Killer On A Hot Tin Roof (12 page)

Of course, all that was just a theory, and maybe a farfetched one at that. One thing I had learned in recent years, though, was that life could be pretty farfetched at times, especially where murder was concerned.

Did I really think that Callie Madison could have killed Howard Burleson? I couldn’t think of any reason in the world why she would have … but I never would have suspected her of playing around with Dr. Jeffords, either.

It was more likely, though, that she might have seen something that would provide a clue to the real killer. The police would have to talk to her.

Which meant she’d have to explain what she’d been doing down here in the garden at this time of night, and Jake was bound to find out about it, and more than likely her marriagewould be ruined. “Shoot,” I muttered to myself. Seeing Callie had put me in a bad position. I didn’t want to conceal the fact that I’d seen her from the cops. For one thing, the sooner this case was cleared up, the better, and Callie might have vital information.

Of course, said a little voice in the back of my head, I could always talk to her first, before I told the cops anything about her being in the vicinity of the murder …

“You’re crazy,” I told that little voice. I’d had plenty of trying to solve crimes. I wasn’t cut out for it, no matter what Will seemed to believe.

But I couldn’t stop my thoughts from replaying everything that had happened tonight. I had seen Dr. Ian Keller down here, too, I remembered. That was earlier, but I didn’t have any idea how long Burleson had been dead. Keller was big enough and intimidating enough to cast in the role of a murderer a lot easier than Callie Madison was.

Again, though, I couldn’t come up with any reason why Dr. Keller would have done such a thing. He didn’t have any stake in whether an old man lived or died.

I could think of two people who did, though: Michael Frasier and Tamara Paige.

Before I could ponder on that anymore, I heard hurried footsteps coming toward me. It sounded like several people, so I wasn’t surprised when Dale Gillette came around the corner in the path, followed by June Powers and a couple of security guards probably summoned from the hotel’s parking garage.

“Oh, my God,” Gillette said. “Where is he? Where’s the body?”

He still wore his suit and tie and looked as dapper as ever. I couldn’t help but ask, “Don’t you ever go home?”

“I am home,” he snapped. “I live in the hotel. Now take us to the body.”

“Right back here,” I said, pushing some branches aside.

Gillette shouldered past me and stopped beside Larry Powers.

“Not him,” I said. “He’s just drunk and passed out. The other one, right there on the other side of that bush.”

“Oh.” Gillette leaned over and took a closer look, then said in a shaky voice, “Oh, Lord. He looks dead, all right.”

One of the security guards said, “Let me check. I used to be a paramedic.”

He stepped around Powers and dropped to one knee beside Burleson. It didn’t take him long to check for a pulse and not find one. As the guard looked up at us, he shook his head and said, “Sorry, Mr. Gillette. The old guy’s dead, all right. The police will still want an ambulance to transport him, though, so it’s good that you called for one.”

“There’s nothing good about this,” Gillette said, sounding stricken. “This is terrible, just terrible. Roy, can you tell, did he fall and hit his head or something?”

The security guard leaned over to take a better look at Burleson’s head without touching him, and when he looked up this time, his expression was grim. “Nah, he didn’t hit his head. Somebody hit it for him.”

Gillette frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“His head’s bashed in, Mr. Gillette. Somebody killed him.”

Gillette staggered, literally staggered. “Killed him?” he repeated. “You mean … murdered him?”

“Yeah. This is a homicide. I saw plenty of ‘em when I was an EMT.”

Gillette started backing away as if he couldn’t stand to be that close to the body. He was about to trip over the still-sleeping Larry Powers when I took hold of his arm to keep him from falling.

“Careful,” I told him.

He turned to look at me, and the dapper, self-assured young man he’d been earlier transformed into a scared kid just a year or so out of Cornell.

“This can’t be murder,” he said. “It just can’t be.”

“You’re bound to have had guests die in the hotel before. It’s not that uncommon.”

“Yeah, there have been a few in the time I’ve been here, but … but they were natural causes. And one drug overdose. Not … not murder. This is going to be terrible for the St. Emilion’s reputation.”

It wasn’t going to do wonders for my agency, either, I thought, especially considering the things that had happened on some of my previous tours. But at the moment I couldn’t let myself think about that. An old man had been killed. The only thing that mattered right now was finding out who murdered him.

Roy, the security guard who had been a paramedic, turned to Papa Larry. “What about this guy?” he asked. “What’s wrong with him?” Before anybody could answer, he leaned over, took a whiff, and said, “Never mind. I can smell the booze.”

“He’s sick,” June put in. “He’s had stomach cancer. He’s supposed to be in remission, but he shouldn’t be drinking.”

Roy frowned. “No, he shouldn’t. Is he the one who threw up over there?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, I don’t see any blood in it, that’s good. Maybe we’d better get him out of here. Doug, give me a hand.”

The other security guard stepped forward, and they each took hold of one of Papa Larry’s arms. They hadn’t even started trying to lift him, though, when somebody said, “Hold it! What are you doing there?”

I looked up and saw a couple of men in suits on the path. Several uniformed police officers were behind them. The twomen looked like detectives, which surprised me. I’d figured that patrol officers would get here first.

“Who’s in charge here?” asked the man who had just spoken. He was a rawboned white man with a shock of red hair. His partner was black, tall, and slender with glasses perched on his nose.

“I … I guess I am,” Gillette replied. “I’m the assistant manager of the hotel. Dale Gillette.”

“Has the manager been notified, Mr. Gillette?” the other detective asked.

“Not yet. I wanted to be sure what the situation was first.”

“We’ll take care of that, then. All communications will flow through us. I’m Detective Nesbit.” He inclined his head toward the redhead. “This is Detective Ramsey.”

Ramsey gave us a curt, unfriendly nod. He was obviously in a bad mood, which didn’t bode well for things going smoothly. Detective Nesbit seemed to be okay, though … or maybe they were just already doing the old good cop, bad cop bit. It seemed sort of early for that to me, but maybe that was the way they played everything, right from the start.

“Step away from the body,” Ramsey told the two security guards. “You’d better be glad we got here in time to stop you from disturbing our corpse.”

“That’s not your corpse,” I said. “The dead man’s over there.” I pointed to where Burleson’s foot stuck out from behind the bush.

Ramsey glared at me and jerked his chin toward Papa Larry. “Then what’s wrong with him?”

“Passed out drunk,” Roy said.

“He in any danger of choking or anything like that?”

Roy shrugged. “Doesn’t appear to be. He’s breathing all right, at least as far as I can tell.”

“All right, leave him right where he is for now. It’s bad enough all you people have been trampling around here for God knows how long, messing up our forensics. Nobody move until I tell you it’s all right, okay? You … Gillette … what’s the story here?”

Gillette shook his head. “I really don’t know, Detective. It was that woman who summoned me out here.” He sounded like he was getting some of his aplomb back, but he still looked like a scared little boy as he pointed to June Powers.

Ramsey turned his head to look at her. “Who are you?”

“I’m Dr. June Powers,” she said. “And that man lying there is Dr. Lawrence Powers, my father-in-law.”

“You mean the drunk guy or the dead guy?”

June looked scared and mad at the same time. “The man who’s passed out. He’s very ill, by the way.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see to it that he gets medical attention if he needs it. So tell us how you found the body.”

June shook her head. “But I didn’t find the body. She did.”

You guessed it. Her finger was pointing at me. Ramsey and Nesbit both looked at me, and Nesbit asked, “What’s your name, ma’am?”

“Delilah Dickinson,” I told him. He had taken a notebook from inside his coat and started writing names in it. He added mine to the list. Then he looked up with a slight frown.

“That name is familiar.”

Ramsey told one of the uniformed cops, “Call it in and have ‘em run the name through the databases. Dickinson, Delilah.”

“No, that’s not it,” Nesbit said, shaking his head. “I know I’ve heard that name before…. Where are you from, Ms. Dickinson?”

“Atlanta,” I said with a sinking feeling.

A smile suddenly lit up Nesbit’s face. “I knew it!” he said. “The
Gone With the Wind
murder!”

R
amsey turned to stare at his partner. “The what?” he asked.

“The
Gone With the Wind
murder,” Nesbit repeated, although I’d just as soon not have had to hear that phrase again. “I read about it a couple of years ago. A tour group was visiting one of those plantations near Atlanta where they put on sort of a reenactment of
Gone With the Wind.
Somebody got murdered, and the lady who was running the tour group figured out who the killer was and solved the case.” He pointed at me. “Her.”

Ramsey turned toward me again. “Is that right?”

I shrugged. “I was there. I don’t know how much I did to actually solve anything–”

“And then last year there was something else,” Nesbit broke in. “Something about a riverboat. I don’t remember the details, but I know there was another murder–”

“Sounds like a Black Widow situation to me,” Ramsey said.

“No, no, she’s more like that old lady on TV who solves all the murders. I mean, that show was before my time, but I’ve seen some episodes in reruns.”

I didn’t know what bothered me more about what Nesbit had just said, but I shoved it all aside. “Look, fellas, this is your case. I just happened to be here.”

Ramsey gave his partner an ugly grin. “Well, ain’t that nice of the lady? She’s gonna let us solve this homicide on our own.”

Nesbit ignored that and said, “So you’re the one who found the body, Ms. Dickinson?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“How did that come about? Start at the beginning, please, and tell us everything you can remember, whether it seems important or not. Start with how you know the victim.”

“Well, I’d never met Mr. Burleson before this morning,” I began. “Or rather, yesterday morning, I guess it would be, technically, since it’s after midnight–”

“Yeah, we got that,” Ramsey broke in. “Get on with it.”

I did, telling them about how the tour group had gathered at the airport in Atlanta to fly here to New Orleans for the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. I explained about Burleson accompanying Dr. Michael Frasier because he’d supposedly been acquainted–intimately acquainted–with Tennessee Williams. I even told them about Burleson’s claim to have written
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
and as June Powers listened to that, her eyes widened.

“That’s ludicrous,” she interrupted to say. “There’s never been the slightest hint that anyone else was involved in the writing of Williams’s plays, other than the first one he wrote while he was in college. He collaborated with another student on that one.”

“Skip the lecture, Professor,” Ramsey said. “Go on, Ms. Dickinson.”

I told them the quick version of everything else that had happened, except for a couple of things. I didn’t say anything about seeing Callie Madison on the balcony with Dr. Jeffords, and when Nesbit asked me if I had seen anyone else in the garden around the time I discovered the body, I mentionedseeing Dr. Keller, as well as a blond woman, but I didn’t tell them that I had recognized Callie. I still couldn’t believe she’d had anything to do with Burleson’s death, so I wanted to talk to her first. I hoped that decision wouldn’t come back to haunt me.

Explaining how I’d come to find the body was easy. I just told the two detectives exactly what had happened and didn’t hold anything back about that. It wasn’t until I noticed June looking nervous that I realized what must be going through her mind: drunk or not, Larry Powers had been out here in the hotel garden around the time of Burleson’s death. The cops would probably consider him a suspect, too, along with Dr. Keller and the blond woman I hadn’t named.

Of course, there could have been a dozen other people in this miniature jungle around that time, I thought. It was designed for privacy. Just because I hadn’t seen them didn’t mean they weren’t there. I was sure Nesbit and Ramsey would question the waiters who’d been delivering drinks out here and try to track down everyone who had been around the scene.

It was harder to answer when Nesbit asked, “Do you know of any enemies the victim might have had? Anyone who might have had a grudge against Mr. Burleson?”

“He seemed like a perfectly harmless old man to me,” I said with a frown. “I don’t know anyone who would have wanted to kill him. Maybe he stumbled into a drug deal or something.”

Ramsey frowned back at me. “Right here in the middle of one of the fanciest hotels in town?”

Actually, I didn’t think that possibility was all that likely, either. But it wasn’t impossible, and I preferred to think that the crime was one of random violence rather than something connected to my tour group.

Then June blurted out, “What about Tamara?”

“Who?” Nesbit asked.

“Dr. Tamara Paige. She was very upset about the whole idea that the old man might have been one of Tennessee Williams’s lovers. She rejected it wholeheartedly.”

I glared at June, but I understood what she was doing. She was trying to throw Tamara under the bus in order to divert suspicion from her father-in-law. I suppose I could understand that motivation, but I didn’t think either Dr. Paige or Papa Larry was capable of murder.