Murder on a Girls' Night Out (4 page)

“That right? What did you teach that boy?”

“English. I was sure he was going to be the next Faulkner.”

“Give him time. Henry is gonna be all right.”

Mary Alice spoke up. “He told us about his little detour.”

“An accident.”

“He said he was selling drugs,” I said.

“Accidentally.”

I was wondering how a person could accidentally sell drugs when the kitchen door opened and the sheriff, deputy and Henry walked out.

“Uh-oh. What’s wrong with this picture?” Sister said softly.

What was wrong was that the deputy’s hand was around Henry’s arm and he was leading him to the front door. Henry, his head down, didn’t look our way.

“Henry!” Bonnie Blue cried, trying to get up. But she was too stuffed into the chair. By the time she was on her feet, Henry was out the door and the sheriff was standing by our table.

“Ladies,” he said, “we’re taking Mr. Lamont in for some questioning. I appreciate your coming out and know I can count on your cooperation. Mrs. Crane, I’ll let you know when we are finished here so you can make plans about the Skoot ’n’ Boot. In the meantime, if you could keep yourselves available.”

“How come you’re taking Henry?” Bonnie Blue hissed. The same height as the sheriff, she had her face so close to his that he backed up, bumping into a chair. She looked big enough to grab him by the shirtfront and lift him off the floor.

He straightened up. “There are some questions we need to ask him, Mrs. Butler. That’s all.”

“You listen. That Henry never did anything wrong in his life.”

“Then he has nothing to worry about.” The sheriff started to walk away. “Ladies, thank you again.”

“Is he going to need a lawyer?” Mary Alice asked, but Sheriff Reuse either didn’t hear or pretended he hadn’t.

“Damn right,” Bonnie Blue said. “You saw those handcuffs.”

“Call Debbie,” I told Sister. “Tell her something terrible has happened and we need her.”

“Who’s Debbie?” Bonnie Blue wanted to know.

“My daughter Debbie Nachman,” Sister said. “She’s a lawyer.”

“Call her,” Bonnie Blue said, reaching for the bottle of Tylenol that was still sitting on the table. “Lord, Lord.”

D
ebbie said she would be waiting for us at her office. It took both Mary Alice and me to tell her what had happened. She thought her uncle Fred was dead somehow in a well, what with Sister’s babbling, and she was much relieved when I got on the phone and explained exactly what was wrong.

“You can tell me all the details when you get here, Aunt Pat,” she said.

“But Henry was handcuffed. I would absolutely stake my life that he’s innocent.”

“When you get here, Aunt Pat. I have to get back to my client now.”

I placed the phone back on the bar.

“She hung up on you, didn’t she?” Mary Alice was moodily bending a straw into shapes. “Do you think this looks like a swan?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I don’t, either,” she said, wrapping the straw around her finger.

“I mean she didn’t hang up on me. That sweet child would never hang up on me.”

“Of course she would. She just does it politely.”

“She does not.”

“Did you get her?” Bonnie Blue ambled from the rest room.

“She’s meeting us.”

“Good. You tell her that Henry’s an angel.”

“I already have.”

“Too good for the ways of this world.” Bonnie Blue hoisted her purse (the twin of Sister’s) onto the bar. “By the way, somebody broke the mirror in the bathroom, Mary Alice.”

“Probably the policemen.” Sister’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t like that Sheriff Reuse.”

Bonnie Blue’s eyes narrowed. “Took that Henry out in chains!”

I listened to them bad-mouthing the sheriff and thought somehow we were missing the point here, mainly that a dead body had just been carted out with its throat cut. That didn’t happen just every day in a person’s life. I suddenly thought of a news story I had read the week before, about a woman finding her husband’s body. The reporter had written, “When she saw that his head was missing, she became greatly alarmed.” At the time I thought,
Alarmed
? What kind of a reporter would write something like that? Now I was beginning to understand how we can put horror in a little cubbyhole in our brains to deal with later.

“Let’s go see Debbie,” I told Sister.

It was good to get out of the Skoot ’n’ Boot. The warm sunshine was a pleasant surprise. As we ap
proached the interstate, we saw a woman with long blond hair riding a horse across the field toward the big house we had admired the evening before. It was a lovely picture.

Sister turned the car onto the interstate ramp. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, slowing as a tractor-trailer rig thundered by, then pulling in behind it. “I think I may have jumped the gun buying that place like I did. I probably should have looked into it a little more.”

I wanted to say, “No kidding,” but decided the best thing to do was to keep my mouth shut. Which I did all the way to town.

Debbie’s office is in an old, remodeled Victorian house on Birmingham’s south side, where the wealthy lived a hundred years ago but which is now a neighborhood in transition. The huge old homes that were falling into disrepair are now being turned into smart apartments and offices. Debbie’s house is both; her apartment is upstairs. She thinks it’s wonderful, especially since it’s right across from a park where Richardena can take Fay and May to play every day. She actually says that, having obviously inherited her mother’s tendency toward rhyme. Mary Alice is suspicious of the neighborhood and the park, and if she sees two people talking together on the sidewalk, she is sure a drug deal is going down. Richardena, the nanny, is not beyond her suspicions, either, since she has had her own criminal tendencies.

“She shot him in self defense, Mama!” Debbie insists. “And she aimed for his foot!”

“Then how come she hit him about three feet higher?”

“An accident, Mama!”

At any rate, the judge believed Debbie, and Richardena escaped a prison tern just in time to get settled
before the twins were born. She is a loving, gentle woman and May and Fay adore her. The fact that Richardena’s ex-husband will never sire children bothers no one but Mary Alice. And probably the ex-husband.

Which brings up another matter that bothers Mary Alice: the sire of Fay and May. One day Debbie had announced to her mother that she was thirty-five years old, wanted a child and had taken matters into her own hands, so to speak, and been artificially inseminated at University Hospital.

“Do you believe that?” Sister had asked me. “I’ll bet it was that Barney what’s his name who has hair growing across his nose.”

After the twins were born, Mary Alice was so enamored of them, I don’t think she even looked for stray hairs across the bridges of those precious little noses. She even sent a large check to University’s fertility clinic. She said it was in grateful appreciation. I figured she was planning on looking into their records someday.

The little girls were taking their naps when we arrived at Debbie’s. Debbie was sitting on the front steps in blue jeans, eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich and drinking a diet Shasta.

“My, aren’t you casual,” Sister said.

“I dress for court,” Debbie said, unperturbed. “Y’all sit down. Want a Coke or something?”

“If I get down on those steps, I’ll have to get up,” Sister said. She pulled a wicker chair over. “Where are the babies?”

“Taking a nap.”

“Richardena up there?”

“She’s gone to the store.” Debbie motioned to the monitor beside her. “I can hear them.”

“I don’t trust those things,” Sister said.

Debbie turned to me. “Hi, Aunt Pat.”

“Hi, darling.”

“What’s going on?”

Mary Alice and I both started talking at once. Debbie held up her hand. “Whoa.”

“You first,” I told Mary Alice. “It’s your crime.”

Sister started with line dancing and, almost without catching a breath, segued through buying the Skoot ’n’ Boot (which Debbie knew about), to our pleasant visit the day before and Ed clapping to our dancing to “Rockytop” and ending up in the well, to Bonnie Blue having a purse almost like hers that she probably hadn’t paid a fraction as much for, to Sheriff Reuse taking Henry away in chains.

She did a fine job of telling it all. Sister is a good one for details. When she finished, she looked at me. “Did I leave anything out?”

“The broken mirror in the bathroom.”

“Oh, yes. That’s another thing I want you to complain about, Debbie. Those policemen aren’t being careful at all with my property. I want you to be sure and get that on the record.”

Debbie looked at her mother and then at me. She took the last swig from the Shasta and crumpled the can up. (Her mother hates it when she does this!) “What?” she said.

“Those policemen are showing no respect for property.”

“What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what’?”

“The child’s confused, Sister.” I took Debbie’s hand. “What do you want to know, honey?”

“What happened to Ed?”

“Dear God.” Mary Alice came up out of the wicker chair with much groaning, though you couldn’t tell who was protesting more, Sister or the wicker chair. “I’m
going to go fix me a sandwich and peek at those darlings. You tell her, Patricia Anne.” She opened the screen door. “I don’t suppose you want a sandwich?” I shook my head.

“Figures.” She pulled the door to with a little popping sound.

“She’s going to wake up the girls,” Debbie said.

“Sure she is.” We looked at each other and smiled.

“Okay, Aunt Pat. Tell me what happened, slowly, and what Mama wants me to do.”

I covered the same bases Sister had but stopped occasionally to breathe, allowing Debbie to ask questions. The answers seemed to alarm her. When I finished, she was actually gnawing at a cuticle, something I hadn’t seen her do in a long time.

“Good Lord. Execution style?”

I nodded. “My main worry right now, though, is Henry. He’s always seemed fragile to me, and no telling what they’re doing to him.”

“What is this about him in chains?”

“Well, Bonnie Blue said she thought she saw handcuffs on him.”

Debbie sighed. “I’ll call and find out what’s what. Chances are they just took him in for some questioning, just like the sheriff said, and he’s already home. But I’ll see. They can’t hold him for no reason, Aunt Pat.”

“He writes poetry, Debbie.”

“They can’t hold him for that, either.” Debbie smiled. Then she frowned. “I wonder what Mama’s got herself into this time. This sounds scary.”

The monitor beside us crackled suddenly. We both jumped. Then Mary Alice’s voice came in loud and clear. “And are Grandmama’s darlings awake already? Are those tiny little eyes open?”

Ten minutes later, when she showed up with a twin
under each arm, she had the nerve to tell us they had been calling for someone to come get them.

“Mama!” each screamed and held out her arms to Debbie. They are fifteen months old and absolutely identical. Debbie and Richardena supposedly can tell them apart, but no one else can. They have dark, curly hair and the longest dark eyelashes I think I have ever seen on babies. Any sperm bank would be proud to claim them. Sister handed one of them to Debbie but held the other one. “Say Grandmama, darling. Grandmama.”

“Dena,” Fay or May said. They both began to cry.

“I’ll get them some juice,” Debbie said and handed her crying baby to me.

“They’re sleepy,” I accused Sister.

“Ponyboy, ponyboy,” Mary Alice sang, jiggling her twin.

I suddenly realized that I had a splitting headache and was exhausted. Fay or May in my arms felt like a ton. I put my face against the dark curls and smelled the sweet smell of shampoo and baby sweat. I felt like crying, too. Too much had happened in one day.

Debbie came back with the juice and took Fay (“Come here, Fay, darling”) from me. “You look green, Aunt Pat.”

“She needs to eat something,” Mary Alice said.

“I have a headache.”

“There’s some Stanback in the kitchen cabinet. Richardena swears by them.”

“She lets these babies see her ingesting a white powder?”

“It is possible, Mama.”

I got up. “I need some caffeine, I think.”

“You want me to fix you some tea?”

“I’ll fix it.” I left Sister and Debbie exchanging slightly hostile remarks. The hall was dark and cool,
furnished as the house might have been originally. The kitchen, however, could have been built yesterday. It was airy and light, and Debbie had added a glass sunroom onto the back. I found the Stanback, took one and heated water for tea in the microwave. I was startled to see that it was only two o’clock. How long could a day last?

Taking my tea into the sunroom, I sank down into a large leather chair. I would have to remember to tell Debbie how to get crayon off leather, I thought. Soon. I leaned back and looked up at the trees, and at the leaves that were just beginning to drift down. How golden everything was! I sipped my tea and closed my eyes. Ed was laughing and clapping to “Rockytop.” I opened my eyes quickly. I didn’t want my imagination to go any farther. But they wouldn’t stay open. I put the tea on the table and made myself think about pleasant things as I sank into a delicious catnap…

“You were snoring,” Sister said. “Drooling, too.” She was sitting on the sofa across from me, looking at a
Glamour
magazine.

“Makes me feel sorry for old Fred.”

“I don’t snore.” I wiped my still damp chin.

“Mash the button on that tape recorder by you.”

“You didn’t!”

“Sure I did. You didn’t come back to the porch and I figured you had passed out or something in here, so I came to check on you and I couldn’t resist. Go on. Mash the button.”

I hadn’t noticed the small recorder when I had set the tea down. Sure enough, the red recorder light was on.

“I’m going to kill you,” I said. “In the most unpleasant way I can think of.” I reached over and turned the machine off. “You act like a child.”

“I know it. Isn’t it fun?” Mary Alice put the maga
zine down and leaned back in the comfortable leather sofa. She propped her arms across her belly, for all the world like a woman nine months pregnant. “Debbie’s gone to get Henry and talk to the police.”

“They’re not holding him?”

“No. They just wanted to ask him some questions.”

“But what about the handcuffs?”

“You and Bonnie Blue watch too much TV. The way you were snoring when I came in, it’s understandable that Fred keeps his distance.”

I refused to rise to the bait. “Listen,” I said, “is she going to bring him back here?”

“I doubt it. You messed her whole afternoon up, you know. She canceled all her clients.”

“Where are the babies?”

“In the park with Richardena. I told Debbie we would go on home. I think she just wants to talk to Henry. She said she would call.”

“Okay.” I pushed up from the chair. “What time is it?”

“Almost four. You had a long nap.”