Dixie Diva Blues (13 page)

Even Bitty gave up her vodka stingers for sweet tea.

“Are you all right?” I asked her at one point since she had lapsed into a rare silence. She looked up at me over a forkful of black-eyed peas.

“Of course. Why do you ask?”

There was a wily innocence in the question that made me suspicious. I leaned a little closer.

“Because you’re never quiet unless you’re plotting something or know something you haven’t shared with anyone else. Which is it?”

Her smile was positively feline. She batted her long eyelashes at me—courtesy of some product that Brook Shields sells on TV—and went into immediate belle-mode.

“Why, Trinket, I have no idea what you mean. Are you sure you’re not still upset by what happened last night? That knock in the head was pretty hard on you.”

“Of course I’m still upset about last night, and it was a chop to my neck, not a knock on my head, so you can forget about that. What are you up to?”

“About five-foot six wearing stilettos, five-two barefoot.”

“Bitty….”

A warning note in my voice must have told her my patience was dissipating. She blinked her baby-blues at me one more time, glanced at Gaynelle and Carolann—who had stopped talking to listen to us—and then gave a melodramatic sigh.

“
Well
 . . . while the rest of you were lazing about in bed early this morning after all the excitement, I got to wondering just why that Ninja would return to the scene of the crime. I’m not all beauty, you know. I do have brains.”

I rolled my eyes, Gaynelle coughed politely, and Carolann accepted her comment without a blink. She doesn’t know Bitty as well as the rest of us.

“Anyway,” Bitty went on, “there I was, wondering and wondering why on earth he would risk coming back to where he had probably murdered someone, and it came to me that he must have left something incriminating behind. What could it be that the police wouldn’t have already found? I mean, you have to admit that the police are usually quite efficient. And then it came to me—why, maybe it was that piece of old paper that I had taken from the vintage console piano that he was looking for.”

“You
stole
the manufacturer’s certificate, Bitty?” Gaynelle sounded horrified.

Bitty looked insulted. “Of course not. I merely borrowed it. Well, for heaven’s sake, Gaynelle, don’t look so shocked. It has all these numbers written on it in ballpoint pen ink, and I know very well that those kind of pens weren’t even invented yet when this document originated in the early nineteen-hundreds.”

“Where is it?” I asked.

Bitty looked smug. “In my bra.”

Of course, three pairs of eyes immediately went to her chest. The place where Chen Ling is usually parked looked oddly empty without diamonds and pug hair. Bitty’s casual button-down shirt in a lovely peach color matched her cotton slacks that were a shade darker than her blouse. Her only jewelry was a simple gold chain at her throat. And diamond stud earrings as big as butter beans on her earlobes.

“What if the police had frisked you last night?” Carolann asked in a hushed tone. “You might have been arrested!”

“Why would they frisk me?” Bitty demanded. “I was a victim, remember? They never suspect the victim of hiding anything.”

“That was very clever of you,” said Gaynelle. “But why do you think the intruder was after this piece of paper?”

“Well, I’m not positive about that, of course, but he was certainly tearing things up looking for
something
. The written numbers on this certificate look like they might be important.”

“May I see it?” Gaynelle asked, and reached in her purse for a pair of reading glasses. For nearly thirty years she wore cats-eye glasses, her hair pulled back in a bun or very short, and plain cotton ensembles suitable for a school teacher. Since her recent retirement, Gaynelle often wears contact lenses, silk or linen, and her hair in a flattering inverted bob. She also has it colored so that it’s no longer a dingy gray; this week it was a nice warm chestnut color.

“For heaven’s sake, Gaynelle,” Bitty said, “I told you it’s in my bra….”

After a moment of silence, Bitty rolled her eyes and slipped her hand beneath the tail of her blouse. An instant later, she handed a folded sheet of paper across the table to Gaynelle. It looked old, and crackled when opened.

As soon as Gaynelle spread it on the oil-cloth covered table, we all bent our heads at the same time to look at it. Lighting in Ground Zero is subtle, to say the least. I had to squint to make sense of the jumbled letters and numbers, and even then it was difficult.

Ink numbers were listed below a printed
Baldwin
manufacturing label; I made out peculiar letters: F#AdC#EdAG#; it looked hastily scrawled. And it made no sense whatsoever to me.

Carolann said, “Those letters are pretty peculiar. What are those things between them?”

Gaynelle studied the paper through her reading glasses. “It looks familiar, but for the life of me, I cannot think at the moment what this reminds me of. Bitty, are you certain this is written in ballpoint ink?”

“Pretty certain, yes. The ink lines are thin and steady, and when things are written with a fountain pen, the lines waver and are often irregular. Ballpoint pens didn’t become really popular until the nineteen-forties, anyway.”

I looked at my cousin. There are times I forget that Bitty really does know a bit about some things. She’s not always the scatterbrain I’m most familiar with these days.

Carolann craned her neck to look at the old sheet of paper. “Could it be a safe combination, or maybe for some kind of padlock?”

“It’s a clue!” Bitty exclaimed. “This was written by the dead man to leave behind to tell us who killed him, I’m sure of it. What else would our Ninja be looking for?”

“But would he have had time to say, ‘Wait a minute, I have to pull out this old piano and write a clue to your identity on the manufacturer’s certificate?’ That seems pretty unlikely,” I said. “Especially if you consider that even the crime technicians didn’t find this. Or didn’t think it was important.”

We all stared at the tattered, thick sheet of paper for a few moments.

Gaynelle spoke up. “I think that we’re going about this the wrong way. We have to ask ourselves why someone—quite possibly the dead man—wrote down numbers on a piece of paper unlikely to be found. Were these numbers for himself, or for someone else to find? If he left these numbers for himself, why take the trouble to hide them? But if he left them for someone else to find,
who
did he expect to find them?”

That was a good question. I thought about it a few moments. “Do you suppose,” I said, “that Larry has—or had—an accomplice that he was expecting? And that maybe the accomplice double-crossed him?”

“That could be true,” Gaynelle said with a nod. “Or it could also be that the killer found Larry before the accomplice got there.”

“So—our intruder of last night could have been the accomplice looking for what Larry had with him, and not the killer. Yes, it sounds plausible. Our early morning visitor may have been in cahoots with Larry in some nefarious scheme.”

“
Nefarious scheme
, Trinket? Good lord.”

I blithely ignored Bitty.

“But if we assume that Larry Whittier had an accomplice, then we must assume that he was not a totally honest person himself. Right?” Carolann looked at all of us for a moment with a frown, as if trying to fit this new assumption into the puzzle.

Thinking aloud, I said, “But why would he write these numbers on an antique label, unless he wanted to hide them from someone—presumably the killer. It makes no sense if he merely meant to hide them for the sake of hiding them, so a friend or an
accomplice
, if you will, is almost a necessary component.”

“Do you think maybe he had a premonition he was going to die?” Gaynelle said, but Bitty shook her head.

“If he had a premonition he was about to be murdered, why didn’t he leave? He could have hightailed it out of there with no one knowing anything. He wouldn’t hide this somewhere where no one was likely to find it. Except me, of course, but I wasn’t looking in the piano for clues. I was checking out the antique.”

“On the other hand, this piece of paper may be nothing more than a label, and whoever sold the piano wrote down lot numbers,” Carolann said. “That’s how they sometimes sell antiques at auctions, by the lot.”

“But wouldn’t it cheapen the value to be scribbling on an actual document that belongs with the antique?” I asked. “Why do that?”

“Exactly.” Gaynelle tapped a long fingernail against the paper. “These numbers were written for a reason. Whether Larry Whittier wrote them down or not, I do not know. But they must mean something. To someone. We can share this with Rob and Rayna, and let them decide whether to try and find the reason this was hidden from sight.”

“Or,” said Bitty, “we can check it out first for ourselves. It’s a clue. I love clues.”

Her eyes were bright, and not just from her vodka stinger, I suspected. Bitty once seemed to thrive on melodrama. Now I suspect she has become an adrenaline junkie. The very thought made me shiver. No doubt, it would make Jackson Lee Brunetti shiver, as well. Keeping Bitty on a leash was next to impossible, and quite often more dangerous than whatever it was she was trying to do.

I said to her, “I think we better just give this information to Rob and let him decide how he wishes to proceed with it.”

“That would be telling on Rayna. She made our reservations here and gave us a few suggestions on what to ask. Do you want to be responsible for a family spat?”

“I’d think that was better than being responsible for bailing you out of jail again,” I said, quite reasonably, I thought. “Look at what’s happened when all we did was come here to ask a few innocent questions. Gaynelle got hit with a Mason jar and I got my neck whacked by a Ninja.”

“Don’t be so cowardly, Trinket. I lost a nice pair of expensive slippers and broke a nail, but you don’t hear me complaining, do you?”

“Only every fifteen minutes or so. Really, Bitty, I vote we give this information to Rob and let him handle it. What does everyone else say?”

I looked around our end of the table. Gaynelle nodded agreement, and Carolann pursed her lips and looked at Bitty. I could see she was wavering. It was obvious that she was caught up in the excitement and had no idea of the severity of situations Bitty—and I admit,
I
—could get us in. So I leaned toward her across the table and empty dishes.

“I once found a frozen corpse in Bitty’s coat closet. Trust me when I say there are things you never want to see when you get involved in a murder case.”

Carolann’s green eyes got nearly as wide as dessert plates. “Oh my,” she said on an exhalation, “I’d forgotten about that. It was pretty horrible, I imagine.”

“Not something you can erase from your memory bank without getting a frontal lobotomy,” I replied.

Our waiter chose that moment to appear at our table. “Dessert, ladies?”

It took our minds off murder and clues as we decided to order the lemon cake, Key Lime pie, pecan pie, and chocolate mousse. Then we all shared with each other so we could taste each luscious confection and decide which one was best. Of course, then we all had our favorites, so it ended up in a draw between the Key Lime pie and the Karo Pecan pie.

Once back in Bitty’s car, we took a small tour of Clarksdale. It was the first time I had seen it in daylight in years. There is a lovely little park by the Sunflower River, and old-fashioned street lights on the curved bridge; large, gracious homes edge part of the downtown area, and Sunflower Square has upscale shops as well as a thrift store and a novelty shop that sells everything from old silver to old bell jars, embroidered table cloths, kites, and a candy counter with bins of chocolate-covered peanuts, raisins, and other goodies. Outside the store there are hanging baskets of flowers, vegetables in four-inch pots, and bedding plants for sale. It’s catty-corner from Madidi’s, an elegant restaurant also owned by Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett. Gas lights reminiscent of New Orleans flank the double doors, and the building is painted a rich, dark rose color.

Clarksdale seems to be a quiet little town, almost sleepy, with traffic mostly on the highways and not in the downtown area. Two of the downtown hotels that are no doubt on the historical register are being refurbished, and there are signs of new life in the railway station and small businesses. Artsy shops and a bakery have opened in the old railway station, and it’s obvious a lot of care has been taken to make it appealing. There is the prerequisite Walmart on the outskirts of town, of course, and other chain stores dot 61 Highway as well as Highway 49.

On the way back to Holly Springs, I reflected on what we had learned, and what we suspected. It seemed to me that we had overlooked one very important fact:
why
had Larry Whittier been at the Shack Up Inn in the first place? As a hideout, it was rather public. Yet he had gone there, presumably to hide from someone: notably on the surface—Rob Rainey. But Larry was facing a minor charge of vandalism to a storage facility. Not exactly the crime of the century. Why go into hiding over missing his court date?