To Live and Die In Dixie (3 page)

“Get Neva Jean downstairs,” I ordered. “Give her a drink and call Swannelle. Tell the others to stay put. Don't let the florists leave. And call nine one one.”

E
DNA SPRAYED A HEAVY MIST of window cleaner on the stainless-steel sink for the third time in five minutes. In the thirty minutes since we'd discovered the body of a young girl on the third floor and herded everyone into the kitchen to wait for the cops, she'd managed to sweep and mop the floor, decrud the countertops and cabinet fronts, and clean the oven.

“Would you stop,” I said sharply. “You're making us all nervous.” In answer, she stepped toward the refrigerator door and attacked the door with a soapy sponge. “If we keep busy, we can still finish up and get paid,” she said. “This is too big a job to lose, Jules.”

I moved quickly across the floor, took the sponge out of her hands and flipped it into the sink. Then I steered her toward the long marble-topped table where the others were gathered. “Sit,” I directed. “The cops aren't going to let us do any more cleaning tonight. It'd be destroying evidence. No telling what we'd already done before we found that girl.”

“Oh,” she said meekly. “I didn't think about that. Anybody got a deck of cards?” The other girls shook
their heads mutely. Neva Jean worried at a microscopic nail polish chip on her left hand.

The doorbell rang then. The girls, the florist, and her helper looked at me expectantly.

“That'll be the cops,” I said. “Guess I'll get it.”

Through the leaded-glass fanlights on either side of the front door I could see the swirling blue lights that told me Atlanta's finest had arrived on the scene. At least three patrol cars were pulled up to the curb, and a crowd of blue uniforms stood on the other side of the door.

I straightened my smudged smock and pulled the door open. “Upstairs, third floor, first door at the top of the hallway,” I said. Four young uniformed officers shouldered past me and raced for the stairs.

They left behind two plainclothes detectives. One of the detectives was a familiar face. C. W. Hunsecker's grizzled close-cropped hair had gone grayer since I'd last seen him at a retirement dinner for my former commander in the Atlanta P.D.'s burglary unit two years previously. And he'd shaved his legendary mustache. But the blue-green eyes, so memorable in a black man with such a dark complexion, crinkled in a warm grin. There'd been a Hunsecker on the Atlanta Police Force ever since a “Negro Force” had been authorized to patrol the city's black neighborhoods in 1948. That first force hadn't been allowed to carry guns or arrest white citizens, but the Hunseckers, starting with C. W.'s grandfather and continuing with his father, and various brothers, cousins and uncles, had all served in the force in varying capacities ever since. All the Hunseckers, C. W. included, were tall, at least six foot three, and almost all of them had those odd blue-green eyes.

Before I could say a word, C. W. folded me into a suffocating bear hug. “Callahan Garrity,” he drawled, hitting heavily on the last syllable of both names. “I
might have known when they said a cleaning lady discovered the body it'd be you. Girl, you got to stop making work for us.”

“I know, C. W., I know,” I said, wriggling out of his iron grasp. “Actually, it wasn't me who discovered the body. It was one of my employees, Neva Jean McComb. She's in the kitchen with the rest of my girls, plus the florist and her helper. They were here when we got here.”

“Ya'll didn't touch anything, did you?” he asked sternly.

I shot him a look that told him he should have known better. “I went in quickly, felt for a pulse to make sure the girl was dead, then I shut the door and came downstairs and called you,” I said. “Nobody's been upstairs since.”

“What else?” he said.

“The room was a mess,” I told him. “Papers and books and junk thrown everywhere. It's a guess, but maybe she surprised a burglar. I'm no homicide expert, C. W., but it looked to me like she'd been hit on the left side of the head with something heavy. Blood spatters on the wall. Oh yeah.” I swallowed hard. The memory of the gruesome murder scene was one I wouldn't easily lose. “I think she'd been stabbed. There's blood all over the bed, and what looks like a puncture wound in her chest.”

He sighed loudly. “Let me get up there and take a look,” Hunsecker said to himself. He gestured to the younger woman who'd been standing silently at his side during our impromptu reunion. “Callahan, meet Detective Linda Nickells. Linda, this here is an old girlfriend, Callahan Garrity. She's been chasing my butt since I taught her criminal investigation back at the academy. Left the department a couple years ago, now she can't decide whether she wants to be a cleaning lady or a private detective.”

“Detective Nickells will take your statement, Callahan. I'll be back down in a minute, but I want to get a look at that body.”

Linda Nickells was dwarfed by C. W.'s bulk. She was maybe five foot three, with tan skin several shades lighter than C. W.'s. She had large dark eyes framed with the longest lashes I'd ever seen, and her hair had been pulled back into a sleek knot at the nape of her neck. Silvery hoop earrings dangled from her earlobes and brushed her shoulder tops. She was dressed in a pair of size nothing knife-creased stone-washed blue jeans and wore a crisp white oversize man's dress shirt and a pair of high-heeled lizard-skin cowboy boots. She looked like something off a
Vogue
magazine cover.

She grabbed my hand and pumped it. “Nice to meet you,” she said, betraying what sounded like a Chicago accent. “Sorry about the sloppy attire. C. W. and I were going over some old case files over Chinese takeout when the call came in.”

“I'll excuse you if you'll excuse me,” I said, gesturing toward my own spattered ensemble. “Where do you want me?”

She turned and her gaze lighted on the living room, a corner of which Baby and Sister had managed to halfway clean before the shit had hit the fan. “Let's sit in there,” she said, gesturing through the arched doorway. “When you and I are done you can take me to the kitchen and we'll get started on the others' statements.”

We sat in a pair of matching carved armchairs near the fireplace and Linda dug into the waistband of her jeans, pulling out a tiny mini-cassette tape recorder. She pushed the button and I started to recount the evening's events. We hadn't gotten far before C. W. came lumbering back down the stairs. He pulled up a nearby ottoman and sat down heavily, listening without saying much.

“It's possible my girls and I might have destroyed some evidence,” I admitted, “but if we did, it was purely unintentional. See, Mr. Littlefield told me on the phone that the place was a mess. So we just figured the guy was a slob. It never occurred to us that the house had been ransacked until after Neva Jean found the girl on the third floor.”

“Littlefield,” Hunsecker said, looking around the hallway with newfound interest. “Not Elliot Littlefield?”

I nodded. “Same one. I thought you knew that.”

“Shit,” Hunsecker said. “Goddamn. I thought there was something familiar about this place.”

“You worked the Sunny Girl murder?” I asked.

“Surprised you remember it,” Hunsecker said.

“I was a kid, but even then I was fascinated with murder. I used to sneak downstairs to listen to the eleven o'clock news every night to hear the latest development in the case,” I said.

Hunsecker turned to Linda Nickells. “You wouldn't have heard about it up north, I don't guess. But the Sunny Girl murder case was a big one. I was just a young twerp with big ideas back then. First black detective in homicide,” he said, with a touch of pride. “'Course, I didn't do all that much. Took statements, interviewed some hippie chicks down on the Strip, that kind of thing.”

Linda shook her head to signal her ignorance. “Sunny Girl? What kind of name was that? Who was she? What's she got to do with this homicide?”

“Sunny Girl was the only name anybody in Atlanta ever knew her by,” I explained. “She was what, about seventeen?” I asked, looking to Hunsecker for confirmation. He nodded.

“It was the same summer as Woodstock, so it must have been 1969,” I said. “Anyway, this girl who called herself Sunny had run away from home. All she ever
told people was that her name was Sunny and she was from nowheresville. She'd been living with a bunch of bikers in an apartment above a poster shop at Tenth and Peachtree.”

Nickells looked blank.

“The Strip, everybody called it,” I said. “It was a magnet for kids from all over the South. Atlanta and the Strip, which was Peachtree and Tenth Street, was it. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Cheap rent, cheap dope, good tunes. Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Janis Joplin. Sunny met a guy when he came into the poster shop. She went to live with him, in his mansion.”

“This mansion,” Linda said. She was starting to catch on.

Hunsecker picked up the story where I'd left off. “Elliot Longstreet Littlefield came to Atlanta to work as a hairdresser. The only place he could afford to live was Inman Park. It was a slum in those days, not ritzy like it is now. He saved his money, bought a little shotgun house on Edgewood. Sold it, bought a couple more. Sometimes he bought houses from old ladies with the furniture still in it. That's how he got into the antiques business.”

“And one day he met Sunny, brought her here and killed her,” Linda prompted. The young have such short attention spans these days.

“Littlefield had a reputation for having the best reefer in town. Lots of young ladies were in and out of his house. Including Sunny. After a dope party one night, a guest who was too stoned to leave stumbled into the master bedroom to sleep it off. He found Sunny, nude, in the master bedroom. She was in Littlefield's bed. Been strangled to death. Never forget that bed,” he said, his usually cheerful face clouding over. “‘The pickaninny bed,' my sergeant called it. Had these carved slave figures holding up palm fronds that made up the top part of the bed.”

“He's still got the bed,” I prompted. “Still sleeping in it too, from what I could see.”

“Yuck,” Linda said. “Did they arrest Littlefield?”

“He was arrested, tried, and convicted,” Hunsecker said.

“And?” Linda insisted.

“And he hadn't even gotten down to Reidsville, that's where they had Death Row back then, hadn't even been transferred out of the Fulton County Jail before the verdict was reversed on appeal.”

“On what grounds?” she wanted to know.

“The usual, a technicality,” Hunsecker said, shrugging. “A rookie detective fucked up the chain of evidence. Untied the stocking from the girl's body, instead of cutting it off. Then somehow, the stocking got cut later. I forget all the ins and outs of it. Right after he was convicted, Littlefield appealed it, and some judge decided the evidence had been tampered with.”

“And Littlefield got off?” Nickells asked. “He went scot-free?”

“Not quite,” said a deep voice behind us. “The courts set me loose from prison, but I've never really been free of that murder charge. Not really.”

Beside me, I heard Hunsecker suck in his breath quickly. A tall balding man in his late forties stood with his back to the front door. He'd let himself in so quietly we hadn't heard a thing. He was dressed in a pair of tight black designer jeans and a black polo shirt.

“Elliot Littlefield,” the man said, nodding politely. “Would someone please tell me what's going on here? Why are all these police here? Not another burglary, I hope.”

Hunsecker stood up, walked into the entry hall, pulled a small leather folder from the breast pocket of his blue denim work shirt and flipped it open to display
a gold shield. “Captain C. W. Hunsecker, Atlanta Homicide,” he said coolly. “There's been a murder here, Mr. Littlefield.”

“My God,” Littlefield said, paling. “Who?”

“That's what we'd like you to tell us,” Hunsecker said. “The body of a young woman was found by a member of the cleaning crew you hired. She's in a bedroom on the third floor. Let's go upstairs and take a look, all right?”

Littlefield headed for the stairs, then glanced back at me. “Are you with the cleaning service?”

“Callahan Garrity,” I said, not bothering to extend my hand for a proper how-do. “I own the House Mouse. Neva Jean McComb, who I believe you know, she was the one who found the body.”

“Oh dear,” he said, clinging to the stair rail. “Please don't let it be Bridget. Not Bridget.”

“Bridget?” Hunsecker said sharply.

“Bridget Dougherty, my shop assistant,” Littlefield said. “I couldn't bear it if it's my little Bridget.”

He glanced at me again. “Jesus. I'm sorry about Neva Jean finding the body. I hope she wasn't too upset.”

“She'll live,” I said dryly.

“Let's go,” Hunsecker said, stepping back to allow Littlefield to precede him up the stairs. “Top floor.” Hunsecker caught my eye and held it. “Detective Nickells will want to take the statements from the rest of your people now, Callahan.”

I nodded agreement.

“And Callahan?”

“What?”

“Don't even think about it.”

T
HE DOORBELL RANG AGAIN. I looked around for someone to get it. Linda Nickells was still in the kitchen, questioning the girls, and Hunsecker and the other cops were still upstairs, as was the lord of the manor, Littlefield.

That left me. As I approached the door I could see the wavy image of a group of people huddled together, close, but not touching.

I opened the door. A man, a woman, and a teenage girl stood quietly, their faces set in a frozen grimace. They stared at me for a moment. “Are you with the police?” the man finally asked. “I'm Lyle Dougherty, this is my wife Emily and our daughter Jocelyn. Someone called…our daughter, Bridget.”

The woman gripped her husband's arm tightly with both hands. A large diamond solitaire winked from a simple gold band on her ring finger. She was what dress-shop clerks call petite, maybe five foot two, and pretty; early forties, with dark brown hair cut in a shining page boy. The silver strands that ran through the hair looked like they'd been placed there for contrast, unlike the unruly gray wires that stuck out from my
own short mop. She wore an elegant beige linen pantsuit, and those little flats with the linen bow and the gold buckle, Ferragamo, I think they are, the ones that cost more than the monthly house payment on my bungalow. Lyle Dougherty was taller than his wife by nearly a foot, with dark hair, wavy and gone gray around the temple in an attractive kind of way. His eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses were red rimmed. He wore a camel-colored V-necked cashmere sweater and cream-colored pleated slacks, and his sockless feet were tucked into soft buckskin loafers. The Doughertys were a regular riot of neutrals. The daughter towered over her mother by a good five inches. She was painfully thin, with frizzy brown shoulder-length hair pushed off her face with an African-looking beaded headband. Jocelyn's eyes were her mother's—big and brown and sorrowful—and her lips were the kind all the young actresses wanted, with that swollen bee-stung look. She wore a shapeless gray T-shirt and baggy, faded black shorts that hung low on her bony hips. Her feet were shoved into scuffed leather sandals. She gazed at me steadily, saying nothing.

“Come in,” I said, gesturing toward the hallway and ignoring their question about whether I was with the police. I guided them toward the armchairs where Linda Nickells and I had sat earlier.

Lyle Dougherty sank gratefully into the chair, and his daughter perched on the edge of the facing chair, but Emily stood behind Lyle, her hands placed precisely on the chair back, her fingers pinching at the soft brocade upholstery. “Is she really dead?” she asked quietly, her eyes unblinking. “Are they sure it's Bridget? Couldn't it be some other girl?”

“I'm sorry,” I said, helplessly. “I'll get Captain Hunsecker. He's the one you need to talk to.”

I fled up the stairs, away from the Doughertys, but I felt their anxious eyes following my ascent. This was
one aspect of police work that made me glad I'd gotten out and started a cleaning business. I'd never gotten used to notifying next of kin that a loved one was no more. Not many cops do, I don't guess.

On the second-floor landing I paused, listening for voices. At the end of the hallway, I heard voices coming from an open doorway.

“Captain Hunsecker?” I said, speaking up to let him know I was approaching. I poked my head around the door. Hunsecker was seated on a small navy blue suede love seat in what looked like a seldom-used sitting room. Littlefield sat across from him on a matching sofa, hunched over, his head in his hands.

Hunsecker looked annoyed at the interruption. “What?” he snapped. “Callahan, I thought I asked you to stay downstairs.”

“I know, Captain,” I said. “But there's a Mr. and Mrs. Dougherty and their daughter downstairs. They're asking questions about Bridget. And Detective Nickells is still interviewing my girls. I thought you might want to talk to them.”

Littlefield raised his head from his hands. “God. The Doughertys. Bridget's loving parents. Who the hell called them?”

“I asked one of the uniformed officers to give them a call,” Hunsecker said evenly. “They're the girl's parents. Got a problem with that?”

Littlefield shook his head, but he sat up straight. “Just keep them away from me,” he ordered.

Hunsecker's face stiffened, but he followed me out of the room without saying anything. At the head of the stairs, he pulled my arm to stop me from going down. “You tell the parents anything?” he said in a low voice.

“I'm the cleaning lady—remember?”

He offered me an apologetic smile. “Sorry. That guy
in there”—he jerked his head toward the room where Littlefield was still seated—“he gets to me, you know? Him and his pickaninny bed.”

“He got an alibi?” I said, trying to sound casual.

“He's got one,” Hunsecker said grimly. “All God's children got an alibi.”

Hunsecker headed down the stairs, treading with surprising lightness for a man of his bulk. He glanced back at me. “Where you think you going, Garrity?”

“Downstairs,” I said. “You got the crime scene guys on the top floor. Littlefield's on the second. The parents and the girls are on the first floor. I'm running out of places to park myself, unless you want me to go down in the cellar with the spiders and snakes.”

“Go home,” he said, not unkindly.

“Love to,” I told him. “But the girls all came in the van with me. And Nickells apparently isn't done with them yet.”

“All right,” he sighed. “You can stay. Sit in the dining room until Nickells is finished. Keep your mouth shut, though. Anything you accidentally overhear, you don't hear at all. Understood?”

“Understood,” I said meekly.

The Doughertys looked like a couple of stone statues. They'd changed places though. Now Emily Dougherty sat in the chair and Lyle stood behind her, kneading her shoulders with his hands. Mrs. Dougherty sat, twisting the large diamond ring around and around on her finger. At least they weren't hysterical. The daughter sat back in the chair, her eyes closed. I couldn't tell if she was napping or meditating.

I could see the unfolding tableau from my seat in the dining room, but the high ceilings and the densely carpeted floors seemed to swallow the polite conversation going on in the parlor across the hall.

Hunsecker offered his hand to Mr. Dougherty and to his wife. They shook gravely, offering polite but weak smiles. I could tell he was breaking the news of their daughter's death. Hunsecker's gleaming mahogany face was etched with sadness, his jowls seemed to deepen before my eyes. But the Doughertys seemed to take the news tolerably well. Lyle knelt beside the chair and hugged Emily. They clung to each other momentarily, then parted, each wiping away tears. Then both enveloped the other daughter in a hug.

The interview went on for ten minutes or so, with Dougherty answering most of Hunsecker's questions and his wife occasionally glancing about the room, as if to search for some glimpse of her dead daughter's presence.

Since I couldn't hear anything, I'd started my own visual inventory of the dining room, out of boredom mostly.

I'm an antiques buff myself, but not a collector of the caliber of stuff Littlefield deals in. From the decor of the house, it appeared he was heavily into Victoriana, with some meanderings into Biedermeier, Empire, and even a vaguely Gothic piece or two.

I was minding my own business, for once, staring at the wall-to-ceiling walnut china cabinet, trying to count the number of different china patterns on display, when something soft swatted at my ankle.

“Christ,” I shrieked, leaping from the chair. The Siamese cat streaked out from under the table and disappeared up the stairs. On the Oriental rug, which I'd already judged to be an Aubusson, lay a bloody half-chewed mouse. A gift, from kitty to Callahan.

In the parlor, the Doughertys and Hunsecker joined in a disapproving stare. “Sorry,” I said. “I fuckin' hate cats,” I muttered, between gritted teeth, moving around the table to avoid the mouse corpse.

Hunsecker brought out a business card, offered it to
Lyle Dougherty, then slowly steered the family toward the front door. “I'll be in touch,” I heard him say.

“I'll be in touch,” Linda Nickells was telling Neva Jean as she shepherded the girls through the swinging door of the kitchen.

Neva Jean tried on a lopsided smile, but it didn't take. Pink sponge rollers dangled from various lank locks of her blond hair, and the dry cleaner's bag she clutched to her bosom showed the green satin ball gown had been badly crushed.

Edna held onto Neva Jean's arm, aiming for the front door. “Let's go home, Jules,” she said tiredly. “The girls and I are beat.”

“Let me get the cleaning cart,” I said, “and I need to speak to Mr. Littlefield about whether he wants us to finish cleaning.”

But Edna gave me the look. “Home. We're finished all right. You can come back tomorrow for the cart and to talk to Littlefield.”

Hunsecker stepped up, took Neva Jean's other arm and guided the group out the door. He touched me on the arm and nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“Ya'll go on and get in the van,” I told Edna, handing her the car keys. “I'll be out in a minute.”

“One minute,” Edna warned. “Then we leave without you.”

The door swung shut behind them. I folded my arms across my chest, waiting for the inevitable lecture about keeping my nose out of police business.

Hunsecker sighed loudly. “Got no business tellin' you this. But shit, Callahan, you gonna know anyways.

“Girl's name was Bridget Dougherty. Just turned seventeen. Folks live out in Dunwoody. The parents say she dropped out of All Saints, that fancy prep school, ran away from home, ended up here. They knew where she was and
all, but hadn't been talking to her. Littlefield says the girl worked for him and that's it. He says the parents kicked her out when she told them she might be pregnant. He says he don't know who the boyfriend was.”

“Might be?”

“It was a false alarm. But she left home two months ago, stayed around with friends and such. Called the parents a month ago to tell them where she was and that she wasn't pregnant, but wasn't coming back.”

“And Littlefield has an alibi?”

He nodded. “Says he left here at four to go to Morningside to look at some antiques in some old lady's estate. According to him, Bridget was on the phone with somebody when he left. That's the last he saw her. It does look like the place was burglarized, by the way. Littlefield's all worked up about some missing Civil War shit. Says it's priceless. He's making a list of what's missing.”

“And the girl?” I prompted. “How was she killed?”

“About what you thought,” he said. “Beaten on the head with something heavy. We don't know what. Stabbed in the chest. Littlefield says there's an old dagger missing from the library.”

“And you think Littlefield killed her?”

He sighed again, running blunt fingers through the close-cropped hair. “I'm inclined to think it for now. We'll see.”

“If it wasn't Littlefield, how'd the murderer get in?” I asked. “I saw a security system sticker right here on the front door and there are wrought-iron bars on all the ground floor windows. This door doesn't look like it's been messed with.”

Hunsecker turned and traced the security sticker pasted on the inside of the fanlight. “Littlefield says Bridget might have turned the system off herself. The
cat had set it off the night before and armed alert guards showed up, damn near arrested her until she persuaded them she lived here.”

He slapped the sticker with the palm of his hand. “Seventeen. Shit. They're gettin' younger, you know, Garrity? Younger all the time. I got a kid sitting over at the Youth Detention Center now, fourteen, took out his best buddy over a rock of crack. The friend was thirteen.”

I patted Hunsecker on the shoulder, awkwardly. “I know, C. W., I know. Thanks for filling me in, anyhow. Talk to you.”

Edna gunned the Chevy's engine at me as I stepped onto the front steps of Eagle's Keep. The resulting backfire echoed through the quiet Inman Park streets like a gunshot.

I climbed stiffly into the front seat and barely had the door shut before the van lurched away from the curb.

“Keep it up, old woman,” I warned. “This street is crawling with cops. One more traffic ticket and the insurance company won't let you drive so much as a three-wheeler.”

She snorted, but slowed down to forty as we careened down DeKalb Avenue toward the midtown senior citizens' high-rise where the Easterbrooks sisters lived.

When we got home I ran the hottest bath I could stand and soaked until I looked like one of those golden raisins. It took thirty minutes to get the smell of that house out of my nostrils.

I went right to bed but after half an hour of wrestling with sheets, pillows, and blankets, I gave up and padded bare-footed into the darkened den.

Edna sat bolt upright in the big red plaid armchair, staring intently at the Sony twenty-seven-inch color set she'd been given for a birthday present that fall.

“Shh,” she cautioned, turning briefly my way.
“They're talking about our murder. Team coverage. That must mean it's a big story.”

“Team coverage means it's either a slow news night or this rocket scientist here,” I said, gesturing toward the television, “is such a dim bulb that they don't trust him to handle the story by himself.”

She shot me the look then, so I sat down on the sofa and wrapped an afghan around my feet.

On television, Eagle's Keep looked like something out of a Charles Addams cartoon. All the lights glowed an eerie yellow, and the glare of television cameras picked out a set of evil-looking gargoyles on the front porch that I'd overlooked earlier in the day. A series of blue swirls played across the front of the house from the revolving lights of the police cars parked at the curb, and they'd roped off the front of the house with yellow crime-scene tape.