Killer On A Hot Tin Roof (16 page)

“I’m not interferin’ in anything,” I insisted. I pointed at Frasier. “I just followed Dr. Frasier here to try to keep him from makin’ a commotion.”

“Well, you didn’t do a good job of it,” the first cop said. “We heard all that pounding on doors. After we talked to you, Dr. Frasier, didn’t we just tell you to stay in your room?”

“Yes, but I thought of something!” Frasier said. “I figured out who killed the old man!”

“You’d better let Detectives Ramsey and Nesbit worry about that. That’s their job, Doctor, not yours.”

“But I’m telling you, it had to be Dr. Paige!” Frasier thumped a hand against the door of Tamara’s room.

“She’s already been taken in for questioning,” one of the cops said.

“I know. You’d better keep her locked up. She might try to kill me next. She’s really got it in for me.”

“I’m sure you’ll be safe,” the other cop said. “We’ll have officers here in the hotel the rest of the night.”

Frasier nodded. “All right. Those detectives will be making a mistake if they don’t go ahead and arrest her for murder, though.”

“Just quiet down and go on back to your room, sir. We’re trying to disturb the rest of the guests as little as possible.”

“Fine,” Frasier said. He glanced at me. “I’ve got to go check on something, anyway. With those manuscript pages, I might still be able to salvage my presentation.”

He hurried down the hall. The cops went to the next room, knocked on the door, and were admitted a moment later by one of the professors who’d spent the whole trip so far arguing with his buddy about Tennessee Williams. That left Will and me alone in the hall to look at each other and shake our heads.

“I can’t believe it,” Will said. “Only a few hours ago we were sitting in Petit Claude’s with Mr. Burleson, and he was having such a good time.”

“And now he’s dead,” I said. “It’s a real shame. Things happen that way, though.”

Especially on my tours, I thought, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

“What was that about Tamara being taken in for questioning?” Will wanted to know.

I nodded. “It’s true. The police seem to think she has the strongest motive, and I don’t think she has an alibi. She was alone in her room most of the time after she got back from that club.”

“Well, I just don’t believe that she killed that old man. I don’t think she’d hurt anyone.”

“Even to save her career?” I asked, playing devil’s advocate for the moment.

Will frowned and was about to answer, probably to defend Tamara again, when a bloodcurdling shriek suddenly sounded from down the hallway.

As best I could tell, it was coming from Dr. Michael Frasier’s room.

W
ill and I were closer to Frasier’s room than the cops, who popped out into the hall when they heard the screaming. By that time, we were hurrying toward Frasier’s door.

It burst open before we could get there. He ran out of the room, saw us, and yelled, “They’re gone! They’re gone, damn it! She must have stolen them!”

Frasier waved his arms in the air and jumped around like a deranged chimp. His face was purple with rage. As the cops pounded toward us, Will grabbed one of Frasier’s arms and said, “Settle down, Michael, or they’re going to arrest you for disturbing the peace!”

Frasier stopped yelling and jumping, but he was still breathing like he had just run a mile and looked like he was on the verge of having a stroke.

As the cops came up, one of them warned, “Quiet down, sir, or you’ll be in trouble.”

“What’s the trouble here?” the other one wanted to know.

Frasier took a deep breath and controlled himself with a visible effort. “There are some very valuable papers missing,” he said, “and I think Dr. Tamara Paige must have stolen them.”

“The manuscript pages from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
?” I asked.

He nodded and looked like he was about to cry. “That’s right. They’re gone.”

The words came out of him in a wail of despair. I almost felt sorry for him, but I couldn’t quite, because he’d been such a jackass earlier.

One of the cops asked, “If these papers were so valuable, why didn’t you put ‘em in the safe downstairs?”

“Because no one else knew about them except me and Howard Burleson,” Frasier replied.

“The murdered guy?”

“That’s right.” Frasier glared at Will and me. “At least that was true until tonight. And you can’t calculate their worth in money, anyway.”

“Still, if they were valuable to you, you shouldn’t have left them in your room.”

“They were in Howard’s room,” Frasier said, waving vaguely toward the next door along the corridor. “They were in his suitcase. But we have adjoining rooms, and when I went in there just now to look for them, they were gone.”

Both cops frowned at him. One of them said, “You were in the murder victim’s room?”

“Well … yes.” Frasier suddenly looked a little nervous.

“You shouldn’t have been,” the cop said. “That room should have been sealed off.”

“No one told me to stay out of it,” Frasier said defensively.

“Ramsey and Nesbit must not have thought about there being an adjoining room,” the other cop said. “They’re not gonna be happy about this.”

“I didn’t disturb anything except the suitcase,” Frasier said. “I just opened it to look for the papers. I swear I didn’t touch anything else this time.”

“You were in there earlier?”

“Yes. After Howard and I got back here to the hotel, I wentin there and made sure the door on his side was unlocked, so I could check on him. I didn’t want him wandering off again, like he did before.”

“But he did wander off,” I said. “He went downstairs to the garden where he was killed. Although, technically, they may not have established that yet.”

Will said, “I don’t see how he could have been killed somewhere else and then lugged through the hotel into that garden.”

“You two shouldn’t even be discussing that,” one of the cops said. “You’re civilians.”

“Actually, I’m a witness,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter. This is police business.”

“In that case,” Frasier said, “I demand that you search Tamara Paige’s room. Those pages may still be in there. Maybe she didn’t have time to destroy them.”

“Why do you think she’d destroy them?”

“Because those pages are my last hope of being able to prove that Howard Burleson wrote
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
!”

The cops looked confused, and I couldn’t blame them. They didn’t understand all the hoopla over who wrote what.

Will helped put it in perspective for them by saying, “What Dr. Frasier is talking about could mean that Dr. Paige’s career would be ruined.”

“Over a stupid play?” one of the cops asked.

“It’s not stupid,” Frasier said. “It’s brilliant. It’s just that the wrong man has gotten the credit for that brilliance all these years. Now, are you going to search Dr. Paige’s room or not?”

“That’s up to Detective Ramsey and Detective Nesbit.” The cop who answered took a cell phone from a holder on his belt. “But I’ll call them and ask them what they want us to do. In the meantime, Doctor, keep the racket down, okay?”

Frasier sighed and nodded. “All right. But I really need that manuscript before ten o’clock tomorrow morning. That’s when my presentation is scheduled. Please make sure the detectives understand that.”

The cop nodded. The other officer pointed to the door of Frasier’s room and said, “The three of you go in there and wait.”

“Hold on a minute,” Will said. “Ms. Dickinson and I–”

The cop glared at us and pointed again, this time jabbing the air sharply with his finger. He didn’t let Will finish explaining that the two of us didn’t have any desire to go into Frasier’s room.

It looked like we were going to, though, whether we wanted to or not. Anyway, I’ll admit I wanted to be there if the cops searched Tamara’s room. Despite my best intentions, I had gotten caught up in the investigation. I wanted to know the truth.

We left the door of Frasier’s room open. The bed was rumpled and unmade, but other than that the place was neat. He wasn’t the type to throw clothes around a hotel room. The connecting doors between Frasier’s room and Howard Burleson’s were both open, so I could see into Burleson’s room. It was neat, too, except for the suitcase lying open on the bed with its contents strewn around.

The cop stood in the doorway to keep an eye on us and make sure we didn’t go into Burleson’s room. A couple of minutes later, the other cop came in and said, “I talked to Detective Nesbit. He and Detective Ramsey will be here in about twenty minutes to search that room. Until then, everybody stays out of there, and we’re gonna wait right here to make sure of that.”

“You don’t need Ms. Dickinson and me, then,” Will said. He didn’t know that I wanted to be there for the search … although you would have thought that he knew me well enough by then to guess that I would.

The cop who had called the detectives put out a hand when Will started toward the door. “Nesbit said for everybody to stay put until he and Ramsey get here. That means everybody stays put.”

“But we don’t have anything to do with this,” Will protested.

“I’m just following orders, sir. Why don’t you sit down and try to take it easy?”

Will looked like he wanted to argue. I put a hand on his arm and said quietly, “Maybe we’d better do like he says, Will.”

He gave me a look that seemed to ask when I’d become so mild-mannered. But then he shrugged and said, “Okay. I still don’t see the point in it, though.”

There was an uncomfortable twenty minutes while we waited for Ramsey and Nesbit. The cops stood on either side of the doorway. Frasier sat in the chair at the desk, while Will and I took the sofa. My eyes kept straying to the curtains over the French doors, knowing that from the balcony on the other side of those doors, I could have looked down on the scene of Howard Burleson’s murder. Then I looked at the connecting doors leading into the old man’s room. The fact that the manuscript samples were missing was one more thing that didn’t look good for Tamara Paige. I wasn’t sure how she could have gotten her hands on them, though.

“Dr. Frasier,” I said, “how did Dr. Paige manage to steal that manuscript, if she did? Weren’t the doors of both rooms locked?”

“I don’t know how she did it,” he said, “but I know she’s to blame.”

“What about the doors?” I persisted.

“Yes, they were locked. At least mine was.” Frasier’s eyeswidened. “She must have come over here and gotten Howard to open his door. She could have talked him into coming with her and bringing the pages along.” He slapped his forehead. “My God! Of course. She suggested they go down to the garden where she could examine the pages while they had a drink. I know how charming she can be … when she wants to.”

Will said, “And you wouldn’t have heard him leaving with her?”

“Not if they left while I was taking a shower. Damn it! I knew I’d have to keep a close eye on Howard while we were here in New Orleans, but I never figured on having to protect him from a murderer!”

I had to admit that Frasier’s theory made sense. Everything about it fit, as far as I could see, except for the fact that I didn’t want Tamara to be the killer.

Ramsey and Nesbit showed up a short time later. We heard them coming down the hall. Ramsey came in first and glared in surprise at Will and me.

“What are you doing here?”

I nodded toward the two uniformed officers. “Your watchdogs wouldn’t let us leave.”

“You said for everybody to stay put, Detective,” one of the cops said to Nesbit, who had followed Ramsey into the room.

“That’s right,” Nesbit agreed.

Ramsey frowned at me. “The way you show up around murders all the time, Red, I’m about to start suspecting you.”

“Is that right, Red?” I threw right back at him. We were never going to like each other, I thought, and it didn’t have anything to do with the color of our hair.

Nesbit started pulling on a pair of latex gloves. “Let’s have a look around the victim’s room,” he suggested. “You two can continue sparring later.”

Ramsey didn’t look happy with that comment, but he pulled on some gloves, too, and the two detectives stepped carefully through the connecting doors into Howard Burleson’s room.

“We would have gotten around to this as soon as we finished questioning Dr. Paige, anyway,” Nesbit told us over his shoulder.

“Is she still in custody?” I asked.

“For the time being,” Nesbit replied. “She hasn’t been charged with anything, though.”

Ramsey turned his head and practically snarled at me. “I wanted to charge her with resisting an officer for trying to run like that, but I got overruled.”

“I’m the one who tackled her,” Nesbit said. “It was my call.”

I stood up and moved so that I could see better as they walked into the center of the old man’s room and stood there for a couple of minutes, turning slowly and just looking around, taking it all in. Nesbit muttered, “No signs of a struggle.”

“What about that suitcase?” Ramsey asked. “Looks like somebody dumped it on the bed, like they were searching for something.”

“I did that,” Frasier called through the open doors. “I was looking for some papers that Mr. Burleson had with him. They’re very important, Detectives. They’re part of the reason he was killed!”

Nesbit asked, “Is that why you were in here? Looking for those documents?”

Frasier nodded. “That’s right. I didn’t touch anything else. But I’ll bet if you check, you’ll find Tamara Paige’s fingerprints in there!”

“We’ll cover that base, don’t worry,” Nesbit said. “Step over to the doorway, Dr. Frasier.”

When Frasier had done so, Nesbit went on, “Now, take a look around from there and see if you can tell if anything else is missing.”

There wouldn’t have been many of the old man’s belongings in the room, I thought, except what was in the suitcase. Other than that, it was just a hotel room, albeit a pretty fancy one. Frasier stood in the doorway gazing around for a minute or so, then shook his head.

“Everything looks normal to me,” he said. “You won’t find anything in here unless it’s Dr. Paige’s fingerprints, like I told you.”