The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

by Susan Wittig Albert

  The phone rang again, and Buddy picked it up. The woman on the other end of the line was screaming, half hysterical. It took a while to calm her down long enough to get the details. When he did, he stepped to the door and spoke to his deputy.

  “Wayne, Miz Parker out on the Livermore Road claims her neighbor stole her old brown mare, and she’s promising to take a shotgun and go over to his place and settle his hash.” He held out the card on which he’d written the directions. The one drawback to Wayne, so far, was that he didn’t know the country. “You better hightail it out to the Parkers’ and take care of whatever the hell is going on. I’d go, but I need to talk to a couple of suspects in the Hancock case. Oh, and when you get back, stop at the garage where Miss Hancock was killed and look around for some rope. Hemp rope. Doc Roberts says she was strangled with a rope, not the stocking.”

  “Oh yeah?” Wayne said, raising both eyebrows. “The stocking was to make it look like a sexual assault, huh?”

  “Yeah. But it wasn’t. There wasn’t any sexual assault.” Buddy thought of telling him about the pregnancy, but didn’t—why, he wasn’t sure. Instead, he said, “While you’re there, look around for something the killer could have used to hit her with. She was conked on the right temple, Doc says, hard enough to give her a skull fracture. Maybe a beer bottle, something like that.”

  “Got it, boss.” Wayne stood, reaching for the gun belt that was slung on the back of his chair. “On my way.”

  Buddy watched him buckle on his belt, feeling regretful. He supposed it would be smart to wear his .38 when he went to see Lassen and Pyle, just in case. And now that he thought of it, he wished he could take Wayne with him, too.

  * * *

  Lassen lived at Mrs. Meeks’ boardinghouse on Railroad Street, two blocks from the rail yard and depot, and since it was Saturday, he was likely to be there. The Meeks place was a two-story frame house that had been recently painted a bilious shade of green (a batch of paint Mr. Musgrove had on sale). There were eight small rooms upstairs, on both sides of a long hall, which Mrs. Meeks rented as sleeping rooms (usually two or three to a room, so there wasn’t much space for anything except sleeping) to men who worked at Ozzie Sherman’s sawmill or on the railroad.

  Buddy knew the place well, because he’d lived there after his dad got so cranky he thought it would be better if he moved out. The rooms were clean, if crowded, and the sheets were washed once a week, regular. You got out of bed in the mornings to eggs, bacon, oatmeal, hot buttered biscuits, and coffee, and came home in the evenings to beef stew and dumplings or meat loaf and biscuits and sometimes baked ham and mashed potatoes, plus green apple pie or stewed pears or even chocolate cake. And all this, including the room, for just $9.50 a week plus $2 for laundry, extra for ironing. Or $35, if you took it by the month and did your own washing and ironing. It was, Buddy thought, a sweet deal for a man who didn’t much like to cook and do his own washing.

  Lassen apparently had the day off, because he was still asleep upstairs when Buddy knocked at Mrs. Meeks’ front door and explained what he wanted. She invited him into the parlor, but he opted for the front porch. The thermometer on the porch wall said it was eighty-eight, but there was a breeze. He cast an eye toward the sky, remembering what Wayne had said about the storm. It was a flat, pale gray, with a kind of silvery sheen to it. A storm sky, his old man would call it. But if there was a storm coming, it wasn’t there yet.

  Five minutes later, Lassen came downstairs, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He was broad-shouldered and bulky, with gingery hair, a round, ruddy face, and muscular arms. From the size of him Buddy judged that he was making the most of Mrs. Meeks’ generous boardinghouse table. His brown wash pants were held up with red suspenders, and he wore a blue, coffee-stained shirt with the shirttail untucked, and brown leather work boots. A bent and misshapen cigarette, hastily hand-rolled, dangled from one corner of his mouth. He seemed surprised to see Buddy and even more surprised—genuinely shocked, Buddy thought—when the two of them went out on the front porch, where it was marginally cooler than the parlor, and Buddy told him, coming out with it hard and fast and without any cushion, that Rona Jean Hancock was dead.

  “Dead?” Lassen took a step backward, as if Buddy had pushed him in the chest, and his mouth worked around the cigarette. “Dead how? Accident? She liked to drive fast whenever she could get her pretty little hands on a steering wheel.”

  “She was murdered. Where were you last night?”

  “Murdered?” Lassen’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped. “Murdered? Aw, jeez. Jeeeeez!” The last word was a long exhale. Lassen sat down hard in the porch swing and dropped his elbows on his knees.

  “Where were you last night?” Buddy repeated, giving his voice an edge.

  There was no answer. Lassen’s head was bowed. He seemed dumbstruck.

  “Mr. Lassen,” Buddy said sharply. “Where were you last night?”

  “Me?” Lassen looked up, blinking, and Buddy saw that there were tears in his eyes. “Well, I’ll tell you where I wasn’t. I sure as hell wasn’t out there killin’ . . .” He swallowed. “Killin’ Rona Jean. I was here, if you gotta know. Howie and Nick and Mr. Meeks and me was playin’ poker from after supper to twelve thirty or one. I won the pot. Two bucks.” His eyes went to the holstered .38 on Buddy’s hip and he licked his lips. “Murdered . . . murdered how?”

  Buddy folded his arms across his chest. “What’d you do after you won the pot?”

  “Went to bed. Me’n Howie share the room at the top of the stairs. Tough to sleep in this heat, though.” He shook his head and kept on shaking it, as if trying to get rid of what he had heard. “I stopped seeing her, you know,” he muttered, and pulled his cigarette out of his mouth, holding it between two fingers. “Rona Jean, I mean.”

  “When was the last time?”

  A sour look crossed Lassen’s face. “It was before she started hanging out with you, I reckon. She didn’t want to see me no more.” He dropped the cigarette and ground it out with the toe of his work boot. His voice hardened. “How’d she get killed? You know who done it? If you do, tell me and I’ll save the county the cost of a trial.”

  Buddy ignored the questions. “When did she tell you she was pregnant and that you were the father?”

  The sour look was replaced with a look of pure surprise, and Lassen reared back. “How’d you know? Where’d you hear about that?”

  “Come on, Lassen,” Buddy said, pushing it. “When?”

  Lassen’s mouth worked. He was silent for a moment. A tear welled up and ran down his cheek. “Last week of April, sometime around there. She phoned me up, asked me to come over to her house so we could talk.” He stopped, as if he were trying to remember.

  The last week of April, which would be after Buddy had taken himself out of the running as a potential husband by declining to take Rona Jean to bed. “Go on,” Buddy said. “What did she want to talk about?”

  Lassen looked down. The words came slowly at first, then faster, as if a plug had been pulled and it was all spilling out. “She said she was pregnant and wanted money to get rid of it, but I told her nothing doing. I wasn’t giving her a cent to get an abortion. I told her that what we was gonna do was get married, just as quick as we could. Ozzie don’t pay me near enough to support a wife and family, but I could hit him up for a little more, and I figured we’d make it some way or another. Folks do, y’know. My folks did. They never had one nickel to rub against another, but they raised seven kids okay.” His voice cracked. “And I wanted to get married, I really did. I told her I’d be damned if I was gonna let a boy of mine be born without my name on him.”

  Buddy felt a tug of compassion for the man before him. No doubt about it, he was hurting. “And she said—?”

  “She said that what she really wanted was the money but she’d think about what I said, about gettin’ married, I mean. But a couple days later, she phon
ed me up here at the boardinghouse and said she was wrong. It was a false alarm—there wasn’t gonna be no baby—and I didn’t need to worry no more about it.” He swallowed. “I was . . . well, I was disappointed, I guess. I’d got my head around gettin’ married and I was likin’ the idea—having a wife to come home to and home cookin’ and all that. So I kinda pushed her on it, but she just kept saying she’d been wrong, it was a false alarm.”

  Caught by surprise, Buddy stared at him. Rona Jean had lied to Lassen about being pregnant. But why? Because he had refused to give her money for an abortion and was instead insisting on getting married? Because she had approached the other candidate, Beau Pyle, and gotten money for the abortion from him? Or because she had decided that abortion was too dangerous? It was strictly illegal and often fatal. In fact, he had read somewhere that in 1932 alone, some fifteen thousand women had died from abortions or complications afterward.

  Whatever the reason, though, Rona Jean must have decided against an abortion, or maybe she hadn’t been able to find anybody to pay for it, because she was still carrying the baby when she was killed. He thought of the stack of twenties he had found in her room. Maybe somebody had given her the money to get rid of the baby, but she had decided to have it anyway—and was asking for more money. Was that why she had been killed?

  Lassen was going on, the words coming faster now, tumbling out in a rush. “I gotta say I was glad we didn’t have to get married right away. But I’d kind of got myself used to the idea, you know?” He looked beseechingly at Buddy. “And Rona Jean, she was right pretty and lots of fun to be with and I figgered she’d make a good wife. But when I asked her to go out with me again, she said no, and that there was no point in me askin’ again. It hurt me like a knife in the gut, but if she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t, and that’s all there was to it.”

  Buddy could hear the pain in his voice. Rejection was hard, whoever you were. “You haven’t seen her since?” he asked, and followed that with another of the questions he had come to ask. “Did she . . . did she write you any letters?”

  “No, sir, Sheriff,” Lassen said emphatically. “Haven’t talked to her since she called me on the phone, and I don’t know why she’d be writing me letters. Sayin’ she was sorry she wasn’t going to have that baby after all? Wouldn’t of been no point.” He looked up, his eyes glittering with tears. “Let me tell you, when you get that guy, you better put him somewhere else than in that tin pot jail of yours, ’cause if he’s where I can get at him, I’ll kill him.” His voice was like a file rasping against bare metal. “I swear to God I’ll kill him.”

  Buddy knew he wasn’t being professional, but he did it anyway. He put his hand on Lassen’s shoulder and said, “For what it’s worth, Lamar, I understand how you feel. Go get yourself a bottle and get drunk. And when you’ve slept it off, forget about killing anybody. It’s not worth it. Believe me, it’s not worth it.” He wanted to say she’s not worth it, but he knew if he did, Lassen would throw a punch.

  When he got back to his car, he took out his notebook and scratched Lassen’s name off his list.

  * * *

  Buddy’s route across town took him down Robert E. Lee, past the courthouse. As he drove, he spotted Verna Tidwell, carrying two brown paper shopping bags, walking toward her house. He slowed and hailed her.

  “It’s too hot to be walking, Verna, and that’s a big load. You want a ride? I’m going right past your place. Or I’ll be glad to take you wherever you want to go.”

  “I’m heading home,” Verna said gratefully, getting in. “Thanks for the offer.” She put one bag on the floor between her knees and held the other on her lap. “You going to your dad’s?”

  When Buddy was a young teen, he and his father had moved into the house next door to Verna, and the old man still lived there, so Verna was a longtime family friend. She kept an eye on Buddy’s dad, who was now in his eighties, and sometimes even shopped for him.

  “Tonight, maybe,” Buddy said. “Right now, I have to see a guy.”

  Verna regarded him curiously. “About Rona Jean’s murder?”

  “Well . . .” Buddy shifted into first gear and they started off. He was frowning, not sure how much he ought to say.

  “That’s okay,” Verna said comfortingly. “It’s different, now that you’re sheriff and not just the boy next door.” She chuckled, then turned serious. “But there’s something you ought to know about Rona Jean, if you don’t already.”

  “Oh yeah?” Buddy was remembering that Sheriff Burns had never liked it when Verna stuck her nose into one of his cases. That damn Tidwell woman again, he’d groan. A pain in the patootie. But he would add that he couldn’t very well tell her to butt out when she might know something he ought to know and didn’t, which she always seemed to do. Roy had even been forced to thank her once or twice. “Like what?” Buddy added cautiously.

  “Well, Ophelia Snow and Liz Lacy and I were talking about her murder, and Liz said she saw Rona Jean with a CCC guy at the movie house in Monroeville a few weeks back. It was one of the nights they showed The Power and the Glory.” She chuckled. “Liz said the two of them were getting into some pretty powerful passion of their own.”

  “Huh,” Buddy said. Mentally, he added Liz to his list of people to talk to, although if his calculations (and Rona Jean’s diary) were correct, the CCC guy wasn’t the father of Rona Jean’s baby. “Any idea who the guy was?”

  “Liz said she thought he was an officer, but that’s about all she could say.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Buddy said. “Thanks for the tip.”

  Casually, Verna said, “I suppose you’ve already talked to Rona Jean’s roommate. Bettina Higgens.”

  “Yep. Did that first thing.” He gave Verna a crooked grin, wondering if Verna and her friends—didn’t all three of them belong to that garden club, the Dahlias?—did nothing all day but sit around and trade gossip. Too bad they couldn’t put all that time and energy and imagination to work solving real crimes.

  “And that you’re making a list of the men Rona Jean was seeing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And that—”

  “Verna,” Buddy said, “I respect your interest in this case. I truly do. Everybody in town ought to be concerned when a girl gets murdered right here in our very midst. I appreciate your telling me about what Miss Lacy saw at the movie show. But I’d prefer that you leave the investigating to me and my deputy. If you don’t mind.” They had reached Verna’s house, next door to his dad’s place, and he pulled over to the curb and stopped. Without giving her time to respond, he said, “Hope I didn’t offend. You need a hand with those grocery bags?”

  “Thanks, I can manage. And no, you didn’t offend. Roy Burns usually said pretty much the same thing whenever I offered my assistance.” She turned to him as if she had suddenly thought of something. “How would you like to come for supper tonight, Buddy? I’m asking because the commandant of Camp Briarwood is coming—Captain Campbell. If you haven’t met him already, you should. Mr. Duffy will be here, too, and Liz Lacy. We’re having chicken pot pie,” she added.

  He didn’t have to think twice. It was time he met Captain Campbell, and he always enjoyed Mr. Duffy, who had Darling’s best interests at heart. “Thank you, Verna. You know how I feel about your chicken pot pie. I appreciate the invitation. What time?”

  “Seven,” she said, and got out of the car. “Thanks for the lift, Buddy—see you then.”

  On the porch of the house next door, Buddy saw his father sitting hunched in his rocking chair, his dog Zach—one part hound, one part beagle, and two parts something else—lying across his feet. It was a hot day, the temperature close to ninety, but the old man wore a crocheted afghan across his shoulders and was staring blankly into space. With a stab of guilt, Buddy thought he ought to stop and talk for a few minutes, see how the old guy was doing. He hadn’t been too well lately.

&
nbsp; But Buddy could do that tonight, before he went to Verna’s house for dinner. Right now, he had to talk to Beau Pyle. So he put the car in gear and drove off, waving to his father.

  His father didn’t wave back. Buddy didn’t think he even saw him.

  * * *

  Beau lived with his mother on the south edge of town, down Robert E. Lee to Natchez, east on Natchez six blocks to Pleasant View, and south to the end of the narrow dirt street. The street—not much more than an alley, really—was misnamed, for there was nothing pleasant about the view. It was lined on both sides by forlorn houses, some leaning one way, some leaning the other, their front yards filled with junked cars, piles of rusting equipment, energetic chickens, laconic dogs.

  Buddy pulled to a stop behind a shiny 1932 black Ford three-window coupe with all four fenders stripped off. Buddy knew that Beau had dropped a V8 into it, giving him the kind of horsepower and torque that allowed him to outrun a sheriff’s car any day—or night—of the week. It was a lot of car for a kid, but then Beau was a lot of kid, eighteen going on twenty-eight and touchier than a hog that’d stepped down hard on a section of barbed wire and couldn’t shake it off. The Ford was parked in front of a dilapidated one-story frame house with a rusted metal roof, set up on stacks of bricks a couple feet high, in the middle of a bare dirt yard.

  Buddy looked at the house for a moment, wondering who was in there and whether whoever-it-was was likely to give him any trouble. He considered leaving his gun in the car, on the theory that, if he wasn’t armed, he’d be less likely to shoot somebody with it, and maybe less likely to be shot. Young Beau had a short fuse, and the three other male Pyles—Bodeen; his older brother, Rankin; and old man Pyle (who right now was serving a five-year prison sentence in Wetumpka State Penitentiary for killing a man in a fight over in Monroeville)—were known to be easily riled. Buddy had had no dealings with the female Pyles, but guessed that they wouldn’t win a be-nice contest, either.