Courir De Mardi Gras (25 page)

“Okay. So, you had sex with the woman and then what?”

“No. Absolutely not. After that kiss, I went to my own room and locked the door. I don’t remember anything since my head hit the pillow.”

George glanced sidelong at Suzanne as if assessing her reaction. She wondered if she should tell the officer about the noise they’d made on the balcony. Sex comes in all kinds of shapes and flavors. Many don’t require actual penetration. George could be using the Bill Clinton defense. Still, this lie lay between them, not George and the sheriff.

Birdie whimpered. “I just know something bad happened to Miss Cherie. When she stayed here last time, she wanted a big breakfast served in bed ’round ten.”

Suzanne could see the sheriff thought black women were prone to hysterics. He cleared his throat and fiddled with his notepad.

“Come on now, Mrs. Angers might have wanted fresh air last night and opened her window. Maybe she’s one of those gals who like to go for a long jog in the morning,” Duval said.

“Not likely,” sobbed Birdie. “Not her, she ain’t the fresh air and jogging type. She’d tell me to crank up the AC and then go to some fancy gym in the city.”

Pleased by Birdie’s remarks making Cherie out to be a high-maintenance woman, Suzanne pointed out the unexpected guest brought only an overnight bag with her, and all the clothes they’d seen her wear lay in a heap on the bedroom floor awaiting maid service. No sign of the nightgown she’d seen the night before, a green transparent, slutty sort of garment no woman, even Cherie Angers, would wear outdoors.

“Miss Hudson, I appreciate your deductions. Honestly, I do. But, don’t you think if Mrs. Angers went out for a walk, she’d be wearing any practical clothes she might have brought along.”

“I’ve only known Mrs. Angers for a very short time, but she didn’t seem like the kind of woman who would go anywhere without makeup, tons of it. Her case is sitting unopened in exactly the same place as last night.”

“Amen to that,” Birdie agreed.

Truthfully, Suzanne agreed with the sheriff. Cherie Angers was probably doing nude aerobics or suggestive yoga poses somewhere George could see her from his window if he’d put on his glasses first thing in the morning instead of stumbling to the bathroom half blind. She’d heard him bumping into furniture early that morning. Cherie knew how to hog attention and excelled at it.

“Ya’ll call me if Mrs. Angers doesn’t get in touch by tomorrow night. I’ll tell my boys to keep a lookout for her in case she sprained an ankle along the road or got snake bit or something.” Folding a biscuit into a napkin, the sheriff prepared to leave.

Very suddenly, Suzanne decided to take ill. She clutched her stomach and begged for Doc Sonny.

“I’m so upset about Mrs. Angers, I feel sick. Maybe I’m having a relapse. You know, Sheriff Duval, a serial killer of young women is on the loose in Philadelphia. Maybe, poor Cherie has become a victim of the same kind of man.” She shivered, not faking it.

Begging the officer to remain until she felt recovered, Suzanne promised to reveal more about Mrs. Angers. Actually, she had nothing else to share about Cherie, other than a strong opinion that the woman was a slut. Revealing her latest theory about the stolen silver at a dinner party had gone out the window, upstaged by Cherie Angers’ disappearance. There would be no Agatha Christie ending. She had to expose the villain in another way.

Feigning dizziness, she swooned into George’s arms and faintly asked him to carry her upstairs to the room Cherie had vacated. While she fully enjoyed being pressed against the warmth of his broad chest, he whispered that she didn’t feel very frail. He grunted when they got to the landing.

“You didn’t complain about my weight the other night,” Suzanne whispered.

“We were going downstairs the night of the storm, not up,” he complained into her ear.

She would have punched him, but that seemed inconsistent with her illness. Besides, he might have dropped her.

“George, I know you were out on the balcony with Cherie last night. I heard you laughing and carrying on. Did you wear your costume? I thought that was our special thing,” she hissed.

“I wasn’t with Cherie. Why do you always think I’m lying?” George answered through gritted teeth.

He dumped her in the middle of the four-poster’s mattress so hard she bounced. If the sheriff and Birdie hadn’t been downstairs and Doc Sonny on the way, they might have worked out their problems right then and there between the sheets. Suzanne sighed and changed the sound to a sickly moan. They just didn’t have the time.

****

Dr. Sonnier took his own sweet time arriving—Suzanne no longer being a favored patient—but he did come. Doc Sonny sat on a desk chair taking her blood pressure at bedside. She asked for Sheriff Duval. In a few moments, the stage would be set.

She tried to look as feeble as possible lying in the big canopied bed Cherie had left rumpled and unmade. The strong scent of hootchie mama perfume on the sheets gave Suzanne a headache and helped in achieving a pained expression. The linens also had a faintly musky smell as if they’d absorbed sexual juices. She wrinkled her nose. Damn, George really had lied about last night.

Still sipping coffee and brushing biscuit crumbs off the front of his uniform, Sheriff Duval arrived to lean in the doorway. Birdie pretended to dust antiques in the hall as close to the door as possible. George sprawled on the fainting couch at the foot of the bed, his long arms and legs dangling over its scrolled ends. Her proposed scenario would not get any better than this.

“I feel much better now, Dr. Sonnier. I wanted you here for another purpose.”

“Then, I have patients who really need me. I have no time for this.” The doctor dropped her arm, briskly unsnapped the cuff, and stood to go.

“You, Dr. Jefferson Sonnier, you are a thief,” Suzanne accused and pointed what she wished were a longer, bonier finger at him. George toppled the couch getting up. Sheriff Duval stood at attention in the doorway. Birdie ceased her pretense of dusting. Jeff Sonnier laughed.

“Not a thief, Miss Hudson, because I’ve paid for the goods. In one way or another, I’ve paid for it all.”

As if someone had pressed a button on Sheriff Duval’s back, he began reciting the doctor’s rights, especially emphasizing the part about the right to remain silent. Dr. Sonnier took the suggestion.

“Isn’t it true, Dr. Sonnier, that you were having coffee with Birdie when she was called away on a family emergency? As a frequent visitor to this house during Virginia Lee’s time, Birdie trusted you to let yourself out. You allowed the door to remain unlocked and returned after George had given me my sleeping pill. Using surgical gloves, you emptied the sideboard of its silver, having full knowledge of where the key was kept since you were Mrs. St. Julien’s trusted lover of over twenty years!”

She paused to gauge her effect, but George ruined it all.

“Except I locked the doors when I left with my great-aunts.”

“A woman’s lover would have a key to her house.”

Then, Sheriff Duval had to butt in. “Shucks, Miss Hudson, this is a small town. Everyone knew about Ginny and Sonny for years on end. We all figured since Helene was Catholic she wouldn’t give the doc a divorce, and old Jacques wouldn’t let his wife go out of pride. I figured Sonny could have done it. He had the chance, being up here when the silver was took, but why in hell would he? He had years to take Ginny’s silver. She would have given it to him. Why now, Jeff?”

“Why don’t you ask Miss Hudson?” Jefferson Sonnier relaxed, reseated himself on the desk chair, and stretched out his legs. “She seems to know it all.”

Suzanne conjured up a picture of Dr. Sonnier sitting hunched and concerned by the bedside of a dying woman. Virginia Lee asked one last thing of her lover.

“Sheriff Duval, the famous Magnolia Hill silver was fake, replicas and plate substituted by Mrs. St. Julien as she sold off the real things to pay her medical bills and keep this house in the family. Randy Royal can confirm this, though I am sure she kept no record of the sales. You see, she didn’t inform the insurance company. You say the whole town knew about Sonny and Virginia Lee. Then, they must also know she was the kind of woman who would extract a promise from her lover to finish what she started. By arranging for the collection of the insurance money on the fake goods after her death, she freed her son of debt and saved the house, her only reward for a loveless marriage.”

“That’s right,” Jefferson Sonnier said. His distinguished face remained unperturbed.

“No, no it ain’t right!” Birdie burst in from the hall, knocking Sheriff Duval out of the doorway and filling the small bedroom with her bulk. “Take me, ’cause I’m more guilty than Doc Sonny. Take me.” Asking to be cuffed by the sheriff, she thrust out her fat wrists.

“It was me who called Doc Sonny when Miss Suzanne found out about the silver. After Miss Virginia died, he wanted to just let things be, to see if Mr. Georgie could make it on his own or just outright give him a loan. I went along with that, but then, I seen danger ahead with Georgie being in trouble with the insurance company, and I calls and I says, ‘Let’s do it now. Let’s give nice Miss Suzanne and Georgie a chance like you and Miss Virginia never had.’ I was helping him load that fake stuff while Miss Suzanne slept that morning after he gave her a shot to keep her still a couple of hours when the call came about my boy. ‘Go,’ says Doc Sonny, ‘You need an alibi anyhow. I’ll hide the silver where it won’t be found.’ I went.”

Defiant and belligerent, Birdie braced her hands on her wide hips. “Now Doc gets the blame of it. It ain’t right ’cause I had the idea. Peoples think you so dumb they can sell good silver right out from under you, so dumb you can’t listen at a dying woman’s door. And you, Miss Suzanne, you ain’t as nice as I thought you was. Look at this mess you done stirred up, ruint Doc Sonny, ruint me, hurt Miss Helene and Georgie when it all comes out. Why Georgie’d be as good off with that tramp who come here last night.”

Birdie had powerful lungs and filled the air of the room with guilt that settled over Suzanne like a feather quilt, light yet smothering. She tried to shake it off, no longer interested in being the girl detective or the heroine of the story. She slid down the high side of the bed and went to George who stood there hunched over as if one of the Patouts had punched him in the gut. Putting her arms around him, she felt truly sick when he did not respond.

“Well, I’ll be. I’ll be,” Sheriff Duval sputtered not knowing what cliché to be. “The polygraph man says he couldn’t get a good reading on that black maid because she’s so hysterical all the time, and here she is, the mastermind.” He removed his handcuffs from his belt.

“Wait a minute.” George looked up from the spot on the floor that had been occupying his attention. He did not glance at Suzanne. “I won’t press charges against either of them. I knew the silver was faked when it was stolen, a detail Suzanne left out of her great exposé. That makes me liable to Mutual Trust. If Jeff returns the fake silver, I will reimburse the insurance company by getting another mortgage on the house. We’re old clients, old family. I’m sure we can work this out.”

Amazingly, George smiled. “Interest rates are the lowest they’ve been in twenty years. Financially, I will be better off than before, Birdie. Thank you.”

“The silver is in my old brick cistern behind the house, Sheriff. I’m afraid it will take more effort to get it out than to put it in. That hole goes down deep and is full of water,” Dr. Sonnier added.

“I can have my boys out there tomorrow, Jeff. I’d like to have a big write up in the
Sentinel
about how I cracked this crime, but I reckon I can live without it. I’ll try to keep it quiet, but some is bound to come out, y’all know that.” Sheriff Duval tipped his Stetson, which he never took off, to the group and started for the stairs.

Everyone behaved so nobly. They’d worked out a solution in a genteel southern way among themselves, and no one was going to thank the nosey, interfering Yankee from Philadelphia for raking up all this muck. Suzanne felt truly nauseated now, but the least she could do was put her jealousy aside and be the one to say, “But what about the disappearance of Cherie Angers?”

Chapter Eighteen

Suzanne’s story

“Give her overnight,” Sheriff Duval said. “The woman’s had marriage problems. No sign of struggle in the room. Could be a stunt to get her husband back or gain George’s attention. Could be she threw herself in the bayou. I’ll start asking around today. See if anyone’s seen her. If she doesn’t turn up, we’ll make it formal tomorrow. Mornin’, Miss Hudson, George, Doc. And you, Birdie, you, too.” He tipped his hat directly at the maid and left.

With a weary step, Dr. Sonnier followed the sheriff. George shrugged Suzanne off and said he had to get to work. He phoned later to say he might go over to Linc’s that night, not to wait up for him. She thought that was a good idea, knowing he’d talk things out with his friend, maybe get over being mad at her and realize she’d been trying to help. Birdie gave her the silent treatment. She went about her work as if she were the only person in the house.

Suzanne made her own lunch and walked out for the mail afterwards. Relieved, she found nothing from Paul for a change. She read a long, newsy letter from her mother, mostly about how bitterly cold it had been, would winter never end? Her brother, the lawyer, had won another case and might possibly be settling down with one woman at last. How was her only daughter doing? Had she met any nice men besides her employer? And Mom remained glad she did not live alone in Philadelphia anymore. The serial killer had struck again last week, a young woman exactly Suzanne’s age stabbed to death in her bedroom. That made twelve victims in less than a year. Nothing like this had ever happened in her day. Sure, Mom.

Suzanne tried to work on her paper but felt too restless and wandered the house, double checking information on the furnishings. By the time she returned to her room, Birdie had made the bed and neatly repacked Cherie’s clothes as if the woman would return at any minute and scold if the work had not been done. The window to the bedroom was latched again. Suzanne wondered if the linens had been changed. She’d prefer sleeping in this room rather than Virginia’s, but not in sheets smelling of Cherie and George together.