Murder on a Bad Hair Day (11 page)

I agreed that a doctor might wish to investigate a pool of blood under someone’s head. “But they were just assuming he had inhaled water. Makes sense.”

“True,” Mary Alice agreed. “It wouldn’t have made any difference, anyway. He was dead as a doornail by the time they started trying to revive him.”

“Do they know who shot him?”

“James says there are deer hunters all over those woods, even where they are posted. He thinks that’s what happened. The hunters don’t realize how close they are to the road and they shoot. He says this time of the year he and his wife are scared to let their children go out to play.”

“My Lord!” I thought about Ross turning and giving a wave as he got into his car, about the shadow on his bald head that looked like Gorbachev’s birthmark. This man had sat across from me at lunch and now he was gone.

“Mary Alice,” I said, “the Crazies are catching up to us.”

“God’s truth.”

We sat quietly for a few minutes, each immersed in our own thoughts. When Fred came in and wanted to know what had happened, I listened to the story again. This time I had some questions.

“How did you hear about it?” I asked when Sister got through telling Fred.

“James was supposed to be a pallbearer. When he didn’t show up, Thurman called and got him on his car phone.”

“That was good news to get at a funeral,” Fred said. He hit the palms of his hands against the table. “I hope they catch the son of a bitch that shot him and lock him up for good. Remember that little girl that got killed on I-65 last year? The same thing. Riding in the car with her mother. Damn! Peeping Toms right on our own porch in the middle of the night and folks getting shot just riding down the road.” He stood up, stomped to the back door, walked out, and slammed it.

“My goodness!” Mary Alice exclaimed.

“He’s just going to talk to Woofer,” I said. “Things that happen by chance make him nervous. He’s a cause-and-effect man.”

“Is that like bread and potatoes?”

I chose to ignore this. “Why do you suppose Ross was in Shelby County? He said he had a couple of errands to run, but he was pushing it to get down there and back in time for the funeral.”

“I have no idea.” Mary Alice went to the refrigerator and got a beer. “You want something?”

“A Coke. There’s one already opened. That’ll be fine.”

Mary Alice came back to the table and handed me the bottle of Coke. It had lost some of its fizz but still tasted good.

“Were the Needham twins at the funeral?” I asked.

“I don’t know them.”

“You couldn’t miss them. They look just like Claire, only taller.”

“I don’t think so. At least I didn’t see them. There was a good crowd there, though. Betty Bedsole made it through okay. I don’t think I could, Patricia Anne.”

“I don’t think I could, either.” We were quiet for a few minutes, each thinking her own thoughts. Mine were about Tom’s funeral. The only thing that had gotten me through it was trying to help Haley. “What about Liliane?” I asked.

“She got through the funeral okay. I’m sure Ross’s death
is going to be another blow, though. They were pretty good friends, I understand.”

“I still wonder what Ross was doing down in Shelby County. You think he could have been going to see James? Was he on the road to their house?”

“It’s the road, apparently. But why would he have been going to see James? He knew he would see him at the funeral.” Mary Alice put her beer down and stood up. “Who knows?” She shrugged.

“You want some bean soup?” I asked.

“Nope. I’ve lost my appetite.”

I looked at Mary Alice in alarm. I had never heard her say this before. “You feel okay?”

“I’m okay.” She started toward the door and turned. “You know, Mouse, I just don’t think I can get away with wearing this suit to another funeral in the same week. Plus the cocktail party. Do you?”

“Go home,” I said.

Mary Alice reached into the cookie jar, got a handful of fruit drop cookies, and left.

Fred came back in as I was turning out the corn bread. “Looks good,” he said. “Smells good.”

“Is good.” I carried the two bowls of soup to the table and Fred followed with the plate of corn bread.

“We are going to watch
Wheel of Fortune
with our supper.” I took the small TV from the counter and placed it in the middle of the table. “We’ll talk after a while.”

“Fine,” Fred said, bless his heart. We ate quietly while Vanna turned letters. “Richmond, Virginia! Richmond, Virginia!” Fred prompted a contestant who landed on $5,000 and called out an
n
. “That’s a hard one,” he sympathized with the woman who was unable to come up with another consonant and who eventually saw $10,000 disappear from the screen in front of her. “They shouldn’t have them that hard.” The woman agreed; you could tell by her pinched smile as she clapped for the winning contestant. I felt myself beginning to relax.

By the time we watched
Jeopardy
and I had answered the
Final Jeopardy question correctly (Wells Fargo), I was ready to talk about Ross Perry and seeing the Needham twins.

“After we get the Christmas decorations down,” Fred said.

“We can talk while we’re doing that.”

Fred held up his hand. “No, we can’t, Patricia Anne. You’ll be telling me something important and I’ll say where’s the nativity scene and you’ll get mad and say I’m not paying attention. We’ll get the decorations down first.” He was right and I knew it. One of the advantages of a forty-year marriage.

He pulled the attic steps down and I followed him up. The last time I had been up there had been a few months before. I had been with Haley, who was looking at her old formals stored up there. It had been a painful, purging afternoon when Haley accepted the loss of Tom. Until then, she had been fiercely, angrily, holding on to him. We had never put the dresses up, I realized. They bloomed on the old rocker, the sewing machine, the trunk.

“What are these dresses doing out?” Fred asked.

“I think Haley’s going to give them to the Goodwill.” I began to pick them up and hang them back in the closet.

“Let’s see. The tree first.” Fred dragged a long box over to the steps.

“The lights and the new ornaments.” He handed me a smaller box.

“And the old ornaments.” This was the most precious box of all. He placed it gently beside the steps. “Now, where’s the nativity scene?” We both laughed.

Within an hour the bottlebrush tree was assorted and assembled in the living room. When it was new, the metal prongs that went into the plastic trunk were color coded. Now we had to hold the limbs out and guess which went where, not too hard a job since the result should be a perfect triangle.

“Fine,” Fred said. “Now the lights.”

“I’m going to talk about Ross Perry now,” I said. “You just do the lights.”

Fred nodded and plugged the first string in. It worked, which I found encouraging. I started by telling him about meeting Ross at the gallery, that he was an art critic for the paper and a friend of Mercy’s and Liliane’s. I talked about the lunch we had had today with Mary Alice and how Ross had waved as he got into his car and how I hadn’t particularly liked him or the Green and White and had acted common as pig tracks, so Mary Alice said, though I really didn’t think it had been that bad. And in the ladies’ room Claire’s twin sisters had shown up and might have had a message for me that Claire was all right, though I wasn’t sure, but they were as beautiful as she was.

A second and a third set of lights came on while I talked. Fred would stop me occasionally with a question.

“Do the twins live here?”

“Liliane Bedsole said they live in New York and model. They’re pretty enough.”

“So they were here for Mercy Armistead’s funeral?” Fred plugged in a fourth set of lights, which didn’t burn. “Damn.”

“I guess so. These are strange people, Fred.” I handed him a string of lights that worked.

“How so?”

It was hard to describe the twins, not their appearance, but the way they communicated with each other. “They’re sort of wispy,” I finally said.

“Wispy?” Fred disappeared behind the tree, pulling lights behind him.

“Like they’re only real for each other.” I knew I was not doing a good job of explaining the twins. “I’ll bet they’re the ones got Claire from the hospital, though. I don’t know why they did it, but I’ll bet they’re the ones. Somebody had to have done it. Claire was too medicated to have slipped out by herself.”

“But why?” Fred stood back and admired the tree before he began to twist another string of lights around it. “Tell me if I’ve got a blank spot.”

“Down there on the left at nine o’clock.”

“Okay.” He filled in the space.

I handed him the last string. “I have no idea why anyone would abduct a sick person from a hospital,” I said.

“Well”—Fred crawled around the tree with this string—“there could be several reasons. One is that the person is in danger.”

“She was being watched.”

“So carefully she just walked out.”

I agreed he had a point.

“Another reason is the kidnapper can’t afford to have the kidnappee talk to the police.”

“True.”

“Which would be why she was in danger.” I was getting confused here.

“Exactly. So, if her sisters took Claire, was it because they were trying to protect her from someone else or trying to protect themselves?”

“They were trying to protect her.” I thought of the twins, of their eerie resemblance to Claire. Their oneness had reached out to include their sister. It was the only way they could have survived the brutality of their childhood. I was suddenly sure of this. “They were protecting her,” I repeated.

Fred stood up and looked at the tree. “There,” he said. “You want me to run to the drugstore and get a couple of more strings of lights?”

“The tree looks fine.” Glynn, Lynn, and Claire. Sisters. The knot of worry that had taken up residence in my belly when I first saw Claire huddled on my steps, and which had increased in size when I saw the obscenities painted on her walls, relaxed slightly. “Let’s put the ornaments on,” I said.

R
oss Perry’s death made the front page of the paper the next morning. Accompanying the story was a picture of him taken at least twenty years earlier when he had hair. The headline read
BIZARRE ACCIDENT TAKES LIFE OF ART PATRON
.

I took the paper into the breakfast room to finish reading the article. For once, Sister had gotten the details right. Dr. James Butler and his wife, Yvonne, had just left their home and entered County Road 17 when they noticed a car weaving down the road toward them. The lunge down the embankment, the upside-down car, and their efforts to rescue and revive an already dead Ross were just as Mary Alice had said.

Mr. Perry (the article continued), 54, a well-known art critic and author of two books of art criticism, served on the board of directors of the Museum of Art and was active in all phases of the Birmingham art scene. He was survived by a sister, Mrs. Delia Reynolds, of New Orleans, LA, and several nieces and nephews.

The story segued into the sheriff’s speculation that a deer hunter was probably responsible for the death; quoted the local president of the NRA, who assured us that guns didn’t kill people, people did; and ended with the fact that the Birmingham art community had lost two of its greatest sup
porters in the last few days with the deaths of Ross Perry and Mercy Armistead, who had also served on the museum board and whose death was still under investigation.

I put the paper down and poured some Cheerios into a bowl, spilling a few of them. There had to be some connection, I thought between Mercy’s murder, Ross’s death, which could very possibly have been murder, and Claire’s disappearance. I spread the spilled Cheerios apart. Claire Cheerio, Ross Cheerio, and Mercy Cheerio I placed across the top. Obviously what they had in common was that someone was after each of them, assuming Ross’s death had not been an accident. It was possible, of course, but what was he doing out on that country road headed away from Birmingham just before Mercy’s funeral? I left his Cheerio at the top. Now, what else did they have in common?

Mercy and Claire had a grandfather and aunt in common. I pushed two Cheerios into place for Amos and Liliane Bedsole. And a mother and aunt. Betty Bedsole took her place. Cousins and sisters. Glynn and Lynn Cheerio joined the Bedsole crowd. But that left Ross Cheerio sitting over by himself. The Bedsole family was a mess and very possibly could have done each other in, but for some reason, I didn’t believe so.

I took another handful of Cheerios. Mercy and Ross had the museum and love of art in common. Claire loved art. One Cheerio went down as a common denominator. Mercy and Claire might both have had Thurman Beatty. And then maybe not. Thurman could have thought Claire hung the moon and still admired her from a distance. A man could certainly be attracted to a woman and not act upon it. But to be on the safe side, I broke a Cheerio in half for Thurman and gave one piece to each woman. Ross Cheerio was left sitting by himself with one denominator, love of art. Not exactly a cause for murder. I thought about Bonnie Blue’s saying Ross owed her father money for some paintings. Money. Now there was a cause for murder.

“What are you doing?” Fred asked.

“Playing a game.” I brushed the Cheerios into my bowl. “You want some cereal?”

“After a while. Just some coffee now.” He poured a cup and came to the table. The paper with Ross’s picture was lying face up. Fred picked it up and glanced at the story.

“I don’t believe it was a deer hunter,” I said. “I think whoever killed Mercy killed Ross, too.”

Fred looked at me over his bifocals and tapped the paper. “Stay out of this, Patricia Anne.”

“I just made a statement.”

“You let that nutty sister of yours drag you into all kinds of dangerous situations.”

“Like a gallery opening and lunch at the Green and White.”

“Exactly. Trouble follows that woman, Patricia Anne. Look at all those dead husbands. I can’t believe three men were crazy enough to marry that woman.”

“My Lord, Fred. You make Mary Alice sound like a black widow. Her husbands were old as Methuselah and died happily.”

“Listen to what I say, Patricia Anne.” He pointed a finger at me and disappeared behind the paper.

I shot him a bird.

“I saw that,” he claimed.

“You did not.” I poured milk on my cereal and reached over to turn on the small TV, which was still on the table. A local newscaster was giving the same story about Ross Perry that was in the paper. I was about to turn it off when she announced that former All-American Thurman Beatty was being held for questioning in the death of his wife, the internationally known artist Mercy Armistead. They showed a picture of Thurman, dressed in a dark suit, being escorted by three policemen into city jail.

“It looks like they picked him up right after the funeral,” I said. “Look how dressed up he is.”

“Who?” Fred asked, putting down the paper.

“Thurman Beatty. He’s being held for questioning in his wife’s death. Held. Sounds like they mean business.”

“That’s ridiculous. All-American. Heisman candidate.” Fred turned the TV so he could see it, but they had already gone to commercial.

“It’ll be in the paper if they did it yesterday,” I said, picking up the Metro section that was still lying on the table. It was—on the front page, with a picture of Thurman in his Alabama uniform. This paper needed some up-to-date pictures.

It was a fairly lengthy article since it not only mentioned that Thurman was being held for questioning in the murder of his wife but also reviewed each of his more remarkable Alabama football games as well as individual plays and reiterated that he had been gypped of the Heisman. His professional career was also examined lengthily. But the two sentences I considered most important were hidden between the goal lines: the fact that he had retired from the NFL because of health problems and that he currently owned a farm in Shelby County, where he raised quarter horses. I knew about the heart problems, but I hadn’t known about the horses. Given the circumstances of Mercy’s death by DMSO, no wonder they were questioning him.

Fred was reading over my shoulder. I finished before he did and handed him the paper. Nope, I thought, thinking of my Cheerio people. If Thurman killed Mercy, then why did Claire run, and what about Ross? Unless Thurman had kidnapped Claire and Ross’s death had really been an accident. I could feel the beginning of a headache between my eyes.

I put my cereal bowl in the dishwasher and poured Fred another cup of coffee.

“I’m having lunch today with Frances Zata,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

Fred was still reading the article. “God! I’d forgotten that Tennessee game when he broke two guys’ legs!”

I patted him on the head and left the kitchen. The smell of testosterone was getting to me.

Frances swept into the Blue Moon looking like a million bucks in a black skirt and a black-and-white herringbone
jacket. With it she wore an emerald-green turtleneck sweater, a combination I would never have thought of but which was a knockout. I had on my red suit, which was seasonal. Its days were numbered, though. You can only shave wool gabardine around the pockets and down the sleeves just so much before it begins to get shiny. I have a gadget I bought at K mart that whisks along fabric, depilling. A wonderful invention. Mary Alice says I shave my clothes more than I do my legs. Which is almost true.

Frances never looks like her clothes have been depilled. Or need to be.

“Morning,” she said, pulling her chair back and sliding into it gracefully.

“I’ll bet you don’t sweat, either,” I grumbled.

“Of course not.” She grinned. “I know why you wanted to have lunch here. I just walked through the mall and saw Mrs. Claus.”

“I hope she saw you.”

“I waved and yelled ‘Hey, Mary Alice!’ I love the T-shirt that lights up, but that’s the worst wig I’ve ever seen. It looks like a road kill.”

“It looks like a poodle the taxidermist hasn’t finished.” We both laughed. “Did she wave back?”

“She raised a finger slightly. Does that constitute a wave?”

“Oh, God!” I laughed so hard I had to wipe my eyes with my napkin.

“Hey, Mrs. Hollowell, Mrs. Zata.” We both looked up to see a tall skinny girl holding the menus. “I’m Susie Connors. I graduated six years ago.”

“Susie, of course, how are you?” Frances said. “And David?”

“He’s just started work with TVA as an engineer and I’m in graduate school. I’m working here for the holidays.”

“That’s great,” I said. Susie Connors? I was trying to place her and Frances was already inquiring about her family! At least Susie had given her name. Most former students greet us with “You don’t know who I am, do you?” ex
pecting us to say, “Sure we do” and being crushed when we don’t.

“You ladies look mighty pretty today. You want the chicken salad and orange rolls?”

“Absolutely,” Frances agreed. “And decaf coffee.”

“Iced tea for me.”

“You got it.” Susie started away and turned back. “It’s good seeing both of you.”

“You, too,” we chorused.

“Who’s David?” I asked as Susie walked off.

“Her twin brother. You remember him, Patricia Anne. He’s the one fell off the stage during
South Pacific
.”

I remembered the incident vaguely. “Was he hurt?”

“Broke his ankle.” Frances looked at me disapprovingly.

“There are too many of them, Frances,” I said. “I can’t keep them straight.”

“It isn’t easy,” Frances admitted.

“Speaking of twins, I saw Lynn and Glynn Needham yesterday. They are drop-dead gorgeous. Followed me into the ladies’ room at the Green and White to tell me, I think, that Claire’s all right.”

“They won’t let you visit her? She’s responding to treatment okay, isn’t she?”

I don’t know why I had assumed Frances knew all about Claire’s disappearance. I told her the whole story, including Liliane Bedsole’s trip to my house to ask for help in finding her.

“Wow,” Frances said. “Where do you suppose she is?”

“And Mary Alice and I were having lunch with Ross Perry at the Green and White when I saw the twins. He left there and drove right to Shelby County, where he was killed.”

“What’s going on?”

“Damned if I know. It’s scary.” I moved my arms from the table so Susie could put down my plate of chicken salad.

Frances took an orange roll and buttered it slowly. “They say it was a deer hunter shot Ross Perry.”

“Maybe it was. I’ve got my doubts. I think there’s a con
nection between Mercy’s death, Claire’s disappearance, and Ross’s death.”

“What kind of connection?”

“I don’t know. Look.” I pushed my salad plate aside and took several packets of Sweet’n Low and played the Cheerio game for Frances. She watched carefully as each packet was added or rearranged. I ended up with the same three—Mercy, Ross, and Claire—at the top, the Bedsoles bunched to one side, and Thurman behind the sugar bowl. At least I didn’t have to explain the relationship between Amos and the Needham girls, since Frances had been at the court hearings. I tapped the Liliane packet. “She seemed worried to death.”

“Ummm,” Frances said, studying the packets.

“You see something?”

“No. This salad’s great.”

I pulled my plate back and began to eat. Frances plucked the Thurman packet from behind the sugar bowl. “He’s out again. I heard it on the radio coming down here. Where shall I put him?”

“Break the packet and sprinkle each woman?”

“I don’t think so.” Frances propped him against the orange rolls. “Something’s missing,” she said.

“From the salad?”

“From this equation here.” She pointed to the table dotted with Sweet’n Low packets. “There’s some big connection here that we’re missing, Patricia Anne.”

“Maybe we don’t want to know what it is,” I said.

“True.”

I gathered the packets together and put them back into the bowl. We were quiet for a few minutes while we ate.

“Maybe it’s the gallery,” Frances said.

I grinned. “We aren’t going to be able to let this go, are we? And no, I don’t think it’s the gallery that’s the connection. That would leave Ross out. Besides, Claire was just Mercy’s assistant.”

“Well, I hate that the police have the gallery closed. I was planning on doing some of my Christmas shopping there. I was so pleased when I saw Mercy was opening with a show
ing of Outsider art. Was it wonderful, Patricia Anne?”

“It was bright,” I said, remembering the vibrancy of the paintings and quilts, how they had seemed to pulse with color.

“That’s what’s so wonderful about Outsider art. The boldness and the self-confidence.”

“And they’re Outsiders because they don’t fit into any particular school of art?”

“Exactly. They’re self-taught. That doesn’t make them any less great, though, just less derivative. I’ve heard them called ‘visionary’ artists, too.” Frances buttered another roll. “Mercy Armistead was smart enough to be tapping into the wellspring here in Alabama.”