The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady (11 page)

“It purely is,” Edna Fay said. “Anyway, Doc said to tell you that she was hit on the head—the right temple, actually. Hard enough to produce a skull fracture. He says it was probably something like a beer bottle.”

“Hit on the head?” Buddy picked up a pencil and wrote
hit on the head
on the scratch paper. Then:
beer bottle.
“I missed that.”

“Doc said it'd be easy to miss,” Edna Fay said. “It was in the hairline. And yes, she was strangled, no surprise there. But not with her stocking.”

“Wait a minute,” he said, frowning. “I saw the body myself. There was a stocking around her neck.”

“Yes. There was a stocking around her neck. But she was strangled with a rope
.
A hemp rope. Doc said he could tell by the bruises, and by some hemp fibers that broke off and got embedded in her skin. The stocking came later. Afterward.”

“Ah,” Buddy said. “I see.” The stocking might have been added to make it look more like a sexual assault. He jotted the words
hemp rope
on the scratch paper.

“Doc said it wasn't just real easy to fix a time of death,” Edna Fay said. “He guesses it's around midnight, give or take. But he also found—”

She broke off and Buddy drew a circle on his scratch paper. “Darla Ann,” she said in an exasperated tone to somebody on her end of the line, “I thought you were supposed to be hanging those sheets out. What are you waitin' for?”

Buddy put clock hands inside the circle, pointing to five minutes to twelve o'clock. There was a murmuring voice and a pause, then Edna Fay said, “Well, go next door and see if Mrs. Barker has any clothespins you can borrow until I can get over to Mann's to buy another package.” To Buddy, she said, “I swear, that girl breaks more clothespins every wash day than a normal person would in a month.” She paused. “Where were we?”

“Yes'm,” Buddy said, and drew a diamond around the clock. “You were saying that Rona Jean—Miss Hancock—was hit on the head and then strangled with a rope, not her stocking. What about assault?” He reminded himself that Edna Fay was a nurse. “Sexual assault,” he added.

“No evidence of sexual assault, is what he said,” Edna Fay replied cheerily. “And—” She broke off. “Lord, Darla Ann, what is it
now
?”

This time the murmur was louder and more querulous and the pause was longer. While he waited, Buddy wrote
no assalt
under the diamond. He frowned at the word, which didn't
look right, crossed it out, and wrote
assallt.
He was glad, for Rona Jean's sake. But if she hadn't been killed fighting off her killer's advances, why had she been killed?

Edna Fay was back on the line, and this time, she was fit to be tied.

“Buddy, you are not going to believe this, but Darla Ann knocked out the prop and down came the clothesline, with all the clean sheets and towels on it. Right down in the dirt, and of course they were still sopping wet, which means they are
muddy.
”

“Sorry 'bout that,” Buddy said, and drew a big square around the diamond. “You said there was no evidence of assault and—” He paused, hoping she'd fill in the blank.

“Yes, no assault,” Edna Fay said. “And no evidence of recent intercourse. But he was surprised when he saw that—” She raised her voice. “Darla Ann, I'll be out there in a minute, soon as I finish on this phone. You start unpinning them off the line and put them in the basket. Shake off as much of that mud as you can. I don't want to have to wash them again if we don't have to.”

Intercourse?
Buddy was shocked. He had read the word, of course, and he knew what it meant, in his own experience. But the guys he knew used other words for it, and he had never heard anybody—let alone a woman—actually utter the word. But then, Edna Fay was a nurse and probably used to talking that way.
No intercorse
, he wrote, and drew two heavy lines under it. “You were saying that when he did the autopsy, Doc was surprised,” he prompted. “Surprised about what?”

“I was saying?” She sounded distracted. “Oh, yes. He said she was about four months. Now, if you'll excuse me, that poor girl I've got workin' for me has absolutely no brains in
her head at all. I am going to have to get out there and rescue those sheets myself.”

Four months
, Buddy wrote. He frowned. “Four months? Four months what?”

Edna Fay's laugh tinkled over the telephone wire. “Oh, Buddy, you are so
funny
. Why, four months pregnant, of course.”

Buddy's pencil lead
snapped.

Charlie Dickens: A Newsman in Search of a Story

Whistling the cheerful refrain of “Dixie,” Charlie Dickens pushed his bicycle through the front door of the
Dispatch
office and leaned it against the inside sill of the wide front window. He was hanging his straw boater and light blue seersucker suit coat on the coat tree in the corner when he heard a male voice.

“Mornin', Mr. Dickens. Wasn't lookin' for you to come in today—it bein' Saturday and all.”

Taking a deep breath of the combined fragrances of ink, kerosene, and newsprint that always hit him when he came into the office, Charlie turned to see Purley Mann leaning on a broom, an inky rag sticking out of the rear pocket of his overalls. Purley's fine, silvery blond hair, cherubic face, and mild manner had earned him the nickname Baby when he was a kid, and he'd never outgrown it. Folks said that Baby hadn't been at the head of the line when the Lord was handing out smarts, but Charlie had found him to be a good
worker. He kept the place clean and helped operate the presses—the arthritic Prouty job press that had to be coaxed into producing handbills and advertisements and the like and the demonic Babcock that shook the floors and rattled the windows. The blasted thing had always given Charlie heartburn, but for Baby, who spent hours fixing and fine-tuning and polishing it, the Babcock purred like a kitten.

Ophelia Snow was Charlie's other helper. To his surprise, she had proved to be a whiz at the Linotype, a balky machine that women weren't supposed to have the strength to operate. She was a good writer and willing to report on the Darling social events—women's clubs, church events, and bridal and baby showers—that Charlie himself hated to cover. And recently, she'd taken a part-time office job at the CCC camp, so Charlie had given her a weekly assignment, “The Camp Briarwood News,” under her byline. She had already written three columns and was doing a commendable job, picking up little anecdotes here and there and weaving them into a readable, often amusing little story. And yesterday, Charlie had talked her into doing some extra investigating on the side.

“Wasn't lookin' to come in today, Baby,” Charlie replied, going to his desk. “But then I got the news about Rona Jean's murder. Figured it might be a good idea to put out a special edition. So let's get ready for an extra print run on Tuesday.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped the sweat off his face. It was another hot day, after too many hot days. The radio had mentioned the possibility of a storm. A good thing, if it would break the heat.

Baby had brightened at the mention of a special edition. The Babcock was his pet and he loved to run it. But then he remembered what the special edition was about and put on a doleful expression. “Terrible thing, that murder.”

“That's right,” Charlie said.
Terrible for Rona Jean
, he
thought—
but good for circulation
. There was nothing like a murder to entice folks to read the newspaper. He could charge thirty-five cents for the special edition, and who knows? They might sell as many as three or four hundred papers, and the only out-of-pocket cost would be the extra ink and newsprint.

Charlie had grown up in Darling and returned after a long and successful career as an investigative reporter. He had worked for the
Baltimore
Sun
and the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
and the
Fort Worth
Star-Telegram
, assignments sandwiched between a couple of stretches in the Associated Press wire service office in New York. He could smell a story a mile off and refused to rest until he had tracked it down, no matter how far he had to go or what he had to do to get it. The stories that paid off in the most column inches were sensational crime stories, of course—murders, kidnappings, bank robberies—and stories about fraud or political corruption. Crime made scorching front-page news, and Charlie had scrapbooks crammed with his bylined clips to prove it.

But lately, he had begun to fear that he was losing his newshound's nose for a good story. There was very little crime in Darling, a tame, two-bit town that was a newsman's arid desert. For months on end, what happened was so unexciting, so unremarkable and utterly non-newsworthy that Charlie could write the stories in his sleep.

And if Darling was a two-bit town, it had to be said that the
Dispatch
was a two-bit newspaper. Charlie had inherited it when his editor-publisher father died of cancer. He had never intended to keep it, planning to invest just enough effort to keep it going until he found a buyer for it. That plan might have worked, too, but then the Crash came and nobody wanted to put scarce money into a small-town newspaper with a serious shortage of paid advertising and an even greater shortage of news. Like it or not, Charlie was stranded here in
Darling, a realization that had not done wonders for his disposition—until Fannie Champaign had agreed to marry him, that is. After that, things were noticeably different. Better. Much better.

Now, Charlie loosened his tie, rolled up his sleeves, put on his green celluloid eyeshade, and sat down at his battered old wooden desk. He opened the bottom right-hand drawer and pulled out a bottle—a bottle of warm, flat Hires Root Beer. Last year at this time, it would have been a bottle of Mickey LeDoux's best, but not now. For one thing, Mickey's still had been busted and a young boy killed (that was the last big news story Charlie had written), and Mickey had spent eleven months or so in the slammer. He would be up and shining again in a few weeks, though, and many in Darling would raise their glasses in celebration. But Charlie wouldn't be celebrating. He would be drinking Hires. He had promised Fannie to leave the booze alone, and he meant to keep his promise.

Charlie swigged his warm root beer, shaking his head at the thought of himself, a crusty bachelor newspaper reporter who had lived to chase stories and who had never had the least intention of settling down, now a married man who had sworn off the hard stuff. His nomadic experiences had given him a slantwise, skeptical view of settled, small-town life, and he'd seen too many bad marriages to be anything but skeptical about the possibility of marital happiness. But now that he and Fannie were married, he was by God going to make her happy and hope that some of it would rub off on him.

He polished off the last of the root beer and tossed the bottle into the wastebasket with a loud clank. And maybe, just maybe, one of the stories he was chasing right now would turn out to be
the
story. The story he'd been waiting for ever since he'd been marooned in Darling by his father's death.

And it just might happen. For the astonishing fact was that at this very moment, Charlie had
two
stories to work on, either or both of which might prove to be a real doozy, something that the AP or UP wire services would pick up and distribute around the country. Or, better, that he could sell as a bylined special to the
Atlanta Constitution.

The first story, of course, was Rona Jean Hancock's murder. The minute he got the word, Charlie had picked up his camera and raced for the scene of the crime, where he'd managed to snap a half-dozen photos before the sheriff—the
new
sheriff, Buddy Norris—showed up and told him to knock it off. He couldn't print the photos in the
Dispatch
, which was a family newspaper. But he could use them in his
Constitution
piece or sell them to one of the wire services, which had recently run those dramatic death photos of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Bonnie and Clyde had been ambushed and shot to death six weeks before, over in the piney woods of Louisiana. The crowd that had gathered got quickly out of control and the scene turned into a circus. A woman whacked off bloody locks of Bonnie's hair and pieces of her dress to sell as souvenirs. A man tried to cut off Clyde's trigger finger, and others pulled off pieces of the stolen Ford V8 that the pair had been driving. Photos of the bullet-riddled bodies of the notorious pair were plastered across newspapers and magazines coast to coast.

Rona Jean was no gun moll (or if she was, that fact had not yet come to light), and her murder wasn't anywhere near as dramatic as the death of Bonnie Parker. But the photos that Charlie had taken were sensational, to say the least. Not to be insensitive about it, but the fact that the girl—a telephone operator—had been strangled with her very own silk stocking would make for excellent copy. Charlie could see the headline now:
Hello Central, Give Me Heaven
.

And with this story, Charlie was going to break a Darling rule. Up until now, the
Dispatch
would not have dared to report to its readers the news that Doc Roberts' autopsy had revealed that the unmarried victim was pregnant. (Yes, his sister, Edna Fay, who was married to the doctor, had let him in on the secret.) “Only the news that's fit to be read—by your mother,” Charlie's father used to grumble, when he couldn't print everything he wanted to print. “Or your grandmother. Or your little sister. It's a curse. It's an obscene, profane, dad-blamed blasphemy, is what it is. No newspaperman worth his salt ought to put up with it.” With a sigh, he would add, “But I do. 'Cause if I don't, I get canceled subscriptions from the Baptists and the Methodists and the Catholics and letters to the editor from the rest of 'em.”

But Rona Jean's murder was the story
du jour
, and Charlie had decided that it was high time the
Dispatch
joined the modern newspaper world. It was a true fact, attested to by a reliable physician, that the victim was pregnant. And regardless of the unspoken prohibition against printing the word “pregnant” in the
Dispatch
, that fact, and that word, was exactly what he intended to print. He wouldn't put it in the headline, out of deference to tender sensibilities, but it would be there. All by itself, that word would make readers blink and make Rona Jean's murder a very big story, worthy of a special edition.

But the killing of Rona Jean Hancock wasn't the only story Charlie had up his sleeve. In fact, the other one might be even bigger, because of its possible national repercussions. It had come to him the week before via a telephone tip from an anonymous source—a woman—who claimed that there was something seriously fishy and definitely illegal going on at Camp Briarwood. The voice sounded familiar, but Charlie couldn't quite put his finger on who it was.
Anyway, he had been in the newspaper business long enough to know that nine times out of ten, an anonymous tip wasn't worth a plugged nickel.

But then the second tip had come in, from the same source but by mail this time, in the form of a handwritten note. In four sentences, it spelled out what the tipster had said on the phone. It was signed with an obvious pseudonym:
Mata Hari
. Charlie did a double take when he saw that. Mata Hari was a famous exotic dancer accused of being a spy during the Great War.

Now, confronted with these serious claims, Charlie realized that
this
could be his big story, an exposé, exactly the kind of story he needed to get him back into the newspaper game. If he investigated and found out that the charges were true, somebody ought to clean house at the camp and throw out whoever was playing dirty. But who could do that? It couldn't be the camp commander, who might be in on the scheme, and it definitely wasn't a job for Sheriff Norris, who had no jurisdiction. It had to be somebody in the government, didn't it? But how would he get word to the right person?

Charlie had no answers, but he knew someone who might. Using the long-distance line, he tracked down Lorena Hickok—Hick, her friends called her—who had been the top female reporter for the Associated Press when Charlie was working for the wire service in New York. Hick had left the AP the year before and gone to work as a roving chief investigator for Harry Hopkins. Hopkins was head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, one of FDR's most important New Deal programs, and responsible for funneling half a billion dollars into federally funded, state-run work projects. FERA's money was government money, big money, and that kind of funding always invited fraud and misuse. Hopkins, who was no dummy, was understandably
eager to make sure it was going where it was supposed to go. So he had hired Hick as an investigator-at-large and ordered her to travel around the country, assess the operation of the programs, and report back to him.

Charlie had caught up with Hick late one evening the week before, at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, where she was staying. As a political reporter during the Tammany Hall bribery scandals of the late 1920s, she'd had plenty of experience investigating bribery and kickbacks. She had listened to Charlie's abbreviated version of Mata Hari's allegations, asked a couple of probing questions, and told him point-blank that he ought to drop whatever else he was doing and start following up on the tip.

“I've seen a few instances of that kind of monkey business in the FERA programs,” she said in her gritty, cigarette-roughened voice, “and there's no reason to think the CCC is any cleaner. Sounds like you're onto something, Charlie my boy. Handle it right, and you've got yourself a story—a
big
story.” Helpfully, she added, “If you latch onto something, give me a call. I know somebody who hates this kind of dirty dealing, who could maybe pass the word to the top.”