by Gail Oust
The corner of Bill’s mouth quirked in amusement. “Don’t you mean conscientious detective?”
“Bingo!” I grinned. “Come on. Let me show you the gun.”
I led the way to the guest room and showed him what I’d found.
Bill removed the gun from its hiding place and held it almost reverently. “Sweet,” he said in admiration. “A Sig Sauer. Can’t be more than five and a half inches in all. Must weigh less than a pound. Perfect weapon for a lady.”
Sweet? Perfect? It didn’t look either of those to me. But it did look deadly, like a water moccasin, coiled and ready to kill an innocent bystander deader ’n a doornail.
After checking to make sure there were no bullets in the chamber, Bill slid the magazine out and pocketed it. “This way, if Krystal doesn’t like the direction the conversation is heading, at least she can’t shoot us.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly. “That makes me feel much better.”
Over coffee—decaf this time—and chocolate-chip cookies, we agreed on the script we’d follow when Krystal returned. I silently congratulated myself on calling Bill in as a consultant on the case. I felt immeasurably better knowing I wouldn’t be alone when I demanded some answers from Krystal.
“By the way,” I said, “while I was out today, my daughter called and left a message on the answering machine. She wondered if I was still seeing ‘that man,’ as she refers to you.”
“My brother, Bob, called today, too. Wanted to know if I was still seeing ‘that woman.’”
I studied Bill over the rim of my coffee mug. “And what did you tell him?”
Bill’s eyes met mine, steady and direct. “I told him ‘that woman’ is the best thing that’s happened to me since Margaret died. Told him not only was I seeing you, but I intended to keep right on seeing you. I should’ve known better than to listen to Bob in the first place.”
I couldn’t help but smile as I reached across the table for his hand. The sparkle in his pretty Paul Newman baby blues told me all I needed to know about the way he felt.
Chapter 36
Bill and I retired to the great room, but we were still holding hands when Krystal burst in carrying an assortment of shopping bags from various stores at the mall.
“Hey, you two,” she greeted us. “You look all nice and cozy. Hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“Krystal,” I said, bracing for the inevitable confrontation, “set your things down. We need to talk.”
“Uh-oh,” she laughed. “Am I in trouble? Mom used to use that exact tone whenever I tried to sneak in after curfew.”
When neither of us returned her smile, her eyes slid from me to Bill. “Sure.” She dropped down alongside me on the sofa. “What’s up?”
Bill gave me a nod of encouragement.
I moistened my suddenly dry lips and took the plunge. “It just so happened as I was bringing you fresh towels that I noticed a vanity drawer ajar. When I went to close it, I noticed this.”
Hearing his cue, Bill produced the Sig Sauer and the box of bullets from beneath a pile of throw pillows.
Krystal stared at them for a long moment, then seemed to collect herself. “So, what’s the big deal? I have a concealed weapons permit. The gun’s perfectly legal.”
What was she going to tell me next? That she won the role of Annie Oakley in a revival and needed the gun for target practice? “The shells are nine millimeter—the same caliber used to kill Lance Ledeaux.”
I couldn’t be positive, but I thought she paled at the mention of his name even though her expression remained impassive.
“Why kill someone I didn’t know?”
Aha! Now we were making progress. I’d caught her in a bona fide fib. “I don’t believe you,” I told her calmly. “Polly saw the two of you together, acting very . . . friendly.”
“Polly?” Krystal scoffed. “The woman’s half blind. The eye doctor told her months ago she needed cataract surgery, but she refused. She made me promise not to tell Gloria.”
“Polly confided all this to you, a virtual stranger?”
Krystal shrugged with elaborate casualness. “She let it slip one day at the diner when she was having trouble reading the menu.”
“I wonder if Gloria is aware of this,” I murmured half to myself.
“I doubt it. Maybe you should give her a call.” With this, Krystal jumped to her feet and started gathering her purchases.
“Not so fast,” Bill stopped her, his voice quiet but firm. “Kate and I aren’t finished.”
Krystal plopped back down on the sofa. “I’m tired,” she whined. “Is this going to take long?”
“You lied when you said you didn’t know Lance.” I watched her expression closely. “Diane did some research online. She discovered you and Lance both had parts recently in a revival of Grease in Atlanta.”
Krystal pursed her lips. “What if we did?” she asked, sounding more like a petulant teen than a woman with her biological clock ticking—clearly a case of arrested development. “All right, all right, I confess. I was Marty Maraschino. Lance was the Teen Angel. At first I thought he was a little old for the part, but he had the right look. It’s not against the law to be friends.”
Friends, my foot! In for a penny, in for a pound, as my daddy used to say. I drew a deep breath and went for the jugular. “How do you explain being in the dressing room the night Lance was killed?”
My question was met with stunned silence. I felt Bill’s gaze on me, but I couldn’t afford to lose ground at this point in my interrogation. Keep your eye on the prize, Kate. Don’t get sidetracked. “Trust me, Krystal, it’s much easier answering me than it will be answering Sheriff Wiggins. He makes grown felons cry for their mamas.”
“What makes you so sure I was there when Lance was shot?”
Hmm, she was trying to bluff her way out of it. But I was prepared for such a contingency. I pulled the ace from my sleeve. “We have proof.”
“Proof . . . ?”
I wasn’t about to elaborate on the single dark hair found by a woman with cataracts and identified by a crime-and-punishment junkie. Come to think of it, it was nothing short of miraculous that Polly, with her faulty eyesight, had spotted the strand in the first place. Talk about Divine Intervention.
All of a sudden, Krystal’s resistance melted like a Popsicle at a Fourth of July picnic. “Okay, I admit Lance and I knew each other.”
“And . . .”
“And we agreed to meet after rehearsal the night he was killed. He told me to wait for him in the dressing room.”
Bill rested one arm along the curve of the sofa. “So the two of you were having an affair.”
Krystal let out a contemptuous snort. “Past tense. We had an affair. It ended the day he took off in a rented RV with a rich old woman he met on the Internet.”
An old woman with money! She had Claudia pegged—except, of course, for the old part. Poor Claudia; she never saw the disaster barreling toward her.
“If you weren’t having an affair, why the clandestine meeting?” Bill asked.
Krystal shifted, trying to find a more comfortable position. From the pained look on her face, I doubt she succeeded. “I don’t know why this is any of your business,” she snapped.
Suddenly she wasn’t the only one angry. “Listen up, young lady. My dear friend is charged with first-degree murder. She might very well spend the rest of her life in jail for something she didn’t do.”
Picking up a throw pillow, Krystal wrapped her arms around it. Her lower lip jutted in a pout. “I don’t know why you’re being so mean to me.”
“We’re not trying to be mean, Krystal. We’re your friends,” Bill said soothingly, assuming the role of good cop to complement my bad cop role. “We’re only trying to get to the bottom of this. Why don’t you start by telling us everything you know about Lance Ledeaux?”
She made a pretty picture, I had to admit, sitting on my sofa, dark hair spilling over one shoulder, eyes big and forlorn.
Only a hint of a baby bump marred her otherwise knock-’em-dead figure. Again I thought, BBFBBM, body by Fisher, brains by Mattel.
Krystal heaved the sigh of a saint about to be burned at the stake. “Oh, all right.”
“You can start,” I said briskly, “by telling us how you knew Lance was here in Serenity Cove Estates.”
“I ran into a mutual friend in Atlanta. Brent told me he’d heard from Lance, said he was living in—of all places—a retirement community in South Carolina. Brent claimed Lance’d invited him to come over when his play debuted. That was soooo like Lance,” she sneered. “He thought he was God’s gift to theater. No one in their right mind would not only write the damn play but produce, direct, and star. Talk about ego! The man had no limits. Anyhow, I thought I’d drop by on my way to Myrtle Beach, renew acquaintances.” She smoothed her skirt. “I heard they were casting roles in one of those fancy productions they put on for tourists. I planned to work there until I started showing and had to quit.”
“Go on,” I urged. “What happened after you found him?”
“At first, I acted all nice and sweet. Told him how I was down to my last twenty bucks and needed a loan to tide me over.”
“Then what happened?” I prompted.
“He refused.”
“And . . .”
She shrugged. “And then I had another idea. I told him I was pregnant. He freaked. Next thing I knew, he was offering me money . . . ten grand . . . to leave town and get an abortion. He was supposed to give me the ten G’s that night, but . . .”
“He was shot during rehearsal,” Bill completed the sentence.
She blinked furiously, as though trying to hold back tears. I didn’t even see a glimmer of moisture. Apparently when it came to Lance Ledeaux, the emotional well had run dry.
“I’d planned all along to leave town, but I’d never get an abortion. I want this baby, but with Lance dead, I was flat broke. My car broke down. I was desperate. Luckily I found a job at the diner. You know the rest, Kate.” She looked at me for confirmation.
Strangely enough I believed her hard-luck story. This wasn’t the first time Lance had deserted a woman carrying his child. Good thing for Claudia, she’d been well past menopause—or maybe that wasn’t such a good thing. It seemed the rat bastard only deserted pregnant women. With no child in the offing, the no-good scumbag might’ve hung around forever. I shuddered at the thought.
Bill cleared his throat, the sound snapping me back to the present. “How is it you have a gun and bullets in your drawer? The same caliber that someone substituted for blanks?”
“I dated a cop for a year or so. We used to go target shooting. He gave me the gun for a birthday present.” Krystal absently toyed with the binding on the throw pillow where it had come loose. “Ted claimed he worried about me leaving the theater late at night. This way, he said, I could protect myself. And for your information”—she aimed a smug look at me—“a lot of handguns are nine millimeter.”
I aimed a look right back. “Did you kill Lance?”
Her eyes widened in shock. “Is that what this is all about?”
Duh! As I just mentioned, BBFBBM.
“Of course not!” she protested. “How could you even think such a thing?”
“Since you were backstage, you would’ve overheard Lance’s announcement that the scene was going to be rehearsed with props. And . . . that he planned to switch roles with Bernie. It would have taken less than a minute for someone with knowledge of handguns to substitute a live round.”
Bill nodded in agreement. “Everyone was busy doing their own thing. No one would’ve noticed.”
Hearing this, Krystal promptly burst into tears. I had no doubt they were real. I also didn’t doubt for a second they were meant for her and not for poor dead Lance.
Bill looked at a loss for what to do next. While he dug in his pocket for a handkerchief, I grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on the coffee table and shoved them at her.
“Are you going to tell the sheriff?” She attempted to dam the tears with a crumpled Kleenex. “He might think I came here to blackmail Lance. I know that’s a crime, maybe even a serious one.”
Blackmail serious? Gee, do you think? I patted her on the back. “Go to bed, Krystal. It’s been a long day, and you have to be at work early.”
“H-h-how am I supposed to sleep, knowing the two of you hold my fate in the palm of your h-hand?” she blubbered.
Yikes! What melodrama. Krystal induced flashbacks of damsels in distress being tied to the railroad tracks by a mustachioed villain. But I wasn’t moved. Krystal was a player, manipulating the situation to her advantage—quite an accomplished little actress. She’s the type who’ll always land on her own two feet. “Take Tang with you,” I told her. “I spotted him prowling around the deck a little while ago.”
Bill and I watched as Krystal, sniffling theatrically, collected her shopping bags and headed toward the guest room.
Bill turned to me when the door clicked shut. “Well . . . ? What do you think? Is she telling the truth or not?”
I rested my head back against the sofa. Krystal wasn’t the only tired one. It had been a long day for me, too. “I believe Krystal’s naive, even devious, but I don’t think she’s a murderer. If so, why didn’t she leave town after Lance was shot?”
Bill chuckled softly. “The fact that her car broke down might have something to do with it?”
I smiled wryly. “Leave it to you to find a gaping hole in my logic.” My logic, or lack thereof, seemed to have sprung a lot of leaks these days. Maybe it was time to hang up my detective shingle.
“Glad to be of service.”
I tried again to make sense of the night’s revelations. “Krystal’s pregnant, and Lance possibly is her baby’s daddy. Call me sentimental, but I don’t think she’d kill the father of her unborn child. Blackmail probably, murder no. And”—I sat up straighter—“if she intended to kill him, she’d have done it after he gave her the ten grand—not before.”
Bill gave me a smile warm with approval . . . and affection? “Has anyone ever told you, my dear Kate, that you’d make a fine detective?”
“Certainly not Sheriff Wiggins,” I said with a tired laugh. “That man might’ve told me many things, but that definitely didn’t make his top ten.”
Chapter 37
Last night’s dress rehearsal had been a disaster of epic proportion. Think Titanic; think Hindenburg; think Katrina. Think opening night and sell-out crowd. Translated, think laughingstock. There’s good news and bad news about appearing before an auditorium filled with friends and acquaintances, folks you run into in the doctor’s office, library, post office, and the Piggly Wiggly. The good news is they’ll laugh at the jokes and applaud until their hands sting. The bad news is they’ll never let you forget if you make a fool of yourself.
Why was rehearsal so terrible? Take Gloria, for instance, who was playing the secretary. She kept suffering “senior moments” and exiting stage left instead of stage right and stage right instead of stage left. For my big scene, I accidentally brandished a poker instead of a feather duster and nearly gave Gus a concussion. He was very gracious, considering the amount of blood shed. He insisted he didn’t need stitches, but I’m not so sure. And last, but by no means least, Bernie kept missing his cues and muffing his lines while his buddy, Mort, snickered backstage. Bernie lost his cool, not that he has much to begin with, and threatened to punch Mort’s lights out. Bill had to physically interject himself between the pair to keep them from coming to blows. Things finally settled down after Eric Olsen reached for his handcuffs and threatened to arrest the two of them.
Krystal Gold, the former Miss Marty Maraschino, was the only one to remain unruffled. She assured us a bad dress rehearsal was a good sign, but I don’t think anyone believed her. Good or bad, the show had to go on.
Tonight Forever, My Darling would play to a packed house.
Seeing as I was out of bagels, I dropped a couple s
lices of cinnamon bread in the toaster and shoved down the lever. I suppose I should have felt excited—or nervous. But truthfully I felt . . . depressed. Two viable suspects, and we were still no closer to finding out who wanted Lance dead. I’d tried really hard to persuade myself that Nadine or Krystal could be our perp. But my gut feeling was that while both had fallen prey to Lance’s faux charm, I didn’t believe either of them capable of murder. Of revenge maybe, even blackmail, but not murder in the first degree. And where did that leave me?
Empty-handed without a single person of interest in sight.
No wonder I was feeling a little down, a bit discouraged. At this point, many people would resort to antidepressants. But I was made of sterner stuff.
When the toast popped up, I slathered it with butter. Typically I use low-fat substitutes, but seeing as how I was depressed, I opted for the real deal. If I didn’t watch it, I’d be hauling out rocky road ice cream for breakfast. I poured a second cup of coffee, then went out to collect the morning newspaper—and let out a shriek that could be heard clear across the street.
I’d nearly stepped on a snake. I hate snakes. I loathe and despise snakes. Snakes terrify me. What was the rhyme Rita once told me about how to distinguish poisonous ones from nonpoisonous? It had something to do with colors touching. Red and black or yellow and red? This was one heck of a time to have a senior moment.
As I inched backward, I realized the snake was either dead or sound asleep. Another observation struck me just then. The snake lay perfectly centered on my welcome mat, coiled as neatly as Great-grandma Elsie’s bun; too neatly to be one of Tang’s tokens of affection. It was almost as if someone had deliberately placed it there. A shiver raced down my spine. Could this be another warning for me to mind my own business? I shot a final look at the snake. It hadn’t budged.
Shuddering, I slammed the door and twisted the dead bolt. If the snake was indeed alive and woke up from its nap on my doorstep, it could slither away. In the event it was dead, I’d worry about disposing of it later—much later.
