Killer On A Hot Tin Roof (11 page)

“Should I call his name?” June asked as we started along the first path we came to.

“No, if he’s drinkin', he’ll know that somebody’s lookin’ forhim and he’s liable to hide,” I said. “There are tables in here. We’ll check them.”

“What if he’s somewhere in that … that jungle?”

I thought about it and said, “If we don’t find him at one of the tables, we’ll go back upstairs and look down from my balcony. If he’s in here, we ought to be able to spot him.”

I didn’t mention having gazed down at the garden earlier, just before I accidentally spotted Callie Madison and Dr. Jeffords. At that time, the only one I’d seen moving around the garden was Dr. Keller. Dr. Powers could have been at one of the tables then, shielded from my view by its umbrella.

June and I twisted and turned through the garden for a couple of minutes, passing several of the tables where hotel guests sat drinking and talking. At one of the tables, a man and a woman were kissing, but the man wasn’t Papa Larry. As we turned a corner around some flowering bushes, I saw a white-jacketed waiter coming toward us, an empty tray tucked under his arm. He smiled and nodded and stepped aside so that we could get past him on the path.

I stopped instead and asked him, “Have you seen a big fella sitting alone at one of the tables in here? He’s balding and has a little beard.”

He didn’t stop smiling as he said, “The hotel staff has a policy of discretion, ma’am–”

“For God’s sake,” June interrupted. “He’s my father-in-law, not some cheating husband. He’ll be pouring booze down his throat and he has stomach cancer. It could kill him. Now do you want to talk to me about discretion?”

That shook the smile off the waiter’s face. He half-turned and waved the empty tray in the direction we’d been going along the path. “He’s up there. I just delivered a rum and cola to him. But I swear I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to.”

I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, but June didn’tlook like she was in any mood to be forgiving. I figured we’d better go on and deal with her father-in-law rather than standing around fussing at a waiter, so I just nodded and said, “Thanks. Come on, June.”

She glared at the waiter but followed me. We went around a couple more bends in the path, then saw the table in a little open area on the left, with a bright yellow umbrella above it. Dr. Lawrence Powers slouched in a wrought-iron chair that looked like it was bending a little under his weight. He had a half-empty glass in front of him.

“Papa Larry!” June cried.

His bleary eyes widened in surprise as he looked at us. Quickly, he lifted the glass to his lips and guzzled down the rest of the drink, even as June hurried forward to try to snatch it out of his hand. She got the glass, but only after it was empty.

“Too late!” he said triumphantly. “Too late, Junebug!”

“My God, Papa Larry,” she said, her voice shaking. “You’re drunk.”

“Gloriously, uproariously drunk, for the first time in ages! And it feels wonderful, you hear me, wonderful! My brain is fueled and lubricated again, girl. You know a brain as creative as mine can’t run on your damned milk!”

“You old fool,” she said between gritted teeth. “You’re going to kill yourself, you know that, don’t you?”

“Then I will die a happy man and go to be with my Lucille.” He put both hands flat on the table and went on. “Have you ever been happy, Junebug? Has that cold-blooded son o’ mine ever truly made you happy? I don’t think so. Leastways, I never heard any evidence of it through the walls at night!”

I had to bite my lip to keep from saying something about how Papa Larry had directed too many Tennessee Williamsplays in his time. He was spouting dialogue that sounded like it came from a play, and not a very good one, at that.

But the thing of it was, he was drunk, and somebody who’s drunk is usually dead serious. He meant what he was saying, even if he was being overly dramatic about it, and his words found their target, too, because June turned pale with anger and hurt. She said, “Let’s get you back up to your room, Papa Larry. You’re going to be lucky if you wake up in the morning. We’ll need to get you to a doctor tomorrow. I’ll call your oncologist in Atlanta and get a referral–”

“I don’t need a doctor! I feel fine!”

I said, “We want to keep you feelin’ fine, Dr. Powers. It’s late, and you need some rest.”

“I am a mite tired,” he rumbled. He squinted at me. “Who’re you again, Red?”

I ignored the nickname and said, “Delilah Dickinson. I’m in charge of the tour.”

“Oh, yeah. I ‘member you now. How’s about helpin’ me up?”

June and I got on either side of him and took hold of his arms. I don’t know how much he weighed–close to three hundred pounds, surely–but we had to struggle to get him on his feet. He was too drunk to give us much help, but after a minute we managed to get him standing. He took a few unsteady steps down the path with us helping him, then stopped short and said, “Oh, hell. I’m gonna be sick.”

He jerked away from us. We couldn’t hold him. He lunged to the edge of the path and plowed into the shrubs, parting them with his thick arms. He fell to his knees and started throwing up.

June looked mortified. She muttered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” I told her. “And not the first sick drunk I’ve had to deal with on a tour, either.”

“I just hope he’s not throwing up blood.”

“Yeah, you and me both.” I had visions of a 9-1-1 call and an ambulance ride to the nearest hospital.

When Dr. Powers was through being sick, June and I started to step off the path to help him up. Before we could reach him, though, he slumped onto his side and lay there motionless. With fear in her voice, June said, “Papa Larry?”

He started snoring.

“You … you old fart!” she said. “Now what are we going to do? He’s too big for us to lift his dead weight.”

“Let’s see if we can wake him up enough to help us,” I said. I pushed some of the branches aside and moved into the garden, being careful to step around the place where he’d been sick. As I reached Papa Larry’s side, I knelt and took hold of his arm, giving it a good shake. “Dr. Powers! Dr. Powers, you need to wake up again for a little while.”

Papa Larry kept snoring.

I sighed and shook my head and, as I did, I looked past his bulky shape and saw a shoe sticking out from under a bush. Curious, I moved my head so I could see better and saw a skinny ankle in an argyle sock above the shoe. My heart started to pound harder. Above the shoe and the argyle sock was a trouser leg, and it looked like it went with an old brown suit.

Without thinking too much about what I was doing, I clambered over Papa Larry without disturbing his drunken stupor. I jerked branches aside and saw the rest of the trousers and the suit coat and the bony shape of the man wearing them. I saw a hat lying upside down and then a bald head covered with blood, and then I dropped to my hands and knees next to the body and found myself staring in horror into the dead eyes of Howard Burleson.

I
was shocked beyond words and for a second I couldn’t think straight. Despite what had happened on some of my other tours, my first thought wasn’t that the old man had been murdered, but rather that he had wandered out here into the garden, gotten turned around and lost, and in his panic had run into a tree or fallen and hit his head. He had seemed so frail, I didn’t think it would have taken much of a blow to finish him off.

But then I saw that there weren’t any trees around for him to bash his head against, no rocks or roots he could have landed on. That was when the suspicion started to well up in me. I shook my head and thought, “Not again, not again, not again …”

“Ms. Dickinson!” That was June Powers’s urgent voice intruding on my thoughts. “Ms. Dickinson, what’s wrong? What are you saying?”

I guess I wasn’t just thinking that shocked litany; I was saying it out loud. I started to back away from the body. To do that, I had to crawl over Papa Larry again. He was still snoring away.

I pushed myself back to my feet and stumbled out of the bushes. “We … we’ve gotta get some help,” I told June.

“He’s so drunk you can’t wake him up. I knew it.” She sighed in exasperation. “I’ll go get Edgar. He’s not much good for anything, but if you point at something and tell him to pick it up, he can usually manage that. I’d rather not involve the hotel staff unless we have to.”

“Oh, they’ll have to be involved,” I said, “and the police, too.”

June stared at me. “The police?” she repeated. “Oh, no, please, Ms. Dickinson, I don’t want to have Papa Larry arrested. His health is too bad for that. I’m begging you–”

I held up a hand to stop her. “I’m not talkin’ about your father-in-law,” I told her. “I’m talkin’ about the dead body that’s in there beside him.”

June’s eyes bulged out even more. “D-d-dead body?” she stammered out. “There’s a body in there?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Who is it?”

“Howard Burleson.”

I could tell she didn’t recognize the name right away. Then she thought about it for a couple of seconds and said, “That old man Michael Frasier brought with him? The one who claimed to be one of Tennessee Williams’s lovers?”

“Heard about that, did you?”

“I think everybody at the festival has heard about it. Dr. Frasier caused quite a sensation. Which is exactly what he wanted, of course.” June shook her head. “And you say he’s dead? Could you tell what happened? A heart attack or a stroke, something like that?”

“The cops’ll have to figure that out,” I said. I didn’t want rumors to start spreading and, for all I knew, June might be such a big gossip that she’d go and alert everybody in the hotel to the fact that Burleson was dead. “Go to the front desk and tell them there’s an emergency, that we need the policeand an ambulance right away.” I was almost completely certain that Burleson was dead, but on the slim chance that he wasn’t, he needed medical help as soon as possible.

“But … but what about Papa Larry?”

A raucous snore came from behind the bushes, as if to answer her question.

“I’ll keep an eye on him,” I promised. “I’m gonna stay right here until the authorities arrive. Somebody needs to watch the scene and make sure it’s not disturbed.”

She frowned at me. “You sound like one of those TV cop shows.”

I didn’t explain to her that I had more experience with homicide investigations than I’d ever wanted to. In fact, if you’d asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said that my desire to be involved in such things was absolutely zero. But they seemed to keep cropping up anyway, whether I wanted them to or not.

“Just go tell ‘em at the desk we need help, okay? I’m pretty sure Mr. Burleson’s dead, but he might not be.”

Understanding dawned on June’s face. “Oh. Okay. But don’t let anything happen to Papa Larry.”

“I won’t,” I promised.

She turned and hurried off along the path, and the way it twisted through the garden, it was only a few seconds before she was out of sight. That left me standing there alone, except for the guy who was passed out drunk and the bloody corpse of an old man.

That wasn’t a very pleasant situation.

It got even more worrisome when I realized that I didn’t know how long Burleson had been dead. I had been too shocked to check for a pulse, so I hadn’t touched his body. He might have still been warm.

If that was the case, then it was possible that whoever killed him was still close by.

That thought made me glance around nervously, but of course I couldn’t see anything except the plants that surrounded me and the path that led through them. Larry Powers made a burbling noise and stopped snoring. That got me to worrying that he had stopped breathing as well, and even though I told myself I was sure he was all right, I really wasn’t. I had promised June I would look after him, and I sure as heck didn’t want to have two clients die on this tour.

So I took a deep breath, then turned around and pushed my way into the bushes again. I only had to go a couple of steps before I could see Papa Larry again. I looked at him intently until I was sure that his chest was still rising and falling. I didn’t want to go any closer because then I would have had an even better look at Burleson’s corpse.

Once I was certain that Powers hadn’t died in his sleep, I felt a little better. I had started to back out of the bushes when I saw something move ahead of me. Curiosity made me stop and look closer. The gaps in the plant life lined up just right for me to be able to peer through the bushes to the path on the far side where Howard Burleson lay. All I could see was a narrow slice of it, but as I watched, I saw a figure moving away from me at an angle, then disappearing. Maybe it was the circumstances, but something about the person struck me as furtive, even as I recognized the blond hair.

Callie Madison had good reason to be skulking around, I thought. She was cheating on her husband and didn’t want him to find out about it.

But was she also a murderer?

I couldn’t stop my thoughts from traveling along that trail. I didn’t know what room the Madisons were in, but I could find out. If it was on the same side of the hotel that my room wason, she could have taken one of the other elevators down from Dr. Jeffords’s room, then cut across the garden to take one of the main elevators back up to her room.

Of course, she could have just gone around the corridor that encircled the atrium and gotten back to her room that way, if it was on the same floor. But she would have been more likely to run into someone she knew that way, and by now it was after midnight. If some of the other professors saw her, it was possible that one of them might say something to Jake about it, and then he would want to know where she had been. I was guessing that he’d been asleep when she slipped out of their room.

But by cutting through the garden to the main elevators, if Jake heard about it, she could make some plausible excuse about going down to the lobby. I supposed the front desk in the St. Emilion, like most hotels, had a supply of toothbrushes, razors, etc., the sort of things that people sometimes forget when they pack, or lose along the way during a trip. If she told Jake she had gone after something like that, he might wonder about it, but he probably wouldn’t be too suspicious.