Savannah Blues

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Who’s in charge?” I asked one of the young women.

  She pointed toward the store’s old mezzanine level, the stairway to which was now roped off. “Up there. Her name’s Stephanie.”

  I stepped over the rope and climbed the stairs. At the head of the stairs a woman stood with binoculars in one hand and a two-way radio in the other.

  “Yes?” She didn’t look happy to see me.

  “I’m looking for a cupboard,” I said. “I saw it when I visited Beaulieu for Anna Ruby Mullinax’s memorial service, and I know for a fact it was included in the original sale. But I’ve been all over the store, and it’s not here now.”

  “If it was part of the estate, it should have been here,” she said, shrugging me off.

  “It’s not here,” I said, “and I doubt somebody ahead of me bought it. It was listed last time at fifteen thousand. That’s not an impulse buy, and I was number thirty-six in line this morning.”

  “Describe the cupboard,” she said, grabbing a typewritten inventory sheet.

  “It’s a burled elm cupboard, nineteenth-century, with original glass. Made at Beaulieu. You’d have it listed as the Moses Weed cupboard,” I said. “Fifteen thousand,” I repeated. “I want to buy that cupboard.”

  She scanned the sheet and shook her head. “No. Nothing like that.”

  I lost my cool. “What’s your name?” I demanded.

  “Stephanie Prevost. Why?”

  “Because I want to remember it,” I said hotly. “This sale has been picked over. You’ve sold off the best stuff to a favored few dealers and I resent the hell out of it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her voice low.

  “You do know,” I said. “I’ve already seen three different pieces that I know for a fact came out of Beaulieu for sale in antique shops in Bluffton. A cherry inlaid card table and two majolica oyster dishes. They were in the house before the last sale started. I saw them. But they’re gone now, and I know for a fact that you people sold them to Lewis Hargreaves. And now the Moses Weed cupboard is gone too. I don’t know who you are, lady, but I’m going outside now, and I’m going to tell every picker, every dealer I know, that you’ve already skimmed off the best stuff.”

  “Who do you think you are?” she asked, her eyes blazing. “I’ve been getting this stuff ready for a month now. I personally did the inventory, and I can tell you unequivocally that nothing, and I repeat nothing, has been skimmed off. I’ve been fielding phone calls for weeks. I’ve personally chased dealers away from the house and the warehouse, because my sales start when advertised, where advertised. And I don’t preview.”

  “Then how did Lewis Hargreaves get his hands on those pieces?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said grimly. “I was hired by the estate’s attorney, Gerry Blankenship, to run this sale after the last one was postponed. If you have any questions, you’ll have to ask him.”

  “Damn straight, I will,” I said, turning to go.

  She picked up her two-way radio again. “Security,” she barked, “there’s a woman up here on the mezzanine with me. I want her escorted off the premises.”

  Chapter 53

  I drove directly to Uncle James’s house on Washington Avenue. As I was signaling to turn into his driveway I saw his white Mercedes approaching from the other direction. I waited and pulled into the drive right behind him.

  As I got closer to his car I noticed he had company. Jonathan McDowell.

  When he got out of the car, James’s face was scarlet and dripping with sweat. Jonathan was dressed in running shorts and a T-shirt that was plastered to his chest with sweat. He looked slightly chagrined to see me there.

  “Weezie,” James said. “I thought your big sale was today.”

  “It was.”

  “And the cupboard?”

  “Gone,” I said. “I don’t think it even made it over to the warehouse, Uncle James. I was number thirty-six in the door this morning, and nobody came past me carrying it.”

  “Weezie had her eye on some fantastic piece of antique furniture from Beaulieu,” James explained to Jonathan as we all trooped in the front door.

  I sat at the kitchen table. I noticed with amusement that Jonathan seemed to know his way around James’s house quite well. Right now he was pouring us all glasses of orange juice from a pitcher he retrieved from the refrigerator.

  “What do you think happened to the cupboard?” Jonathan asked, taking a seat at my grandmother’s red Formica dinette table.

  “I know what happened,” I said. “Gerry Blankenship has been skimming the best pieces out of the house and selling them off to Lewis Hargreaves.”

  “Lewis has a very good eye. Are you sure he has the cupboard?”

  I nodded and told them both about the majolica oyster plates I’d traced back to Zoe Kallenberg. “She’s his shop assistant, and she lives in an apartment at Lewis’s house on Abercorn,” I said. “I think she’s been selling off some of the smaller items for him. But I can’t understand why they’re doing this so quietly.”

  Jonathan and James exchanged a look.

  “Blankenship doesn’t want to attract any attention to what he’s doing out at Beaulieu,” James said. “We went out there the other day and had a look around.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Detective Bradley gave Jonathan a key. It’s all perfectly legal.”

  I leaned forward. “Is the house totally empty now?”

  “It’s more than empty,” Jonathan said sadly. “It’s been stripped. Every noteworthy bit of any architectural significance has disappeared. Moldings, cornices, mantelpieces, stained glass. All of it’s gone.”

  “But why?” I asked.

  “It was the only way the paper company could be sure that the county’s historic preservation officer wouldn’t certify the house as a historic landmark.”

  “And it worked,” James said. “They’ve got a demolition permit. We saw it. The earthmoving equipment is out there. They’ve already started clearing trees for the new road into the property.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “It’s bad enough that Lewis Hargreaves got all the best furniture from the house, but now they’re going to tear that beautiful old house down? I can’t believe they can get away with it. It sucks. This means if they sell everything off and put some hideous paper plant out there, Caroline wins.”

  “She’s dead,” James said quietly. “How is that winning?”

  “She gets what she wants. Tal’s miserable, and he’s making me miserable. Beaulieu is gone without a trace. And people like Gerry Blankenship and Phipps and Diane Mayhew end up richer than ever.”

  “Maybe not,” Jonathan said.

  “How can we stop them? You just said it’s a matter of days until they tear the house down.”

  “There might be a way,” Jonathan repeated. “If there was enough of a public uproar.”

  “From whom?” James asked. “You can’t be involved in anything like that. It’s a conflict of interest with your job.”

  “Not me. Not directly,” Jonathan said. “But I know somebody who’d move heaven and earth to save Beaulieu.”

  Suddenly I knew whom he was talking about.

  “Merijoy Rucker. But what can she do?”

  “Given the facts we’ve gathered, she can do a lot,” Jonathan pointed out.

  “What facts?” I asked.

  James sighed and shook his head. “I really don’t want to do anything that might put Grady and Juanita Traylor at risk of losing their house.”

  “What house?” I asked, looking from my uncle to his friend. “What have you guys been up to?”

  “Your uncle is quite the detective,” Jonathan said. “He figured out that Gerry Blankenship tricked an elderly couple who used to work for Anna Ruby Mullinax into witnessing the will that allows Beaulieu to be sold to the paper company.”

  “Tricked them, how?”

  “The husband has had a stroke and is basically a vege
table,” Jonathan said, “and his wife is nearly blind from diabetes. Blankenship had them witness the will without Miss Mullinax present. Heaven knows whether or not she was capable of agreeing to the sale. And then, to ingratiate the couple and keep them quiet, Blankenship moved them into a new house way out in the country, to a house that belongs to the Willis J. Mullinax Foundation—which he runs.”

  “But that’s illegal,” I said. “Blankenship engineered the whole thing. The sale of Beaulieu is bogus. We could stop them from tearing it down.” I looked over at Jonathan. “You’re the chief assistant district attorney. Can’t you have Blankenship arrested or something?”

  “Maybe,” Jonathan said. “The will and the foundation and all of that is probably a matter for a grand jury to look into. The whole thing reeks of fraud. But what interests me even more is the question of how Caroline DeSantos’s death ties into all of this. My boss hates the idea of having an unsolved homicide on the books. It’s an election year coming up, you know.”

  Jonathan got up and rinsed his juice glass out, then placed it neatly in the dish drainer.

  “Weezie,” he said, coming back to the table. “Your uncle tells me Tal knew Caroline was having an affair.”

  I nodded, feeling my stomach start to knot up.

  “How angry was he about that? Angry enough to kill her?”

  “No,” I blurted. “He was depressed, it’s true. He told me he knew it was over between them before she died, but it wasn’t that he was angry about that. More like resigned. To the fact that she’d found someone else, and that he’d ruined his own life by divorcing me.”

  “He says he was alone the night she was killed. But nobody else can verify that,” Jonathan said.

  “She told him she had a meeting. Tal didn’t believe her. He tried to follow her. But he lost her at the light at Victory and Bee Road.”

  “But nobody else saw him that night,” James reminded me.

  “Tal wouldn’t kill anybody,” I said. “That’s just not him. The man has no convictions. He—he doesn’t feel things deeply enough to kill for. Not love. Not hate. Not jealousy.”

  “What about money?” Jonathan asked.

  “His family has gobs of money,” I said. “And the firm was doing well. That new paper plant commission would have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  “Maybe he knew how fragile the deal was,” Jonathan said. “He was president of the firm. He had to know what was going on out there. Certainly he knew Blankenship was involved in something sleazy, possibly with Caroline’s help.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s a rat bastard. But he’s no killer.”

  “He knew his way around Beaulieu,” James said quietly. “He had a key to the plantation house. Think about it, Weezie. Tal had motive, and he had access.”

  “But not the guts,” I said. “He didn’t even have the guts to make her buy him real cream for his coffee.”

  Jonathan put his palms flat on the table. “All right. Talmadge Evans is innocent. What does that leave us?”

  “I think your idea before was a good one,” I said. “Let’s go talk to Merijoy. She was at Beaulieu for the memorial service. And you said yourself,” I reminded Jonathan, “she’s the gossip queen of Ardsley Park.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” James said. “You two go see Merijoy. And after I get cleaned up, I’ll go pay a call on Gerry Blankenship. It might be interesting to see what he has to say about Anna Ruby’s will and the Mullinax Foundation.”

  Chapter 54

  As we pulled up into the Ruckers’ driveway, Merijoy emerged from the house followed by a gaggle of small children, all of them dressed in snowy white shirts and shorts and clutching the smallest tennis rackets I’d ever seen.

  “Hey there, Jonathan. And Weezie!” she said, not bothering to hide her surprise at seeing us together. She opened the doors to her Suburban and started hoisting the children inside.

  “Y’all, I would love to sit and visit, but you’ve caught me at the worst possible time. The children have tennis lessons at the golf club, and we’re ten minutes late as it is.”

  She lowered her voice. “Ross had an upset tummy this morning, and I’ve changed his little outfit three times. I swear, if he makes poopie one more time, I’m going to put a cork up his little behind.”

  “We really need to talk to you, Merijoy,” Jonathan said. “When could we get together?”

  “Oh, Jonny, today is not a good day,” she said. “I’ve got to drop the children at the club for their lessons, then I have to race over to the cleaners before they close at noon. And I’ve got to look at some wallpaper samples for the downstairs powder room, and then I’ve got to pick up a wedding gift for Randy’s niece—the wedding’s tonight at St. John’s and I’ve got a nail appointment—”

  “It’s about Beaulieu,” I said, being deliberately rude. “How about if we just ride along with you on your errands? It’s really important, Merijoy. You could help us stop Gerry Blankenship and the Mayhews from tearing down Beaulieu.”

  Her eyes widened. “But I thought it was all settled. The environmental impact statement hasn’t been approved. They can’t dredge the rice canals without that.”

  “They’ve got a demolition permit to raze the house,” Jonathan said bluntly. “The bulldozers are already on the premises.”

  “Good Lord,” she said. She poked her head inside the car. “Rodney and Renee, be Mommy’s little angels and climb in the way back, will you? Miss Weezie and Mr. Jonathan are going to go for a ride with us. Isn’t that exciting?”

  Jonathan got to ride shotgun. I got wedged in the backseat between the twins, Rachel and Ross. Ross eyed me suspiciously from behind pale wheat-colored bangs that fell over his eyes.

  “Hello,” I said, trying to be friendly.

  “Go away,” he whined, turning his head away from me.

  Once we’d unloaded the kids and picked up Randy Rucker’s tuxedo at the dry cleaners, we went to the Krispy Chik for a friendly little lunch chat.

  “You know, Jonny,” Merijoy said, dipping a french fry in some ketchup, “I’d do anything to save Beaulieu. I’m dead serious about that. I know people think that Merijoy Rucker is just a flake, a rich do-gooder with too much time on her hands; but Beaulieu means something to me. It’s the last great intact antebellum rice plantation in the low country. I’ve done my research. There’s not another place like it; not in Georgia or Florida or South Carolina. There are a couple in Louisiana, but that’s it. What can I do to help, Jonny?”

  “Do what you do best,” Jonathan said. “Run your mouth.”

  “Now you sound like Randy Rucker,” she said crossly.

  “I’m serious,” Jonathan said. “You’ve got the best contacts in town. And I’ve got some ammunition for you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Remember the day we met at Beaulieu, during Anna Ruby’s memorial service?” I said, butting in. “I saw you snooping around that day, taking pictures and samples of wallpaper. Do you still have any of that?”

  “Of course,” she said. “At the time I was still under the impression that the preservation league might be able to acquire Beaulieu as a living-history museum. I wanted to start documenting things. For the fund-raising campaign.”

  “Those photos could prove that the house was deliberately stripped,” Jonathan said. “And if we could prove that, maybe the preservation league could do something to get the county to withdraw the demolition permit.”

  “Lord knows, I’ve tried everything else to stop Phipps Mayhew. Including some things I’m not too proud of,” she said, making a wry face.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  She turned around in her seat so she could face me. “I wasn’t ever going to tell anybody about this. Ever. Especially not you, Weezie. After you were arrested, and it looked like they might actually charge you with killing Caroline DeSantos, I nearly died of shame. And guilt.

  “You know that day we ran into each other in K
roger?” she asked. “That was no coincidence. I deliberately followed you into the store so that I could act like I’d bumped into you and invite you to dinner. I had the whole thing planned out. I had to do something nice to make it up to you for spending the night in jail.”

  “Why should you feel guilty about me being arrested?” I asked. “I’m the one who climbed in the window and went in the house.”

  She lowered her eyes, then cut them over to Jonathan.

  “Jonny, if I tell you something, will you keep it just between the three of us? If Randy ever found out what kind of crazy stunt I pulled, I swear he’d have me locked up in the funny farm.”

  Jonathan laughed easily. “I won’t say anything to Randy. Unless you’re about to confess you’re the one who killed Caroline.”

  She tucked a strand of her dark hair behind her ear. A nervous gesture, because every hair on Merijoy Rucker’s head belonged right where it was.

  “I didn’t kill her, but honestly, I was so angry at her, at the way she was, that I wanted to. Of all the scheming, conniving Yankee tramps to hit this town, Caroline DeSantos was the worst. That’s speaking ill of the dead, but it’s true.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “What Jonny said. I used my God-given snooping talents. It wasn’t even hard. She was such a trashy thing, she hardly ever bothered to be discreet.”

  “Discreet about what? Sleeping with Tal and wrecking my marriage?”

  Merijoy looked a little uneasy. “No, honey, that she was sleeping with Phipps Mayhew.”

  “What?” Jonathan and I said it together.

  “Oh yes. They were quite the hot item. At one point they even went house hunting together.”

  “So that’s who Anna and Emily’s mystery client was,” Jonathan said.

  “Why didn’t you say something the night of the supper club?”

  “Because I already knew too much,” Merijoy said. “I didn’t want you asking a lot of questions I couldn’t answer.”

  “What else do you know about Caroline and Phipps Mayhew?” I asked.