of jail, all that.”

  BeBe pursed her lips. “Uh-uh.

  “What else?” she asked, leaning closer. “Come on, tell Dr. Babes.”

  “It was Tal.”

  She looked shocked. “He came over here? What did he say?”

  “He didn’t come over here,” I said. “I haven’t talked to him. I was sitting out in the courtyard, and I happened to look up, and he was upstairs, sitting at his desk, looking out the window. The look on his face, BeBe, the anguish. It was so pathetic. I felt so sorry for him. He looked so brokenhearted. And it all came back in a rush. How we fell in love, what we had together. It was all I could do to keep from running over there and asking him to take me back.”

  Her eyes widened. “Tell me you didn’t do anything stupid.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, I went over there and fucked his brains out.”

  “Which means you drank yourself into a stupor feeling all sorry for the scumbag and his slutty little girlfriend.”

  “Getting drunk seemed smarter than getting laid by my ex,” I said.

  “True again,” BeBe said. “But look, I brought you some provisions.”

  She started pulling packages out of her tote bag, inventorying the contents. “Chocolate. Much more satisfying than shitty chardonnay. Croissants. Coke. Fruity Pebbles cereal—oh yes, I know your little shameful secret, Eloise Foley. Skim milk, even some doggy treats for Jethro.”

  “You’re the best,” I said, getting up to take the groceries into the kitchen.

  “Down, Jethro,” BeBe said, following right behind me. She took the box of treats, opened it, and tossed him one. “See how nice Aunt BeBe is?”

  She reached back into the tote bag again, then paused. “I brought something else, besides food. The papers. Want to see?”

  “I think I’ll pass. Mama already gave me the rundown.”

  “Well, now what?” BeBe asked, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “Are you just going to hide out here the rest of your life?”

  “No. Maybe. Hell, I don’t know.”

  “What does your uncle say?”

  “He says his friend who’s a criminal lawyer thinks the security guards screwed up everything out at Beaulieu by messing around inside the house and seizing my bag without my permission. This friend says it’s doubtful that any of that evidence—including the pistols—would be admissible as evidence in court.”

  She took a sip of her coffee. “Who is this hotshot lawyer friend?”

  “I don’t know. James is being very mysterious about that.”

  She grinned. “Do you think he’s got a girlfriend? Good for him!”

  “I don’t know who this person is,” I said truthfully. I hadn’t told BeBe yet that James was gay. He was still very hesitant to let people know about his personal life.

  “I think we need to get you out of this house,” BeBe said, eyeing the empty two-liter wine bottle in the trash can, “before you start drinking gin out of a steam iron.”

  “What did you have in mind?” I asked. I was starting to feel a little claustrophobic.

  She brought out the newspaper.

  “Not interested,” I said.

  “Not so fast,” she said, tapping the page. “These are the classifieds. Remember the Little Sisters of Charity school—out in Sandfly?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It was the all-black parochial school before the archdiocese integrated all the schools. But it’s been closed since the eighties.”

  “Right,” BeBe said. “And the last of the Little Sisters has retired. Gone back to the mother house in Philadelphia, according to a story in today’s paper. They’re ge
tting ready to tear down the school and the convent, to build a shopping center. Can you say liquidation sale?”

  I slid my bare feet into the flip-flops by the back door and grabbed for my purse. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 19

  James parked his car beside the navy blue sedan, in the shade of a spreading old live oak a dozen yards from the front door to the old plantation house.

  Jay Bradley, the detective he’d met the night Weezie was arrested, leaned against the hood of his county-issue vehicle, smoking a cigarette, which he flipped to the ground at James’s arrival. He wore a short-sleeved white dress shirt, wrinkled dark slacks, and a bored expression.

  “How ya doin’ there, Father?”

  “Just James. Remember?”

  “Sorry. Old habits die hard, you know.”

  “So,” James said briskly, “we’re all clear to take a look around the house?”

  He had hated to ask Jonathan for the favor, but he really did need to get an idea of what kind of evidence the police might have against Weezie.

  And Jonathan had been uneasy about it too. “It’s a defense attorney’s right to see the crime scene,” he’d pointed out. “Of course, Weezie hasn’t really been charged with the homicide.”

  “But you think she will be,” James said.

  “You know I can’t talk about that,” Jonathan said.

  So Jonathan had told him whom to call, and this morning Bradley had called back to set up the walk-through, not sounding exactly thrilled with the idea.

  James could already feel the sweat soaking through his shirt. It must be close to a hundred degrees already, and not even ten o’clock yet. He hated to think about what that musty old house would feel like in this heat and humidity.

  Bradley strode toward the east side of the house. He put his hand on the trunk of a huge old magnolia tree that nearly dwarfed the house. “This here’s how your niece says she got in the house,” he said.

  “If she says she climbed the tree, she did,” James said.

  “We lifted her fingerprints off the doorknobs, kitchen and front door,” Bradley said.

  “She tried the doors first, of course, but they were all locked. She needed to use the bathroom.”

  “Right,” Bradley said, doubt dripping from his voice. He dug a key from the pocket of his pants. “We’ll go in the kitchen.”

  James followed Bradley inside. A narrow path had been cleared through the old-fashioned room, but otherwise the place was stacked to the ceiling with dust-covered furniture, dishes, and boxes and boxes of miscellaneous stuff.

  “Whole house is like this,” Bradley said, clucking his disapproval. “Packed with crap.”

  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” James said, remembering Weezie’s insistence that the house was a treasure trove of valuable antiques. Although he himself could not picture anybody wanting any of this stuff.

  James followed Bradley into the hallway, and Bradley pointed again, with his radio, toward the stairway.

  “The body was found up there, in a bathroom closet. According to your niece, anyway.”

  “Have your people found any evidence to indicate the body had been moved?” James asked. “The DeSantos woman was much taller than Weezie. Even if she had killed her, which she didn’t, I doubt she could have stuffed the woman into a closet.”

  Bradley volunteered nothing. Instead, he started up the stairs. His labored footsteps echoed on the splintered wooden steps, and the handrail groaned as he pulled his bearlike body upward. James said a small silent prayer that the staircase wouldn’t collapse beneath the weight of the both of them.

  Upstairs the heat was even more oppressive, if that was possible.

  Bradley mopped his steaming forehead with a handkerchief, and James did the same.

  “Closet’s right in that bathroom,” Bradley gasped, lunging toward a bedroom doorway. “I gotta get a window open, get some air in here before I pass out.”

  “Right,” James said. He waited until he heard the wooden window creak open, then whipped out the small camera he’d tucked in his pocket.

  He slipped into the bathroom and with the toe of his shoe, James pushed the closet door open, bracing himself for a ghastly sight.

  There was actually very little blood. It was an ordinary closet. Empty, save some old wooden coat hangers littering the bottom of the closet.

  James clicked away as rapidly as he could, changing the angle with each shot. When he was done, he tucked the camera back in his pocket and stepped back into the hall.

  He heard Bradley approaching, his breath labored. The cop’s face was an alarming shade of pasty gray.

  “Detective Bradley?” James said, reaching for the detective’s arm just as the younger man swayed, his eyes rolling upward in his head.

  The cop slumped to the floor.

  “Sweet Jesus,” James said, kneeling down beside Bradley. He put his fingertips at the base of the cop’s throat. His breathing was shallow, his color unearthly, and despite the suffocating heat, Bradley’s flesh felt clammy to the touch.

  James ran back into the bathroom. He grabbed an old rag from a towel bar, shoved it under the tap, and turned it on. The pipes groaned, and after what seemed like an eternity, a thin trickle of brown water began to drip from the faucet. He soaked the rag in the water, than ran back to Bradley’s outstretched form, squeezing the water onto the detective’s face and neck, then dabbing at his wrists and the back of his neck.

  He struggled to unbutton Bradley’s shirt collar, which bulged under the bulk of his fleshy neck. But his hands were sweaty, his fingers clumsy. He tore at the collar until he’d ripped the buttons off, then went to the man’s waist, loosening the cinched leather belt.

  “Jay?” James said, keeping his fingers on the man’s pulse. It was rapid, fluttery even. The detective couldn’t have been much older than forty, but he was at least fifty pounds overweight, and a smoker. Could he have had a heart attack?

  Should he raise the detective’s head? Try CPR? Years ago, at his first parish in Thunderbolt, he’d sat in the church social hall while the Boy Scout troop went over the basics of CPR. But James had paid scant attention, being more intent on keeping the boys from disturbing a group of parishioners attending the Overeaters Anonymous meeting in the adjacent library.

  He needed help, James thought. Was there a working phone in this godforsaken place? Surely not. Then he remembered the detective’s radio. It was there, clipped to his belt. James reached over and unclipped it. He held the radio to his face, pushed what he prayed was the send button.

  “Er, uh, this is a civilian. My name is James Foley, and one of your detectives is in need of medical attention. He appears to have had an attack of some kind. He’s breathing, but his pulse seems erratic. We’re at Beaulieu Plantation, near the Skidaway River, on the second floor of the house. Please send an ambulance immediately.”

  The radio squawked and a woman’s voice floated out. “Ten-four that, Mr. Foley. We have a rescue unit on the way.”

  “Thank God,” James said.

  Chapter 20

  When I was just a little kid, we’d go out to Sandfly to buy boiled peanuts from the peanut man. Back then, Sandfly was just a barely paved crossroads, with the peanut stand and a gas station and lots of little children playing ball in the middle of the sandy road. Sandfly had been like that just about forever, according to my daddy, who said he understood the neighborhood was started by freed slaves who moved off Beaulieu and Wymberly and Wormsloe, the big plantations on Isle of Hope, which was just up the marsh road from Sandfly.

  Today though, there’s an honest-to-goodness shopping center, and a couple of gas stations, and even a four-way traffic signal, and most traces of the old-timey black community have vanished—although the peanut man is still there. The Little Sisters of Charity school was slated to be the next to go.

  A neatly lettered banner was strung across the squat two-story brick schoolhouse on Skidaway Road. “Sale Today,” it said.
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  I pulled the truck into the crushed-shell parking lot, alongside a lot of trucks and vans. “What time does the sale start?” I asked BeBe.

  “Not ’til noon, according to the paper,” she said.

  “Looks like they might have opened their doors early,” I said, gathering my largest tote bag, the one with wheels and a pop-up handle.

  I was hustling toward the school’s entrance when BeBe stopped cold in front of a four-foot-tall statue of a nun that had been placed in a sheltered corner of the parking lot.

  “Look,” she squealed, pointing at it. “Fabulous. I love it.”

  “That?” I said doubtfully. It was a plain concrete statue, painted many times over, of one of the early Little Sisters of Charity, or the gray nuns, as everybody in Savannah called them. This one wore the old-fashioned white wimple and long gray habit. Her hands were clasped together, a rosary clutched between the broken concrete fingertips. She’d been installed in a shell-shaped grotto that had been covered with a tile mosaic, and a concrete pot held a faded plastic philodendron and some washed-out yellow plastic chrysanthemums.

  “Do you think they’ll sell it to me?” BeBe asked, kneeling down beside it to get a better look.

  “What would you do with a statue of a nun? You’re not even Catholic.”

  “Put it in the restaurant,” BeBe said, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “Did I tell you? That hideous tattoo parlor next door is closing at the end of the week. The landlord is dying to unload the building. I’ll knock through our adjoining wall and double my space. Finally have a real lounge. Hey, what if I called it Little Sisters Lounge? Wouldn’t that be wild? I could fill it with all this funky Catholic stuff. You know, statues, candelabras, the whole deal. And the waitresses could wear short little nun’s outfits, but like, with fishnet stockings.”