Murder on a Bad Hair Day (20 page)

“What are you trying to do?” I asked when I came in and saw them. “Denude the Alabama forests?” She ignored me.

A fire was crackling in the fireplace and the mantel was draped with greenery. She had even set the table with her good Christmas china.

“Where’s Santa?” I asked.

“In his workshop.” She smiled sweetly.

“With Tiffany?” She stepped on my heel.

The evening was what a holiday celebration should be. Good friends, good food, beautiful surroundings. Interesting gossip.

But my hand was throbbing. The Ace bandage called for an explanation so the trip to Claire’s town house was first on the agenda. It took a couple of glasses of wine—in my case, diet Coke—along with Norwegian crackers and a spicy pâté to get through the story.

Bonnie Blue was a wonderful listener. “Damn,” she said when I told about the stuffing ripped out of the sofa. “Damn,” she said at the “whore” above the bed and the gash in the door.

I raised my injured hand and showed how I had dashed at the door. “Damn,” she said admiringly.

“Supper,” Mary Alice said.

But Frances wasn’t ready to let Claire’s story go. “Tell me again about the small painting,” she said as we headed for the table.

“A woman who looks like Mercy Armistead. Long curly red hair. She’s painting three pictures. She’s in a field or something. There’s grass at her feet and she has on a blue robe. The women in the pictures have black hair and they’re lying down dressed in white gowns, holding a white flower, probably a lily. They’re lying on some kind of a platform or raft and there may be a castle in the background. I’ll show you after supper. I’ve got a sketch in my purse.”

“Damn,” Bonnie Blue said.

“I think it’s important. Anybody got any ideas?”

Three heads shaking no was my answer.

“Everybody finished their shopping?” Mary Alice asked brightly, passing the angel biscuits.

It was fifteen minutes later when Frances asked me about Claire’s husband.

“James said it like to have killed her, his death,” Bonnie Blue said.

“She told me today that Mercy and Thurman rescued her. Had her hospitalized.”

Bonnie Blue nodded. “Bless her heart. She’d had enough to throw anybody into depression.”

“She’s lucky she had them to intervene,” Frances said.

Mary Alice came in with the coffee. “What’s the story with Thurman and Claire, Bonnie Blue? You said he’s smitten with her. Did Mercy know it?”

Bonnie Blue reached for another tart. “Lord no, she didn’t know it. Thurman knew which side his bread was buttered on. Which side the money was on, anyway. Mercy’s daddy’s on his last leg and rich as Croesus, and her mama’s toddling on the brink. That Thurman’s no fool. Besides, my sister-in-law Yvonne says it was as much Claire after Thurman as vice versa.”

“Well, scratch Thurman’s motives for killing Mercy,” Sister said. “He lost out on her inheritance, didn’t he?”

“Is his heart very bad?” I asked.

“James says someday he may have to have an aortic valve replaced, but he’ll live to be an old man.”

“Just not a rich one.”

“Sure he will. He’ll find somebody else with money,” Frances said.

We all looked at her in surprise.

“Well, he will. I just hope Claire’s not counting on him too much. She’s been through enough.” She slapped her napkin down in a way that precluded any more discussion. I tried to remember the details of Frances’s divorce or of some subsequent affair, but they escaped me. There was a skunk in the woodpile somewhere, though.

“Y’all ready for bridge?” Mary Alice asked.

We played at the table where we had eaten supper. Bonnie Blue explained to us that she was just a country girl, not knowledgeable in the big-city game of bridge, and we should be patient with her, please. On the first hand, she opened with four no-trump, ended up with a bid of six hearts, and made seven.

“Should have chanced it,” she said. “I’m just too careful.”

That was the story of the bridge playing for the evening. When we were Bonnie Blue’s partner, it was great. When we weren’t, we were covering our butts.

My hand began to ache badly, and I went into the kitchen to get some more aspirin. Bubba was lying on the counter on his heating pad, and he looked up and yawned. “You feeling okay now?” I asked. He stretched and went back to sleep. I poured a glass of water and looked over the city, wishing every animal such comfort on this chilly night. For some reason, Leota Wood’s coydog came to mind. I put the glass down and went back to the bridge table, where Bonnie Blue was laying down a five-club bid.

“Sister,” I said, “you were going to ask Bonnie Blue about Leota Wood.”

“What about her?” Bonnie Blue was writing another huge number on the score pad under “We.”

Mary Alice picked up the cards to shuffle them. “Well, yesterday afternoon, Mouse and I went out to get Bubba, my cat. He was at your brother’s clinic. Anyway, we went on down the road to Leota Wood’s because we wanted to see her quilts and figured her prices might be better there than at a gallery. And they were. We bought several.”

“I’m scared of that dog of hers,” Bonnie Blue said.

“She came out and got him and shut him up,” I turned to Frances. “He’s a coydog. Did you know there was such a thing? A combination of coyote and dog?”

“Well”—Mary Alice rapped the deck of cards against the table—“she’s got a whole room just crammed with Outsider art. I mean just crammed.”

“Sister thinks she’s a fence,” I added. “She thinks Ross Perry was on his way out there when he was killed and that they’re part of some kind of gang that’s stealing art.”

“Stealing’s what she’s doing, all right,” Bonnie Blue agreed. “But it’s not illegal. She goes down to somebody’s house and says, ‘I’ll give you ten dollars for that painting or that old wooden horse you carved’ knowing full well it’ll sell for hundreds in some gallery. Waves the bill in front of them, and they’re tickled to death. Say, ‘Sure, Leota. I got lots more you can have.’ Daddy’s still selling her stuff. See, he can see that ten-dollar bill in his hand. He can take it in the liquor store and buy him a bottle.” Bonnie Blue spread her hands out on the table. “Folks never had anything, that ten-dollar bird looks mighty good in their hand.”

“So Ross Perry could have been buying the stuff from her and taking it somewhere to sell for a good price,” Frances said.

“Most probably was. I doubt he was the only one, though.”

“Claire said Mercy had received threatening phone calls from people who didn’t want the artists to see what their work sold for in galleries,” I said.

Bonnie Blue shook her head. “You tell some of these folks that you could get a thousand dollars for their work in
New York and they’d say, ‘I’ll just take the ten now, thank you, ma’am.’ I know Daddy would.”

“What about the younger artists?” Mary Alice asked.

“Just as bad. See, what they’re doing is fun. They don’t take it seriously. Don’t even think of it as art.”

“Maybe that’s the secret of its charm,” Sister said.

“Most probably. Anyway, that’s what all that stuff was doing in Miss Leota’s house. You can bet on it. Somebody’s getting ready to make a big Christmas haul.” Bonnie Blue picked up the cards Frances had dealt. “Two spades,” she said without even arranging her hand.

“Bonnie Blue,” Mary Alice said, turning over the score pad and picking up the pencil, “give me the first six numbers you think of between one and forty-nine.”

“Eight, fourteen, forty-three, twenty-nine, two, thirty-seven. Why?”

“Are you kidding? The Florida lottery’s up to thirty-six million this week. Halves?”

Bonnie Blue grinned. “Halves.”

We played for a couple of hours until Frances and Bonnie Blue said they had to call it a night since they had to work the next day.

“And you haven’t shown us the sketch of the picture,” Frances reminded me.

I got my purse and unfolded the sketch on the coffee table. I was amazed at how bad it was.

“What’s that bump?” Sister asked, pointing toward one of the reclining figures.

“It’s one of the women who looks like Claire that the woman who looks like Mercy is painting.”

“That’s a person?”

“It was just to remind myself of some of the details.”

Frances and Bonnie Blue were slightly kinder.

“I wish I could see it,” Frances said. “It sounds interesting.”

“Go back tomorrow and take a camera,” Bonnie Blue suggested.

We walked out into a clear, crisp December night. In spite
of the lights of the city, the brightest stars were visible.

“There’s Orion,” Frances said, pointing to the three familiar stars almost directly overhead.

“I wonder,” Bonnie Blue said, “about the Star of Bethlehem. Don’t you? What it could have been?”

“Sure I wonder,” I said. “It must have been something amazing for the Wise Men to follow it like they did.”

Mary Alice had walked out to the driveway with us to pick up her paper. “Leaving their wives behind with the kids and dirty laundry,” she added.

“Perchance, verily, to each wife was alloteth a Tiffany.”

“Go home,” she said, swatting me with the rolled-up evening paper.

We exited, laughing.

Fred was sound asleep when I got home, but I was cold and my hand ached. I put on my nightgown and robe in the bathroom and tiptoed down the hall to curl up on the sofa with the afghan. I read Tony Hillerman for a while, something usually guaranteed to keep me awake, but as soon as I began to get warm, the Navajo Nation drifted away.

Ross Perry came and sat at the end of the sofa. I could see the broken capillaries on his face and the shadow of the fern that reminded me of Gorbachev’s birthmark. He leaned back and got comfortable. “Do you know what Claire has always reminded me of?” he asked. “The Lady of the Lake with a lily in her hand.”

I came straight up. The dream had been so vivid, I could still feel his weight against my feet.

“Yuck!” I sat up and pulled the afghan around me.

“What’s the matter?” Fred asked, standing in the door. “You okay?”

“I think I was just visited by Jacob Marley.”

“Maybe it was something you ate.”

“That’s what Scrooge thought.”

“Come to bed, honey. Is your hand hurting?”

I had broken down and told him how I had slammed the car door on it. His immediate sympathy made it hurt worse.

“It’s okay. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Don’t get cold.”

I sat hunched in the afghan for a few minutes and then got up and took the sketch from my purse. A white flower clasped in her hand. A lily. A white flowing gown.

The Lady of the Lake had been part of the King Arthur legend. But what was the story? She could look at the world only through mirrors? And then she saw Lancelot pass by and turned to look at him?

Tennyson. Tennyson had written a poem about her. I got up, still wrapped in the afghan, shuffled to the bookshelf and pulled down
Victorian Poetry
. It took me just a few minutes to discover that there were two ladies who died for love of Lancelot, had themselves decked out in white robes with lilies in their hands and set adrift toward Camelot. One was Elaine, whose rejection by Lancelot caused a galloping case of medieval anorexia. She was placed by her family on a bier on a barge (God, how had Tennyson gotten away with that!) and sent to Lancelot with a note guaranteed to make him feel like dirt. The other, the Lady of Shalott, whose name just happened to rhyme with
Camelot
and
Lancelot
, was much more interesting. She was the one I had remembered, the one who was cursed to watch the world through a mirror. “Sick of shadows,” she turned to face the world, got her own self on the bier on the barge, and headed toward Camelot before she died. Nor did she carry any note. Pale, beautiful, both women drifted, lilies clasped in their hands. Neither woman was the Lady of the Lake who had forged Excalibur. But Ross Perry had been out of school almost as long as I had. Give him credit.

I looked at my sketch again. The three women in the paintings were definitely on biers on barges. And a castle was in the distance. And a redheaded woman was painting them. Who was she? Morgan Le Fey? And what did it mean?

Halfway through the third reading of “The Lady of Shalott,” it hit me. “Whoa,” I whispered. “Whoa.” It didn’t matter what the picture meant. It was who did it that was important. And that person could only have been Ross Perry.
He was the one who thought of Claire this way. It was as if he had signed his name.

I went into the kitchen and put a cup of water in the microwave for coffee. By the time it dinged, I knew who had killed Mercy and why, why Claire’s town house had been vandalized, and why she had escaped death. There was one piece missing, but the police could handle that. I looked at the clock. Damn. It was too late to call Sister.

T
he phone’s ringing awoke me. “Good heavens, are you still asleep?” Mary Alice asked. “Who cut up Fred’s banana?”

“Fred can handle his own banana,” I grumbled. “What time is it? I couldn’t sleep last night.”

“It’s nine o’clock. I was just checking on your hand.”

I wiggled my fingers. “It’s swollen and aching. I hope it’s not broken.”

“Well, get some coffee. I’ll talk to you later.”

“No. Wait a minute.” I sat up and pushed my hair out of my face. “I need a haircut in the worst way.”

“Make an appointment. Don’t try Delta Hairlines, though. They’re booked up until New Year’s.”

“No. Listen. I know who killed Mercy Armistead.”

“Who?”

“Ross Perry.”

“Why?”

“They hated each other. It went back a long way. Remember, he wrote that awful review of her work, and she showed that movie he was in that’s supposed to be the worst one ever made. A movie her father made, incidentally, probably because Ross was still in love with Betty Bedsole even though she had dumped him. Plus, maybe he was buying and
selling Outsider art and she was running up the prices he was having to pay.”

“Then who killed Ross?”

“I’m not sure. It could have been a hunter. He was the one vandalized Claire’s house and came at her with the knife, though. He painted that little picture I showed you last night. You remember him telling us he always thought of Claire as the Lady of the Lake with a lily in her hand?”

“No.”

“Well, he did. And that’s what the picture is. It’s of a pale, black-haired woman, actually three of them, on biers on barges floating to Camelot. It’s actually the Lady of Shalott, not the Lady of the Lake, but it’s easy to get them confused.”

“I can understand that. It’s hard to tell one beer on a barge from another.”

I chose to ignore her. “But what he was trying to do was set Claire up. He wanted it to look like she had vandalized her own house and stuck the knife in the door. And he figured everyone would think she had painted the little picture even though he had done it because he wouldn’t do anything so obvious.”

“Right,” Mary Alice said. “Get some coffee before you run this by the police.”

“Hey, Ross Perry did it.”

“Could be. Let me know.”

I got a cup of coffee, put on my sweats, and went out to walk Woofer. It was a cold, sunny morning, and the Iron Man on the mountain was mooning us with a vengeance. I gave Woofer plenty of time to investigate every lamppost and tree while I tried to decide how I would convince Bo Mitchell that Ross Perry was the murderer. I certainly hadn’t convinced Mary Alice, but she hadn’t seen Claire’s house, the knife slit in the door, or the little painting. It was too well planned, made to look like Claire had done it trying to set up Ross. Which meant that Ross had really done it.

“It was Ross,” I explained to Woofer. “He wanted to look so guilty that everyone would think it was Claire.”

Woofer hiked his leg and marked a tree. “That was an ugly remark,” I said. “But have you considered the fact that only the kitchen wasn’t damaged? Only a man would think the kitchen unimportant enough to do something to.”

Woofer squirted the tree again.

“Enough,” I said, pulling slightly at his leash and making my hand throb.

The chilly morning air had cleared the cobwebs from my brain and made me hungry. After I put Woofer in the yard with some treats, I fixed myself a bowl of oatmeal, poured a small package of raisins in it, and sat down at the sunny window to look at the morning paper. Haiti, Iran, Iraq. Hadn’t I read this same paper five years ago? Ten? Twenty? I turned to the funnies and read my old favorites. I particularly admire Mary Worth, who grows younger, slimmer, and sharper-looking every year. Not bad for an old lady who sold apples during the Depression. Gives us all hope.

I finished my cereal and looked at the phone. Surely there was a whole team of policemen working on Mercy’s murder. Unfortunately, the only one I knew was uncommunicative, sometimes sarcastic Bo Mitchell. I dialed the number.

Officer Mitchell wasn’t in. If this was an emergency, Officer Black was available. If not, leave a number and Officer Mitchell would return the call. I left the number.

The sweatshirt I was wearing was hot. I pulled it off and slipped on a T-shirt that had a picture of van Gogh’s cat on it. The yellow tabby looked at the world from the vividness of a van Gogh painting. On its left ear was a bandage. Sister had brought it to me from London, and she and I had laughed until we cried when I unwrapped it. Fred didn’t think it was funny at all, which made us laugh all the harder.

The dining room was ready for the holidays except for decorating the antique sideboard, which had belonged to Grandmother. I have a large ceramic reindeer I put in the center and I cut magnolia leaves and holly at the last minute and lay the greenery down the length. The china, crystal, and silver were ready, though. Today I was going to concentrate on the guest bedrooms.

I opened the windows and let the cool air sweep through the rooms. I changed the beds, dusted, and vacuumed. I gathered up all the old magazines that tend to collect in these rooms and put them in a garbage sack to take to the library. I Windexed the windows inside and, reaching under, as far as I could on the outside. Some day, I told myself, I would splurge and get some of those fancy windows that flip over so you can wash them on both sides. Finally, I opened a new package of Christmas potpourri and put a small amount in a bowl on each dresser.

“Ready,” I said, admiring the shining, sweet-smelling rooms. A Tiffany would be nice, but there was a lot to be said for cleaning your own house.

I dragged the heavy sack of magazines into the kitchen. I’d get them to the library that afternoon. Right now, I had worked up a sweat and my hand was hurting. I had ignored it while I was cleaning, but now I took the Ace bandage off and saw that it was swollen badly as well as discolored. I probably should go to the doctor, I thought.

I was standing at the kitchen sink drinking a glass of water and wiggling my fingers, all of which worked, when the doorbell rang.

“I got your message, and I was in the neighborhood,” Bo Mitchell said.

I held the door open for her. “I’m cleaning house. Come on back to the kitchen.”

“Like that shirt, girl.”

I grinned. “Thanks.”

The opened newspaper and my cereal bowl were still on the table. I moved them and motioned for Bo to sit down. “How come Mary Worth gets younger every year?” I asked.

“Beats me. I’m still worried about what happened to Mickey Mouse’s tail.”

“You want some coffee or Coke?”

“Some Coke would be nice.”

I fixed two glasses and brought them with napkins to the table. “You think I ought to go to the doctor with this hand?” I held it out so Bo could see.

“It hurt bad?”

“Off and on. The cleaning this morning didn’t help.”

“Wiggle your fingers.”

I did, but they didn’t move as easily as they had before I had removed the bandage.

“Better go,” Bo advised. “Now, what can I do for you, or is this just our daily visit?”

I sat down at the table and held the cold glass against my hand. “I know who killed Mercy Armistead.”

“Well, do, Jesus.”

“No, I’m serious. Don’t start that smart-aleck stuff.”

Bo stirred the ice in her glass with her finger. “Okay, who killed Mercy Armistead?”

“Ross Perry.”

“Unh-huh.”

“I mean it. You know that little painting on the bedroom wall? The only thing that made sense? The one of a redheaded woman painting a picture in a field?”

Bo Mitchell nodded.

“Well, I know what it means. Ross Perry always said Claire Moon reminded him of the Lady of the Lake and that’s what that painting is. It’s a picture of Mercy painting Claire and the twins.”

“I don’t remember a lake.”

“There wasn’t one. There was a river, and the three women, Claire and her sisters, are on biers on barges floating down to Camelot, dead for love of Lancelot. Ross just got the legend a little mixed up. They were really the Lady of Shalott or maybe Elaine. My bet is on the Lady of Shalott.”

Bo Mitchell put her glass down. “You know, Mrs. Hollowell, something tells me what you’re saying probably makes sense somehow. But I got lost back there drinking beer on a barge.”

“Not drinking beer. You know, laid out on a funeral platform. That kind of bier. It was very romantic.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Wait a minute.” I went into the den and got
Victorian Poetry
from the bookshelf. “Here,” I said, opening it to
Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and handing it to Bo Mitchell. “Read that.”

“You want me to read Tennyson?”

“It won’t kill you. Just read enough so you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

Her head bent automatically at my schoolteacher glare. In a few minutes she looked up. “Oh, my, that’s so sad. And all that damn Lancelot said was she had a pretty face.”

“That Lancelot caused a lot of trouble,” I agreed.

“Some men are just born that way.” Bo looked back at the poem. “‘Singing in her song she died.’ That’s pitiful.”

“Well, you see what I’m talking about, don’t you? How this fits the picture on Claire’s wall? It has to be connected with Ross Perry calling her the Lady of the Lake.”

“Could be. Who is Claire’s Lancelot?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Thurman Beatty. But I don’t think the picture is supposed to fit the whole story. It’s just to lead us to Claire as a suspect.”

“But Ross painted the picture.”

“Yes, but it’s so obvious he did it, we’re supposed to think Claire did it, trying to lay the blame on Ross. See, he was too smart to have done anything that blatant unless he had an ulterior motive, which in this case was making himself look so much like the prime murder suspect that you would blame someone else.”

Bo Mitchell drank some of her Coke and looked at me. “I’m still back drinking beer on the barge,” she said.

“Ross killed Mercy. Put the DMSO in her hair spritzer hoping it wouldn’t take effect for several hours, which is what happened. He left the party and went to Claire’s where he cut up the furniture and wrote on the walls. He also did the little painting, which was just like signing his name. You with me?”

Bo nodded that she was.

“Okay. Claire comes home and Ross goes for her with her kitchen knife. But he never intends to kill her. He sticks the knife in the door, being careful to hold the end so he won’t wipe off her fingerprints. He’s wearing gloves, you
understand. Claire runs and he leaves. You, the police, come in and say, ‘Nobody tried to kill this girl. She did this herself, and look here, here’s a painting like Ross Perry would have done. But he’s too smart to have done that. She’s trying to frame him.’ Right?”

Bo ran her fingers across her lips. “One minor detail. Who killed Ross Perry?”

“Hey,” I said, “I can’t do everything. You’re the one getting paid for this.”

“Not enough.” Bo pushed her chair back. “Can I borrow this book?”

“Sure. Yeats is my favorite.”

“Thanks.” Bo walked down the hall with me following right on her heels.

“What do you think? About my theory? It could be right, couldn’t it?”

Bo turned and looked at me. “Could be,” she said, “but don’t start setting odds just yet.” She opened the door and walked to her car, turning to give me a little wave. I went to call the doctor to make an appointment, giving a little triumphal skip on the way.

He put my right hand in a cast. My right hand, two weeks before Christmas, ten days before the family would descend on me. My Christmas cards weren’t addressed, my shopping wasn’t finished, I couldn’t even make another batch of fruit drop cookies because I couldn’t stir the batter.

“It’s to keep the hand immobile,” he said. “That’s about all we can do with knuckles.”

Worst of all, I was going to have to tell Fred the truth about how I hurt it. And admit I’d lied to him. There was no way I could keep up the car door story for a month.

There was a message to call him when I got in. Might as well bite the bullet. I picked up the phone and discovered immediately that you can’t even punch the buttons on a phone with a cast on your hand. The ends of my fingers were free, but the cast kept hitting the phone.

“Metal Fab!” he barked into the phone. Fred’s business
is a small metal fabrication shop he has owned for twenty-five years. His shop deals in a lot of special items that are hard to find, and his customers range from the utility companies to strip joints. For the latter, he provides the metal poles the dancers slide down. They have to be brass and shiny. And smooth. God knows those poles have to be smooth. The nature of Fred’s business means emergency orders sometimes. Not often, and he’s paid well for them.

“It’s me,” I said. “You mad at the world?”

“Just busy. How are you, honey?”

“Okay.” I could tell now was not the time to mention my hand.