The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Wayne Springer was tall and rail-thin, with a beaked nose that looked as if he had inherited it from a Cherokee ancestor (which he had), in a narrow, sun-darkened face, and he preferred a battered felt cowboy hat to his deputy’s uniform cap. Buddy had hired him because he had five years of experience as a deputy over in Jefferson County, where he’d worked with a bigger and more up-to-date sheriff’s office and had gone through a law enforcement training program.

  But what was even more important to Buddy’s way of thinking was the fact that Wayne came from Birmingham. He had no local baggage or history or kin, unlike the dozen or so other men who had applied for the job, five or six of them with daddies who had political muscle in the county and fully expected to be hired. Buddy thought it would be better to bring in somebody who was essentially unknown and didn’t have any special friends or foes. Wayne had smarts and he definitely knew his business. He also had more experience than Buddy, especially when it came to handling a .38 Special, the standard cop gun. (Buddy was a fair shot when it came to pinging cans on a fence, but he’d never gotten used to the idea that he might actually have to shoot somebody.) And so far, Wayne had been easy to work with. But they were still trying each other out.

  Buddy peered over Wayne’s shoulder. The deputy had dusted the dark surfaces of Myra May’s car with Chemist Gray Powder made of mercury and chalk, then lifted the prints with strips of that handy new Scotch cellulose tape. Still at the scene, he had transferred the print tapes to individual cards and labeled them with the site where he’d lifted them (the steering wheel, the gearshift, the door handle) and the date and time. Now, he was sorting and classifying them, getting ready to make comparisons.

  Wayne sniffed. “You been usin’ perfume?”

  “I was searching the victim’s bedroom,” Buddy said. “Is it bad?”

  “Not as long as you don’t get too close.”

  Buddy stepped back. Looking down at Wayne’s work, he said, “You get the prints of the ladies at the diner and the Telephone Exchange?”

  “Yeah.” Wayne nodded at a thin stack of cards at the corner of the table. “From all the weepin’ and moanin’ that went on, you’da thought their fingers would be purple forever.” The fingerprint kit contained a purple ink pad that some people objected to using.

  “Females are like that,” Buddy remarked. “Where you at on that job?”

  “Just getting organized. There were lots of prints on that car, but I’m focusing on the doors, the front seat area, and the dashboard. Miss Mosswell is supposed to be giving me a list of everybody that’s been in that car in the past month—could be three or four more, on top of the ladies I printed this morning. They’ll all have to be excluded.” Wayne’s voice was flat, uninflected, unexcited. Buddy liked that about him. “Anything that’s left could belong to our man. There’s a good one on the driver’s side door handle that I haven’t found a match for yet. A thumbprint with a scar.”

  “Yeah. Well, stay with it, Wayne,” Buddy said, congratulating himself on hiring somebody precise and methodical enough to do a picky job like matching prints. “Could be what’s needed to get a conviction.”

  He went into his office, in what had once been the dining room of the house, and set the coffee mug on the corner of his desk. Taking down a large brown envelope and a smaller white envelope from a supply shelf, he slid Rona Jean’s diary into the brown one and the $140 in twenties into the white one, labeled both, and dated them. He raised his voice, speaking through the open door.

  “Nothing from Doc Roberts yet, I reckon?” He was asking just to be sure. Even if the doctor had gotten to Rona Jean first thing, he wouldn’t call with the results until after he’d written the report—unless there was something extra special he wanted to pass on.

  “Nope,” Wayne replied. “Nothing. Been quiet as the grave since I got here. Except for the weather report, just before you came in. Might want to keep an eye on the sky today.”

  “Oh yeah?” Buddy opened the top drawer of the scarred wooden desk and slid the envelopes into it. “What’s happening?”

  “Storm pushin’ in off the Gulf right about now. Could be a hurricane.”

  “Just what we need,” Buddy said darkly, remembering the last hurricane that had blown through Darling, maybe ten years before. It had crossed the Gulf Coast west of Mobile, ripped the roof off Jake Pritchard’s Standard Oil station, blown in windows and torn up fine old trees all over town, and sent Pine Mill Creek out of its banks, flooding pastures and drowning old Tate Haggard’s cows. Buddy had been in high school then, and remembered that the sheriff had imposed a curfew and helped the mayor organize the cleanup. He probably ought to talk to Jed Snow, the current mayor, and figure out what they should do if this storm turned out to be a bad one.

  He was reaching for the phone to call Jed when it rang. “Sheriff’s Office,” he said. He always liked what came next. “Sheriff Norris speakin’.”

  “Buddy, this is Edna Fay Roberts,” a woman’s voice said. “Doc called a little while ago. He wanted me to call you.”

  Buddy sat down, picked up a pencil, and pulled a piece of scratch paper toward him. Edna Fay was the doctor’s nurse as well as his wife. She might have news about the autopsy. “Is he finished?”

  “Yes.” Then, in a louder voice, she said, “Henrietta Conrad, if you’re still on the line, I’ll thank you to get off, if you don’t mind.” There was a pause and then a click, as the Exchange operator broke the connection. “Those switchboard girls,” Edna Fay said, in a tsk-tsk voice. “Myra May tells them it’s against the rules for them to listen in, but they do it anyway, especially on the doctor’s line. Probably on the sheriff’s line, too. They like to think they’re getting the latest news hot off the wire.”

  “That’s the truth,” Buddy remarked pleasantly, putting down the pencil and taking a sip of coffee. He had known Edna Fay since he was a kid, for he’d been accident prone and frequently ended up in Doc Roberts’ office getting stitched and splinted. In his experience, the lady was a talker. If you gave her an inch, she’d take the rest of the morning, and by noon, you’d be no wiser. But there was no hurrying her. She had to go at her own pace.

  “It purely is,” Edna Fay said. “Anyway, Doc said to tell you that she was hit on the head—the right temple, actually. Hard enough to produce a skull fracture. He says it was probably something like a beer bottle.”

  “Hit on the head?” Buddy picked up a pencil and wrote hit on the head on the scratch paper. Then: beer bottle. “I missed that.”

  “Doc said it’d be easy to miss,” Edna Fay said. “It was in the hairline. And yes, she was strangled, no surprise there. But not with her stocking.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said, frowning. “I saw the body myself. There was a stocking around her neck.”

  “Yes. There was a stocking around her neck. But she was strangled with a rope. A hemp rope. Doc said he could tell by the bruises, and by some hemp fibers that broke off and got embedded in her skin. The stocking came later. Afterward.”

  “Ah,” Buddy said. “I see.” The stocking might have been added to make it look more like a sexual assault. He jotted the words hemp rope on the scratch paper.

  “Doc said it wasn’t just real easy to fix a time of death,” Edna Fay said. “He guesses it’s around midnight, give or take. But he also found—”

  She broke off and Buddy drew a circle on his scratch paper. “Darla Ann,” she said in an exasperated tone to somebody on her end of the line, “I thought you were supposed to be hanging those sheets out. What are you waitin’ for?”

  Buddy put clock hands inside the circle, pointing to five minutes to twelve o’clock. There was a murmuring voice and a pause, then Edna Fay said, “Well, go next door and see if Mrs. Barker has any clothespins you can borrow until I can get over to Mann’s to buy another package.” To Buddy, she said, “I swear, that girl breaks more clothespins every wash d
ay than a normal person would in a month.” She paused. “Where were we?”

  “Yes’m,” Buddy said, and drew a diamond around the clock. “You were saying that Rona Jean—Miss Hancock—was hit on the head and then strangled with a rope, not her stocking. What about assault?” He reminded himself that Edna Fay was a nurse. “Sexual assault,” he added.

  “No evidence of sexual assault, is what he said,” Edna Fay replied cheerily. “And—” She broke off. “Lord, Darla Ann, what is it now?”

  This time the murmur was louder and more querulous and the pause was longer. While he waited, Buddy wrote no assalt under the diamond. He frowned at the word, which didn’t look right, crossed it out, and wrote assallt. He was glad, for Rona Jean’s sake. But if she hadn’t been killed fighting off her killer’s advances, why had she been killed?

  Edna Fay was back on the line, and this time, she was fit to be tied.

  “Buddy, you are not going to believe this, but Darla Ann knocked out the prop and down came the clothesline, with all the clean sheets and towels on it. Right down in the dirt, and of course they were still sopping wet, which means they are muddy.”

  “Sorry ’bout that,” Buddy said, and drew a big square around the diamond. “You said there was no evidence of assault and—” He paused, hoping she’d fill in the blank.

  “Yes, no assault,” Edna Fay said. “And no evidence of recent intercourse. But he was surprised when he saw that—” She raised her voice. “Darla Ann, I’ll be out there in a minute, soon as I finish on this phone. You start unpinning them off the line and put them in the basket. Shake off as much of that mud as you can. I don’t want to have to wash them again if we don’t have to.”

  Intercourse? Buddy was shocked. He had read the word, of course, and he knew what it meant, in his own experience. But the guys he knew used other words for it, and he had never heard anybody—let alone a woman—actually utter the word. But then, Edna Fay was a nurse and probably used to talking that way. No intercorse, he wrote, and drew two heavy lines under it. “You were saying that when he did the autopsy, Doc was surprised,” he prompted. “Surprised about what?”

  “I was saying?” She sounded distracted. “Oh, yes. He said she was about four months. Now, if you’ll excuse me, that poor girl I’ve got workin’ for me has absolutely no brains in her head at all. I am going to have to get out there and rescue those sheets myself.”

  Four months, Buddy wrote. He frowned. “Four months? Four months what?”

  Edna Fay’s laugh tinkled over the telephone wire. “Oh, Buddy, you are so funny. Why, four months pregnant, of course.”

  Buddy’s pencil lead snapped.

  EIGHT

  Charlie Dickens: A Newsman in Search of a Story

  Whistling the cheerful refrain of “Dixie,” Charlie Dickens pushed his bicycle through the front door of the Dispatch office and leaned it against the inside sill of the wide front window. He was hanging his straw boater and light blue seersucker suit coat on the coat tree in the corner when he heard a male voice.

  “Mornin’, Mr. Dickens. Wasn’t lookin’ for you to come in today—it bein’ Saturday and all.”

  Taking a deep breath of the combined fragrances of ink, kerosene, and newsprint that always hit him when he came into the office, Charlie turned to see Purley Mann leaning on a broom, an inky rag sticking out of the rear pocket of his overalls. Purley’s fine, silvery blond hair, cherubic face, and mild manner had earned him the nickname Baby when he was a kid, and he’d never outgrown it. Folks said that Baby hadn’t been at the head of the line when the Lord was handing out smarts, but Charlie had found him to be a good worker. He kept the place clean and helped operate the presses—the arthritic Prouty job press that had to be coaxed into producing handbills and advertisements and the like and the demonic Babcock that shook the floors and rattled the windows. The blasted thing had always given Charlie heartburn, but for Baby, who spent hours fixing and fine-tuning and polishing it, the Babcock purred like a kitten.

  Ophelia Snow was Charlie’s other helper. To his surprise, she had proved to be a whiz at the Linotype, a balky machine that women weren’t supposed to have the strength to operate. She was a good writer and willing to report on the Darling social events—women’s clubs, church events, and bridal and baby showers—that Charlie himself hated to cover. And recently, she’d taken a part-time office job at the CCC camp, so Charlie had given her a weekly assignment, “The Camp Briarwood News,” under her byline. She had already written three columns and was doing a commendable job, picking up little anecdotes here and there and weaving them into a readable, often amusing little story. And yesterday, Charlie had talked her into doing some extra investigating on the side.

  “Wasn’t lookin’ to come in today, Baby,” Charlie replied, going to his desk. “But then I got the news about Rona Jean’s murder. Figured it might be a good idea to put out a special edition. So let’s get ready for an extra print run on Tuesday.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped the sweat off his face. It was another hot day, after too many hot days. The radio had mentioned the possibility of a storm. A good thing, if it would break the heat.

  Baby had brightened at the mention of a special edition. The Babcock was his pet and he loved to run it. But then he remembered what the special edition was about and put on a doleful expression. “Terrible thing, that murder.”

  “That’s right,” Charlie said. Terrible for Rona Jean, he thought—but good for circulation. There was nothing like a murder to entice folks to read the newspaper. He could charge thirty-five cents for the special edition, and who knows? They might sell as many as three or four hundred papers, and the only out-of-pocket cost would be the extra ink and newsprint.

  Charlie had grown up in Darling and returned after a long and successful career as an investigative reporter. He had worked for the Baltimore Sun and the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, assignments sandwiched between a couple of stretches in the Associated Press wire service office in New York. He could smell a story a mile off and refused to rest until he had tracked it down, no matter how far he had to go or what he had to do to get it. The stories that paid off in the most column inches were sensational crime stories, of course—murders, kidnappings, bank robberies—and stories about fraud or political corruption. Crime made scorching front-page news, and Charlie had scrapbooks crammed with his bylined clips to prove it.

  But lately, he had begun to fear that he was losing his newshound’s nose for a good story. There was very little crime in Darling, a tame, two-bit town that was a newsman’s arid desert. For months on end, what happened was so unexciting, so unremarkable and utterly non-newsworthy that Charlie could write the stories in his sleep.

  And if Darling was a two-bit town, it had to be said that the Dispatch was a two-bit newspaper. Charlie had inherited it when his editor-publisher father died of cancer. He had never intended to keep it, planning to invest just enough effort to keep it going until he found a buyer for it. That plan might have worked, too, but then the Crash came and nobody wanted to put scarce money into a small-town newspaper with a serious shortage of paid advertising and an even greater shortage of news. Like it or not, Charlie was stranded here in Darling, a realization that had not done wonders for his disposition—until Fannie Champaign had agreed to marry him, that is. After that, things were noticeably different. Better. Much better.

  Now, Charlie loosened his tie, rolled up his sleeves, put on his green celluloid eyeshade, and sat down at his battered old wooden desk. He opened the bottom right-hand drawer and pulled out a bottle—a bottle of warm, flat Hires Root Beer. Last year at this time, it would have been a bottle of Mickey LeDoux’s best, but not now. For one thing, Mickey’s still had been busted and a young boy killed (that was the last big news story Charlie had written), and Mickey had spent eleven months or so in the slammer. He would be up and shining again in a few weeks, though,
and many in Darling would raise their glasses in celebration. But Charlie wouldn’t be celebrating. He would be drinking Hires. He had promised Fannie to leave the booze alone, and he meant to keep his promise.

  Charlie swigged his warm root beer, shaking his head at the thought of himself, a crusty bachelor newspaper reporter who had lived to chase stories and who had never had the least intention of settling down, now a married man who had sworn off the hard stuff. His nomadic experiences had given him a slantwise, skeptical view of settled, small-town life, and he’d seen too many bad marriages to be anything but skeptical about the possibility of marital happiness. But now that he and Fannie were married, he was by God going to make her happy and hope that some of it would rub off on him.

  He polished off the last of the root beer and tossed the bottle into the wastebasket with a loud clank. And maybe, just maybe, one of the stories he was chasing right now would turn out to be the story. The story he’d been waiting for ever since he’d been marooned in Darling by his father’s death.

  And it just might happen. For the astonishing fact was that at this very moment, Charlie had two stories to work on, either or both of which might prove to be a real doozy, something that the AP or UP wire services would pick up and distribute around the country. Or, better, that he could sell as a bylined special to the Atlanta Constitution.

  The first story, of course, was Rona Jean Hancock’s murder. The minute he got the word, Charlie had picked up his camera and raced for the scene of the crime, where he’d managed to snap a half-dozen photos before the sheriff—the new sheriff, Buddy Norris—showed up and told him to knock it off. He couldn’t print the photos in the Dispatch, which was a family newspaper. But he could use them in his Constitution piece or sell them to one of the wire services, which had recently run those dramatic death photos of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Bonnie and Clyde had been ambushed and shot to death six weeks before, over in the piney woods of Louisiana. The crowd that had gathered got quickly out of control and the scene turned into a circus. A woman whacked off bloody locks of Bonnie’s hair and pieces of her dress to sell as souvenirs. A man tried to cut off Clyde’s trigger finger, and others pulled off pieces of the stolen Ford V8 that the pair had been driving. Photos of the bullet-riddled bodies of the notorious pair were plastered across newspapers and magazines coast to coast.