The Turkey Wore Satin (3 page)

“
Especially poisonous
ones,” Ponytail added.

“
No,” Aunt Cynthia cut in.
Her voice sounded strangely hard and unemotional, considering her
husband had just died. “No, that won’t be necessary, thank you.
Just take George away, to the morgue or wherever it is dead bodies
go. Please.”

The ponytailed paramedic took one step
closer to the body, and cocked her head at Cynthia. “But Professor
Turquay is a leading expert in sexual cannibalism.”

“
In
what
?”
Kristin’s mother cried.

“
I should ask you to watch
your language!” Grandma Iris added. “This is a respectable
house.”

“
Black Widows are renowned
for killing their mates,” Whoopie explained. “The professor will be
able to tell us if we’re right about that bite, if it really was a
Black Widow.”

“
No,” Cynthia said
sternly. Her hands formed fists at her sides. “This is all getting
quite out of hand. Now take him away. Go!”

“
It really is rather
morbid,” her daughter Georgette agreed. “Strange, though—Turquay.
That name rings a bell.”

“
You’re just hungry,
dear,” Grandma Iris consoled her granddaughter. “Come, let’s return
to the Great Room while these public servants clear the foyer of
corpses.”

Chapter Four

Beth and Georgette threw back their heads
and wailed while Kristin escorted them from their father’s bloated
body. Everyone shadowed the young women, with Marty bringing up the
rear. He followed the click-clack of high heels while Brykia
trailed softly behind him.

“
How are you holding up?”
he asked her, since the Mayfairs’ staff were usually easier to
relate to than the Mayfairs themselves.

Brykia pouted, “My turkey will be black by
the time this is over!”

While the paramedics clumsily attempted to
un-split George’s legs, Marty stared down at the man’s sequined
heels. That’s when he remembered the noise he’d heard from the
kitchen earlier on, when he’d swiftly escaped the dressing
room.

Heels! He’d heard heels in the kitchen!

And that was just before Brykia brought up
the cheese platter and George’s guilty grapes. It hadn’t been
Brykia—she wore soft soles. So who was it?

Marty was getting a weird feeling about all
this.

When he’d reached the Great Room, something
came over him. He ran to the stage, grabbed Tyrone’s microphone
from its holder, and said, “I don’t want to ruin Thanksgiving, but
I think George was murdered!”

The family gasped. “Murdered? No!
Never!”

Well, to be accurate, everyone but the
Mayfair Matriarch gasped. Grandma Iris just sat there like a queen,
looking all around with a quaint smile on her face.

From what Marty had heard on the family
grapevine, Grandma Iris stood accused of slaughtering her share of
husbands. But money erases all sins in these parts, and if there
was one thing the Mayfairs had it was money.

“
Marty, sit down!” Kristin
shouted. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“
No I’m not,” Marty said
as he tugged his vintage Madonna wedgie out of his butt crack.
“There’s something fishy going on here, and I don’t want it swept
under the rug.”

“
Hey, you weren’t so keen
to hit the stage,” Jack piped up. With a cantankerous chuckle,
Marty’s father-in-law said, “Maybe
you
killed George so you
wouldn’t have to perform in the drag show. What’s your alibi,
kid?”

“
Alibi for what?”
Kristin’s mother asked. “You heard the Ambulanciers. It was a
spider bite, not a shot through the heart.”

“
Maybe it was a spider
bite,” Marty agreed, “but how, exactly, did a deadly spider get
into George’s grapes?”

Aunt Cynthia shook her head. “Weren’t you
listening? It’s been all over the news: Black Widows get shipped
north in bundles of grapes.”

“
But Brykia washed the
grapes.”

“
And she did a bang-up job
of it,” Grandma Iris said, before issuing a dry Katherine Hepburn
cackle.

Brykia brought out her rosary, pleading in
silence as she joined Marty on the makeshift stage. He needed to
convince the family she wasn’t guilty, not even of being a bad
grape-washer. The last thing he wanted was for Brykia to land the
blame of Uncle George’s death.

“
Look,” Marty said. “I saw
George brush something off his arm when he was eating those grapes.
I’m sure a spider
did
bite him, but I also suspect that
spider was planted there… to kill him!”

The family gasped, and the grieving
daughters sobbed on Kristin’s shoulders.

“
Brykia,” Marty asked,
“George’s dish was covered in plastic wrap when you gave it to him.
Why?”

The poor woman looked up from her beads, her
eyes wide with alarm. She shook her head. “I don’t know. I did not
cover it. I…I…” Brykia burst into tears, hollering, “I did not kill
him! I swear!”

“
I know you didn’t,” Marty
said, wrapping one arm around her.

“
Ouch!” Brykia cried,
pulling away from Marty’s cone-bra. “Your bosoms are sharp enough
to kill a man.”

“
Yeah,” Jack said. “You
were with George when he died, Marty. I’m still not convinced it
wasn’t you who did the dirty deed.”

Marty was getting antsy in a
He-Who-Smelt-It-Dealt-It sort of way. “I’m not the killer.”

“
Baby, we know. You
wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Tyrone stood dramatically. In a classic
j’accuse
pose, he pointed at the man dressed as Cher. “You
killed George, didn’t you Jack?”

“
I hardly think so,” Jack
said, brushing his long dark wig over both shoulders.

Jonnie picked that one up and ran with it.
“Jack, you’re the only one here with a motive. George was all
twisted up about that business deal gone bad. He threatened to
launch a class action suit after Thanksgiving.”

“
What happened?” Georgette
asked Beth.

“
Daddy lost money?” Beth
asked Georgette.

“
Girl, your daddy lost a
buttload of cash,” Tyrone answered. “And it was all Jack’s fault.
Jack has got to be the killer.”

“
I didn’t kill anyone, you
little puke! Jonnie, rein in your husband.”

Jonnie waved a hand in the air. “Honey, I
have triiied…”

“
Marty, you were there
when George threatened me,” Jack called across the room. “Where
would I have gotten a poisonous spider between then and the time
Brykia handed him those grapes? I never even left the
room!”

“
That’s right,” Kristin’s
mom said, holding hands with her Cher-look-alike husband. “If
anyone killed George, it was probably Tyrone.”

“
Oh, sure! Blame the black
man! Real original, Angela.”

Kristin’s mother rolled her eyes
dismissively, which pretty much said it all.

“
I think what my wife is
trying to say,” Jack picked up, “is that George always took home
your coveted Best in Show title.”

Angela nodded decisively. “You’d have run
over your own mother with a dump truck to get your hands on that
prize.”

Tyrone stamped his heel on the ground.
“What’d you say about my mama?”

“
My floors!” Grandma Iris
cried. “How dare you!”

“
I’m sorry, Granny, but
you heard your daughter disrespecting my mama.”

Iris turned decisively and said, “Angela,
apologize to Tyrone.”

“
Mother, we’re not
children!”

“
Angela!” she
growled.

Lowering her gaze, Kristin’s mother grunted,
“I’m sorry, Tyrone.”

He flicked his wig and shrugged. “Yeah,
well, you really think I’m gonna kill my brother-in-law over some
stupid drag contest?”

Grandma Iris’s eyes flashed. She pounded her
cane on her precious hardwood floor, then hoisted herself up. “The
drag show is not stupid, Tyrone! It is a Mayfair family tradition!
Now if you young people are quite done yammering, on with it! On
with the show!”

“
Grandma!” Georgette
cried. “Daddy just died! They’re not going to prance around the
stage like a bunch of goofs.”

“
A bunch of goofs?” Iris
replied. “No granddaughter of mine will refer to our men in skirts
as a bunch of goofs!”

“
Daddy died,” Beth cut in.
“The paramedics say a spider bite, Marty thinks it’s murder. A
stupid drag show should not be your top priority, Grandma, and I
don’t care if you cut me out of the will for saying so!”

“
Insolent child,” Iris
grumbled.

“
Crazy old lady,” Beth
shot back. “Somebody in this room probably killed my dad and you’re
hiding your head in the sand!”

Grandma Iris scoffed, “Nobody killed
anybody, silly girl!”

With the tension coming to a head between
grandmother and granddaughter, Marty lifted the microphone to his
lips and said, “I witnessed it! I’m a witness!”

Chapter Five

The Mayfair family fell silent as Marty’s
voice echoed through the speakers.

“
A witness?” Kristin
asked. “A witness of what? What did you see, Marty?”

“
Well, it’s not so much
what I saw,” Marty replied, feeling less sure of himself now that
all eyes were on him. “It’s more like what I heard. I left the
dressing room just before Brykia brought the grapes
upstairs.”

“
Yeah, why did you leave?”
Jack asked.

“
To get away from you!”
Marty wanted to say, but he was on thin ice already. What he
actually said was, “I got nervous. Nervous-hungry, like when your
stomach fills with acid and you need to eat some bread. So I went
to grab something to eat, except I heard a noise in the kitchen:
high heels.”

“
High heels?” Cynthia
asked. “Well, so what? If you didn’t actually see anything, you’re
not much of a witness.”

Marty explained to the family, “I think
whoever was clacking around the kitchen planted that spider in
Uncle George’s grapes. We’re all wearing high heels—well, everyone
except Brykia—so it could have been any one of us!”

“
Could have been you,”
Jack shot back.

“
Yeah, that’s what I’m
saying,” Marty agreed. “I mean, it wasn’t me, but it could have
been.”

“
Well, it wasn’t any of us
men,” Tyrone said, in a resonantly low tone of voice. “None of us
left the holding room. We can all vouch for each other.”

“
Everyone but you,” Jack
heckled. “You’re the only one who left the dressing room,
Marty-Boy.”

Marty swallowed hard. His heart thundered in
his ears and his cone bra dug into his chest. He had no way of
defending himself, except to say that he didn’t do it and ask,
“What about the women? You were all together down here, waiting for
the show to start. Someone must have left the room at some
point.”

“
We were all in and out,”
Grandma Iris said. “Powdering noses and such.”

Scratching his head, Marty said, “There must
be some way to figure this out. It couldn’t have been an accident.
I know in my gut Uncle George has been murdered. But whodunit?”

“
Sit down, Marty,” Kristin
shouted across the room. She sounded exasperated. “Nobody dunit.
Can’t you see you’re embarrassing yourself?”

“
A true Mayfair would
never accuse his fellow family members of murder,” Grandma Iris
clucked. “Not even if they were guilty!”

If Iris was trying to cast suspicion on
herself, it was working.

“
Brykia.” Marty turned to
the woman in the canvas shoes. “Who asked you to bring us the
cheese platter up to us?”

“
The lady of the house, of
course.”

“
You mean
Iris?”

A deep flush took over Brykia’s cheeks and
she looked down at her feet. “Yes.”

Grandma Iris huffed and puffed and pounded
her cane on the good hardwood floors. “You will not accuse me
murder in my own home!”

Jack laughed. “Wouldn’t be the first
time.”

Her elderly body shot arrow straight and her
lips pursed, but it was Angela who defended the matriarch. “My
mother is not a man-killer.”

“
No, just a ball-breaker,”
Tyrone chuckled.

Jonnie’s body tensed, and he took his turn.
“Marty, look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, here, but my
mother’s not a murderer and neither is anyone else in this family.
George got bit by a spider and he didn’t call an ambulance. He died
for drag. Simple as that.”

“
I think I’m starting to
agree with Jonnie,” Cousin Beth said, her cheeks streaked with
tears. “Anyway, we’ll know more when Professor Turquay gets here.
He’ll be able to tell us what kind of spider bit Daddy.”

Suddenly, Cousin Georgette shot up from the
couch and shouted, “Turquay! T-U-R-Q-U-A-Y!”

Everyone turned to look at her.

“
I knew I’d seen that name
somewhere. It was spelled funny and it made me laugh.” Georgette
turned to her mother, and her face fell with an expression of deep
shock.

“
What’s wrong?” Marty
asked. “Where did you see the professor’s name?”

“
It was on that shipping
box when we got here,” Georgette murmured. “Remember, Mother? It
was on that package from the university.”

Cynthia waved a dismissive hand in her
daughter’s direction. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,
child. What shipping box?”