The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady (6 page)

Buddy was taken aback. He hadn't gone any farther than an undefined suspicion of Myra May, but now that Mr. Moseley had laid it out so clearly, he found himself agreeing. Myra May may not have appreciated the friendship between Violet and Rona Jean, but she was not a suspect.

He nodded and said, “By the time I get all that done, maybe Doc Roberts will have the results of the autopsy.”
He shivered at the thought of Rona Jean being cut open. “After that . . . well, I guess I'll have to figure out where to go from there.”

Mr. Moseley nodded. “Makes good sense.” He smiled slightly. “Tell you what, Sheriff. You go out there and do your job, and when you've finished, I'll do mine.” His voice hardened. “You bring me the killer and enough hard evidence for me to make the case, and I'll see that the son of a bitch is convicted.”

Buddy stood. “Yes,
sir
,” he said, and almost saluted.

Now, holding his hat in one hand and raising his fist to knock at Bettina's front door, he stood tall and confident, knowing that Mr. Moseley was behind him.

*   *   *

Well before the second month's rent was due, Bettina Higgens had understood that agreeing to take Rona Jean Hancock as a roommate was a big, fat mistake.

It was Rona Jean's half of the rent money that had tempted her. For a couple of years, Bettina had lived with her sister and her brother-in-law over on Oak Street, which hadn't been bad, although their apartment was small and there wasn't a lot of privacy. But her sister had gotten a divorce and moved to Atlanta, and Bettina had to hunt for another place to live.

The cheapest place she found was a room at Mrs. Brewster's boardinghouse for young working women on West Plum. But Bettina hadn't liked what she heard about the place from girls who had lived there. Curfew was at nine on weekdays and ten thirty on weekends, and if you weren't in the house on the dot, Mrs. Brewster (the girls called her Dragon Lady behind her back) simply locked the doors and you were stuck outside for the night. If you overslept at breakfast time (six thirty in the morning) or you were late to supper (five thirty at night), you went hungry, for you couldn't use the kitchen or
keep food in your room. As for entertaining company—well, that was a joke. You could sit out with a young man on the front porch until it got dark. Then you could sit in the parlor (on separate chairs, with the lights on), but only so long as the door to Mrs. Brewster's sitting room was open.

But bad as Mrs. Brewster's was, Bettina finally decided it was the best she could do, so she called to make the necessary arrangements. She hadn't any more than hung up, however, when the phone rang again, and the switchboard girl at the Telephone Exchange—Rona Jean Hancock—introduced herself. She sincerely apologized for having overheard Bettina's conversation with Mrs. Brewster. She said she would never have done such a thing but she was looking for a roommate, too, and knew of a small house for rent. If Bettina was interested, maybe they could go and look at it together.

That was how Bettina got hooked up with Rona Jean, and when the two of them had first moved in together, she had thought that it would be okay. She certainly enjoyed the little house, and since Rona Jean was gone a lot, she had it mostly to herself, which suited her just fine. After a hard day's work making women beautiful, it was a relief to come home and kick off her shoes and relax.

But it wasn't more than a couple of weeks before Bettina began to see the mistake she had made. First there was the money. Rona Jean was always a couple of weeks late with her share of the rent and was forever asking to borrow fifty cents or a dollar, which Bettina usually felt she had to loan her because she had been broke herself and knew what it felt like.

And then there were the men. Monday through Friday, Rona Jean worked the three-to-eleven shift at the Exchange, so she was never home on those evenings. She wasn't home on the other evenings, either, for she was in the habit of going out
every
weekend night—to the movies, to the new
roller skating rink, to the CCC camp for a dance—and staying out until all hours.

And not with the same guy, either. In fact, Bettina had the idea that Rona Jean never went out with the same young man more than twice or three times. Then there were the occasions when Rona Jean had asked Bettina if she would mind going out to a movie so she could entertain a friend—like the night she'd had the sheriff over for supper and there had been that trouble.

And meanwhile, Bettina had no dates at all, which wasn't just embarrassing, it was downright disheartening. She had learned quite a number of neat tricks at the Beauty Bower, and she thought she had improved her appearance. She'd also studied up on style, using the fashion magazines that a client occasionally brought to the Bower, and she'd bought a sewing machine and taught herself to use it. So her clothes were as good as the next girl's—here in Darling, anyway, where everybody was making do and getting along on not very much.

But she never met a man at work (they got their hair cut at Bert's Barbershop, on the square), and the men at the Baptist church, where she went, were already married or engaged or so old they didn't have any spark left in them. There were quite a few CCC boys in town these days, and Rona Jean obviously had no problem making friends with them. But Bettina felt shy and awkward around people she didn't know, and she couldn't for the world imagine herself going up to a man she had never laid eyes on and starting a conversation right out of the blue. Which made her resent Rona Jean's casual way of connecting with men.

And now, Rona Jean was dead. When Myra May had phoned to tell her, she was stunned. She simply couldn't believe what she was hearing. When she put the phone down, she thought she should cry (after all, she and Rona Jean had
been
living together
for more than six months), but she couldn't. Whether it was because of the shock or something else, she didn't know. And then she'd gone to stand in the doorway of Rona Jean's small room, which was just as messy as it always was, with her filmy underwear strewn everywhere, and her makeup and face creams and hair curlers piled on the vanity, and her collection of stuffed bears—which she said boys had won for her at fairs and carnivals—waiting for their mistress on the windowsill.

Bettina did cry, then, for the thought of those forlorn pink and orange and purple plush bears forever waiting for someone to come back and hug them and love them—someone who would never come back, someone who was
dead—
was just too overwhelming. She sank down on the unmade bed, buried her face in a pillow scented with Rona Jean's flowery perfume, and burst into tears. She was still crying when the sheriff phoned to say he would be coming over and would she please stay home from work until he'd had a chance to interview her.

Which gave Bettina something else to think about, because of what Rona Jean had told her about him, about the terrible way he had behaved the night he had come over for supper.

And that was what Bettina was remembering when she heard the knock on the door and opened it and came face to face with the sheriff himself, dressed in a khaki shirt and pants, with his star pinned to his shirt and holding his brown fedora in both hands. She was remembering what Rona Jean had told her about him and thinking that it wasn't right that
he
should be investigating her murder.

*   *   *

Buddy sat down on the chair that Bettina Higgens pointed out, and put his hat on the floor beside him. She sat on the edge of the sofa, hands clasped nervously.

“Sorry to have to barge in on you, Miss Higgens,” he said. “I'm sure this has got to be really tough for you, so I'll make it as quick as I can.” Taking out his notebook, he glanced around. The little parlor was neat but sparsely furnished, and with a few feminine touches here and there—the embroidered pillow on the sofa, the anemic plant on the windowsill, a frilly doily under the lamp.

The young woman on the sofa was tall and thin, with a wide forehead, gray eyes, and high cheekbones. She didn't think she was attractive, Buddy guessed from the way she held her shoulders. She had dressed quickly or carelessly, misbuttoning her red dress, and her shoulder-length brown hair looked as if she hadn't taken the time to comb it since she got out of bed. She clasped and unclasped her hands and then hunched over, wrapping her arms around herself.

“I don't know what I can tell you.” Her voice was hesitant, doubtful. “Rona Jean worked three to eleven at the Telephone Exchange five days a week, and I work eight to five at the Beauty Bower every day but Sunday. We weren't what you'd call bosom buddies, I guess. We didn't go places together. To tell the truth, we weren't even home together all that often.” She cleared her throat. “To tell the truth, about the only time we talked was when she wanted to borrow money.”

Buddy glanced down at his notebook, where he had written
thick as theives.
But she was making it sound as if they were no more than a pair of strangers sharing the same house. Which was right?

“Borrow money?” he asked, remembering that Rona Jean's pocketbook, which he had found on the floor of Myra May's car, had contained one two-dollar bill in a billfold and forty-seven cents in a coin purse, along with the usual comb and makeup items.

Bettina nodded reluctantly. “She was always broke and, most months, behind on the rent.”

Always broke
, Buddy wrote. “Had you been living together long?”

“Four or five months.” Bettina frowned. “No, six. We rented this place in January. It was either move in here with Rona Jean or get a room at Mrs. Brewster's.” She told the rest of the story simply, as Buddy took notes. When she stopped talking, he jotted down
just roommates.
At least, that's how she'd put it.

He cleared his throat. “What about Miss Hancock's friends?”

Bettina lifted her eyes. “You mean, friends like . . .
you
?” Her expression was unreadable, but there was an unmistakable challenge in her voice. “I bet you didn't call her ‘Miss Hancock' the night she had you over here for supper.”

Buddy met her eyes without flinching. He wanted to answer her challenge, but now wasn't the time. “Yes, ma'am, friends. Men, women, anybody she spent time with.”

Bettina looked away. “Well, in addition to spending time with
you
,” she said pointedly, “she also went out with Lamar Lassen—he works over at the sawmill. And Beau Pyle.”

Buddy didn't know Lassen, but he'd already had a run-in with young Beau, Bodeen Pyle's brother. The boy—he wasn't any more than eighteen—had a reputation around town as a kid with a bad temper. He got in a fight at Pete's Pool Parlor, and Pete (who wouldn't stand for roughhousing in his joint) told him to leave. More fists flew, a knife was pulled, and Buddy was summoned to settle some hash. It had been his first major test in keeping the peace, and he thought he'd won the respect of Pete's customers. He hadn't made a friend of the Pyles, though. Beau had spent his night in jail getting even by shredding the straw tick mattress and wrecking the
wall-hung bunk in his cell, which had earned him an extra two days' incarceration, sleeping on the floor, and a $12.50 fine. His brother Bodeen, with a surly grunt of protest, had paid the fine. In Buddy's opinion, Rona Jean would've done better if she had stayed away from Beau. He was bad news, and in any case, four or five years younger than she was.

“Lassen and Pyle.” He wrote their names. “Anybody else?”

Bettina paused. “Well, she was seeing a guy out at the CCC camp. Lately, I mean. In the last few weeks.”

Buddy was momentarily distracted by the curve of her pale cheek, half hidden by a lock of brown hair. Her skin was pale and lightly freckled. She was pretty, in a kind of natural, unself-conscious way—which struck Buddy as odd, since she worked at the Beauty Bower, where women went to get themselves prettied up. “Who?” he asked. “Who was she seeing out there?”

“Ray somebody. I don't know his last name, but he's some kind of something out at the camp. Works in an office, I mean.”

“How often did she see him?”

“No idea.” Bettina lifted her shoulders and let them fall. “Maybe she put it into her diary.”

Diary
, Buddy wrote, and drew a box around the word. “What about girlfriends? I probably need to talk to them.” Especially, he thought, since I'm not getting much out of you.

“Girlfriends?” Bettina's mouth quirked. “Rona Jean didn't have a lot of time for girls. There are the ones she worked with at the Exchange—Lenore Looper and Henrietta Conrad—but she didn't see them after hours. She didn't get along with Myra May just real well, but she sometimes went to the movies with Violet. When she wasn't going out with some guy. She liked Violet a lot.”

“What was her trouble with Myra May?”

Bettina paused, considering, then said, “I guess mostly it
was because she was friends with Violet. There was some kind of trouble on the switchboard, too. Every now and then, Rona Jean would say that Myra May had warned her that she was going to get fired.”

“Why?”

“For listening in on people's conversations. The operators aren't supposed to do that.”

“But Rona Jean did?”

Bettina nodded. “Last week, she told me that Myra May got really mad at her about it and threatened to fire her, but Violet wouldn't let Myra May do it.” She pulled her eyebrows together, puzzled. “At the time, I thought it was odd. She even said, ‘Myra May wouldn't
dare
fire me.' She laughed when she said it. She seemed to think it was funny.”

Buddy wrote
listening in
and
MM wouldn't dare
and added two emphatic question marks. He scratched his nose with his pencil.

“So what about last night? Was Rona Jean planning to see anybody after she got off work?” Eleven o'clock was late by Darling standards, but apparently that didn't matter to Rona Jean.