Authors: Duffy Brown
“
I
GOT
Elsie and AnnieFritz to handle the Fox for me,” I said to KiKi as I climbed into the Batmobile for another day of killer on the loose. “They promised to walk BW and not feed him any more biscuits. Seems I have a dog with fiber issues.”
“How do you plan on getting the Gucci purse away from Dinah? Maybe she threw it away already.”
“Would you throw away a Gucci purse? And this one has special significance for Dinah; it’s her trophy.”
“Like she won, and Cupcake lost,” KiKi added as we did the stop-and–go traffic shuffle all the way up Abercorn.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said to KiKi. “What if you take Dinah to breakfast, and I’ll get into her hotel room?”
“Don’t you think it’ll look a little suspicious if I just ring her up out of the blue and say, ‘Hey there, cookie, let’s grab a bite’?”
“Tell her you’ve heard rumors that Raimondo has a new rose coming out this summer and thought she might be interested in it for her TV show in Atlanta. Say it’s to make up for Savannah giving her the cold shoulder when she first got here. Take her to 17Hundred90; they have great Bloody Marys. Tell her about the Anna Powers ghost in room 204, make up stories, juggle, balance a ball on your nose, anything—just keep her entertained.”
“We’re both going to hell for all the stuff we’ve pulled this last week; you know that, don’t you?” KiKi found a spot on the street so we didn’t have to valet the Beemer. I said to KiKi, “I’ll give you a half hour to get Dinah out of Marshall House, then I’m going in. Call me if you have a problem. Just think, if this works, I’ll be living next to you forever.”
“Right now I’m trying to decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
I pocketed my cell phone and some cash from my purse, then stuffed Old Yeller under the front seat in case a passerby had the hots for a yellow-vinyl bag and would be tempted to ravage the Beemer to get it.
KiKi walked off, and I looked up and down Broughton Street, hoping for inspiration. The Gap, J.Crew, and Abercrombie and Fitch were not inspiring. A Dan’s Flora and Fauna van double-parked beside the Beemer. The driver, dressed in a green shirt and yellow ball cap, slid out, snagged a big bouquet, and hoofed it into the Gap store.
In Savannah, delivering flowers got you a free pass anywhere. All I needed was an outfit of some kind, flowers, and a big dose of intestinal fortitude to pull it off. I could do this. I found a tourist trap in City Market and bought a yellow cap with
Savannah
stitched in teal and a matching T–shirt.
I changed in the little dressing room and jammed my hair under the cap. I needed flowers, free flowers. The five bucks I had left would get me one rose, tops. I cut over to Hull Street and stopped in front of Colonial Park Cemetery.
KiKi’s prediction of going to hell was about to take a serious turn in that direction. No one had been buried in this historical cemetery since 1850. That was a long time to be dead, but the soldiers there were not forgotten. The DAR made sure of that every Wednesday, when they had fresh flowers delivered to the center arch in memoriam. The random stuff I knew as a Southern history major was frightening.
I walked to the center, where a wreath of gorgeous daffodils, azaleas, daisies, and tulips stood on a wire stand. A wreath wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it would have to do. “Look,” I said in a low voice to all the dead people around me. “I’m just borrowing this. It’s for a good cause, I swear. I’ll have it back in an hour. What’s an hour when you’ve been here for one hundred and seventy years, right?”
Getting no objections, I lifted the metal stand, then felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. “What’s this all about?” said a voice with a deep drawl. For a second I thought it was God striking me dead for taking the wreath. Everyone knows God lives in Savannah because this is as close to heaven as one got on this-here earth in springtime.
I turned and looked straight into the face of Officer Dumont, so his nametag said. He was tall and thick and formidable, but he was not the Almighty. “I’m with Dan’s Flora and Fauna,” I said, lying to the best of my ability. “We delivered the wrong wreath here. This one goes to the Savannah’s House of Slumber, over on Price. My mistake.”
I held my breath and tried to keep my legs from shaking. Officer Dumont gave me a quick once-over. “Where’s your van?”
Oh, Lordy, the blasted van. “My partner went to get the right wreath. I’m just going to walk this one over to House of Slumber, where it belongs, and make things right.” I lifted the stand and started off. When I got to the corner, I glanced back, and Dumont was walking down Drayton in the other direction. I crossed the street, slung the stand over my shoulder, and ducked down an alley till I wound up in the lane behind Marshall House. Thanks to Baxter Anderson, I knew where the back entrance was, and I took the rear steps to the second floor. “I’m delivering this to Dinah Corwin,” I said to a maid pushing a cart past room 210. “Do you know which room is hers?”
“Good Lord, did she up and die? Who would order such a thing for a living, breathing person? Miss Corwin’s up in 312.” The maid got close and dropped her voice. “She’s a pain, that one is. Wants fresh towels twice a day, and the bed is never made up right to suit her.” The maid glanced at the wreath. “Maybe someone’s trying to send her a message.”
I took the service stairs to the third floor. “I need to put this in room 312,” I said to the maid doing up room 314.
“Sweet Jesus, are we having a funeral?”
“It’s for Dinah Corwin.”
“One can always hope.” The maid gave me a hard look. “Flowers are to be left at the front desk, you know.”
“It’s on a stand. I have orders to put it in her room.”
“Well, I’m not going to touch the thing. Bad karma.” She slipped her handy-dandy universal open-door card into the slot, and turned the handle on 312.
“It’ll just take me a minute to freshen this up,” I said as I dragged the stand into the room.
“Honey, I’m here to tell you that you can freshen up those flowers all day, and they’re still gonna look like they belong on a grave.”
The maid shivered, made the sign of the cross, and left. I waited a minute, yelled thanks and good-bye, and then let the door slam shut, hoping the maid would think I was finished and left. Me and my intestinal fortitude pulled it off!
I searched the closet, then the drawers. The black beaded earring was right in with the pair of earrings I’d sold to Dinah at the Fox. I sat on the bed feeling weak and strong and happy and flabbergasted all at the same time. Dinah was the killer for sure; I had the earring to prove it. The whole ordeal was over, except for Cupcake being dead. Hollis would come home, and how much I owed Boone wouldn’t be that bad, since Hollis didn’t go to trial. Cherry House was mine!
I checked the door peephole. The maid wasn’t in the hall, so I picked up the wreath, opened the door, quietly closed it, and crept down the back steps. I’d found the killer! My plan had worked!
“W
HAT DO YOU MEAN MY PLAN WON’T WORK?”
I said to Boone in his office an hour later. “I saw the earring that matches the one at the crime scene. Go to the police, get a search warrant, find the earring and probably Janelle’s Gucci purse, arrest Dinah—end of story.”
Boone had that patronizing glint in his eyes that made me want to rip all his hair off and throw him out the window.
“There’s a glitch,” he said to me in his know–it–all lawyer
voice. “You broke into Dinah’s room, and from the looks of your outfit, I’m sorry I missed your performance. Anything you find because of the break–in is inadmissible in court.”
“Tell the police you have a hunch the earring in the crime-scene photo is Dinah’s.”
“Oh yeah, the police just love that hunch stuff.”
“Janelle had a restraining order out against Dinah in Atlanta. That has to count for something.”
“So Dinah and Janelle didn’t do lunch. The police can’t ransack her room and her rights because of that. I need something more, something concrete to connect Dinah Corwin to this earring before the police will move on a warrant.”
Boone looked at me, his eyes serious, his brain having a power surge. He tapped the picture from the crime scene of the earring I’d put down on his desk. “What we need is a picture of Dinah wearing this earring.”
He got up from behind his desk, and I followed him into the large closet with the expensive espresso machine. He stooped down by a pile of newspapers. “We’re here to look at your recycling?” I asked, the urge to strangle him stronger than ever.
“This is the week of the Homes and Gardens Tour, and Dinah Corwin has had her face plastered all over the newspapers. Maybe there’s a photo of her with the earring. She dropped it when she murdered Janelle, so we’re looking at papers dated before then.”
I pulled off a handful of newspapers. Boone did the same, both of us checking dates.
“Here,” Boone said holding up a front page of the
Savannah Times
. He pointed to Dinah with Baxter and Trellie Armstrong, smiling, holding drinks, looking very important.
“That’s the earring!” I said, grabbing the paper right out of Boone’s hand. I stood and did a yippee dance right there in the closet with Mr. Lawyer looking on as if I’d lost my mind. “We got her!” I threw my arms around Boone in a bear hug, realized what I was doing, and jumped back.
The corner of his mouth turned up in a slight smile. “You need to get out more.”
“I get out plenty. What do we do now?” I said all breathless and exited. Finding that picture made me happier than I’d been in ages.
“
I
take the picture from the crime scene and the newspaper and go to the police,
they
get a search warrant, and
you
go home.”
“Yeah, right.”
We left his office together. Boone cranked up his Chevy and headed for the police station, and I hustled back to the Marshall House. I took a seat at the bar with a clear view of the double-glass entrance doors, the beautiful walnut check–in desk, and the winding stairway that General R. E. Lee supposedly took a time or two. With five bucks in my pocket, I ordered water.
Twenty minutes later, two uniformed police and Detective Aldeen Ross came in, Boone behind them. Ross flashed her badge and the warrant at the manager in a black suit, blue shirt, and yellow silk tie. Together the little party trooped up the circular stairway.
Boone spotted me. “That went pretty smoothly,” I said to him when he took a stool next to mine.
“This is a nice place, but it’s not the first time the Marshall House has seen a search warrant.” Boone ordered a beer, and KiKi and Dinah Corwin came through the front
door. KiKi mouthed, “What’s going on?” behind Dinah’s back, as Dinah said, “Well, I’ll be. Here you two are together in the middle of the day. I think you’re sweet on each other.”
Dinah whispered to me, “But you really need to fix yourself up a little, honey. Walker here is a real catch, and you’re looking kind of frumpy these days, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
Ross and two uniforms hustled down the stairs. Ross stopped when she spotted Dinah in the bar and pulled herself up to all of her five feet two inches. “Dinah Corwin,” Ross said as she came our way. “You are under arrest for the murder of Janelle Claiborne.”
“What?” Dinah looked ready to faint, and everyone within earshot stopped to take in the show. “You have the murderer!” Dinah declared.
Ross held up a plastic baggie thing that held the incriminating earring, and the Gucci bag.
“I didn’t kill Janelle,” Dinah said, her voice breaking. “She was already dead when I got to the house. I wanted to talk about the rumors she’d been spreading about me and tell her to stop. I might have done a little dance when I saw her beady little eyes staring straight up at me, and I took the purse, which was mine all along. Then I ran out. Well, I sort of skipped out, but I didn’t kill her. I swear I didn’t.” She looked at Boone. “Can you help me?”
“Yes. Don’t say anything more.”
The police read the entire “can and will be used against you” mantra, then led Dinah out of the Marshall House in handcuffs.
“You’re going to defend her?” I asked Boone. He tossed beer money on the bar.
“Why not? I sure didn’t make much off you.”
“This time you didn’t make much. What about last time?”
“Yeah, there was last time. I’ll get the paperwork going for Hollis. He should be out by tonight.”
Boone left, and the rest of the hotel staff and guests switched gears back into a normal routine. KiKi hugged me tight enough to impede breathing. “That’s it, honey,” she cooed. “It’s over. Lord be praised, you did it.”
KiKi took Boone’s stool and ordered us vodka martinis with blue-cheese-stuffed olives. “Now
this
is the way to begin a day.”
I started in on the olives. KiKi started in on the martinis and asked me, “Why aren’t you dancing on the tables?”
“Dinah looked totally distraught when Ross arrested her, not like someone who had killed and was glad that person was dead because she had it coming.”
“Dinah was upset because she got caught. She thought she’d get away with it.”
“Dinah and I had no use for Janelle, to be sure, but we’d both moved on, or so I thought. Why would Dinah risk that by killing Cupcake?”
“Because of Cupcake, Dinah couldn’t get interviews, and she’d had enough of her; that’s my take on this.” KiKi finished off her martini and started on mine. “What are you thinking, honey?”
“I can’t see Dinah pulling me into that alley, or breaking my window, or poisoning BW. I mean, why would she do those things?”
“I think there’s two parts here,” KiKi said, giving her martini-induced theory of the situation. “Yes, Dinah killed Cupcake for her own reasons, but when you went looking
for the murderer, you got into a lot of people’s business. The people Cupcake blackmailed got antsy you’d find out who they were and expose them and their secrets. They wanted you to stop, and scaring you is a good way to do that.”
“I can’t see Raylene or Urston breaking into my house.”
KiKi held up a toothpick speared though an olive. “That sounds more like Sissy, if you ask me. Cupcake was out of the picture, Hollis in jail, and Sissy thought everything would die down and she and Franklin would go on with their hanky-panky. Then you came along, stirring the pot and riling everyone up again.”