Dixie Diva Blues (24 page)

Carolann, who knows my feelings about panties without a crotch, laughed. “In my side with ladies lingerie. Rose hired someone full-time for the Blue Velvet Room.”

“Do you need full-time or part-time?”

“Just part-time for now. Around the holidays when business picks up, I usually hire a couple of high school girls to help out, too.”

I didn’t mull over my decision very long. I needed something to keep me busy and away from Bitty and her bright ideas, and it sounded perfect.

“I’d love to work for you,” I said, and Carolann smiled.

“Great! We’ll have fun working together, I just know. Just come in to see me and we’ll do all the required stuff like filling out tax forms and so on, then we’ll get started.”

When we parted company, I decided to visit Bitty and tell her my good news. After all, getting a job had been one of my goals since I had discovered that my parents are perfectly capable of feeding themselves and finding the toilet. Besides that, I hadn’t talked to her since I’d been arrested, then un-arrested.

Jackson Lee had told me that Bitty hadn’t left her house in a couple days, and I knew she was probably feeling bad about all the trouble she’d caused. I owed her a visit and an apology. Yes, while I had no idea what I’d said to her—it had seemed to come from an alien source inhabiting my body—I was pretty sure I’d hurt her feelings and I hated that.

Despite her wacky ideas, Bitty is really a good person. She’s very loyal to friends and family, and unless someone has deliberately earned her animosity, she holds no malice in her heart. Those who have been unwise enough to harm her or those she loves, soon find out the error of their ways.

So I parked my car at the curb in front of Bitty’s house and got out with the full intention of throwing myself on her mercy. I marched through the iron gate and up the bricked walkway to her wide front porch with determination. Just before I got to the door Bitty appeared from the side porch. When she saw me, she dropped the wicker basket of flowers she’d apparently picked and rushed to greet me.

Throwing her arms around me she said, “Oh Trinket! I’m so glad you’re here! I’ve missed you, I really have, and I’m so sorry I did all that and didn’t listen to you when you warned me that it was a crazy idea and we’d be sorry, and then it ended up with you getting arrested and people saying all kind of things about you they shouldn’t even think much less say, and well . . . I’m just so sorry!”

Startled by her rambling confession—and a bit worried that she hadn’t taken a breath of air during it—I hugged her back and told her to take a deep breath. Then I said, “What people are saying all kind of things about me?”

Bitty stepped back, produced a tissue from somewhere in the smock she wore over her pink slacks and blouse, blew her nose, then said with a vague wave of one hand, “Oh, just people. They don’t matter.”

I wasn’t so sure. “Do any of those people wear blue uniforms?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. Of course, I don’t know what they do when no one’s around to see. Some of them—well, we won’t worry about them. Come inside while I fix us some sweet tea. We’ll have it on the porch.”

I followed her into the cool, airy house. Bitty’s house always smells like fresh flowers and lemon wax. Her housekeeper does a fantastic job. I know she has someone come in and clean because I know Bitty doesn’t do it herself, but I’ve never met her or even seen her. I don’t know why. Even when I’ve stayed over at Bitty’s, we’ve managed to miss each other. Probably because she comes in before daylight and leaves before I get up. All I know about her is that her name is Maria and she’s good.

Since I had arrived with all good intentions of apologizing for my moments of unbridled anger, I said as Bitty poured tea from a glass pitcher into tall glasses of ice, “It wasn’t all your fault, you know. I went along with everything when I could have refused to cooperate.”

Bitty shook her head. “You did refuse. I blackmailed you into it. Oh, I know my flaws, Trinket, I really do. When I get an idea in my head, there’s no stopping me until I get my way. It’s not one of the nicest things about me. Even Philip—who was never one of the brightest bulbs in the pack despite the fact he managed to get elected senator—knew that about me. I’m stubborn to a fault. And I say mean things about people. You’ve tried to get me to stop gossiping, but I still do it. Just about people who’ve been mean to me, but still . . . sometimes I think I’m really not a nice person, Trinket.”

She seemed on the verge of tears, and that appalled me. “Honey, don’t be so hard on yourself. None of us can help who we are. All we can do is try to be better people. And I have never known you to deliberately hurt someone. You’re also one of the most generous people I know, even though you don’t want anyone to find that out.”

That’s very true. Bitty is a huge contributor to local as well as national charities. She’s also very generous to the University of Mississippi, where she attended college and where her twin sons are currently enrolled.

We hugged, then took our glasses of sweet tea outside to the front porch. Bitty chose to sit on the longue and stretch out her legs. Hot pink Fendi sandals matched her cotton slacks and her toenail polish. Coordinated gardening wear. Go figure. Once we were installed comfortably in the fat blue cushions of her wicker furniture, we clinked our tea glasses together in a toast to friendship.

“You know,” I said reflectively, “people can’t choose their relatives, but they can choose their friends. If possible, I’d have chosen you as a relative, too.”

Bitty smiled at me. “Even though I drive you crazy?”

I shrugged. “It was a short drive. I was already on that road anyway.”

We smiled at each other. I rocked a few times in pleasant silence, sipping at my tea, before I noticed something. Or rather, the absence of something.

“Where’s Chen Ling?”

“At the doggie spa getting her bath and nails trimmed. Jackson Lee is going to pick her up for me since he’s going right by there on his way back from Ashland.”

Chen Ling—although I still think of her most of the time as Chitling—gets to go to the “spa” every week. It sits on Highway 4, the road that leads to Snow Lake as well as Ashland, and Jackson Lee has an office in Benton County as well as Marshall County. It came in handy a couple months ago when there was a murder in Benton County and we needed an attorney quickly. Jackson Lee is worth every penny he earns, believe me.

“This tea tastes different,” I said after taking another sip. “Is Sharita using a different brand?”

Bitty shook her head. “She always buys the same thing.” She took a big sip of her tea, then looked at me. “Oh. I think I poured from the wrong pitcher.”

I looked at my tea glass. It seemed innocent enough, but with Bitty, one never knows what she might have done.

“You haven’t been mixing rat poison, have you?” I asked a bit nervously.

“Oh no, I haven’t done that again. Not since I had such a close call the last time. But I did discover something new last week when I went to the package store.”

Bitty sometimes likes to disguise her visits to the liquor store by calling it by a more discreet name. I’m not sure why.

“What’d you find?” I asked, though not really sure I wanted to hear the reply.

“Sweet tea.”

“At the liquor store? Has the Prohibition repeal been repealed?”

“No, this is Burnett’s Sweet Tea. It’s vodka mixed with sweet tea. You can barely tell it’s in your tea at all. Quite nice for an evening’s refreshment.”

I had to agree. “Yes, this is much better than Jack Daniel’s and tea. Do I detect a trend? Did word of our experiment reach the distillers?”

Bitty laughed. “Obviously, we aren’t the only ones to stretch the boundaries.”

“I’m not at all certain that’s reassuring.”

“Trinket, I have something to tell you,” Bitty said so solemnly that I had trouble switching conversational gears. By the time I caught on that she was serious, she’d said, “I found something the other day that may be vital to finding the murderer.”

“Murderer?” I echoed rather numbly.

“Yes, the person who killed Larry Whittier and probably Lee Hazen, too. I don’t know what to do with it.”

I stared at her a moment. Did I really want to hear this? Would it involve me feeling as if I should do something about it? And if it did, was I willing to risk another Bitty-scheme and possible arrest? All that flitted through my mind in the space of a milli-second or two. Then responsibility for any decision on my part was removed.

Bitty leaned toward me and lowered her voice.

“It’s one of those hard drive things that people save all their computer stuff on. It must have been inside the saxophone. When you broke it on the policeman, it fell out on the floor and I just picked it up. I think it must have belonged to Larry Whittier, and may be what he was looking for.”

I blinked.
Hard drive things? Aren’t those too big to fit into a saxophone?
I thought to myself.

Bitty reached into the pocket of her gardening smock and pulled out a small box. I watched her open it and remove a small object that looked more like a keychain than a hard drive, and I realized it was one of those flash drives that are so easy to use. “See? I stuck it in the USB port on my computer but it wouldn’t open without the right password. Now I don’t know what to do with it. Should I take it to Rob? Or to the police?”

“I don’t know,” I said after thinking about it a few moments. “The police don’t want to see us or hear from us. They made that pretty plain the other day. I’m afraid if we show up with crucial evidence in our possession, we’ll be looking at obstruction charges. I hear the chief of police was most unhappy about the waste of manpower and city funds. If we take it to Rob, since he’s already charged with murdering Larry Whittier, it might look to the police as if
he
was withholding evidence. Or that he’s guilty of murder.”

“So what do we do with it? It might be important.”

“And it might be just filled up with porn. Men do that, I hear.”

Bitty and I both made a face at the thought.

“Should I give it to Jackson Lee?” she asked after a moment. “He could be the one to turn it over to the police.”

“That would be the same thing as you going in to the police station and giving it to them. They’ll know where he got it.”

“Not necessarily. Jackson Lee has a lot of clients,” Bitty said.

“Yes, but you’re the only one connected to this murder case. The police can put two and two together and come up with five.”

Bitty sighed. “Too bad we’ve ticked off the entire police force. I hate to think of having evidence that might be important and just what Rob needs to prove he didn’t kill anyone, and not being able to give it to the right people. Maybe I should just take the risk and give it to the police anyway.”

“Wait,” I said as an idea occurred to me. “What about Jake? He’s our cousin, after all, and wouldn’t want to see us go to jail. He might be able to submit this as evidence and not say where he got it. Or how he got it. Don’t police have to protect their sources?”

Bitty interrupted. “Jake Hankins sent his own daddy to jail for running a still. Why wouldn’t he do the same to us?”

“According to Mama, it wasn’t Jake who sent Uncle Ralph to jail. It was Betty Lou, Ralph’s wife. Or ex-wife now, I think. His second or third, I’m not sure. Anyway, she was mad at him and turned him in, and Jake just had to stand back and let it happen. He’d warned his daddy over and over that he wouldn’t get in the way if the ATF found it, the way I heard the story.”

We looked at each other, and then Bitty said, “Gaynelle. She’ll know what to do. She knows practically everything.”

Gaynelle arrived at Bitty’s within fifteen minutes of our phone call. Bitty handed her a tall, frosted glass of sweet tea—sans the vodka—and she sat down on the wicker longue to look at us.

“Now, what’s all this about? You were too mysterious on the phone. Haven’t you two been in enough trouble lately? The entire town has heard all about your masquerade and arrest, and it wasn’t even in the weekly paper.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “Half the town was out there watching. Everyone we know must own a police scanner.”

“Probably. Now.” Gaynelle settled herself and looked straight at me. “Tell me what you two have done that you shouldn’t have done.”

“Well, that’s just it. We don’t know what to do,” said Bitty. “We’re afraid to do anything right now. So we thought we’d ask you and see what you could think of to do about it.”

“About what? Details would be greatly appreciated.”

Bitty dug into her garden smock once more and pulled out the flash drive. “I found this at the storage unit the other day. I don’t know who to give it to, and it might be important.”

Gaynelle took the small object from Bitty. She seemed to recognize it at once. She looked back up at us. “Well, you are quite right that this could be very important. Tell me how you found it and why you didn’t give it to the police right away.”

Typical of Gaynelle, going right to the point.

Bitty inhaled then said, “When Trinket swung the saxophone at the policeman who came in the door, I couldn’t move for a minute. It was like I was paralyzed. Then it broke over his head, and about that time I realized it was the police and not the mafia, and this thing had come flying out when she smacked the cop with it, and landed right at my feet. I picked it up. I don’t know why. Anyway—”