Dixie Diva Blues (11 page)

Joe tilted his head to one side. “Are you sure you’re not a cop? You ask the same kind of questions.”

“No, I’m not a cop.” I laughed. “Why? Would it bother you if I was?”

He shook his head. “No, not bother me so much, I guess. It’s just that—why are you asking all these questions, anyway?”

I hesitated. I’m not the best liar in the world, and it’s usually pretty obvious. Not that I haven’t given it my best efforts at times, but I’m about as believable as a talking frog. I’d like to think it’s because I’m intrinsically honest, but I have a feeling that it’s really because I’m a terrible actor. So I stayed close to the truth—with a slight twist.

“A friend of mine is supposed to be doing his own investigation, but he couldn’t make it today so we’re here asking questions for him.”

“Your friend a cop?”

“No,” I answered truthfully. Rob is an ex-cop, but I felt it best not to add that. It seemed my little friend Joe was suspicious of police. “He works with different insurance companies.”

“Oh. You don’t, like, tell what you hear to the police, right?”

“No,” I lied, keeping it to one short word. I have a tendency to elaborate when I lie, and that’s usually what trips me up.

“Or to, like, the owners here?”

“Why would I do that?” I smiled. “Anything I find out goes in a report back to my friend, not to anyone else. So tell me about Mandy. If she wasn’t the one who called in the report, was it you?”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t me. But I know who did. They got scared, I think, so just used her name.”

“Scared? Of the police? So who was it?”

Joe eyed me for a long moment, apparently weighing his options on telling me or not. To spark his memory, I reached in my purse. I had a fifty dollar bill and a twenty. My share of the final bill and gas money. I pulled out the twenty. Joe looked at it and kept his mouth closed. Sighing, I reached in and exchanged the twenty for the fifty. After another pause during which we both played a game of mental Chicken, he took the fifty.

He stuck it in his pocket. “Patty Carter. She heard the shot and called it in.”

“She actually heard the shot?” I got a little excited about that. Someone who had actually seen something, too, perhaps. “Is Patty here today?”

“Yeah. But you can’t tell her I told you. She’ll get mad at me.” He pushed away from the wall where he’d been leaning. We stood outside the Cotton Gin, with the highway behind us, and two or three more shacks and an old Silverstream travel trailer in part of what was once probably a cotton field. Flat land stretched for miles, broken by highway and occasional trees. Good delta land for farming.

“Where will I find her?” I asked as he started toward the open door of the gin. He walked around a rusted old gas pump and then turned to look back at me.

“She cleans the shacks.”

“Wait, what does she look like?” I called after him, but he’d already stepped into the Cotton Gin. I stood there a few minutes, trying to sort through things in my head. If this Patty had really heard the shot, then she might have gotten a look at who did the shooting. Maybe that’s why she’d panicked when the 911 dispatcher had asked her name. If she’d gotten a good look at the guy, she might be worried he’d come after her. I would have been, too, if I was her. Could it be the same guy who had broken into our cabin last night? Maybe he’d taken the time and trouble to cover up from head to toe this time, if he thought he’d been seen before. Or maybe be recognized as one of the guests?

Even though the Clarksdale police had taken our statements after the break-in, it was obvious they didn’t think there was much chance they’d ever find the guy. They had discussed taking foot impressions, but by then there were so many in the soft dirt still wet from rain that it could be one of a dozen or two people.

When I had asked one of the officers if he thought this was the killer returning to the scene of his crime, he’d studied me for a moment, and answered my question with a question.

“Why do you think we didn’t arrest the right guy?”

I had been completely truthful: “Because I know Rob Rainey, and he is not a killer.”

The officer had just stared at me for another moment, then shook his head and told me that since nothing had been stolen, he was classifying our intruder’s crime as aggravated assault and battery.

“
Aggravated
assault?” I had asked. “Does that mean he was aggravated at me, or I was aggravated at him?”

I still don’t know the answer to that question since he had rolled his eyes, flipped his notebook closed, and walked off. Really, it was a simple question that deserved a simple answer.

At any rate, I pondered the reasons a killer would return to the scene of the crime as I went in search of Patty Carter. There weren’t many reasons I could think of that could justify the risk of being caught. Unless he’d left something behind that might incriminate him. That was a possibility. What had he been looking for in that cabinet? Or had he even been searching the cabinet? Drawers had been opened on tables and the contents spilled across the floor. Nothing seemed to be missing, which could mean that the intruder had found what he was looking for, or that he hadn’t found it at all.

Carolann saw me walking across the greensward toward a shack with a maid’s cart parked in front, and came over to join me. “Find out anything yet?”

“Maybe.”

“Really?” She perked up a bit. While she always dresses in what could be called New Age, or may be best known as Old Hippie, she looked comfortable in the simmering heat that would burn off to a bearable evening. Her ankle-length skirt was tie-dyed, her sleeveless tank was an apple-green to match one of the many colors in her skirt, and her bright red hair curled outward into unruly tangents that seemed to have a life of their own. Her attempt to corral her hair with a bright green ribbon had mostly failed; it defied her efforts and framed her face despite having been pulled into a sort of ponytail on the back of her neck. I felt quite dowdy in comparison, even though I had worn a new pair of cream-colored Capri pants—in washable cotton—and a bright-red, short-sleeved blouse.

Of course, a peacock strutting his feathers would have probably felt dowdy next to Technicolor Carolann. Bless her heart.

“Do you really think you have a clue to something?” she asked me excitedly.

Carolann has one of those voices that can be heard for miles, as if she has a built-in microphone. It broadcasts widely even when she tries to whisper.

“Shh,” I said. “Let’s not jinx it yet. I’m about to ask someone a few questions, and I want you to just watch her face and tell me if she’s being deceptive.”

It seemed like a good compromise, I thought. While Carolann has a keen business sense, and can make lifelong friends out of acquaintances she meets at a bus stop, she’s also prone to Bitty Syndrome: only opening her mouth to change feet. It’s not that she means to stick her foot in her mouth so much, but it could be a problem in this case. So I made the motion of zipping my mouth just to be certain she got my meaning.

She remained silent when I climbed the three steps up to the shack’s front porch and tapped on the door. It was partially open and swung a little wider at my knock.

“Miz Carter?” I called inside. When I heard a vacuum humming, I figured she couldn’t hear me, so stepped right inside the door. “Patty Carter?”

A slender woman with a mop of blonde hair tucked back into a bandana kerchief straightened and flicked off the machine. I could tell she was irritated by the interruption even though she put a pleasant smile on her face and her tone was polite.

“I’m sorry. I thought this unit was vacant—would you rather I come back later and clean?”

“Oh, I’m not a guest here. Well, I am a guest, but not in this cabin,” I amended, and when she lifted an eyebrow, I added, “I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Any questions you have about the history of the Hopson Plantation can be asked over at The Commissary, or of one of the Cotton Gin employees,” she began, and I shook my head.

“No, I need to speak specifically with you, please.”

At that her eyes narrowed slightly and her mouth thinned into a suspicious line. “Who are you? Are you the cops?”

What was it, I wondered, with people not wanting to talk to police? I put on my most ingratiating smile and shook my head again.

“No, no, I’m not with the police. My name is—” I started to give her my real name and then recalled that very few people ever believe my name is Trinket Truevine at first. I have to convince them, explain that my brother gave me the nickname
Trinket
when I was very young, and my parents saddled me with Eureka May because some of our ancestors helped found the Eureka Truevine Methodist Church a few generations back and they thought it would be nice to honor that event. Lucky me.

“—Bitty Hollandale,” I finished instead of enduring five minutes of explanation. “I want to ask you about the nine-one-one call made the night of the murder.”

“Yeah? Why ask me?”

“Because I’ve talked to everyone else here, and no one seems to be the one who made that call,” I lied. “That leaves you. Can you tell me when you made the call, and how close you were when you heard the gunshot?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never heard any gunshot, and I didn’t make that call.”

A voice right in my ear boomed, “She’s lying! I saw her eyes move to the left! A clear sign when someone is lying!”

Carolann’s shout made me jump about two feet into the air, and I staggered two steps into the room before catching myself. I turned to look at her incredulously. Her smile faded.

“What,” she whispered only half a decibel lower than a sonic boom, “didn’t you ask me to watch her face?”

I cleared my throat. “It would be best if you kept your observations to yourself until I can talk to you later, okay?”

“Oh. Sorry.” Carolann made the motion of zipping her lip, then fastened a sharp gaze on Patty Carter, squinting at her as if trying to read her mind.

I barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes as I turned back to Ms. Carter. “It will go no farther than me if you’d like to tell me the truth. I can leave your name out of it completely. If you didn’t hear a gunshot, can you tell me
why
you made that call? What did you see, or hear, that led you to feel the police should be called?”

Ms. Carter fiddled with the vacuum cord a few moments, her eyes still narrowed on me. Then she said, “I can’t get involved in this, you know? I’ve got a . . .
situation
that I need to keep to myself.”

“I understand. As long as your situation doesn’t involve shooting Larry Whittier, I have no problem whatsoever with keeping your circumstances quiet.”

A faint smile tucked at one corner of her mouth, and her eyes shifted to Carolann. When she still hesitated I turned to Carolann and said quietly, “Do you mind waiting for me at the bottom of the steps? This won’t take but a moment.”

“Are you sure—?”

“Quite sure,” I said firmly, and Carolann gave Ms. Carter a last squinty look before moving across the small porch and down the steps.

I looked back at Patty Carter. She bit her lower lip, then asked, “Why should I tell you anything at all? You’ll go to the cops, I know you will.”

“No, I won’t. This is for my own reasons that have little to do with the police. It’s more of an insurance matter than a police matter.”

“Look, I got a kid, you know? If my ex finds out where we are, he’ll make lots of trouble for us. I can’t go through that again, running out in the middle of the night when he calls, leaving everything behind—my little girl, she’s only five. He did things . . . no one believes it, and I’ve got to do what I can to protect her. You know?”

“I understand. I just need to know what you saw or heard the night of the murder. No one needs to know who told me.”

She drew in a deep breath. “I hated not being able to tell anyone, because, well, murder’s a crime, you know? But I was afraid that the police would start asking me a lot of questions, start checking around . . . anyway, I had run really late cleaning a vacant unit, and I’d forgotten to put the cart back up. I’d pulled it around to the trash cans, and got distracted and just left it there . . . well, I didn’t want to have to explain that I’d had to go to school to pick up Amy—she’s my little girl—and forgot all about putting it up. So, I came back after she went to bed and my neighbor could watch her, so I could get it and put it away, and all.

“It was really dark that night, no moon out, just some rain, but the lights from the gin made this kind of glow across the parking lot there in front of those railroad ties. I was getting out of my car when I saw this guy walk up to the Robert Clay shack and knock on the door. I didn’t think anything about it until the guy inside opened the door and this guy on the porch shoved him backward. The guest was kinda little, you know, and this other guy was pretty big. So I stopped, since the guest let out a weird sound when the guy pushed him inside. Then the other guy—the big guy—went inside and slammed the door behind them.”

She sucked in a deep breath and I nodded encouragingly, afraid to say anything for fear she might stop talking.