Nothing but Gossip (22 page)

“No kidding.” I took a huge gulp of my drink.

“I’m beginning to see why Richard loves you so much.”

“Ditto.”

“And I’m absolutely mad for your mother.”

We both drew in deep breaths, let the moment pass, and smiled at each other.

“Let’s start over,” she said.

I wanted to burst into tears.

“Well, dear,” Alida continued, since tears would never do, “tell me, now that the killer has been caught, does that mean you’ll be able to relax and enjoy the next few days? It is your wedding, after all.”

“You mean Kennedy McGee?” My pulse began to approach normal. Talking about work helped a lot. “I’ll tell you right now, he’s not the killer. The police want to believe he is because all the evidence adds up, but there’s a problem. He escaped this afternoon.”

“Oh, goodness.”

“Don’t worry. He’s not going to hurt anyone. He’s probably on some rich widow’s private jet right this minute sipping champagne and telling her whatever she wants to hear. Unfortunately, this case is far from over, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to ride this horse all the way back to the barn.”

“Who do you think did it?” By now she was becoming legitimately interested.

I grinned and shook my head. “It’s a big mess. First I think it’s one person and then another.”

My mother slipped her arm around my waist. I could tell it was her arm before I saw her, because she’s the only person in the world I know who wears Miss Balmain perfume. I kissed her cheek. It was soft as velvet. A wide collar of emeralds circled her neck and lay flat against the peach shantung of her evening gown. “I think I may have what’s known as a hot tip,” she told me.

“Oh?”

“Go look in the Buckhorn Room.” Mother winked as broadly as Charlie Chan’s Number One Son. “There are some people having dinner in there that I think you will find very interesting.”

The Buckhorn Room is the discreet little dining room where members never, ever discuss what they’ve seen because it’s smoky and dark and you never can be totally sure if you’ve seen what you think you have, so you keep your mouth shut. You can practically get away with murder in there. The Buckhorn Room is a gleaming beacon of closemouthed clubdom.

“Isn’t it against the rules to see
anything
in there?” I asked.

“I believe we need to disregard the rules from time to time. Don’t you agree, Alida?”

“Completely.”

“All right. Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t you worry about your daughter?” I heard Mrs. Jerome ask as I left the ballroom.

“What good would it do?” my mother answered.

I crossed the lobby and headed down the carpeted hall, past glass-fronted cabinets packed with tarnished
golf trophies and color portraits of club champions decked out in a variety of sportswear and holding a variety of athletic equipment: tennis rackets, drivers, putters, bows and quivers, ice skates and hockey sticks. At the end of the gallery, just before I turned to go into the Buckhorn Room, I glanced over my shoulder and caught my mother and Alida Jerome actually tiptoeing behind me. I put my finger to my lips, and they stopped and giggled. I knew Mrs. Jerome had never behaved like this in her life, with or without Dean Martin, and I had a feeling she also had never had so much fun.

The room was almost empty, and murky as ever, but as my eyes adjusted, I squinted into the darkness. Back in the far corner I made out a seriously inebriated, very happy Duke Fletcher having a very public grope of Tiffany West, who had on a blunt-cut red wig with long, straight Yvette Mimieux bangs. Oh, well. He was a widower, after all, and if he got elected, it would be the first Republican presidency on the order of—and with all the excitement and verve and hog-wild copulation diplomacy of—the Kennedy-Johnson-Clinton years. Now those guys could get down and party. Big time.

“Duke,” I said with a big smile. “Just the man I was looking for.”

He turned his head in my direction, but his eyes couldn’t focus very well because Tiffany had sucked one of his fingers into her cherry-bomb lips like a piece of spaghetti. She opened her mouth, and his hand plopped onto the table.

“Hell,” he said. “Don’t you ever take a break?”

“I’m really sorry to interrupt, but I have just a couple more questions I needed to ask you. Tiffany, I think your lipstick is a little smeared. By the time you get back, I’ll be done.”

“You run along, sugar,” he told his Amazon. “Big
Duke’s got a little business to do, but I’ll be here when you get back.”

She actually blew him a kiss.

“I hear you were up talking to my housekeeper and the neighbors this afternoon.”

“Is it true what she told me?”

“About what?”

“About that Alma used to beat up Wade.”

“I don’t know anything about that. I think it’s probably nothing but gossip. Wade’s always been a scrapper. Bar fights and so forth. I don’t think he’d take it from a woman, even one as big as Alma.”

“Your housekeeper said Wade used to come over to your house and she’d patch him up.”

“Never when I’ve been around.”

“She also told me Mercedes used to come up and stay with Wade when Alma was out of town, and the three of you often had dinner and sometimes talked all night.”

“So what if we did?”

“Senator, did you and Wade and Mercedes conspire to murder Alma Rutherford Gilhooly?” It was an educated shot in the dark, and the reaction was disappointing.

Duke looked at me with complete incredulity. I might as well have punched him in the solar plexus, his breath was so gone. “What in the world are you talking about?” he finally said.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “But I know I’m headed in the right direction. Sorry to interrupt.”

The ladies were gone by the time I got back into the hall, but fortunately Richard was there. He had a big smile on his face.

“What have you done to my mother?”

“What?” I asked, thinking maybe she was missing. Or dead.

“She’s acting like a complete fool.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I insisted, all innocence.

Well, at least I could take that problem off my list.

S
unlight crept silently through the open doors, across the bedroom floor, up the side of the bed, and into our eyes, waking us with a start. I sat up and leaned across Richard to see the clock and then fell back into my pillows.

“Can you believe we slept this late?” I said. “It’s ten of six.”

“We needed it. The last couple of days have been killers.”

Sparky and Tom Kendall do not speak to each other in the morning until each has been at his or her office for at least an hour. They get up, walk the dogs, have breakfast, watch the “Today” show, read the papers, shower, get dressed, and they don’t say a word. Even on their birthdays. They talk at night. We’re the opposite. Richard and I both wake up speaking in complete sentences. Just open our eyes and start yakking away.

“I wonder how Elias is doing.” I dragged the phone off my bedside table and called the hospital.

“He had a good night,” the duty nurse reported,

“and has been awake since five-fifteen. Do you want to talk to him?”

“Sure.”

The phone only rang a half. “Yo,” Elias answered. His voice sounded strong.

“How’re you doin’, honey?”

“Fine, but I’ll tell you something, little sister. I don’t think I’m going to work for you anymore unless I start to get some hazardous-duty pay. Some kind of benefits. My leg is barely right from the accident down at the theater, and now I’ve just about gotten my arm shot off.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But I’m so glad you’re going to be all right.”

Richard began kissing my neck, working his way across the top of my shoulder.

“Hell, it’s not as bad as it sounded. I’ll still be able to sign checks and drink. I’m just waiting for the doctor to come in and tell me to go home. Now, did Linda tell me you went to Billings, or did I dream that?”

“No, I went.” I was having trouble concentrating, because Richard had hooked his finger under the strap of my nightgown and slipped it slowly down my arm.

“So you heard all about the Gilhoolys? About how she used to beat the daylights out of him? And how Mercedes used to visit whenever Alma was out of town?”

“Yes.” I was having trouble getting my breath. Richard slowly lowered one side of my gown, the fine satin no more than a balmy breeze on my skin. “But I really think that’s nothing but gossip. The big problem is, Wade was in Billings when Alma was shot and Mercedes was in the powder room with Johnny Bourbon. And Duke Fletcher isn’t sure.”

Satin slid up my legs and around my waist.

“I know there’s a path to the truth, and I’m on it, but …”

Richard pulled the phone from my hand and said into it. “Your sister has to go now.”

“I’ll see you when you get home,” I yelled at Elias, but by then Richard’s lips had covered mine, so I don’t know if Elias understood me or not and, frankly, I didn’t much care.

The chief wrangler, Art, had an old kitchen chair tilted against the barn door. He sat in the sunshine reading the morning paper and sipping coffee around the home-rolled cigarette that’s permanently embedded in his lower lip. “I thought you all wanted to ride before breakfast, not lunch,” he said, not looking up from the paper. It was six-thirty. “You going to start sleeping this late when you’re old married people? Day’s half over.”

I laughed. “Okay. Okay.”

We followed him into the barn, where our horses were saddled, just waiting for their cinches to be tightened. He had the team of golden Percherons—Blackie and Blondie—ready to go, too. Fully rigged for another test run, they stood ready to be harnessed to the buck-board I would ride to our wedding. Tomorrow. It gleamed with fresh varnish.

“I didn’t think buckboards ever looked this fancy,” I said to Art. “Even in the movies.”

“Don’t. Just yours. Look at this.” He slapped his hand on the tufted black-leather seat. “Innerspring bench. That’s what Richard here said he wanted. ‘Don’t want my bride with any splinters in her butt.’ That’s what you told me. Isn’t that right, Mr. Opera?”

“Yup.” Richard laughed, drawing up Hotspur’s
cinch. Richard and Art had a strong mutual-admiration society.

“Don’t you think this is sort of overkill on the horsepower?” I patted Blondie’s thick neck. “I mean, its not exactly as though they’re dragging a fully loaded stagecoach over the pass. It’s just for my father and me.”

“What your daddy wants,” Art said, and we all knew that that was that. “Should be down here any minute. Here he comes now.”

True enough. The old 1975 hailstone-pitted yellow Wagoneer bucked to a stop next to my pickup, and my father, the epitome of the West, the son of the son of the son of a pioneer, wearing what looked as if it could have been his great-grandfather’s original Stetson it was so mauled, stepped to the ground and slammed the old Jeep’s door with an authoritative crash.

“Have a good ride?” he asked us and moseyed into the barn. “How’re my girls today?”

The massive animals gobbled up handfuls of cut-up apple from Daddy’s gloved hand, and then he walked slowly around each of them the way a pilot inspects his aircraft before takeoff, sliding his hand over their glowing withers and rumps, up and down their legs. Rubbing their noses and foreheads. Checking their harness.

Nobody needs Percherons anymore. In the U.S. anyway. They’re a throwback to a way of life that no longer exists. No one needs horses to haul sleds full of boulders or move two-ton safes up Main Street from the railroad station to the bank. Art uses our team occasionally to drag one of our fancy four-wheelers out of the mud, but he could use one of the big tractors just as easily. When you go to draft-horse power-team shows these days, the only people who compete look as though they’re from some lost part of Appalachia. They all have on dirty T-shirts, backward baseball caps, few
teeth, and probably use the horses to haul tree stumps out of the way of their new stills or outhouse sites.

He and Art hitched up the team and led them into the farmyard while Richard and I watched.

“Your mother says don’t forget the rehearsal dinner tonight,” my father called over his shoulder as he and the rig rolled away at a bright-eyed clip. He’d been working the team for a couple of hours every morning so there wouldn’t be any surprises when the big day came to drive me down into the meadow next to the river to give me away to my man.

I
’m glad you’re here,” Linda said when I got to the office. Richard and I had decided to forget our ride. She looked at her watch. “Seven forty-five. I’ve got to get back to town and take Elias home.”

“Back to town?” I asked.

“I spent the night at the hospital again, but I thought I’d better get out here first thing to see what’s going on and get you set up for the day.” She squared off a stack of faxes and marched them into my office like a teacher handing back disappointing tests. “Not much here. Wade left a message. He’d like you to come by the house around noon for cocktails and a light lunch before the funeral. Fax from London.”

She handed me the sheet. Scrawled across a piece of Connaught Hotel letterhead were the words “I DID NOT DO IT.”

“Kennedy McGee,” I said.

“Do you believe him?” Linda asked.

“Yes. He had nothing to gain and everything to lose. Whoever did this, and I’m pretty sure I know who it
was, had a scheme that was extremely well planned. It was thought out over a long period of time, but went off course with the first shot and now has gotten totally out of control.”

I scanned the offered, uninteresting correspondence and tossed it onto my desk, then pulled my notebook out of my purse. I flipped through the pages that were black with my notes. “All this other stuff,” I said. “Russian letters, Russian payoffs, Russian dictionaries—it’s a bunch of last-minute dust. I still have two big pieces missing, but I’m going by the airport on my way to Wade’s, and I think I’ll find one of them.”

“Speaking of the airport”—Linda pushed her glasses back up on her nose—“the Frontier Airlines crew supervisor called a few minutes ago and said the crew you’re looking for from the flight Wade was on the other night came in yesterday afternoon. They’ve told all but one of them you’d be wanting to talk. No problem.”