Divas and Dead Rebels (18 page)

“So you’re saying that I’m a murder suspect again?” Bitty burst out.

Stone shook his head. “No ma’am, I’m not. You might be a little crazy, but you aren’t strong enough to have killed the professor.” He shifted position to lean against the counter with his back to it and his elbow propping him up. “Here’s what I think. I think you found the professor’s body, went and got the laundry cart, and moved the body to keep it from incriminating one of your boys.”

Bitty went white as a bleached cotton sheet. A cold chill gripped my throat and all the way down to my knees. I shivered.

“My boys would never—” Bitty began, but the lieutenant cut her off with a lifted hand as he agreed.

“I know your boys, known ’em all my life, and I agree that neither one of them is the kind to commit murder. But I’m not the one you have to convince. This didn’t happen in my jurisdiction.

“What you have to help me do is figure out what happened, and you can do that by telling me the truth. The
whole
truth, Miz Bitty. Not even a little white lie.”

There it was, laid out plainly so that even Bitty had to see the sense in it. I made up my mind that if she didn’t tell the truth, I’d have to, but she beat me to it.

“Trinket, would you mind getting some more coffee and bringing it out to us in the living room?” she asked. “Oh, and maybe a little of that pound cake with raspberry preserves Sharita’s mama made.”

Turning back to the lieutenant, Bitty said, “I’d have you in the parlor, but as you know, it’s a mess right now, so we can talk in the living room well enough, I think.”

It turned out that all four of us sat in the living room eating pound cake drizzled with raspberry preserves and drinking coffee while Bitty sorted out what she wanted to say. The uncomfortable horsehair stuffed antique settee was occupied by Bitty and Chen Ling. Sharita, the lieutenant and I sat in antique chairs drawn up to the Turkish ottoman that did double duty on occasion as a coffee table.

The silver tray was set with Bitty’s serviceable china and accessories, and I thought the lieutenant looked way too big and bulky to be sitting in the Louis XVI chair he occupied. He balanced a rose-patterned china plate on his knee that held pound cake, but had held on to his mug instead of drinking from one of the Royal Albert tea cups. Men can be intimidated by fragile china, I’ve observed.

Once Bitty started explaining the events of our day the morning the professor was murdered, Stone put down his plate and took out a small notebook and pen. He scribbled a few things in it, then began writing furiously when Bitty got to the part where we found Sturgis dead in Clayton’s dorm room closet.

“Why in God’s name did you move him?” the lieutenant asked in a brief pause. He sounded cranky. “You should have called in the police immediately.”

“I didn’t want anyone to think Clayton had anything to do with him being dead,” she explained. “You know how it would look to people.”

“Now it looks even worse,” Stone said dryly. “It looks like a conspiracy. Or at best, a cover-up.”

“Well, that’s just ridiculous. Of course it isn’t. Clayton has no idea that Sturgis was stuffed in his closet like a Christmas turkey. I mean, all tied up, you know.”

“Yeah. I got that.” He glanced over at me. “One of you should have thought this through more before you did something so stupid.”

“One of us did,” I replied, but didn’t have to clarify. Stone is pretty quick on the uptake.

“Hunh,” he grunted, shaking his head as he jotted down more notes in his little book. Finally he looked up at Bitty. “Okay, this is the way I understand it. Stop me if I’m wrong about anything. First, you and Trinket got down to Oxford at approximately eight-fifteen Friday morning on the fifth. You went immediately to Professor Sturgis’s office for your eight-thirty appointment. At approximately nine ten, the professor allowed you into his office for a pre-arranged meeting to discuss your son Clayton Caldwell’s failing grade in his ancient history class.”

“Can you believe he was so rude as to keep us waiting that long?” Bitty cut in with an indignant sniff. “Definitely low-class.”

Stone ignored her interruption and comment, and went on. “During this meeting, the professor suddenly became highly irate at your insistence he should allow Clayton to make up a test he had missed for medical reasons. He began yelling and ordered you to leave his office immediately. Whereupon you did so, but returned to his door to tell him that you intended to report him to the board of directors and to the alumni association so they could remove him before tenure. At that, the professor ran after you down the hall and proceeded to scream what you deemed to be threats. You then said—and this is a direct quote: ‘You’ll be long dead before that happens.’ Is this correct so far, Miz Bitty?”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, except I really wanted to slap some sense in him, too. If not for the fact that he’d already made such a scene, and Trinket was trying to pull my arm out of socket, I think I would have done just that.”

I rolled my eyes, Sharita seemed suddenly interested in the contents of her coffee cup, and Marcus Stone just stared at Bitty for a moment before shaking his head.

“That information isn’t necessary, so I advise you to keep it to yourself. I have here that, after meeting with Sturgis, you and Miz Truevine took a taxi to the Square and did some shopping, then had lunch at Old Venice Pizza and later returned to your sons’ dorm room to see if they were out of class. You said you have credit card receipts for your purchases and lunch and are willing to give them to me. At approximately three-fifteen, you found the door to the dorm room unlocked and your sons still absent.”

Now he turned to me. “Miz Truevine, in your statement you say you noticed what appeared to be an unusual pile of clothing on the floor in front of Clayton Caldwell’s open closet, so stepped closer to look at it, is that right?”

I affirmed it, and he went on. “Upon closer inspection, you realized it was the body of Professor Spencer Sturgis. He lay halfway inside the closet with a wire clothes hanger wrapped tightly around his neck, and his hands and ankles bound with duct tape. You did not touch him at that point, realizing he was deceased. Is this correct so far?”

“Yes,” I said. “It appeared that the coat hanger had been attached to the closet rod at one point but had come loose so the professor just sort of . . .
leaned
into the closet.”

Stone wrote in his notebook, then looked back over at Bitty. “That is when you decided to remove the professor from the crime scene to another location to prevent your sons from being involved. You then proceeded to place the professor into the laundry cart you found in the hallway, and—”

“No,” I interrupted. “The laundry cart was already inside the room. Over behind the door.”

“Was it. Ah.” Stone wrote some more in his book and looked up, his eyes going from me to Bitty. “That’s when you placed the body into the cart and disguised it with clothing and linens, right? Then you took it downstairs in the elevator, during which you had a brief discussion with Randy Klein, a student and resident of the dorm. After leaving the dormitory, you headed east until you saw a moving truck. That is where you left the professor’s body. He was wrapped up in two L.L. Bean blankets, one blue plaid and the other a red plaid.”

“No,” said Bitty. “Two blue plaid blankets.”

Stone checked his notes again. Then he frowned. “Are you sure?”

“Of course, I’m sure. I bought them, after all, and I always buy the boys matching blankets, pillows and sheets for their beds. Just like here at home.”

After ruffling the pages of the notebook for a moment, Lieutenant Stone said, “I must have it written down wrong. No problem.”

After a couple more questions, the lieutenant flipped his notebook closed and put his ballpoint pen into his shirt pocket. He wore an open vest and what looked like body armor under his uniform shirt. Even in small towns, police have to be wary of people off their medication or on the run, I suppose.

“Miz Bitty,” he said, “I’ll make sure the Oxford police get a copy of my report, but you can expect that they’ll want you to come down and make a complete, official statement. If you weren’t who you are, they’d probably have you in the back of one of their units right now.”

“Well, I’m grateful for your intervention,” said Bitty. “I do wonder, though—how did they decide that just because my fingerprints were on the laundry cart that it was used to move the professor?”

“Did I say that?”

“You said that my fingerprints were found on the cart.”

“I did say that, yes.”

Bitty looked up at him with slightly narrowed eyes. “You tricked me into telling you what happened, didn’t you.”

“Think of it more as asking the right questions. I’ll mention that you cooperated fully in my report.”

We walked him toward the front door while Sharita grabbed up the bag she used to carry supplies for her customers. Rain still dripped outside, mostly from the eaves now instead of the downpour of earlier. Marcus Stone paused and turned to look down at Bitty when we reached the door.

“By the way,” he said, “one of my patrolmen reported that he gave you a warning about a rolling stop down at the corner. Just so you know, next time you run that stop sign, it will get you a ticket.”

Bitty put her hands on her hips. I wondered if she knew she looked just like an indignant chicken all fluffed out in her white terry cloth robe and her hair glued atop her head.

“Honestly. I never knew police could be so picky about small things that don’t matter worth a hill of beans!”

Stone looked at her with an expression of weary patience. “It’d matter a lot more than a hill of beans if another car had the right of way and slammed into you. What may seem a minor infraction to you could end up being a pretty serious accident. So come to a complete stop at all stop signs. That’s why they’re called
stop
signs.”

I thought for a moment that Bitty might continue to argue, but it surprised me when she took a deep breath and nodded. “Yes. You’re right, of course. I promise to do better from now on. Please tell Officer Farrell that I won’t say anything about him to his grandmother.”

That last sentence earned a lifted brow from the lieutenant, but if he meant to say anything, he didn’t as Sharita appeared in the entrance hall wearing a raincoat.

“I called Alfie,” she said, “and told him you’re picking me up so he doesn’t have to.” She fluffed out the collar of her raincoat and looked at Bitty. “Chen Ling’s special food is in its usual place, but I think you should take her to the vet anyway. If she ate a bow, no telling what else she might have gotten into.”

“Oh, I will,” Bitty assured her. “I’m pretty sure it was just the bow she wore to Oxford with us today, but I don’t want to take any chances.”

After they left, Sharita climbing into the front seat of her brother’s patrol car, I looked at Bitty. “Are you really going to take her to the vet?”

“Don’t you think I should?”

I thought about it a moment. “Well, it was just a bow, and it seems to have passed naturally. Of course, if you’re worried we can call Kit.”

Kit is short for Christopher. Dr. Coltrane has only been a vet at Willow Bend Animal Hospital for about a year and the main man in my life for less time than that.

Bitty hesitated. “Well, it’s not like she hasn’t done this kind of thing before. Just not all over my white chairs.”

I tried not to laugh. “She’s probably fine. From what I could tell, all the ribbon came out.”

For a moment Bitty just stood there, then she shook her head and started to laugh. That made me laugh, too, of course. By the time we finally subsided, we both had tears in our eyes. At some point we’d fallen into each other’s arms to hold ourselves upright. Chen Ling looked up at us with a disgusted expression. Not that she doesn’t look at me like that most of the time anyway.

“Right now,” said Bitty ruefully as she wiped at her eyes, “I’m just as worried about my white slipcovers. How will I ever get that . . . that
stuff
to come out? It’s all purplish and probably soaked into the material so it won’t ever come clean.”

“Bleach,” I said. “Lots of bleach.”

“On linen?”

“Oh. Call your dry cleaners. They’ll know what to do.”

I hooked my arm through Bitty’s and led her toward the kitchen. “As for Chitling, have I ever told you about the time Brownie ate my earrings?”

“Only about a dozen times. He ate your emerald earrings, and you had to follow him around the back yard wearing plastic gloves in case he pooped them out, yadda yadda, yadda.”

“Ah, I see you haven’t learned the moral of the tale,” I replied instead of giving her a good shake.

“There’s a moral?”

When we reached the kitchen I released her arm and headed toward the laundry room. “Yes,” I said over my shoulder, “the moral is not to expect small furry creatures to act like rational human beings. In your case, that would be like me, not you.”

I think I heard her say something quite rude as I went into the laundry room, but decided not to ask her to repeat it. There are some things it’s best not to know.

Despite tumbling around
in Bitty’s dryer, my clothes were still a bit damp when I reached home. Mama and Daddy had a small fire lit in the living room fireplace, and were cuddled up together watching a 1950s movie with Carmen Miranda wearing a pile of fruit on her head. Brownie, of course, was nestled between them, warm in his sweater matching my parents’ cardigans. Really. It boggles my mind how my parents treat their dog like a small, furry child. I’m sure Brownie is in their will, his name right above mine and Emerald’s. He’ll probably get the house, I’ll get the cats, and Emerald will get any money left, if my parents don’t spend it all buying clothes for the dog. Not to mention money spent feeding a battalion of stray cats they also get fixed so there isn’t an army of new kittens every spring.