Dixie Diva Blues (9 page)

“Okay,” Gaynelle said when we had lured Bitty from behind the piano and had her stationed behind the door as the killer, “you can be Larry Whittier, Trinket.”

“Lucky me,” I said, but dutifully took a position in the approximate spot where he must have stood. I felt a little queasy knowing that he must have seen it all coming and been powerless to prevent it. Or had he hoped to escape alive?

“Do I look vicious?” asked Bitty from her position behind the door.

She had a stick in one hand and her face scrunched up as far as Botox would allow. It gave her a curious expression, but not what I considered particularly vicious.

“No, you look constipated. Cancel your next Botox appointment. You’ve had more than enough,” I said.

“There can never be too much,” she replied serenely.

“Pay attention now,” Gaynelle said sharply in her best teacher-voice, and we gave her our immediate attention. “Carolann is Rob. When she knocks at the door, Trinket, you as Larry will tell her to go away. I believe that is what the victim said first. Rob, of course, gave him another warning before he entered the shack. That is when you, Bitty, as the killer, will allow Rob to get inside before you strike.”

“Is she going to hit me with that stick?” Carolann inquired somewhat anxiously.

“Of course not. She’s going to pretend to hit you. I want you to pretend not to know there’s anyone behind the door when you come in. Trinket, you as Larry do what he must have done after Rob was hit from behind.”

“I don’t have a gun,” I said.

“Here. Use this.” Gaynelle shoved a banana into my hand, then stepped back to survey the scene. “Hm. Trinket, move back a bit. If Rob actually hit you with a bullet, you should be standing behind the chalk outline.”

When I moved, I came up short against the plaid couch. It hit me right behind the knees, and I had difficulty staying upright.

“This won’t work,” I said. “Maybe the couch was moved over.”

“No room. This has to work. At least, according to Rob’s story. So just stay there and let’s see how this works out.”

Carolann knocked loudly on the door, then demanded in a gruff tone that Larry open it. I, as Larry, refused. “Go away,” I said as commanded by our director.

“She doesn’t sound very mean,” Bitty complained. “Shouldn’t she sound mean?”

I looked at Bitty. “I imagine Larry was terrified if there was a killer with a gun right behind the door. Why would he sound mean?”

“Okay, then sound terrified.”

“Are we on TV? Because unless we are, I don’t think this has to be that accurate.”

Carolann banged on the door again and demanded to be let inside. She sounded very determined.

“Carolann’s playing her part the way she should,” said Bitty. “The least you can do is try, Trinket.”

I rolled my eyes. “Fine. I’ll be terrified.” Using my best Minnie Mouse voice—I’ve always thought she sounds just like a squeaky mouse would sound if it could talk—I said again, “Go away!”

The door knob rattled. “What? I can’t hear through this door. Did someone tell me to go away?”

This time Gaynelle took charge and said loudly, “Go away!”

Carolann obliged by grasping the door knob and shoving open the door. She did so quite vigorously, and Bitty shrieked.

“My toes! You’ve scraped my toes with that door—and look! My pedicure is all ruined. Darn it, Carolann.”

“Stay in character, Bitty,” I said from my position by the couch, and she glared at me as she held on to her right foot and hopped in place.

Gaynelle sighed. “Bitty, why don’t you put on some shoes, and we’ll try this again.”

It was obvious to me that our re-creation of the moment right before Larry’s death was doing little more than providing us with an excellent idea of how it could
not
have happened. As I stood there waiting for Bitty to put on shoes and Carolann to go back out onto the porch with her gun—actually a cell phone—it occurred to me that something in all of this was really wrong. It couldn’t have happened like Rob said. Could it? I puzzled over that for several minutes while Bitty went through the shoes she’d brought with her to find a pair suitable for a killer. She chose a pair of pink Nikes. Go figure.

Once more we went through our little play. I hovered by the plaid couch, Bitty hid behind the door, and Carolann demanded entry. This time, when Carolann burst into the room as Rob, Bitty hit her over the head with the stick, and I automatically lifted my hand and fired my banana.

That was it. That’s what was off about the whole thing. Why would Larry not have fired at the killer if it all happened like Rob said? Anyone would have done so if faced with the prospect of being killed, I was pretty sure. But no bullets had been fired at either Rob or the killer, apparently, since the police had found evidence of only one shot being fired. Had Larry fired and missed, there should be a bullet hole somewhere.

Intrigued by my discovery, I moved toward the door. Carolann sat on the floor in front of it, and Bitty hovered over her apologizing for having actually struck her with the stick. The weapon was a wooden spoon big enough to stir a number eight washtub.

“You were supposed to pretend, Bitty,” Gaynelle said with a shake of her head, and Bitty nodded contritely.

“I know. I got carried away. I’m so sorry, Carolann. Does it hurt very badly?”

“Well, it doesn’t feel good,” Carolann said as she sat up. “I dropped my cell phone-gun. Do you see it somewhere?”

While they searched for the pretend murder weapon, I inspected the door, the wall behind the door, the frame, even the window frame. Nothing. No sign of a bullet hole. I felt sure that if there had been one, the Clarksdale police would have already found it anyway. I mulled all this over while Carolann tried to reassemble her cell phone. It had exploded into several pieces when she dropped it, battery going one way, SIM card going another, and the plastic back skidding up under the couch where I had just been standing a few moments before.

It occurred to me as I stood in the same place Rob’s assailant had stood, that Larry Whittier must have had a clear shot at his killer. Why hadn’t he taken it? Rob had said he had a gun. Did he even try to use it? If he had, he could hardly have missed at this close range. The faint chalk outline of his body was barely six feet away.

Several possibilities came to mind. One, that Larry Whittier was a really bad shot or extremely unlucky guy. Two, his gun hadn’t been loaded. Three, Rob had been wrong about him holding a gun. Four—and not at all likely—Rob had lied for some reason.

I didn’t really think he’d do that. He’d always seemed a pretty honest guy, and I felt sure Rayna wouldn’t be with him if he were not.

But the facts were that Rob’s pistol had been used, and one of the bullets ended up in Larry Whittier. So if Rob had been struck from behind, who had been holding the gun when it murdered Larry? The most likely answer was the unknown assailant behind the door. All we had to do was find him.

“You know,” said Gaynelle thoughtfully, “it seems to me that Whittier was either part of a conspiracy and was double-crossed, or that he was forced to play along with the person who killed him.”

I looked at her and nodded. “I’ve been thinking along those lines as well. Maybe he was the bait to get Rob in the door. But if so, why? Is there a reason Rob has been setup, or did he just stumble into a situation?”

Gaynelle nodded slowly. “Rob never heard anyone else, but someone was hiding behind that door and hit him, so it may well be that he was lured here for some reason. Or that when he tracked down Larry Whittier, he found him at a most opportune time for the killer.”

“What a nightmare, and all because Rob showed up at just the wrong time.”

We looked at each other. I’m sure our minds were traveling in the same general direction, that Rob was charged with a murder he hadn’t committed because he’d tracked down a guy for a misdemeanor crime. There had to be a lot more involved than just the charge of vandalism. Why would Larry be so afraid otherwise?

“No one really gets murdered over a vandalism charge, do they?” I asked no one in particular, and Bitty turned around to join our conversation.

“Oh, Lila Tompkins’s middle boy—I think he was the middle. Maybe the third. Or fourth. Anyway, Lila’s son got run over by a garbage truck just because he hollered at the driver that he’d left trash all over the street. And then there was Riley Gunner, who got in an argument with a friend over ten dollars he owed him. Riley ended up dead, and the friend is doing life down in Parchman.”

When Gaynelle and I just stared at her, Bitty shrugged. “So, you know, people get murdered over silly things all the time.”

“True,” I said after a moment. “Although I can’t really think of any reason good enough to murder someone.”

“Well, you know how people are, Trinket. They make up all these things to justify what they’ve done. Or plan to do. Now, do you think this cut on Carolann’s head needs stitches?”

CHAPTER 5

We executed the next stage of our plan quite efficiently, I thought, even though the results were less than any of us could wish for. Bitty and Gaynelle interviewed guests in the shacks close by. Guests on the left side of the Robert Clay shack had been there when the murder occurred, but had seen or heard nothing. They’d been listening to blues music inside their shack for a while.

“No car racing away, no furtive figures, not even a strange shadow,” Gaynelle reported as we all ate dinner in our sharecropper shack. “They said they went over to the Cotton Gin a little before ten to hear the music, and saw nothing out of place. There were a few cars in the lot, but there always is, so they wouldn’t have thought anything of a strange vehicle. And the music was loud enough that they never even heard the gunshot.”

“Did they know who called the police?” I asked Gaynelle, and she shook her head as she added ketchup to her plate for a stack of fries.

“No idea. They didn’t even know anything had happened until they left the bar after midnight and saw all the police cars. What did you and Carolann find out?”

“Not much more than you. None of the employees working that night heard or saw anything unusual. There’s a bar-back I didn’t get to talk to who is off tonight but will be here during the day tomorrow. He was here the night of the murder. Maybe he can tell us something. Other than that . . . we struck out, too.”

“No doubt the police have already talked to everyone anyway,” said Bitty, “but it still would be nice if we could find out something they don’t already know. Just to get Rob out of trouble, of course.”

“And to prove we aren’t over the hill?” I asked around a generous forkful of my salad.

Bitty smiled. “You know me so well.”

“That terrifies me.”

We finished the rest of our homemade meals, and cleaned up the small front room. Music came from the direction of the Cotton Gin.

“Anyone feel like going dancing in town?” Bitty asked. She lolled back in one of the cane chairs, looking like a well-fed sloth.

“Are you thinking about it?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Not very hard.”

I laughed. “Yeah, I’m exhausted. Who knew asking a lot of questions could be so tiring?”

“Oh, I always knew that, Trinket. Don’t you remember when I used to work on the school paper and I had to go around and interview everybody about whether or not we wanted to vote for Homecoming Queen and King again?”

“Yes,” I said as quickly as I could. “I remember that very well. How could I forget? You haven’t stopped talking about it in thirty-odd years.”

Bitty looked at me with slightly narrowed eyes “That’s not true. I haven’t mentioned it in a coon’s age, and you know it. You don’t have to listen if you don’t want to, then. Gaynelle, have I ever—”

“Several times,” Gaynelle said as she wadded up a paper towel and stuffed it into the trash can disguised as a potato bin. “A fascinating tale, however.”

Bitty smiled. “Carolann, I know
you
haven’t heard this. Well, it was in my sixth grade class, and I was the star reporter on our school paper. All that Civil Rights stuff was going on, and there was a big hoorah about whether or not we should elect a Homecoming King and Queen since we had just been recently integrated. Now, I always thought it shouldn’t matter worth a hill of beans about color, that whoever got the most votes should get to ride in the convertible and wave at everybody, and since I’d already served as Queen two years in a row, I certainly didn’t have a dog in
that
fight. Well, anyway, it ended up that I had to interview
every single student
in our school, just so we could get a percentage of how many Yeas and how many Nays—”

“I’m going to step outside for a breath of fresh air,” I interrupted Bitty’s tale, “so whoever wants first in the bathroom go now or forever hold your peace.”

Bitty jumped up. “Oooh, me! I call it first!” She scrambled toward the bedroom for her overnight bag.

Carolann gave me a grateful smile and I nodded. It had been an act of mercy on my part.

With four women and one bathroom,
I learned the true meaning of
crowded
. Bitty took so long that Gaynelle finally threatened to take a buzz saw to the oak door if she didn’t get out and let someone else have a turn.