Killer On A Hot Tin Roof (6 page)

“Not until you tell me what you did with Howard Burleson!” Frasier shouted back.

“Oh, no,” I muttered. “Those two are gonna ruin the evening.” I started trying to push my way through the crowd, hoping that if I could reach them, I could calm things down and maybe salvage the rest of the reception.

Dr. Keller caught up with me and moved past me. “Let me give you a hand,” he said.

He was about six-three and probably weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, which meant that people were a lot more likely to get out of his way than they were to move aside for me. So I got right behind him and let him plow a path through the crowd for me.

By the time we reached Drs. Paige and Frasier, a circle had cleared around them as people backed off from the angry confrontation. The two of them were still yelling at each other.

Frasier wasn’t dressed for the reception. He wore slacks and a casual shirt with no jacket or tie, which told me he had intended to stay at the hotel this evening. Something had caused him to come here to the theater, however, and it was obvious that something was the disappearance of Howard Burleson.

I wondered what had happened to the old man and immediately thought that he might have forgotten where he was and wandered off. He could be shuffling around the streets of the French Quarter and getting into all sorts of trouble.

But while that possibility worried the heck out of me, I had more pressing concerns, like keeping Drs. Paige and Frasier from trying to punch each other. Dr. Jeffords was plucking ineffectually at the sleeve of Tamara Paige’s dress, but she ignored him as she glared defiantly at Frasier.

“I tell you, I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” she insisted. “I haven’t seen that old scoundrel you dragged along and persuaded to lie for you, since we got here.”

“Who else would have taken him?” Frasier shot back. “And he’s not lying!”

“Why would I want to kidnap some delusional geriatric fraud?”

“You’re worried that what he’ll say during my presentation will invalidate everything you’ve ever written about Tennessee Williams and
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
!”

“You’re insane!” Dr. Paige spread her arms and then gestured at her body, which was covered by a rather formfitting green dress. “Anyway, do I look like I’ve got an old man hidden somewhere on me?”

Frasier made a curt, angry slash with his hand in the air. “You’ve probably got him stashed in your room at the hotel. Or maybe you got him out of there completely and hid him inanother hotel. You just want to ruin my presentation tomorrow.”

“You’re wrong,” Dr. Paige said. “I’d much rather you get up there and make a fool of yourself, Michael, so that everyone can see for themselves what I found out a long time ago: as a scholar, you’re a complete failure.” She sniffed contemptuously. “Just like you’re a failure as a man.”

That was one too many cheap shots for Frasier to withstand. He took a quick step toward her, his hands coming up as if he wanted to wrap them around her throat and choke the life out of her.

Ian Keller glanced at me and then stepped between them. He was too big for Frasier to get around. “Hold on there, Michael,” Keller said in a mild but firm voice. “I think you’ve made enough of a scene here tonight.”

“Get out of my way, Ian,” Frasier snapped. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

The likelihood of Frasier being able to hurt Dr. Keller was so farfetched it made me want to laugh, but I wasn’t in a laughing mood at the moment. I was mad and worried at the same time. I stepped up and said, “Dr. Frasier, do you claim that Mr. Burleson has disappeared from the hotel?”

Frasier gave me an impatient glance. “Of course he’s disappeared. Would I be here trying to find out what that harpy did with him if he hadn’t?”

“Calling folks names isn’t going to do anybody any good,” I said. “Did you have Mr. Burleson paged at the hotel? It’s a big place. Maybe he just got turned around and couldn’t find his way back to his room.”

“I looked everywhere before I came over here. He’s not there.” Frasier sent another glare toward Tamara Paige. “She did something with him.”

“I most certainly did not!” she said.

Dr. Jeffords cleared his throat and spoke up. “Dr. Paige has been with me most of the time since we arrived, Dr. Frasier. I doubt if she would have had time to abscond with your … your companion.”

“Don’t call him that,” Frasier snapped. “He’s part of my presentation, that’s all.”

Dr. Paige said, “You should be more worried that the crazy old coot wandered off somewhere.”

That same thought had occurred to me, of course, although without the “crazy old coot” part. I said, “I really think we should alert the authorities that he’s missing. If he’s wandering around New Orleans alone, he could get hurt.”

Will had made his way over from the table with the food. He came up holding a saucer with some squares of cheese and a dozen or so crackers on it. Obviously, he had heard enough of the conversation while he was making his way through the crowd that he knew what was going on, because he said, “I agree. Someone should call the police.”

Frasier lifted his hands and said, “Hold on, hold on. Let’s not overreact.”

That brought a hoot of derisive laughter from Tamara Paige. “Says the man who charged in here accusing me of kidnapping! I ought to sue you for slander.”

“It’s not slander if it’s true,” Frasier shot back, his upper lip curling. “And you still haven’t proven that it’s not.”

“I don’t have to.”

“You do to win a lawsuit for slander.”

I said, “You’re gettin’ off the track again, folks. We need to find Mr. Burleson.” I didn’t want something else to go wrong with one of my tours. I don’t mean an occasional glitch; there are always plenty of those. I was worried about a major snafu, like having a client vanish. And, of course, I was concernedabout Mr. Burleson’s welfare, too. I’m not completely mercenary.

“He’s an old man,” I went on. “How long ago did you notice he was missing, Doctor?”

Frasier frowned. “About half an hour ago, I guess.”

That would have been about the same time Will and I had left the St. Emilion to walk over here to the theater. I didn’t recall seeing Burleson in the hotel lobby as we left.

“How long before that was it you saw him last?”

Frasier thought about it for a second, then said, “Maybe another half-hour. I got him settled in his room after we got here, and then he took a nap. Old people have to have naps.”

I wasn’t sure I appreciated that comment, since I’d taken a nap myself before getting ready for the reception, but I let it go and asked, “What about after that?”

“I went to his room about six to see that he got something to eat. I called room service and placed the order for him.”

“But you didn’t stay there until the food came?”

He shook his head. “No. I thought he could handle opening a door and letting the waiter bring the food in, for God’s sake!” Frasier ran his fingers through his hair in exasperation. “Obviously, I was wrong.”

“Did you check with room service?” Will asked. “Did they deliver the food?”

“That’s the first thing I thought of. They said nobody answered when the waiter knocked at six fifteen.”

So whatever had happened to Howard Burleson, it had happened during that fifteen minutes or so after Frasier called room service. Which meant that by now Burleson had been gone for about an hour, maybe a little longer.

That was long enough for plenty of things to have happened, and most of them weren’t good.

One of the men wearing tuxedos had come over to see what all the commotion was about. He said, “Do I understand that one of the festival’s guests is missing?”

“He’s not a guest,” Frasier said. “He’s part of my presentation.”

“But he’s still a human being,” the man said. “I hate to generate any bad publicity for the festival, but I’m calling the police–”

“Wait!” Frasier said. “I don’t think that’s necessary yet.”

He had reacted like that when Will suggested calling the cops a few minutes earlier. I didn’t know why Frasier was so opposed to the idea, but clearly he was. Just as clearly, we couldn’t afford to stand around talking much longer when an old man’s life might be in danger. We might have waited too long already.

“I’m going back to the hotel to have another look around,” Frasier went on. “Then if I can’t find him, I … I’ll call the police, I swear.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said. I hated to miss the rest of the reception and the readings afterward, not to mention this mess was threatening the late, intimate supper I had planned with Will. But Howard Burleson was one of my clients, even if I hadn’t met him or even heard of him until today, and if he was in trouble, I had a responsibility to help him.

“I’m coming, too,” Tamara Paige stated. “I know you’re still suspicious of me, Michael, and I want to prove I didn’t have anything to do with the old man going missing.”

“Fine,” Frasier snapped. “Let’s just go find him.”

I turned to Will. “I’ll be back later if I can–”

“I’m coming with you,” he broke in as he handed the cheese and crackers to one of the men standing there. “I’m not going to let you wander around the French Quarter alone at night.”

“I won’t be alone. Dr. Frasier and Dr. Paige are going, too.”

“Well, there’ll be four of us, then,” Will insisted.

I didn’t want to waste any more time arguing about that, so I said, “All right, come on. Let’s go.”

The tuxedo-clad man protested. “I still think we should call the police now.”

“Let ‘em take a look,” Dr. Keller urged. “It won’t take long to check and see if the old guy showed up at the hotel since Dr. Frasier left.”

That’s what I thought. There wouldn’t be any leisurely stroll along the sidewalks of the French Quarter this time. I wanted to get back to the St. Emilion as fast as we could.

We left the theater and headed for the hotel, walking fast. I asked Frasier, “Did you actually tell anybody at the hotel that Mr. Burleson is missing?”

He shook his head. “No. The room service operator probably wondered why I was asking if his food had been delivered, but I didn’t specifically say that I couldn’t find him.”

That meant the hotel management wouldn’t have notified the authorities, either.

“Does he have Alzheimer’s?”

“What?” Frasier snapped in reply to my question. “Howard, you mean?”

“Yeah. Has he been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s? Is he on medication for it or for anything else?”

“Not that I know of. His memory’s a little fuzzy sometimes, but mostly he’s as sharp as he can be.”

Dr. Paige said, “Except when he starts trying to convince people that he and Tennessee Williams were lovers.”

“They–” Frasier began angrily, then stopped short in his argument. He turned back to me and said, “Why do you want to know if he has Alzheimer’s?”

“Because if he doesn’t, the police might not even start to look for him for twenty-four or forty-eight hours, depending on what their policy is here. They’ll make an exception, though, if the missing person is delusional or on medication.”

“I don’t know what medication he’s taking,” Frasier said. “He never mentioned anything about being delusional, though.”

That was just the thing, I thought: if you’re delusional, you probably don’t know it. You think you’re all right and it’s the rest of the world that’s crazy.

I was also shocked that Frasier would bring a man in his eighties on a trip like this without even knowing what medications he was taking. What if Mr. Burleson had had a medical emergency of some sort? Maybe he carried all that information on him, but maybe he didn’t.

That confirmed my hunch that Frasier didn’t really care about the old man as a person. Burleson was just a prop for his presentation. A vital prop, maybe, but still a prop.

I saw the hotel ahead of us. I’d been looking at everybody we passed and trying to peer into the windows of every building, too, hoping to spot Howard Burleson. So far, though, there had been no sign of him.

As we reached the hotel, I suggested, “We should talk to that fella Gillette, the assistant manager, if we can find him. I bet he’d be glad to help–and keep quiet about it. He won’t want any bad publicity for the hotel.”

Will said, “That’s a good idea, but he’ll probably be even more worried about the hotel’s liability in a potential lawsuit.”

“I don’t care what gets him movin', as long as he helps us find the old man.”

When we asked at the concierge’s desk for the assistant manager’s office, the pretty blond woman on duty there pointed us down a narrow hallway.

“Is there a problem?” she asked with a look of professional concern. “I’d be glad to help if I can.”

I shook my head. “We just need to talk to Mr. Gillette for a minute. Is he still there?”

The woman smiled slightly. “Dale’s always in his office. I swear, I don’t know when he sleeps.”

We went down the hallway, and Will knocked on the door. From inside, Gillette called, “Come in.”

Will opened the door. Gillette glanced up from his desk, then looked again as he saw all four of us marching in. He came to his feet quickly.

He asked the same question that the concierge had. “Is there a problem?”

“One of your guests has disappeared,” Frasier said.

Gillette came out from behind the desk. He looked as dapper and cool as ever, but I saw alarm lurking in his eyes. “Let’s all stay calm now,” he said. “Who’s missing?”

“Howard Burleson.”

“The elderly gentleman who was with you when I checked you in this afternoon?”

“That’s right.”

I saw the relief that appeared on Gillette’s face. “Mr. Burleson’s not missing,” he said. “He’s just gone around the corner to Petit Claude’s.”

All of us stiffened with surprise. “Where?” Frasier demanded.

“It’s a jazz club, just around the corner.”

“How do you know this?” Will asked.

“Because I ran into Mr. Burleson in the lobby a little while ago, and he asked me if the club was still there. I told him it was and asked him if he was familiar with it. He said that he had been there many times, years ago, with a friend of his.”

I had a hunch that the friend Burleson meant was Tennessee Williams, but that didn’t matter now.