Savannah Blues

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “He was wild about her,” Merijoy said. “I saw a program about it, on Oprah. They were talking about sexual obsession. That’s what I think it must have been like for those two. It was indecent. They had sex everywhere, like a couple of animals in heat. In his office, at her office, at his house at Turner’s Rock, even at your house, Weezie—I mean, Tal’s house. They even did it at Beaulieu, right there in the parlor.” Her face was now pink with indignation.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked, getting a queasy feeling.

  “I followed her,” Merijoy said. “That little yellow Triumph of hers was like a big old neon arrow. All I had to do was look for that yellow car. God, a couple of times they nearly spotted me, peeking in windows at the two of them just banging away. In broad daylight!”

  Jonathan’s lips twitched. “What did you intend to do about them?”

  Merijoy nibbled at the cuticle around her thumbnail. “It wasn’t really blackmail,” she said finally. “I wasn’t demanding money or anything. I just wanted to put a stop to that paper plant.”

  “Tell me what happened,” Jonathan said, now straight-faced.

  “The day before the sale at Beaulieu, I finally got up the nerve to call Caroline,” Merijoy said. “I thought it was my last chance to stop the estate sale. No offense, Weezie, but it killed me to think of all the Mullinax things being carted away from the house. Think of it—all the original furnishings, gone. I called Caroline at her office. And I told her I had a matter we needed to discuss.

  “She told me she didn’t have time for any of my hysterical historical nonsense. So I just told her she’d better get down off her high horse and meet me, because I knew all about her affair with Phipps Mayhew. That got her attention.”

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “I told her to meet me out at Beaulieu,” Merijoy said. “At first she flat out refused. Then I told her that if she didn’t meet me, I’d tell Tal and Diane Mayhew about the affair. That’s when Caroline changed her tune.”

  “Did you actually see her that night?”

  “No,” Merijoy said. “I got to the house at eight o’clock, like we’d arranged. I went inside and waited. But it was pitch black. I waited and waited. Finally, at nine, I didn’t dare stay any later. I went home. And the next morning, I saw on the news that Caroline was dead. And they’d arrested you, Weezie.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you tell Jonathan right then what you knew?”

  Tears welled up in her eyes. “I couldn’t. If Randy knew I’d been sneaking around, spying on people, threatening them, he’d have a fit. An absolute fit. Anyway, I didn’t know who killed Caroline.”

  “You knew who had a good motive,” I said coldly.

  She sniffed a little, and wiped at her eyes with a balled-up paper napkin.

  “Honey, please don’t be mad at me,” she pleaded. “I’ll help you now. I’ll do whatever it takes to make it up to you. All right?”

  Chapter 55

  After we left Merijoy Rucker’s house, Jonathan took me back to Uncle James’s to pick up my truck. The Mercedes was gone, so we assumed he’d left on his visit to Gerry Blankenship.

  “Do you really think we’ll be able to save Beaulieu?” I asked Jonathan.

  “I do,” he said. “Those photos Merijoy gave us, plus the affidavit she’ll swear to, will document the fact that Coastal Paper Products, or their agents, deliberately engaged in fraud by stripping the house of elements that contributed to its landmark status. And,” he said smugly, “Gerry Blankenship is toast. I’m sure we’ll be able to nail him on the matter of the Mullinax will, as well as the foundation. He’ll at least be disbarred, and if everything falls into place like it should, I’ll be able to pursue criminal charges too.”

  “How long will all of that take?” I asked. “What’s to stop Coastal Paper Products from firing up those bulldozers today and knocking the house down?”

  “As soon as I leave here I’m heading in to the office,” Jonathan said. “I’ll call a judge and ask for a temporary restraining order to keep their demolition permit in abeyance at least until we finish gathering all the facts.”

  “Can you get a judge to do that?”

  He took his glasses off and polished them on the hem of his golf shirt. “Merijoy is at home right now, working the preservation league’s phone list. At the top of her list is Bea Gunther, who is a very preservation-minded person. I think Judge Gunther will give us our TRO without batting an eyelash.”

  “Jonathan,” I said, “do you think Phipps Mayhew killed Caroline?”

  “It’s possible,” Jonathan said. “But in light of what we’ve just heard, I’m more inclined than ever to believe that Tal was involved.”

  I opened my mouth to defend him, but I could think of nothing to say. What did I really know about my ex-husband after all? He’d cheated on me for years, and I’d been blissfully unaware of his betrayal. He’d gotten involved in the Coastal Paper Products deal too, and it was impossible to believe he hadn’t condoned the stripping of Beaulieu.

  “Detective Bradley’s medical leave doesn’t take effect for another couple of weeks,” Jonathan said. “I’m going to call him right now to see if we can get together this afternoon so I can bring him up to speed on all I’ve learned today.” He looked suddenly and unexpectedly stern, like the prosecutor he was.

  “I can trust you to keep quiet about all this, can’t I?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t suppose you can put one of those TROs on Lewis Hargreaves while you’re at it, can you?”

  “Only if you can prove he acquired those antiques through a criminal act.”

  I was halfway back to the carriage house when it struck me; Tal could be a killer. Not just a rat-fink liar and a cheat and a sloppy drunk; he very well could be the one who put a bullet in Caroline DeSantos.

  It was ninety-five degrees outside, but the memory of her body sliding out of the closet at Beaulieu sent cold shivers up my spine. What if I had totally underestimated Tal? What if he was the killer? He’d known she was having an affair. He’d admitted to me that he’d followed her halfway out to Beaulieu. By now I knew he was a skilled liar. Maybe he was lying about everything else too.

  And if he’d killed Caroline in a jealous rage, what was to stop him from killing a second time? He’d seen me at least once with Daniel. Maybe Daniel was right. Maybe Tal was watching me. Stalking me. I’d changed the locks on the carriage house, but if Tal decided to come after me, a little thing like a lock wouldn’t stop him.

  I detoured over to BeBe’s house.

  “What now?” she asked when I barged in the back door.

  I went straight to the refrigerator and found the chocolate fudge sauce where I’d left it the night before. The spoon was still in the jar. I dipped in and started finishing it off.

  “Don’t tell me,” BeBe said. “You made up with Daniel after you left here last night, and now you’re broken up again? Weezie, sweetie, you need to pace yourself with these things.”

  “It’s not Daniel that’s got me stressed out,” I said between bites. “It’s Tal. Jonathan and James think Tal killed Caroline. Think about it, Babe. Tal, the man I slept beside for ten years, a killer.”

  “No,” BeBe said. “He doesn’t have the guts.”

  “What if that gutless-WASP thing is just an act? I’m serious, BeBe. I could be living right next door to a stone-cold killer.”

  “Look at the bright side,” BeBe said. “Maybe they’ll arrest the SOB and throw his ass in prison. And then you can move back into the townhouse.”

  “Maybe.” I put the cap on the fudge sauce and started to put it back in the refrigerator. BeBe took it and handed it back to me. “You keep it,” she said. “Since you’ve basically licked it clean.

  “Hey,” she said, brightening. “I almost forgot to ask about the estate sale. How did it go? Did you get the cupboard?”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t even listed in the sale catalog. Lewis
Hargreaves beat me to the punch again.”

  Her face fell. “Are you sure?”

  “Who else?”

  She stood up and grabbed her purse and car keys. “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?” I asked. “Not home. Not right now. I’m too spooked.”

  “Not home,” she said. “To L. Hargreaves. My money’s as good as anybody else’s. If he’s got the cupboard, what’s to stop me from buying it?”

  “Money,” I said. “If Hargreaves bought it for fifteen thousand, that’s his wholesale price. He’ll have it marked up to thirty thousand or even forty-five thousand or more. Retail. If we pay that much for it, there’s very little margin for profit left.”

  “Weezie, Weezie, Weezie,” she said, shaking her blond curls. “This is BeBe Loudermilk you’re talking to. I never paid retail in my life. And I don’t intend to start now.”

  I looked around the kitchen for my own pocketbook, but I couldn’t find it. Panic set in. All my cash—more than seventeen thousand dollars—was in that purse. “Oh my God,” I said slowly, and then it hit me. I’d taken it into Uncle James’s house. It must still be there.

  I called his house, but there was no answer. At least it was locked up safe and sound, I thought. BeBe and I could retrieve it later.

  The front window at L. Hargreaves featured a typically spare Hargreaves tableaux: against a backdrop of wrinkly unbleached muslin he’d set a spindly-legged heart-pine huntboard in original paint.

  “Ugh,” BeBe said, stopping dead in her tracks in front of the window. “I thought you said Hargreaves has exquisite taste.”

  “I did. He does. That huntboard has the original faux-grained blue paint, and dovetailed drawers. It’s definitely Southern, late nineteenth century. He’s probably asking around eight thousand dollars for it.”

  She sniffed. “My granddaddy’s got a table just like that out in the hen-house at his farm.”

  “Tell him I’ll give him five hundred bucks for it,” I said.

  “Let’s go in and browse,” BeBe said. She pushed against the glass door, but it didn’t give. We stood back, and that’s when we noticed the Closed sign on the door.

  “Since when does an antique shop close down on a Saturday afternoon?” BeBe asked.

  “If you’re Lewis Hargreaves, you can afford to keep banker’s hours,” I said. “He’s mostly open by appointment. Let’s go. This is pointless, anyway. He’s probably already sold the Moses Weed.”

  We were starting to cross the street to get to the car when I happened to turn around. A tall, thin girl with waist-length red hair came out of L. Hargreaves and locked the door.

  “Look,” I said, clutching BeBe’s arm. “That’s Zoe Kallenberg. She’s Hargreaves’s assistant.”

  She walked quickly down the street until she got to a white van parked at the curb along Liberty Street. She unlocked the van and got in.

  “I’ll bet she’s going back out to Beaulieu to fetch another load of furniture,” I griped.

  “Come on,” BeBe said, quickening her pace until we were both at her car. “Let’s follow her and see what she’s up to.”

  “I was kidding,” I said, but I got in the car and BeBe fired it up and swung easily into traffic behind the white L. Hargreaves van.

  We followed Zoe Kallenberg to a hardware store on DeRenne Avenue. When she got out of the van she had a cell phone clutched to her ear.

  BeBe and I trailed along behind her as she pushed a shopping cart up and down the aisles.

  Zoe’s long tresses swayed slightly as she minced along in tiny little steps, which were necessitated by the three-inch heels on her black mules. Her lacquered fingertips fluttered over the shelves while she consulted with the person at the other end of the phone, who was obviously dictating the shopping list.

  Our decoy cart stayed empty, except for a can of spray paint we added for effect, but Zoe’s cart was piled high with paint and brushes, steel wool, sandpaper, lacquer, mineral spirits, and other assorted hardware-type goods.

  “She doesn’t look like Ms. Fix-it to me,” I said as we watched her pay for her purchases with a Platinum American Express card.

  “Not with those nails and that outfit,” BeBe agreed.

  We tagged after Zoe to her car.

  “Keep going?” BeBe asked as she started her car.

  “Yeah,” I said. “This is kind of fun.”

  We followed the van easily through the light Saturday-afternoon traffic toward the east side of Savannah, where the neighborhoods were more run-down, and the look more urban industrial than residential.

  “The shipyards?” BeBe asked as we approached the sprawling Port Authority complex.

  “Maybe it’s the hot new Gen-X stomping grounds,” I said.

  “Uh-uh,” BeBe said. “There aren’t any nightclubs over here. Motorcycle clubs, maybe.”

  But we passed by the shipyards and kept going until Zoe swung the van unexpectedly into the parking lot of a grimy warehouse complex.

  BeBe drove on past, pulled into a convenience store, and turned and cruised slowly back past the warehouses.

  The white van was now parked next to a loading dock. Zoe stood by the open back doors, talking to two men standing on the dock above her. One of them was Lewis Hargreaves.

  I slid down in the seat until my chin was touching the dashboard.

  “Keep going,” I told BeBe. “I don’t want Hargreaves to spot us snooping around here.”

  “What do you suppose they’re up to?” she asked, craning her neck to see in the rearview mirror.

  “I don’t know,” I said, sitting up again. “But I think it bears looking into.”

  Chapter 56

  James sat down at the desk in the house on Washington Avenue. He folded his hands, said a quiet prayer for serenity, and called Gerry Blankenship.

  “Gerry. This is James Foley. We met out at Beaulieu the day of Anna Ruby Mullinax’s memorial service. I have a matter I’d like to discuss with you.”

  Blankenship tried to give him the brush-off. “Call me Monday, during office hours,” he barked. “Tell my secretary what it’s in regard to.”

  “It’s in regard to Miss Mullinax’s will,” James said calmly. “And the sale of Beaulieu to Coastal Paper Products and the impending demolition of the plantation house.”

  “Foley?” Blankenship sounded puzzled. “Who are you? What’s your interest in this matter?”

  James was prepared for the question. Prepared to fib too.

  “Grady and Juanita Traylor are old friends of mine,” he said smoothly. “I visited them this week. I was shocked at the extent of their impairment.”

  He heard a quick intake of breath.

  “What do you want?” Blankenship repeated.

  “I’d like to talk to you in person. Today.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes,” James said. “Events at Beaulieu are happening so quickly, I think it’s important that we talk immediately.”

  “You know where my office is? On Madison Square? I can be there in half an hour,” Blankenship said. “But I have a tee time at three.”

  “That’ll give us plenty of time,” James said.

  It was only after he’d hung up the phone that he realized he was sweating profusely. He mopped his forehead with his handkerchief and decided to get a cold drink of juice from the refrigerator.

  As he was taking a glass from the dish drainer he noticed a pocketbook lying on the counter next to the sink. Weezie’s purse, he thought. It was a blue canvas affair, and its contents had spilled onto the countertop. There were a billfold, a pair of sunglasses, a lipstick, and an old-fashioned pill bottle. He picked it up. Doan’s pills, the label said. But these would be Marian’s stolen tranquilizers, which Weezie had retrieved from Cousin Lucy’s house. The brand name escaped him, something with an X. Brand X? How appropriate, he thought, tucking everything but the pills back into the pocketbook.

  He put the Brand X bottle on the kitchen counter, beside his mother’s sug
ar canister.

  It really wouldn’t do for Weezie to be running around town with such powerful narcotics, James thought. Weezie had already had one brush with the law this summer. And one was more than enough.

  Gerry Blankenship’s fleshy cheeks quivered with agitation at the sight of James Foley standing in his outer office.

  “I checked up on you,” he said flatly. “You’re a priest. Why didn’t you say so on the phone?”

  “Former priest,” James said. “It wasn’t germane to the matter at hand.”

  Blankenship pointed toward the inner office. “We can talk in there.”

  “Fine,” James said. He took a seat in a straight-backed leather chair opposite Blankenship’s enormous desk.

  “Say what you came to say,” Blankenship said bluntly.

  “Very well,” James said. “As you’re well aware, Grady and Juanita Traylor are both in their late seventies. Grady’s stroke two years ago left him totally incapacitated. Juanita has suffered from diabetes for some years now, and glaucoma has left her virtually blind. You and I both know there is no way either of them was capable of properly witnessing Anna Ruby Mullinax’s will.”

  Blankenship had a silver fountain pen that he was rolling back and forth over his desktop, his thick freckled fingertips caressing the silver at each touch. He kept his gaze on the pen while he spoke.

  “The Traylors witnessed the will at Miss Mullinax’s request. She was very fond of them because they’d been in her employ for so long. I had no idea they were incapacitated. They were both alert and cognizant of what they were signing at the time.”

  “No.” James clutched the file folder on his lap with both hands. “That’s not true. The Traylors were not present when Miss Mullinax signed that will. You brought papers to their home and instructed them that they were to sign them “as a favor” to their old friend. Neither of them had seen your client for many months before her death.”