Death by Devil's Breath (11 page)

In the second before my chin slammed into the fence and starbursts exploded behind my eyes, I screeched my surprise. Stunned and hurting, I didn’t even realize I’d let go of my hold on the fence until I looked down and saw the ground heading way too fast in my direction.

I couldn’t dance without the Chili Chick costume? Well, I was pretty sure I couldn’t dance with broken legs, either. At the thought, my stomach flipped. I clawed at the fence to slow my fall, and for a moment it worked. The world settled back into place and I let go a breath, at least until gravity took over and the inevitable happened. I squeezed my eyes shut, bracing myself for the impact.

That is, before out of nowhere like a superhero on a mission, Yancy showed up. He was up in years, remember, a small and wiry guy, and there was no way he could actually catch me. In all fairness, I think what he tried to do was steady me. Instead, it was more of a slam. Caught between Yancy and the fence, my feet dangled just above the ground.

“You okay? You get hurt?” Yancy couldn’t hold on for long. His arms gave out and the second he loosened his hold, I flumped down on that geranium. Good thing it was already dead.

It took me a moment to catch my breath and another few before I could think clearly enough to check my arms and my legs and make sure there were no bones sticking out anywhere they shouldn’t be. My chin hurt like hell, and when I touched it, there was blood on my fingers.

Yancy to the rescue again. He pressed a white handkerchief into my hand, and when I looked from it to him, I found him fumbling for the sunglasses in the pocket of his blue-and-white-striped golf shirt.

I waved my unbloodied hand, hauled myself to my feet, and brushed dead geranium off my butt. “Forget it. It’s too late for the sunglasses.”

I guess he realized it, too. With a sigh, Yancy walked over to the gate in the fence and shooed me into the yard. There was a table and chairs on the cement patio under a canvas awning, and he went over there, grabbed ice cubes out of a cooler near the back door, and wrapped them in a paper napkin. He handed me the impromptu cold pack along with another wet napkin to wipe up the blood.

I did, and flinched.

Yancy took the wet paper towel out of my hand and cleaned up the wound, then pressed my other hand and the ice in it to my chin. “It won’t stop bleeding until you stop squirming. Head back.”

“It hurts.” It wasn’t exactly easy talking, I mean what with my head tilted back and a sack of ice just above my windpipe. Still, I felt obligated. After all, Yancy might not have saved my life, but he sure kept it from being a whole lot more painful. “Can I just get . . .” I ducked away from Yancy’s ministering hands and darted over to the table, where there were other paper napkins piled next to a bottle of beer and a bag of Fritos. “A dry paper napkin,” I said, holding up the one I’d plucked from the pile, then touched to my chin. “Look,” I said, showing the almost-unstained napkin to him. “Better already.”

“Won’t be for long if you don’t take it easy.” He pointed me toward a chair. Truth be told, I was a little shaky from the near-bone-crushing experience and I gladly sat down.

“So . . .” Yancy handed the bottle of beer to me and got another one out of the cooler for himself, then sat down across from me. “Now you know.”

It had been an exciting couple minutes, and my heartbeat was still ratcheted up way past what was healthy or normal. I can be excused for not thinking clearly for a moment or two.

The truth that had been niggling in my head when I watched Yancy fumble for his glasses dawned, and the words whooshed out of me. “You can see! You’re not . . . you’re not really blind!”

“Shhh!” There was no one around, but that didn’t keep Yancy from looking over his shoulder. “The neighbors don’t know.”

“But . . .” Words failed me. A not-so-common occurrence. I flapped my arms at my sides, which did the double duty of expressing my amazement and keeping the ice off my chin because, really, the cold on my raw skin hurt like hell. “Why would anyone . . .?”

Yancy took a long drink of beer and, with a crook of one finger, urged me to do the same. Who was I to ignore the hospitality of my host? Even the icy beer wasn’t enough to cool the heat of my curiosity. It took a long time of staring at Yancy before he finally gave up with a toss of his hands.

“Don’t you get it?” he asked. “I’m just a guy who plays the piano, and I play the piano really, really good. But in Nashville, or Memphis or Las Vegas, there are about a million guys who play the piano really, really good.”

I thought this through. “So you pretend that you’re blind so you can stand out in the crowd?”

He shrugged. “It works for Stevie. And it worked for Ray.”

“Except Stevie really is . . . and Ray really was . . . they’re both really blind.”

He made a face. “A technicality! And now . . .” One corner of Yancy’s mouth pulled into a frown, and he scrubbed a finger under his nose. “You gonna tell?”

Was I?

I turned the thought over in my head, but right from the start, I knew my answer was a no-brainer.

“It gets you more gigs?” I asked him.

“Got me a permanent spot at Creosote Cal’s, and I guarantee, that wouldn’t have happened if I was just another guy who knew his way around the ivories.”

“And everybody thinks . . .?”

“Like I said, the neighbors don’t even know. I mean, I can’t let them, can I? Cal would hear about it, and I’ll tell you what, he’d get all bent out of shape. I’ve seen it happen before. Back a couple years ago he hired what he thought was a drag queen. Turned out she was a woman just pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman, and Cal, he might not have the best sense when it comes to business, but he’s got good connections in this town, and they go deep. I hear that woman’s waiting tables at some local diner now. She’s never appeared onstage again.”

I raised my beer bottle in a toast to Yancy. “It’s brilliant!”

His slim shoulders shot back and a smile tickled his lips. “You think?”

“I know a thing or two about promotion, and this . . . well . . .” I wrinkled my nose. “Isn’t it a pain in the neck, though?”

“You mean acting blind? Sometimes, yeah. But hey, it keeps a roof over my head and beer . . .” He clinked his bottle against mine. “Beer in the fridge. Life might not be perfect, but it’s plenty good and that’s good enough for me.”

We settled back and finished our beers, and when Yancy pushed the open bag of Fritos toward me, I grabbed a handful.

“So I guess I can ask now . . .” I brushed corn chip crumbs from my hands. “About the murder this morning. What did you see?”

Whatever Yancy had been expecting me to say to explain my appearance at his home, it obviously wasn’t this. He pursed his lips. “Cops send you?” he asked.

“Nope. Ruth Ann did.”

“She believe that horse hockey about me poisoning Dickie?”

Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t had lunch, and when Yancy got up to grab a couple more beers, I scooped up another handful of Fritos. “Reverend Love and Hermosa and Osborn sure did.”

Yancy opened my beer and sat back down. “And you wonder why one of them didn’t jump right up and tell the cops that there’s no way good ol’ Yancy Harris would ever poison Dickie Dunkin.”

“It crossed my mind.”

With his fingertips, Yancy tapped out a beat on the metal tabletop. “Truth?” He didn’t wait for me to answer; he knew that’s exactly what I was looking for. “I think we were all in shock so none of us could be expected to be thinking straight. The good reverend, she proposed a solution to the problem, and nobody had the good sense to jump in and say it couldn’t possibly be right. But after we had a couple minutes to come to our senses . . . well . . .” He tipped back the bottle and drank some of his beer. “I think each of them—I mean, the reverend and Hermosa and Norman, that’s Osborn’s real name, you know—I think each of them knew they didn’t do it, so naturally when Reverend Love thought it was me . . .” A shrug finished the thought and said all he needed to say.

“But if each of them knew they didn’t do it and you know you didn’t do it . . .” I let the thought hang in the air between us for a while before I asked, “So who do you think did do it?”

Another shrug was his only answer.

It was my turn to rap out a beat on the table. Mine wasn’t nearly as rhythmic as Yancy’s. But then, I was starting to get frustrated. “Do you think this has anything to do with Reverend Love’s big wedding ceremony on Sunday?” I asked him. “You and Hermosa and Dickie and Osborn, you were all fighting about who was going to sell the most tickets and participate in the ceremony. Osborn and Dickie went at each other before the judging started, remember.”

“Osborn and Dickie going at each other had nothing at all to do with that silly contest Cal came up with. Mark my words about that. Come on, Maxie, you’re a smart girl. Two guys jawing at each other, puffing out their chests, and acting like big macho men. What do you think it was really all about?”

“A woman.”

Yancy laughed. “A woman who was right there to watch it all.”

“Reverend Love?”

This time he didn’t just laugh, he roared. “Now there’s a visual! Reverend Love with either Norman or Dickie! No, no, not the reverend. Hermosa. Norman and Dickie, they are—well, they were—both in love with Hermosa.”

Maybe another drink of beer would help this make sense. I sat back and sipped and thought it over. “But last night, Dickie made fun of Hermosa’s singing.”

“It was his thing. His shtick. You know? My guess is that Hermosa knew it was coming and played along. After all, it gave her a couple extra moments in the spotlight. And I’ll tell you what, Hermosa loves her time in the spotlight.”

“So The Great Osborn and Dickie and Hermosa . . .” When it came to middle-aged people, it was hard for me to wrap my head around these sorts of passions. “Who was with who?”

“Well, Hermosa and Osborn used to be a couple. Lived together for a while. Then a couple weeks ago when I got to work one night, I heard all this yelling and carrying on. Turns out Hermosa dumped Osborn. Right before he was set to go onstage. Told him that she was in love with Dickie and he was moving in with her.”

I whistled low under my breath. “That might give Osborn . . . er, Norman . . . that might give him a motive to want Dickie dead.”

“Yeah.” Yancy made a face. “If you thought Hermosa was worth fighting for!”

I made a mental note of it. “And then there’s the ticket sales, too,” I reminded Yancy. “All of you were competing to sell the most. Do you think—”

“That somebody would kill Dickie over something like that?” Yancy shook his head. “Besides, I always sell out my shows. And the others, they hardly ever do. Especially Dickie. There was a time folks thought his teasing people in the audience was funny, but not so much anymore. Kindler, gentler. You know, all that. So it just goes to figure, if anyone was going to get poisoned because of the contest, it should have been me.”

“But you and Dickie weren’t even sitting next to each other. So it’s not like somebody could have meant to poison you and poisoned him by mistake.”

I think the way Yancy screwed up his mouth said that even though he’d proposed the idea, he’d never actually thought it was a possibility. Now that he thought about it, he realized it was pretty darned scary. “Anybody who would kill anybody because of how many show tickets they sold, well, that’s just crazy.”

“As crazy as poisoning a bowl of chili?”

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “That’s not crazy, it’s evil. Imagine doing that to another human being.”

“It happens all the time.”

He was about to take another drink, and he shot me a look over his beer bottle. “People have their reasons, I suppose. So I guess the thing we should be asking is, did any of the people at the contest have a reason to kill Dickie? I mean, other than Osborn because he might have been jealous about Dickie and Hermosa. For instance, those other contestants—”

I cut him off with a shake of my head. “I don’t think so. Whoever killed Dickie must have known that the murder was going to put an end to the Devil’s Breath contest. Karl Sinclair, he lost some big canned chili endorsement because of it. The way that man believes his own hype, if he did kill Dickie—and I don’t see any reason why he would—he would have waited until after the contest was over. Then there’s Brother William. Why would he kill Dickie? He’s a holy guy, and besides, no contest means no chance of winning and he’s convinced that means the sales of his monastery’s chili mix are doomed.”

“And that woman?” Yancy asked.

I tsked my opinion and that should have told him all he needed to know, but he still waited for more. “The jury’s out on her,” I told him. “I knew Bernadette a long time ago, and I know she’s a sneaky, sly, nasty individual.” I thought about the altar with Jack’s pictures on it. “I’m for sure not counting her out.”

“She’s a good looker.”

I would not go so far as to agree with him on that.

“And then there’s Tyler York,” I reminded him. “He’s too good to be true.”

Yancy laughed. “And that makes you suspicious of him right off the bat.”

“You got that right.” I laughed, too. After I got more Fritos. “The only other people in that room were me and Nick and Ruth Ann and Tumbleweed.”

“Those two, Dickie made fun of them at the show the night before.” Yancy didn’t need to remind me.

“Maybe, but that’s not a reason to kill somebody. Then again, at the show last night . . .” I sat back, letting my memory linger over everything that happened when Dickie took the stage. “He pointed you out in the audience. He said something to you, something like, ‘You see what I mean, Yancy. You
see
what I mean.’” I sat up like I’d been zapped with an electrical current. “Dickie knew, didn’t he? Dickie found out your secret, just like I did.”

Yancy glanced away. “I told you, nobody knew. Nobody knows now. Nobody but you and me.”

“Dickie did.” I was so sure of this, I pinned Yancy with a look and waited for him to squirm. “Dickie Dunkin knew you weren’t blind. He made a point of mentioning it during his act. Was he . . .” I swear, nothing people did anymore surprised me, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be outraged. I’d already gritted my teeth when I remembered how much my chin hurt. The ice was melted, but the wet paper napkin soothed my skin.