Iced Chiffon (27 page)

IdaMae looked around as if to make sure no one else was near, then whispered, “I came to warn you, honey. I hear you nearly got yourself run over by that Sissy Collins girl yesterday. Everyone’s talking about it, and I couldn’t sleep a wink all night just thinking about you in danger like that.”

IdaMae got closer still. “I had to get myself over here and warn you. Sissy’s not quite right in the head, if you know what I mean. Her mamma and I are neighborly, and I remember her saying that her Sissy is sweet as pie, but if she gets riled up, she can be downright dangerous. I was thinking if she tried to do you harm, she could have gone after Janelle. Now there’s a woman with a real knack for ticking people off. Some say she was into blackmail.” IdaMae put her hand over her mouth as if just saying the word was sinful. “Others say Sissy Collins had a reason to get herself blackmailed.”

IdaMae gave me a hug. “Hollis has his troubles, and I couldn’t bear it if something happened to you, too. You promise me to watch yourself.” She cut her eyes back to the display table. “And since I’m here, I sure could do with a new hat and maybe a new sweater to replace this old thing I have on.”

I wrote up the sale and thanked IdaMae for the warning. I told her not to worry and that I’d look both ways before I crossed any more streets. I closed up at six, straightened, and cleaned till seven. I took a long shower, shaved my legs, and moisturized. Just in case things went the way KiKi suspected
they might go tonight, I put on good underwear and a nice yellow dress I wouldn’t be mind being caught dead in. If I wound up on a slab at the morgue, I didn’t want to embarrass Mamma. These things mattered in Savannah.

At eight thirty, I met up with KiKi, and we headed for the Historic District. “Given any thought to that strategy you were talking about?” I asked her as we tooled along.

“To tell you the truth, I took a lesson from Janelle’s playbook.”

“You’re going to blackmail Raylene?”

“I wrote a letter and put it in my mailbox. It’s all about how Urston and Raylene are in cahoots to fix the Homes and Gardens judging and how Janelle got wind of it and was blackmailing them. I said that we’re on our way over to Raylene’s house, and if this note goes out, come looking for us in her garden under the fountain.”

“That should be enough for the police to investigate.”

“Who said anything about the police? I sent the letter to Elsie and AnnieFritz. If we don’t make it home, the letter goes out to them. One phone call from Elsie and AnnieFritz, and it will be all over Savannah what Raylene and Urston have been up to. They won’t be able to lift their heads in this town ever again, and it will serve them right.”

When we got to Saint Julian, we parked two blocks from Raylene’s. “I suppose this is discreet enough,” KiKi said and killed the engine. We got out and walked down to Raylene’s, but instead of going up the elegant front main entrance, we took the gate to the side. A narrow path led to the garden, which was lit with little brass electric lights. Raylene sat at a wrought-iron table across from Urston, my fountain trickling in the corner.

“I’m not sure why we agreed to come here,” I said to Raylene, KiKi and I taking the two empty chairs.

“Because you have no proof that Urston and I were involved in Janelle’s murder, and you’re hoping to get some information to save that husband of yours.”

“Ex–husband.”

“Whatever. Urston and I need to get this Janelle thing straightened out before you ruin us both, and in this town it doesn’t take much. Junior has no idea what’s going on, and he wouldn’t be one bit happy if he found out. Winning Best of Show is nothing to him. I do declare, all that man cares about is his bank and whether Mother Carter called today and whether she was fairing well.” Raylene cut her eyes to Urston. “Some men never do grow up.”

“We figure you know about our little arrangement,” Urston said, ignoring Raylene. “Belinda told me that you found my red notebook and the racing form when you were at my house. Doesn’t take rocket science to figure out what we’re up to.”

“I’m not proud of what I’m doing,” Raylene added. “But I’m the kind of person that when I want something bad enough I don’t wait around to get it handed to me. I go after it, and nobody gets in my way.”

I was okay up until that last comment. “And we’re in your way?”

“You two are in everyone’s way,” Urston grumbled.

“Now you’re going to kill us because we know too much,” I said to Raylene and Urston, and KiKi rushed in with, “You should know we left a letter saying where we are and what’s going on here. If we don’t get home in one piece—”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Raylene said in her most
exasperated voice. “There’s no need to kill you, though there are times when it’s been mighty tempting, indeed. The truth is, Urston and I weren’t anywhere near Janelle when she was murdered. You’re right in that I went to see her when she was showing the house, but that was the last time I laid eyes on the woman. I needed to talk to her. With me giving money to Urston and Janelle these last few months, I was out of cash. In the beginning, it was simple—I just paid Urston—but then Janelle came along. If I went to Junior for more money, he’d ask questions. Having the wife of the bank president involved with blackmail and bribery would not set well with him and even less with Mother Carter. Junior may not divorce me, but things would never be the same between us; I know it.”

“Janelle said she didn’t care about your problems so then you killed her,” KiKi said putting the obvious spin on the story.

“You’re not getting this at all,” Raylene huffed. “Janelle and I had a fight, verbal not physical, over my paying her. I couldn’t afford it. She told me that was too bad and a couple wanting to look at the house was due any minute, so I left the place. I called Urston, and we met at Forsyth Park, in front of the fountain. There was a concert that night, and I had on some dreadful clothes that one of the maids keeps here at the house. Urston and I blended right in with the Savannah riffraff. We needed to figure out what to do about Janelle, but there was nothing we could do. Janelle held all the cards.”

I rolled my eyes so far back that I nearly fell out of the chair. “And you expect me to believe that you then left the park and meekly went home.”

“After my encounter with Janelle, I was dying of thirst and started to buy lemonade from a street vendor,” Raylene continued. “Lola’s Lemonade. She had a daughter, six or seven, who kept playing with the cups. I told the girl to stop touching everything with her dirty little grimy hands and that she needed a haircut and to wash her filthy face. She called me an old witch. I called her a street urchin. The mother and I got into it, and a policeman came over.”

I felt bad for the little girl, the mother, and the cop, and it was unfortunate Raylene hadn’t gotten tossed in the slammer.

“If you have any notion about telling Junior or the Homes and Gardens Committee about Urston and me and our arrangement”—Raylene went on—“realize it’s your word against ours. You have no evidence of bribery or payoffs. You’ll look like fools. And, of course, I’ll have to sue you for defamation of character.”

The looking-like-fools part was more bark than bite. Half of Savannah already suspected there was something going on between Raylene and Urston. Getting Best of Show three years in a row was suspicious as a hairpin in a bachelor’s bed. “What did Janelle have on you?”

“Why do you need to know?” Raylene asked.

“It could help us find the killer, and that would get us off your back.” Truth be told, it was a bad case of plain old Savannah nosiness on my part.

“This whole ugly affair is a result of Urston’s big ego and small brain,” Raylene quipped.

Urston straightened his bow tie. “Janelle played me like she played Hollis. She was young and pretty, and she and I shared a few bottles of Château Lafite. I told her I was an
important person in this town and I was going to make Raylene win the competition. Janelle said I was fantastic, powerful, and handsome. She followed me around till she got pictures of Raylene paying me.”

“Who knows where those pictures are now, but you sure don’t have them,” Raylene said to me in her snooty, high-pitched voice, irritating as nails across a blackboard. “In fact, you don’t have anything on us.” She stood. “Now go find the real murderer and leave us be.” She did a little shoo wave as if KiKi and I were pesky mosquitoes who dared to invade her garden.

On our way to the Beemer, I said to KiKi, “I was so sure Raylene and Urston had something to do with Janelle’s murder, and now we’ve got nothing.”

KiKi gave me a devilish grin. “We got Raylene sweating, and that in itself is worth the price of admission. But I have to say, this makes Sissy Collins our gal.” KiKi took the driver’s side. “She must have been the one to visit Janelle after the couple left. She killed her and got the Lexus using the key in Janelle’s purse.”

“Can you really see Sissy doing that? Having the wherewithal to pull it off?” I asked KiKi.

“Bet if I had a martini in my hand I could see it a lot better.” KiKi headed up Bull Street to Jen’s and Friends. The place had cheap drinks, was always crowded, and the decibel level made overhearing anything nearly impossible.

“How do you think Sissy got in the ‘For Sale’ house without being seen?” KiKi asked me once we had appletinis with more apple than tini, since we would have to drive home. We sat at one of the little outside tables on the sidewalk, surrounded by other tables jammed close together.

“Same way I got in.” I hunched over the drinks. “I snuck across the backyard. The privacy fence helps with the sneaking part. The night of the murder, Tommy Lee was at the movies and not out doing street patrol. Later, when Sissy came back with the Lexus, she’d want someone to see it because that would implicate Hollis. My guess is she drove real slow to give everyone a good look.”

“But Sissy is so wrapped up in Franklin that nothing else registers with that girl, and the murder took some figuring out. If she is the killer, maybe she left something behind at the house,” KiKi said over the rim of her glass. “I think we should go back to the house together and take another look around.”

My skin crawled at the thought of revisiting the place where Cupcake died. KiKi asked, “So how did you get in the house, Houdini?”

Judge Gloria Summerside and Arthur-Murray KiKi Vanderpool were day-and-night different in some ways, but dead–on in others. George Clooney was their dream man, peanut-butter-chip ice cream from Leopold’s their favorite food, and good-old Savannah stubbornness their life’s blood. Reluctantly, I dug in the front pocket of my purse and pulled out the key to the “For Sale” house, still embedded in the fragments I’d grabbed from the floor to leave the crime scene as I found it.

“You need to clean that purse,” KiKi lamented. “You’re going to catch some god-awful disease they don’t have a cure for and all your skin’s gonna fall off,” KiKi said pushing grass and leaves aside and reaching for the key.

“Wait a minute.” I held my hand over the little pile of rubble in front of me. I plucked out a blade. It wasn’t grass.
It was thicker, longer, distinctive, pointy, withered. It was pink. It was a frond. Yesterday I didn’t know a frond from a cucumber. “This is a Tillandsia something–or–other. Someone else was in the ‘For Sale’ house the night of the murder.”

“Right. Raylene was there, then Sissy.”

“Besides Sissy.” I held up the blade, pink, wilted, and interesting. “What do you know about Raimondo Baldassare?”

“How did Raimondo suddenly get into the picture?” KiKi asked me.

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out.”

K
I
K
I
took the last sip of her appletini and wagged her brows, a sassy smile on her lips. “Well, Raimondo is always a fine topic of conversation, no matter what the reason. He’s Italian, gorgeous, does up an incredible garden, and everyone knows he has the best butt in Savannah. Are you thinking about making a play for Raimondo?” KiKi gasped. “Is that what this is all about?”

Before I could answer, she grabbed my hand, her eyes dancing and not just from the tini. Auntie KiKi, Love Doctor. “Oh, honey, that’s the best news I’ve heard all day. You’re taking the plunge, getting back into the dating pool, and Raimondo is more delicious than strawberry shortcake at Sunday dinner. I’m plumb tickled for you. This is wonderful news. I never saw it coming.”

This time I grabbed KiKi’s hands and looked her dead in the eyes. “It’s not coming. I don’t want to date Raimondo;
I want to know what his plants are doing in Hollis’s town house. Hollis has the same palms at his place that are at the country club, and we know the club spares no expense—the members wouldn’t stand for it. How did Hollis get these expensive plants? More to the point, how did Cupcake?”

“And why do we care?”

“It’s another big question that involves Cupcake.” I twirled the frond around on the table. “Raimondo was at Cupcake’s wake at the Marshall House. At the time, I thought it was a coincidence; the bar at the Marshall House is a popular watering hole for half the city, and he happened to be there. But now we have his plants at the town house. My guess is Cupcake put the squeeze on Raimondo, and not in a romantic way, and he gave her the palms. But why? What did Cupcake have on Raimondo?”