Dixie Diva Blues (36 page)

“Bitty,” I said, “will you do us both a favor and remember that you’ve just been through a terrible ordeal? And, really, you look much,
much
better than any other woman would look after going through—”

“Oh, that’s it,” Bitty cut me off. She waved both her hands in the air. “Any time you say something like that, I know it’s bad. Where’s a restroom that isn’t filled with police?”

I just pointed in the right direction. Bitty didn’t bother asking me if I wanted to go with her. She probably knew I’d rather eat dirt than listen to her screech from that close a proximity.

I will say that when she did scream, only two people among those being let back into the casino hit the ground and covered their heads. It was an elderly couple, and I think I heard the man holler something like “Air raid!” as he went down. I figure he must have Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. I understand that World War II was really hard on people’s nerves.

Bitty didn’t rebound from the shock
of her appearance until long after we’d gone back to Holly Springs. She insisted upon wearing a bag over her head before coming out of the casino restroom, and the only one that could be found to fit over her head with her hair sticking out like frayed wire was a black plastic garbage bag usually used to take out thirty gallons of trash. While I sympathized with her horror, I couldn’t help thinking that karma doesn’t always wait too long to bite back. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that
I
had been the one in public who looked like I’d stuck my finger into an electrical socket.

Gracious person that I am, I refrained from mentioning it to Bitty in her unstable state of mind. Her previous calm had gone the way of the Dodo bird. In other words, she was a sniveling wreck. I also refrained from saying “I told you so.” Yes. I am a saint.

Suffice it to say that only after she had showered for thirty minutes and downed two margaritas did she approach anything normal again. Normal for Bitty, that is.

“I can’t believe I have to throw my Chanel pantsuit away,” she grumbled once we all sat in her parlor trying to recuperate. “It’s totally ruined.”

“I can’t believe you wore a bright pink pantsuit at all,” I said as I contemplated the relaxing qualities of tequila. “You were a neon flag saying ‘Hey, look at me!’ It’s no wonder Walsh and Garcia found you so quickly.”

Bitty looked at me over the rim of her margarita glass. “Don’t think they missed
you
, cupcake. You towered over everyone there.”

“What’s with the calling me ‘cupcake’ thing? You’re the second person today to do that.” I glanced over at Jake, who sat back in one of Bitty’s extra-comfy chairs with a kind of glazed look in his eyes that had nothing to do with tequila. Because of the botched “rescue” of Bitty, he wasn’t even going to be allowed to assist in any kind of investigation of the casino fiasco. He’d been put on desk duty while his superiors figured out just what they want to do with him. I had a few suggestions, but I’d decided to save them for a later date when we all had time to recover. No point in hitting a man when he’s down.

Bitty waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t know. I must have heard it somewhere. Why? You don’t like being called a cupcake?”

I thought about it a minute. “I don’t know. I guess that depends on who’s doing the calling and how they really mean it. Some people use it in a demeaning way.” What I really meant was that some men used it in a less than flattering tone. “It’s sort of like when Rob called us over-the-hill
Charlie’s Angels
, if you know what I mean.”

Bitty nodded. She had a snowy white towel wrapped around her wet hair like a turban. Instead of her usual pink silk, she wore a Chinese silk caftan in a dramatic deep red with tiny mountains and temples woven in gold thread throughout the material. It shimmered all the way to her feet, on which she wore gold lamé slippers. Most of the fingernails on her right hand were broken, but she’d already called her new manicurist at home and made an appointment for the next morning. Bitty can be very resourceful about things like that.

I still wore the tan slacks and cotton blouse that I’d worn to work that morning. I felt grungy. Relaxed, but grungy. I don’t get my nails done, so I keep them short. Usually clean, too. Today was an exception for some reason. It probably had to do with my earlier activities in dealing with dangerous criminals.

“I’m sure Rob will reconsider that remark since we’ve solved the crime now,” my delusional cousin replied to my previous comment about us being over-the-hill
Charlie’s Angels.

I just looked at her over the rim of my margarita glass. No salt. “How do you figure that?” I asked when it seemed that no one else wanted to challenge her statement. “I don’t think the police consider this crime as solved yet. Am I right, Jake?”

Jake gave me a brooding look. Honestly, men can be just as melodramatic as any woman, I promise you that. He wore a tragic expression when he said, “How would I know? I’ve been taken completely off the case, remember?”

I barely kept from rolling my eyes. To halt the tacky retort trembling on my lips, I applied them to the margarita glass. Two swallows of delicious margarita on the rocks later, and I felt capable of speaking without derision.

“Yes, I do remember that, Jake. I’m sorry this has happened. Does that mean you are free to work on the case on your own time now?”

He stared at me as if he had no idea what I meant. Then he shook his head. “I don’t think you know what being taken off the case means, Trinket. I’ll be on a desk. I’m not supposed to work the case
at all
.”

“Nonsense,” Bitty said. She looked over at Jackson Lee. He sat barely two feet from her as if afraid to leave her alone. He treats her like she’s made of fine china, but he should know by now that she’s more like rubber than anything breakable. I’ve never known anyone else who can bounce back so quickly from situations that’d probably put ninety percent of our population in a nursing home gumming their meals.

“Isn’t that right, sugar?” she asked Jackson Lee. “Can’t Jake do what he wants on his own time?”

“Sure,” he said. “As long as he doesn’t interfere with police business.”

“See?” Bitty looked back at Jake and said. “You can keep working the case, too.”

“Too?” I echoed in a suddenly hoarse voice. “What do you mean,
too?
”

“Well honestly, Trinket, you don’t think we can just let this injustice go, do you? I mean, poor Rob has been accused—and now indicted—for a murder he didn’t commit, and if the Holly Springs police won’t help him, and the Clarksdale police are convinced he killed Larry, why, it’s up to us to convince them of the truth.”

“And how do you propose to do that, sugar?” Jackson Lee asked with a worried frown. “I don’t want you going off on your own again. You saw what can happen. You’re not going to do anything foolish, are you?”

I stood up. “Good heavens, look at the time. I must get home. It’s nearly nine-thirty, and I still have to feed a herd of wild cats and a peevish dog. Excuse me for not staying. I’d love to linger and listen to Bitty’s plans, really I would. Duty calls, however.”

Jake gave me a sour look. “Coward.”

“Oh, yes. A devout coward.”

I made my escape with barely a moment to spare. As I went out the front door I heard Bitty say, “I don’t know why someone hasn’t already thought of this . . .”

That was enough to make me nearly run to my car. I’d had enough excitement for the day. I was just grateful that Bitty hadn’t yet recalled that our trauma stemmed from one of
my
plans. It had seemed so simple, so safe. And yet it had turned into a truly terrible nightmare.

Now Jake was in trouble, Bitty had narrowly escaped being killed, and I had begun to rethink my detection skills. Not that I ever had a lot of faith in them, but it sure seemed as if some rather glaring evidence had been ignored. And not just by me.

As I drove home to what were no doubt indignantly hungry animals, I reflected on what I knew were facts—whether they made sense or not—and what I just suspected. It wasn’t as long a list as I had thought.

First, Walsh and Garcia were definitely involved with Larry Whittier. They knew about the flash drive; they wanted it for whatever reason, but it was no doubt—and here’s where I roamed into just the suspicion part of my summary—full of information that was vital to them. Too bad Jake hadn’t been able to access that info before having to return it. Now we’d probably never know what was on it. Or at least, not until Walsh and Garcia were caught.

Second on my list of factual puzzle pieces, Lee Hazen had been the Ninja burglar who broke into the shack where Larry Whittier had stayed and been murdered. That begged the question of
why
; on the surface, we had no facts. My suspicion was that he also wanted to find the flash drive. It was crucial to more than just the murderers, quite obviously. That also begged the question of why. What could it contain that both Larry Whittier and Lee Hazen wanted desperately enough to risk being murdered? I could see Larry taking risks if he had somehow caught Walsh and Garcia fudging on their taxes or stealing money from the casino, but for Lee Hazen to risk his neck after it was obvious how far those two men would go just didn’t seem logical. Unless . . . unless it was about more than catching tax cheats or embezzlers.

I pondered that a few moments. What was the number one thing people would risk their lives for? Next to family, the obvious answer was money. Had Larry Whittier been foolish enough to trade his silence for a portion of money stolen from Bailey’s Casino? If so, that may explain why he had been reluctant to be candid with Rob about his motives for vandalizing the storage unit. He hadn’t been after his saxophone. He’d been after the flash drive that probably held details about the embezzled funds. That was my suspicion; not factual, but it was the only thing that made sense to me.

I ran that through my cluttered brain a few more times. Okay, what was on the flash drive had to relate to money. So that would mean . . . bank account numbers? Say, in Switzerland or offshore? Would Larry Whittier have access to that kind of information? I had no idea if it was easy to open up accounts in Switzerland or offshore. Maybe I needed to find someone who could answer those questions.

That would have to wait until another day. Meanwhile, I ran another possibility through my internal logic scanner. Yes, I have one. I call it my brain. It’s just not usually plugged in to a power source.

Third scenario: None of the above suspicions had a shred of validity. Larry Whittier had been murdered for another reason, like cheating with another man’s wife or something similar. Rob had just had the bad fortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If that were so, the other half of my brain argued, then why did Lee Hazen break into the shack the very first night it wasn’t being guarded by police? He expected to find something there, obviously. Lee Hazen knew Larry; that was fact because Larry had tried to break into a storage unit rented in Hazen’s name. The fact that a musical instrument belonging to Larry was in there validated it. Hazen had come into its possession somehow. So, if the unit had been rented by Hazen, why didn’t he step up and say that he knew Larry and had given him permission to go into the locked unit? That would have kept Larry from being charged with a crime. How did Hazen’s murder tie into Larry’s?

Obviously, they were both hiding a lot more than a saxophone. No one gets killed for an empty file cabinet and sheet music. Hm. I had missed something. It had to do with music . . . the missing pages of the sheet music book, perhaps? But it had been just a plain music book, not anything antique or special. No, that couldn’t be it. There was something about music, though, that eluded me. It pertained to this situation, yet I just could not quite put my mental finger on it . . . sheet music, saxophone, musical notes—that was it! Musical notes! Those strange letters on the manufacturer’s certificate Bitty found were
musical notes
. No wonder Rob and the Fed guy hadn’t been able to decode it. It was written in a code only a musician could read. So—could
I
unravel the code?

When I was a pre-teen, I had decided to take piano lessons. It was a short-lived bout with what I tried to convince myself was a marvelous talent. My piano teacher told my mother I had a deaf ear and absolutely no aptitude for music, but I’d probably make an excellent track star. Since I was already tired of practicing scales for an hour every day it was not a huge disappointment to me. But I had learned to read music.

Hah! I congratulated myself on my perspicacity, then remembered that the last time I’d congratulated myself on something, not an hour later I was neck deep in another murder case. I took back my self-congratulation and made a mental note to contact Jake with what I suspected. He could take it from there. Or not. Well, at least he could give it to someone else in the department.

It wasn’t until I reached home and let myself into my now-empty house that I had the thought that somehow, Miranda Watson must be involved. How else would she have known about Walsh and Garcia? Maybe I needed to ask her just how far her involvement went before I gave her name to authorities. Or to Bitty.