Killer On A Hot Tin Roof (17 page)

“Don’t try to tell us our business,” Ramsey said with a glare. “We know what we’re doing.”

“I’m sorry,” Frasier said, but his apology didn’t sound too genuine to me. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do, Detective. I just really need to find those pages, if she didn’t destroy them. Do you think … do you think it would be possible to look in her room?”

Nesbit said, “That’s one of the things we were going to do when we got back to the hotel, along with searching this room. I suppose we can go take a look now.”

“Can I come with you?” Frasier asked eagerly. “You’ll need me to identify the papers, if you find them. And, by all rights, I should have them.”

Ramsey shook his head. “Anything we find is evidence. You won’t be able to touch it, Doctor.”

Frasier looked stricken. He had allowed himself to hope he could still give his presentation, and now that hope had been snatched away from him. He said, “You can’t mean that! My career depends on those pages!”

“Sorry, Doctor,” Nesbit told him. “Detective Ramsey is right. If those documents are in Dr. Paige’s room, they’re evidence and will be impounded.” He paused. “We might be able to make photocopies of them for you. Would that help?”

Frasier was still upset, but he shrugged a little. “Maybe. At least people could see that the play is in Howard Burleson’s handwriting.”

I didn’t see how that was going to prove anything. Burleson could have sat down and copied Tennessee Williams’s play out of a book. But the pages would be something, anyway, for Frasier to present at the festival in support of his theory, even if they didn’t prove it. They would show that Burleson hadn’t been lying about having a handwritten manuscript of the play.

“All right, come along, Doctor,” Nesbit said as he and Ramsey came back into Frasier’s room and headed for the door.

Will and I were on our feet. “What about us?” I asked.

“What about you?” Ramsey asked. “This is none of your business.”

“Actually,” Will said, “I could help Dr. Frasier identify any manuscript pages you find, if you find any. I’m quite familiar with Tennessee Williams’s work and have published several articles about it.”

I wondered if he was saying this just so I could tag along and observe the investigation. Maybe he had realized by now that my curiosity was up.

I added, “And since I feel a certain responsibility to my clients, I’d like to go along to see that Dr. Paige’s interests are protected.”

Ramsey gave me a withering stare. “You’re not an attorney, and, anyway, we’re not going to do anything illegal.”

“Do you have a search warrant for her room?”

“As a matter of fact, we do,” Ramsey said with a smirk. “But you know what? You can come with us. I know what you want to do.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. You want to play detective, just like you did those other times. You think you’re gonna figure out the case and show up the dumb cops.”

“I never said that,” I insisted.

But there was a smattering of truth in what he said. Not about me thinking they were dumb, of course. I didn’t like Ramsey, but I had no idea how smart he was … or wasn’t. I just wanted to see if there was any other explanation for the growing evidence that pointed toward Tamara.

Nesbit smiled slightly and said, “Personally, I think it might be better to have Ms. Dickinson where we can keep an eye on her. That way we’ll know she’s not doing anything to hinder the investigation.”

“Thanks … I think,” I said.

Ramsey made a curt gesture for me, Will, and Frasier to follow them, then left the room with Nesbit. Ramsey told the two uniformed cops to stay there and keep the scene secure. He used a walkie-talkie to call downstairs and tell the forensics team to come up and go over Howard Burleson’s room when they were finished with the crime scene in the garden.

We went down the hall and stopped in front of a doorway. Ramsey and Nesbit seemed to know that this was Tamara’s room. I realized they must have gotten that information from Dale Gillette.

That wasn’t all they had gotten. Nesbit took a key card from his pocket and used it to unlock the door. He was still wearing the latex gloves, so he grasped the handle, turned it, and swung the door open. He looked back at the three of us civilians and said, “Stay in the hall. Don’t even step inside the door.”

We nodded. The two detectives went in. Will and Frasier and I crowded up close so that we could look into the roomand watch as Ramsey and Nesbit walked around looking at everything.

I felt bad for Tamara, having a couple of strangers pawing through her stuff. A woman needs some privacy, even for her possessions.

There wasn’t really much to see in the room, though. Tamara had hung her clothes in the closet, but her under-things were still in her suitcase. I figured her makeup kit and things like that would be in the bathroom.

Her laptop was open on the writing table, with a slide show of photographs serving as her screensaver. I could see them from where I stood. Most of them seemed to be family photos–of a bunch of people I didn’t know, of course–but there were also a few landscape shots and some pictures of dogs and cats. A paperback book lay on the table next to the computer. I could see enough of its cover to recognize it as a copy of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
She had probably been looking through it earlier while she was thinking about Howard Burleson’s story, before she started working out.

Nesbit said, “I don’t see any handwritten papers, Dr. Frasier. You did say they were handwritten, didn’t you?”

“That’s right,” Frasier said. “Mr. Burleson wrote the play in a legal pad, so the samples would be on lined yellow paper of that size.”

“Nothing like that in here.” Nesbit picked up Tamara’s laptop case, which was sitting on the floor next to the table, and looked in it. “Nothing here, either.”

A look of sweaty desperation appeared on Frasier’s face. He could see his last hopes slipping away. “Keep looking,” he said. “Please.”

Ramsey gestured toward the open door that led into the bathroom. “I’ll check in there.” Nesbit nodded.

I didn’t think it was very likely that Tamara would havehidden the pages in the bathroom–if she had taken them, that is–but I supposed anything was possible.

Ramsey had been inside the bathroom only a moment when he said, “Hello.”

Nesbit hurried over there. “What is it?”

“Looks like a little bit of ash around the drain in the sink.”

“Ash?” Frasier repeated. At that moment, his face was about the same color as ashes.

Nesbit said, “Yes, it looks like something’s been burned in here, and then the ashes were washed down the drain except for a few tiny pieces. Wait a minute, maybe I can get one of them …”

Frasier looked like he was about to burst into tears. His hands knotted together. I thought for a second he was going to pray, then decided that he just wasn’t the type. Then he started murmuring something and for a second I thought I was wrong, that he was praying after all.

Then I realized that he was saying, “Shit, shit, shit,” over and over again.

Nesbit emerged from the bathroom with a pair of needle-nose tweezers in one hand and a clear plastic evidence bag in the other. He held up the bag and said, “Take a look at that, Dr. Frasier.”

At first glance, I thought the bag was empty. Then I spotted the tiny piece of burned paper inside it, a ragged square about a quarter of an inch on each side. Most of it was gray ash, but along one side a strip of unburned paper remained.

It was yellow, just like the paper from a legal pad.

“She burned them,” Frasier whispered. He lifted his hands to his temples. “She burned them.”

And then he really did start to cry. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he clutched at his hair.

Nesbit said quietly, “For the record, Dr. Frasier, do you recognize that paper?”

Frasier jerked his head up and down.

“That’s it, then,” Ramsey said with a note of finality in his voice. “We’ll seal this room, and then we’d better get back.”

And even though he didn’t say it, we all knew what they were going back to do.

They were going to arrest Dr. Tamara Paige and charge her with the murder of Howard Burleson.

R
amsey and Nesbit didn’t tell us that, of course. Far be it from them to let us in on what they were planning, especially Ramsey.

But it was obvious, and even though I didn’t like it, there was nothing I could do about it. Anyway, judging by everything I had seen tonight, there was a good chance Tamara was guilty, and I disliked one of my clients killing another of my clients even more.

The detectives told us to go back to our rooms and keep ourselves available for further questioning. A distraught Michael Frasier stumbled off to his room. Will walked with me back to mine, and we paused in the doorway before I went in.

“You know Dr. Paige a lot better than I do, Will,” I said to him. “Do you really think she could have done such a thing?”

Will thought it over for a long moment before he shrugged. “Before tonight, I would have said no, not in a million years. Tamara and I aren’t close, but I’ve known her for years, and I’ve never seen any signs that she has a violent nature.”

“A lot of people don’t … until they’re pushed too far.”

He nodded. “That’s true. And I know that she’s very dedicated to her work. She’s not married, doesn’t have any closefamily …” He shrugged again. “So her work means a lot to her. What bothers me is that she didn’t seem the least bit convinced that Howard Burleson was telling the truth. It seems a lot more likely to me that she would have just let Frasier go on with his presentation, because she believed that Burleson’s claims would be discredited.”

I thought about what he’d said, then told him, “You’re right, unless something happened to change her mind.”

“Like what?”

I started putting things together in my mind. “Maybe Frasier’s right about how Dr. Paige got her hands on those manuscript samples. Maybe she went to Burleson’s room and convinced the old man to show them to her. She could have decided to check them out for herself, before Frasier’s presentation. And you saw how Burleson was. I think she could have talked him into showing her the pages without much trouble.”

“Yeah, that’s probably true,” Will said.

Warming up to the speculation, I went on. “I don’t think she intended to hurt the old man when she went to his room. She just wanted to look at the pages and confirm that he was either delusional or lying to get the attention. But if she saw something in the manuscript that convinced her he was telling the truth …”

“She could have decided that she couldn’t risk letting Frasier go on with his presentation,” Will concluded.

I nodded. “Yeah. So she talks Burleson into going downstairs with her, takes him out into the garden so they can talk some more, she tells him, and then once they’re out of sight of everybody …”

I couldn’t make myself go on, and this time Will didn’t finish my thought. He just nodded and looked grim.

“There’s only one thing wrong with that theory,” I said after a moment.

“What?”

“I can’t believe that she’s a murderer.”

“Nobody else would have had a motive to kill that harmless old man,” Will said. “And I don’t like thinking that about Tamara any more than you do.”

“Nobody else that we
know of.
But maybe something else is going on, something we don’t even know about.”

Actually, I was thinking that I might know about it. I couldn’t shake the memories of the two times I’d seen Callie Madison earlier tonight, first on the balcony of Dr. Jeffords’s room, then hurrying through the hotel garden right after I’d found Burleson’s body. Thinking that Callie might have killed the old man because he had seen her returning from her rendezvous with Jeffords was mighty farfetched … but was it any more farfetched than Callie fooling around with Jeffords in the first place?

There was Dr. Ian Keller to consider, too. He had been in the garden before I’d found the body. Probably perfectly innocently, of course. Hotel guests probably cut through there all the time. But I figured it was still worth talking to Keller and trying to find out exactly what he’d been doing there.

Those were just two possibilities off the top of my head. There could be others that, like I’d told Will, we weren’t even aware of.

The problem was that Ramsey and Nesbit weren’t going to do any more real investigating. They had their suspect under arrest, and from here on out they would only be looking for evidence that would support the charges against Tamara. They probably wouldn’t even consider any other theory, let alone look into one.

So that left it up to somebody else.

“Delilah,” Will said slowly, “I’ve seen that look on yourface before. You know how upset those detectives will be if you interfere with their investigation.”

“What investigation?” I asked. “They’re convinced that Tamara did it. The investigation is over.” I paused. “It’s a prosecution now.”

I could see in his eyes that he knew I was right. He was worried anyway, of course. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t like the idea of poking around and trying to uncover a killer, either.

But unless Tamara confessed–which was still a possibility–I wasn’t going to be convinced she was guilty, evidence or no evidence. A little scrap of half-burned paper wasn’t conclusive. Not for me, anyway.

“Just be careful,” Will said. “The festival will go on, despite what’s happened, and I’m going to be pretty busy for the next few days. I won’t be able to stay with you all the time and help you.”

My temper flared a little. “You mean you won’t be able to protect me.”

He shrugged but didn’t deny what I’d said.

“Listen here, Will Burke,” I said. “I can take care of myself. And it’s not like you’re John Wayne–you’re an English professor.”

As soon as I said that, I wished I hadn’t. It was hurtful and I knew it. But I couldn’t call the words back.

Will just smiled faintly and shook his head. “No, I’m not, am I?” he said.

“Will, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean–”

He held up a hand to stop me. “No, no, you’re absolutely right, Delilah. Look, I just don’t want you to get hurt, so like I said, please be careful.”