Which set Olive to worrying about the shape the Ladies was in. Oh, she’d emptied the trash like she did every morning, made sure there was plenty of toilet paper and paper towels and pink liquid soap. But she hadn’t mopped it. She wished she’d swabbed it down with Lysol and hung some of those little huck towels with the day of the week done in cross-stitch and laid in some of that pink carnation soap her grandbaby, Bobby, gave her for Christmas four years ago, still in the box, Olive was saving it for something special. But Olive handed over the $32.45 in change and hoped for the best, bathroom-wise. “Thank you so much,” said the redhead stepping outside.
Olive shook her head. “There’s them that has, and them that don’t, Pearl. You know that? That’s the way God made the world. ’Course there’s them that say there’s only so much people stuff in the universe and it keeps getting recycled, so there’s always another chance, depending on what you did the time before, you could come back a millionaire. I know what
I
want to be next time around.”
Pearl sat up and said, “Rowooo, rowooo,” like she had a big old coon up a tree and could see the shine of his eyes,
her
idea of nirvana.
Olive said, “Nope. Don’t wanta be like that redhead, either, driving that big silver car. I already was a pretty woman, and look how that turned out.”
Pearl muttered something deep in her broad chest.
“That’s right,” said Olive.
“
You.
I’m coming back as a coon dog with a momma who owns a store full of snacks and nothing better to do than sit around and spoil me all day. Though, I wouldn’t mind having that one’s figure again. I used to have me one like that—and a pretty pale yellow suit. Wouldn’t that look swell at Jinx’s party? I think it’d be perfect, early evening do.…”
Just about then, the lady whose suit Olive was coveting was striding back to her car, turning and waving with that stiff little motion like you see beauty queens do, when suddenly she yelled bloody murder. It was the kind of scream that you used to hear from the blonde in monster movies. The kind of scream that let you know the screamer wasn’t fooling around. There really was something out there in the dark that was going to scare the bejesus out of you. More likely it’d eat you alive. Olive thought maybe the redhead’d stepped on a snake, so she grabbed her .44 Bulldog from behind the counter, and hit the door running, making sure Pearl didn’t escape. “You stay!”
The lady was still screaming. Then she saw Olive with the revolver and threw her arms up in the air. “Oh, my God! Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot me!”
“Lady, are you crazy?” Olive was looking all around for the snake. Where’d it go?
The lady was jumping up and down hollering. “I’ve lost my ring! My diamond ring!”
Her ring? That’s what all this fuss was about? Then once again Olive saw that emerald-cut sparkler catching the fluorescent lights, and she commenced to joining in the screaming. “Where? How? Tell me exactly what you did.”
Now the lady was jumping up and down, shaking her wrists. Then stopping to stare at the right hand like if she looked at it long enough, her ring would reappear. “I took it off in the ladies’ room to wash my hands, and then, well”—she started to wail—“I don’t remember!”
“Yes, you do. Just calm down. If you get ahold of yourself, you’ll see what you did.” Olive knew how that was. How you did things automatically. Driving, even. Like when you were thinking about something real hard, you’d start off in your car in Hot Springs, next thing you knew you’d be in Pine Bluff, 40 miles away, not remember a dad-blamed thing.
“I was thinking about Dean, Dean’s my boyfriend who gave me the ring.” The lady broke into some serious tears.
Olive wouldn’t have figured her for a crybaby, but you never knew. She could hear Pearl yodeling away inside. Pearl was dying to poke her nose in their business, see if it was something she could chase through the brambles, torture across a bog.
“Listen, lady,” Olive said.
“Madeline.”
“That’s a right pretty name. So listen, Madeline, let’s just collect ourselves here. I know we’ll find that ring.”
Madeline was wiping her eyes, making black smudges on her knuckles. That and the runny nose, she looked like a kid.
“Come on, now. You only went from here to the Ladies. We’ll retrace your steps, find it for sure.”
So that’s what Olive and Madeline did. Olive slipped the revolver in the pocket of her muumuu, and together they examined every square inch of the oil-spotted concrete. They poked at old chewing gum, at gravel, at weeds growing up through a crack. They inspected every last centimeter of the Ladies itself, though Madeline swore that she knew she hadn’t dropped it in there. The more she thought about it, the more she remembered shaking her fingers one last time in the sunshine to make sure they were dry before she put on her ring because she was prone to dermatitis, she had sensitive skin. The ring had simply disappeared into thin air.
Well, it couldn’t have done that, said Olive. Things just didn’t dematerialize. They weren’t snatched up by haints. Olive was a practical woman who’d always lived in the here and now, and by God, that diamond was here, and it was here
now,
and they would find it if they just persevered. So they did the search all over again. Frontwards. Backwards. Sideways. Widening the area each time, but with no luck. Madeline was crying all the while, blubbering like a baby, talking about how much that diamond was worth. A quarter of a million dollars, she said. Insured, of course. But she couldn’t report it missing. Not after that robbery that she and Dean had had at his beach house last summer, when the thieves broke in and knocked them around and tied them up and took every last piece of jewelry she had. My stars, said Olive. Dean had given her this ring as a sort of consolation prize while they were looking around to replace things with the insurance money. Not that you could ever replace those pieces with sentimental value. Of course not, said Olive, shaking her head, remembering that pink-gold locket with the little engraved roses, pictures of her first dog, Pokey, inside, that a john had ripped right off her neck 40 years ago. Thinking about it still made her mad. But because of that robbery, said Madeline, her insurance premiums were already so high, if she reported this… Besides, she wanted the ring that Dean had given her, the very one, not some replacement. Then she broke into sobs so heartrending, Olive almost joined her.
After a while Madeline got control of herself, blew her nose in a white linen handkerchief trimmed with both cutwork and lace, rocked back on those alligator heels, and moaned, “On top of that, now I’m late for my meeting. And it’s an
important
meeting.”
Olive was sure it was. What other kind of meeting would a woman wrapped in linen and silk and alligator and diamonds and gold and stainless steel and a silver Mercedes be going to?
Madeline reached in her alligator bag and pulled out a little notepad and a gold pen. She scribbled her name,
Madeline Brooks,
and the words
Arlington Hotel, Hot Springs.
“That’s where I’m staying.”
Olive nodded. Anybody who knew anything about Hot Springs knew the Arlington. It and the Palace were the two grand hotels left from the good old days when Hot Springs was something. Al Capone had kept a suite there.
“I hate to leave.” Madeline turned her head and closed her eyes and threw her naked right hand over her pretty white-silk-and-yellow-linen-covered breast. “But I must. With the hope, of course, that I’ll hear from you soon. That you’ll call and say that you’ve found my ring and you’re waiting for me to come and claim it and give you your thousand-dollar reward.”
Olive gasped. A thousand dollars! Now wouldn’t that come in handy? That trip she and Loydell were planning to Morocco.
“Cash,” said Madeline. “To anyone who finds Dean’s token of affection. Oh, Olive, please, please, find my ring.” Tears danced in her emerald green eyes.
Olive had never seen anyone with eyes that color. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. Unless the angels have swooped down and carried it off for the Good Lord to wear on His pinky, you’re gonna hear from me soon. I promise you that.” With any luck, she’d find it right after Madeline left, bring it into town with her on her way to Jinx’s party, stop into the Arlington, call Madeline up on the house phone.…
“Oh, Olive!” Madeline clasped her to her bosom and gave her a big hug. “I know you’ll be my salvation.” Reluctantly she stepped into the Mercedes and pulled the door to with that solid kerchunk like a bank vault closing, and waving a sad little Miss America wave, drove off.
3
THERE WERE TWO
messages waiting for Sam at the hotel desk. The first one said, Call Harry. That was a laugh. What did he want, to fill her in on a forgotten detail of his trysts with Barbie? And how’d he know where she was, anyway? She handed the yellow slip of paper back to the desk clerk and said, “Could you burn this, please?”
The second message was from Kitty telling her to get herself down to the baths. Now! So she dumped her bags in her room, stripped, grabbed up the monogrammed terry cloth robe and paper slippers the hotel had so graciously provided, and rang for the cute little gilded elevator, which took her to the spa on the Palace’s second floor.
The reception area was a Moorish temple done in tiles of turquoise and maroon. Behind the desk the receptionist wore a platinum beehive and rhinestone cat eye glasses and called her Honey. She took Sam’s room number and pointed her through the pink curtains, straight back to the twenties. The waiting room sported wooden ceiling fans, walls of spanky clean white tile and gray marble, and mazelike floors of pink and white octagons.
Kitty threw herself at Sam from a scalloped green metal lawn chair. “Oooooooh, I am so glad to see you!”
The two old friends kissed cheeks and hugged. The top of the five-foot-two Kitty’s strawberry blond head tucked neatly under Sam’s chin. She said, “I know. I almost died without your smart mouth running in my ear the past twenty-four hours.” And that was true. The visit with Olive had been great, but nothing beat old friends.
“Speaking of dying. I don’t know why you didn’t fly. Did it rain all the way? I was just sure you were roadkill by now. You all agitated, driving eighty miles an hour.”
“I never topped seventy-five,” Sam lied. She was famous for her speeding tickets, and her impatience. “The driving was good, I needed to work off some nervous energy.”
“Well, sit right down here and tell all.” Kitty patted the chair beside hers.
So Sam repeated the tale of woe she’d shared with Olive and had already told Kitty the night before on the telephone, filling in more details. But woe was like that. You needed to twist it around and chew on it several times before you could begin to get the hurt out.
Kitty fell back in her chair, her robe flapping. “I say shoot both the sons of bitches. Him and her.”
“Oh, you always say that. But you don’t mean it.”
“What the hell are you talking about? I never say things I don’t mean.” Which was a joke. Kitty was in the public relations business in New Orleans. She lied for a living.
Sam said, “Let me remind you that twenty-odd years ago, back in school, when Jinx, this very same Jinx whose
third
engagement party you’re here for”—she held up three fingers—“ran off with Frank, my very best boyfriend in the whole world up until that time, you said the same thing. Shoot ’em.
Moi,
I agreed it was a superlative idea. Then, I start chatting up our friends in the Panthers about a gun, what did you do?”
“I said you were nuts. Locked you in our dorm room. Reminded you that all that bourbon you used to consume made you forget the difference between Southern hyperbole and reality.”
“So what does that say about my killing Harry and this blonde now?”
“Says you’re sober, which means you’d know more about what you were doing, plus you have all that crime-reporting business under your belt. I’d say you could probably get away with it.”
Sam laughed. “While I’m at it, you think I could get away with doing Jinx, too? Since I missed my chance the first time around?”
Kitty got that prim look on her face that meant she was going to say something that would make Sam want to slap her. And sure enough she did.
“Now, you know you don’t still hate Jinx.”
Sam slammed a hand on her forehead. “By God, you’re right. How could I forget that? We went over the same ground when you first tried to drag me up here for this stupid party.
You
feel sorry for her—which, of course, is akin to feeling sorry for Attila the Hun because his momma wasn’t nice to him. And
I
let go of all my mean, ugly, and vicious feelings about her eons ago. I don’t think about her any more often than I think about—oh, say rattlesnake bellies.”
Kitty’s eyes narrowed. “You’re lying through those pearly teeth, and you know it. Otherwise why wouldn’t you come to her party? She invited you. I know the invitation came in the mail the same day as mine.”
“Jinx probably invited the entire South. And Texas. Especially Texas, since she made off with their lottery.”
Kitty had her forefinger ready to point.
“
That’s
why you let that green-eyed monster get ahold of you again. You’re jealous because Jinx won that million dollars, tax-free.”