Daniel parked the truck across the street so that we could see the front door of the warehouse. “Seems like a pretty brazen way to be doing drug smuggling,” he said.
We rolled the windows down and watched the place for a while.
“Hear that?” I asked. A high-pitched whining sound floated across the street.
“Power tools,” Daniel said. “Sounds just like my place.”
“They could be cutting the drugs out of the furniture shipped from Hong Kong,” BeBe offered.
“That’s absurd,” Daniel said again.
“We’re not gonna just sit here,” I said finally, nudging BeBe in the side. “Let me out.”
“Hold on,” Daniel said, grabbing my arm. “What’s the plan?”
“Plan?”
“I’ve got a plan,” BeBe announced. She pointed toward the corner of the warehouse, where a For Lease sign was nailed to the siding.
“We’ll tell them I’m a real estate agent, and you’re my client, and we want to look at the space to lease.”
“Not bad,” Daniel said.
“You’re just sucking up to her because she’s your boss,” I said. “Who do I get to be? The interior designer?”
“Nobody,” BeBe said. “Hargreaves knows you—right? If he sees you, you’ll blow our cover.”
“No fair,” I said. “This was my idea. Anyway, you two don’t know anything about antiques. You’ve never even seen the Moses Weed cupboard.”
“You’ve described it to me a dozen times,” BeBe said. “If it’s in there, I’ll recognize it. Now come on,” she said, nodding at Daniel. “Before I lose my nerve.”
I sat in the truck and pouted, watching the warehouse with my hand on the cell phone in case any dangerous-looking drug-smuggling types showed up.
Daniel and BeBe crossed the street, and I had to admit that BeBe looked very cool in her Honey West jumpsuit. BeBe tried the door, then turned around and pantomimed to me that it was locked.
Daniel found a buzzer beside the door and leaned on it for a minute. After a long time, the door opened, and a man, short, Mexican-looking, with thick forearms, came out to talk to them.
I could see BeBe talking and gesturing animatedly, and Daniel talking and nodding in agreement. The Mexican kept shaking his head no, but every time he did that, BeBe took another step forward, followed by Daniel, until they were inside the warehouse and the door swung shut.
Nothing happened for about five minutes, which made me nuts. I tucked the cell phone in the waistband of my pants and got out of the car and crept across the street, trying to stay out of the beam of the parking-lot spotlight.
I crouched down behind a row of Dumpsters at the edge of the lot, out of the light but close enough to keep the doorway in view.
After another five minutes, the door swung open and BeBe and Daniel walked out, followed by the Mexican, who was doing a lot of his own gesturing and talking.
The Mexican stood in the doorway and watched them cross the street to the truck, but I didn’t dare move from my hiding space. They got in the truck, and I could see they were wondering where I’d gone. After a moment or two, Daniel started the truck’s engine and rolled slowly down the street. The Mexican watched them go, then, finally, let the warehouse door swing shut.
Shit. Were they leaving me? I crouched down next to the Dumpster and tried to decide what to do.
My waist started to buzz, which startled me badly until I realized the buzzing was coming from the cell phone. I flipped it open. “Hello?” I whispered.
“Where the hell are you?” BeBe demanded.
“Hiding between the Dumpsters,” I whispered. “Come back and get me. And make it snappy.”
When the truck cruised slowly past the parking lot, I did a very un-Diana Rigg run for the truck. BeBe had the passenger door open, and I jumped inside before Daniel could roll to a stop.
“What did you see?” I asked, gasping for breath.
“A warehouse,” Daniel said.
“Four thousand square feet, unheated,” BeBe added.
“What were they doing in there?” I asked.
“That Mexican kept trying to shoo us back to the front,” BeBe said. “But I explained that my client needed to see all of the space. We wandered out to the warehouse for a minute or two, before he hustled us back to the front office area.”
“You were right about the building materials,” Daniel said. “There were stacks of lumber, power tools. Lots of hand tools too, which I found peculiar. Old bandsaws and chisels and old-timey stuff. They had a paint table set up, and lots of hardware, nails, chains. Like a workshop.”
“What about antiques? Did you see any antiques?”
“We saw a couple of tables almost exactly like the one you and I saw in the window at Hargreaves’s shop,” BeBe said. “Except these were just plain wood. And there was a stack of like, table legs, and doors, like the kind that might go on a cabinet or something. And lots and lots of piles of old-looking wood. The kind that looks like it’s been pulled off an old house or something.”
“What about the Moses Weed cupboard?” I asked. “Did you see it?”
“No,” BeBe said. “But we only got a glimpse of the workshoplike place. There was furniture in there. That’s for definite.”
“Antique furniture?”
“You know, sort of that primitive, junky stuff like you like,” BeBe said. “The guy didn’t speak much English, but it was real clear he wanted us out of there, and pronto.”
“Primitive furniture,” I said. And then I remembered all the sandpaper and steel wool and paint Zoe Kallenberg bought at the hardware store. And I had a very good idea of what Lewis Hargreaves was doing in his warehouse. Really good Southern vernacular antiques were getting harder to find. The market was heating up, but the supply had dwindled to nothing. So Lewis Hargreaves had found a solution. He was making his own.
Chapter 58
Saturday nights, James had a gin and tonic promptly at 5 P.M. He liked to take it on the back porch, looking out at the garden Bernadette had tended for so many years. Here, more than any other place in the house, he felt close to his mother. Her worn-out cotton mop still hung from a nail by the back door. Her gardening shoes, a pair of rubber-soled boots she’d cut the tops off of, stood companionably in the corner, toes pointing in, and the granite-ware dishpan she’d used to shell white-acre peas was placed upside down on a wobbly table beside his rocking chair.
He rocked and thought about the day’s events. Phipps Mayhew was not a man to cross. His anger was volcanic; his pockets deep. Faced with any kind of threat, he would strike back, and viciously.
James winced, thinking of Mayhew’s threat to make public his sexual orientation. Money was the least of his worries. He would be forced out of the closet. His family, old friends, would be shocked, disgusted, and feel betrayed. Not Weezie. Weezie knew and apparently accepted that aspect of his life. But the rest, how would they react?
He sipped his drink and weighed the issue. But no matter how he framed the question, the answer stayed the same. He would do what needed to be done. He would take the consequences as they came.
From inside the house he heard the quiet dinging of the doorbell. He picked up his drink and walked through the house to the foyer. He was expecting Weezie to come by to pick up her pocketbook. He opened the door.
Diane Mayhew stood on his porch in a silk party frock. Her flowery hat was gone, but she had a new accessory: a snub-nosed pistol.
“Hello, Father,” she said.
He stared down at the barrel of the gun.
“It’s a forty-five,” Diane said, seeing what he was looking at. “It’s loaded, and I know how to use it. May I come in, please?”
Inviting her inside seemed the thing to do.
“Now what?” James asked.
“Could we sit down?” she asked. “I’ve had these damned heels on all day. My calves are throbbing.”
He gestured toward the living room, whose picture windo
ws faced Washington Avenue. The drapes were open. Maybe somebody would drive by and see Diane Mayhew holding him at gunpoint.
“Not here,” Diane said, reaching down and kneading the back of one leg. “Don’t you have a study or something?”
“Of course,” he said, pointing to the dining room. He ate all his meals in the kitchen, so he’d given his mother’s furniture to one of the nieces and moved in a desk and some bookshelves.
“This is nice,” Diane said, looking around the room. “This house is much bigger than it looks from the street. Did you do the decorating yourself?”
“Some of it,” he said, trying not to sound nervous.
“I like this paint color,” she said, running her free hand over the wall of the study. “What do you call it?”
“Brown,” James said.
Diane Mayhew, James thought, was unhinged. She was pointing a gun at him and asking him for decorating hints. It occurred to James that most of the women in Savannah he had contact with were, on some level, slightly deranged. Look at Marian, his sister-in-law. And Denise Cahoon. And Merijoy Rucker.
It could be hormones, he decided. Or maybe just the humidity.
“Sit right there, Father,” Diane was saying, pointing with her gun to one of the straight-backed chairs against the far wall. He did as he was told.
“What’s this about, Mrs. Mayhew?” he asked, keeping his voice low and nonconfrontational.
“I heard everything you said to Phipps in his study today,” Diane Mayhew said. “If you stand in the master bedroom upstairs, by the heat vent, you can hear every word spoken in the den. It’s really uncanny.”
James said, “I’m very sorry you had to hear it from me. I apologize.”
“I already knew he was cheating on me with that woman, Caroline DeSantos,” Diane said. “But you’ve got it all wrong. Phipps only fucked her.” She blushed slightly. “Excuse me, Father, I mean, he had sex with her. He never would have killed her. I’m the one who killed Caroline.”
“I’m sure you had your reasons,” James said calmly. “It must be devastating to find your husband is attracted to another woman. And Caroline DeSantos was not a nice person. A home wrecker, you might call her.”
“Exactly,” Diane said. “And to think, things might have gone on until it was too late, if I hadn’t been so worried about my boys.”
“Your boys?”
“Our sons. Phipps III, we call him Tripp, and Phillip. Flip. They’re teenagers, enrolled at Country Day, but I was afraid they were mixing with the wrong element.”
James nodded, understanding nothing.
“I found condoms in Tripp’s backpack. I begged Phipps to talk to the boys, but he said I was blowing things out of proportion. I decided to find out who the girls were.”
“A fine idea,” James said. He wondered how this had anything to do with why Diane Mayhew found it necessary to shoot Caroline DeSantos in the chest.
“I bought a taping device,” Diane went on. “A bug. And I put it on the boys’ phone. And every night I’d listen to their conversations.
“About a week after I bought the device, I heard Phipps. On the boys’ phone. I almost died. He was talking to a woman. Dirty talk! On my boys’ phone. What if they’d overheard him talking that smut talk?”
“Could be damaging to their self-esteem,” James murmured soothingly.
“He was talking to Caroline DeSantos,” Diane said, gritting her teeth as she said the name, “setting up meetings. She didn’t wear panties. Did you know that? Whenever she was going to meet him—no panties. I heard her telling him that on the phone. And that’s when I decided she had to die.”
“Very disturbing,” James agreed. Disturbed? She was a whack-job.
“Phipps was talking to a divorce lawyer too,” Diane said, tears welling up in her pale brown eyes. “I had to stop him from leaving. For the boys’ sake.”
“Mrs. Mayhew?” James said, leaning forward. “I think you should tell this story to a therapist I know. You’ve been under such stress.”
“No!” Diane screeched, raising the gun and pointing it at him again. “No therapist. You sound like Phipps.”
She swallowed. “Don’t waste your time trying that therapy crap on me, Father. The point of all this is, I killed Caroline. You figured it out, or came close, and now you’d like to blow the whistle on Phipps. But if you do that, you’ll ruin everything. We’ve spent millions putting this paper plant deal together. The financing is all laid out. But it’s all short-term, high interest. Any delay, and we’re wiped out. I can’t let that happen. I have my boys to think of.”
James nodded. “I understand.”
“Do you?” she said bitterly. “I doubt it. The planning that went into all this, the thought. It was masterful, if I do say so myself. I kept all the tapes of Phipps and Caroline’s phone calls. I got another tape recorder, and I cut bits and pieces of their conversation. And then I called Caroline’s office and waited until I got her answering machine. I played back a tape I’d made. It was Phipps’s voice, asking her to meet him out at Beaulieu. And that’s all it took.”
“Very clever,” James said.
“She went out to Beaulieu that night, thinking she and Phipps would have one more filthy little sex session,” Diane said. “But I got there first. I brought my own gun, but when I got to the house, I found the box with the dueling pistols. It was providence, really. Both pistols were loaded. I took one, fired it once into the wall, and it worked perfectly. After that, I hid in the upstairs bedroom. She came running up the stairs, calling his name. And I came out of the bedroom, and I shot her right in the chest. You should have seen the look on her face,” Diane said triumphantly. “You know, if she’d known she was going to die, I’ll bet she would have worn panties that night.”
“Mrs. Mayhew?” James felt tired. “Isn’t there anything I can do to help?”
Diane cocked her head and smiled. “You have to die. The children’s college money is at stake. And the Mayhew name. I can’t let anything interfere with that. Or with our marriage. You being a priest and all, you understand.”
“I’m not a priest anymore,” James said. He was fed up. “Your husband betrayed you, Mrs. Mayhew. Why don’t you take your anger out on him?”
“He’s a husband. And a father,” she said. “You’re just another gay man. There are thousands of your kind in Savannah. No wife, no kids. No big loss.”
“I have family here,” James said. “People who love me.”
“They don’t know you’re queer, do they?” she said pityingly.
“Don’t do this,” James said. “You’re a person with morals. Killing is immoral.”
She stood up suddenly. “I hate this godforsaken town. The minute the boys are out of high school, I’m packing up and leaving. She laughed. “Actually, ‘hate’ isn’t a strong enough word. I loathe this town. My God! The roaches. And the gnats. They gnaw on my skin until I bleed. And this obsession with being from Savannah. Have these people ever heard of Boston? Or Philadelphia? Those are seats of culture. And learning. Not this stinking bug-ridden swamp.
“And the rice!” she moaned, waving the gun around.
“Rice?”
“Rice,” she said, shuddering. “If anybody else serves me another dish of rice in this town, I think I’ll just die.”
She was standing very close to him, and the gun was pointed right at his chest. But James thought of an old joke. It was about how Savannahians are just like the Chinese—they both worship their ancestors and eat a lot of rice.
Diane’s breath was coming in short gasps now. Her hair was askew and her face was sheened with perspiration.
“You seem anxious,” James said.
“You think I like killing people?” she snapped. “This isn’t easy for me. I’m not a serial killer. I’m a woman at the end of my rope.”
“Would you like a cool drink?” he asked, crossing his fingers.
“Maybe a quick one. I need to get home before the boys g
et back from lacrosse practice.”
“I’ll just go in the kitchen and get you something,” James said.
“I’m right behind you, so don’t try anything funny,” Diane instructed, poking him in the small of the back with the barrel of her pistol.
“Some iced tea?” he asked when they were in the kitchen. “Or juice?”
She stood with her back to the kitchen door, taking shallow breaths. “I’m so tense,” she complained. “Really anxious. It wasn’t like this with Caroline. I was cool as a cucumber when I shot her. Walked out of the house, saw all those people driving up for the sale, and I just drove off like nothing happened. Maybe I’m anxious because of you being a priest.”
James’s own nerves were considerably frayed. His hands shook uncontrollably as he fumbled around in the cabinet, looking for a clean glass. And his eyes lit upon the pill bottle. Marian’s tranquilizers. Brand X.
“Let me fix you a glass of wine,” James said. “I have a nice Bordeaux.”
“Maybe just one glass. I have to keep a clear head. Don’t want to get pulled over by the cops while we’re out for our drive.”
“Our drive?” A chill ran down his spine. Reaching for the wineglass, he managed to palm the pill bottle in the same hand. He set the glass on the counter.
“Yes. I can’t very well shoot you here. I’ve been thinking about that swamp out at Beaulieu. There are alligators there. I’ve seen them sunning on the banks.”
“Let me see,” James said, squatting down in front of the lower cabinet and thrusting his torso inside. “That bottle is way at the back here.” It was actually in the front. But with his body nearly inside the cabinet, he managed to open the pill bottle and spill six tablets into his hand. Would they dissolve in the wine? He stood up, put the tablets on the counter and the bottle on top of them. James took the corkscrew out of the drawer and while lifting the cork, mashed the pills as hard as he could with the bottle bottom.
“I’ve been saving this wine for something special,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. “I guess this is as special as it’s going to get for me.”
Savannah Blues Page 37
