Murder Boogies With Elvis (19 page)

Sister put her spoon down. She was beginning to look panicked.

“I’ve never ironed Fred’s, either,” I said. “I don’t believe in ironing what doesn’t show.”

Tammy Sue gave me a weak smile.

“You could eat off her floor?” Sister asked.

“Yes, ma’am. She loved a clean house.”

I could hear Muffin scratching in the litter box in the pantry. So much for eating off of my floor.

Tammy Sue heard the sound, too. “I love cats,” she said. “Larry and I have two of them now. But when I was little, every year I’d ask Santa Claus for a kitten, and I never got one. Daddy hates cats.”

Visions of Bubba Cat, asleep on his heating pad on Sister’s kitchen counter, danced through my head. Through Sister’s, too, I’m sure. I glanced at Tammy Sue to see if she was putting us on. But her face as she leaned over her soup was guileless. Sister, on the other hand, was frowning as she broke open a muffin and buttered it. She had been, I knew, considering taking Bubba Cat with them on their honeymoon in the RV, rationalizing that if she put him on a counter on his heating pad, he wouldn’t know the difference.

I decided I’d better change the subject. “Something nice happened while you were in seeing Larry,” I said. “A lady came over and told us that Elvis had visited them in the waiting room last night. Mary Alice told her that it was Buddy, but she didn’t believe it. Tell him he’s very convincing.”

Tammy Sue looked up, puzzled. “Buddy wasn’t there last night. He had to do a show at a VFW hall, and I told him to go ahead. There wasn’t anything he could do at the hospital.”

“Oh.” I leaned over and concentrated on buttering my muffin. The rest of the meal was very quiet, each of us concentrating on her own thoughts.

“Maybe he left and came back while Tammy Sue was dozing or was in visiting Larry,” Sister said later.
Tammy Sue was asleep in my guest room. Sister and I had cleared off the kitchen table and she had brought Bonnie Blue’s books in.

“Probably,” I said.

She opened one of the books to a place she had marked with a folded page from the
Birmingham News
that had a picture on it of spring shoe fashions. “Here’s the Rubenesque.”

It was beautiful, very simple, and certainly not cut as low as she had drawn it.

“Perfect.” And it was true.

She sat down and studied the dress. “I don’t know, Mouse. You heard all that stuff about Virgil’s first wife. He’s not going to get a spotless house or ironed shorts from me. He’s not even going to get the body that all my other husbands married me for.”

“Don’t be silly. They didn’t marry you for your body. They married you because they loved you. And so does Virgil.”

“Well, I know that. But the first three never expected to have their shorts ironed, and they all loved cats. That really worries me. Virgil never mentioned that he didn’t like Bubba.”

“Maybe he’s changed. Mellowed.”

“I’m going to find out. That’s for sure.”

The phone rang and I grabbed it, hoping it hadn’t awakened Tammy Sue.

“Patricia Anne?” It was Bernice Armstrong’s voice. My stomach knotted, but I didn’t get the anger from her that I had expected. Instead, she said that she wanted to apologize for Day’s putting a knife in my purse and causing me so much trouble.

“I swear I can’t imagine what came over that child,” she continued. “She says it was on the floor of the
stage, and she picked it up, not thinking, and then when she saw in the paper that it might be a murder weapon, she panicked. And your purse was there. She says she hardly remembers dropping it in.”

“Has she told the police this?”

“She’s still down there. I went down there with her, but they’re going to do a bunch of stuff, make sure she’s telling the truth.”

“A voice-stress analyzer,” I said.

“That sounds about right. Anyway, they said I might as well come on home, and it’s a good thing I did because poor Maurice had fallen right over on his face in the foyer. It’s the strangest thing. Looks like some kind of animal attacked him. There’s fur everywhere.”

It took me a second to put the name Maurice and the stuffed grizzly bear together.

“He’s heavy as lead, so the best I can do is vacuum around him until I can get someone here to help me stand him up to see if he’s all together.” She paused. “I don’t know where Dusk is.”

“I’m sorry, Bernice,” I said. What else could I say?

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry, and Day is going to call you herself and apologize as soon as she sets foot out of that jail. I promise you that. I didn’t raise my girls to act like that.”

Apparently it had never occurred to Bernice that there might be more to the knife incident than Day just happening to see it on the floor and pick it up. I wondered if Dusk had told her mother about her marriage to Griffin Mooncloth and the fact that he was blackmailing her. I doubted it, or she would have sounded more upset about the consequences of the questioning that Day was going through at the police station.

“Well, let me go vacuum, Patricia Anne. And you can be expecting that call.”

“Bernice,” I said to Sister when I hung up. “Day admitted putting the knife in my purse. She’s down at the police station now. Bernice was apologizing for her.”

Sister closed the books and stood up. “You know, I just can’t see Day Armstrong getting so mad at Griffin Mooncloth for trying to stay married to Dusk that she kills him. Unless she’s in love with him herself. There are four things people kill for, Mouse. Money, revenge, jealousy, and hatred. And, of course, sometimes they’re just plain nuts. But, think about it. Would you kill a man because he wanted to stay married to me?”

“No. I’d let you kill him.”

“Exactly. So, unless Day was madly in love with Griffin herself, Dusk was the one who killed him.” There was some sense lurking around in here somewhere. Sister picked up the books and said she was going to the Big, Bold, and Beautiful Shoppe to talk to Bonnie Blue but that she would be back to take Tammy Sue to the hospital. “Let her sleep a couple of hours. Lord knows she needs it.”

So the rest of the afternoon was very quiet. I pulled off my good gray outfit, put on some jeans, and cleaned the house. It was the first time I had felt like it in several days. I couldn’t vacuum, but I mopped the kitchen floor and dusted, even in the living room, where we never go. I cleaned the toilets and scrubbed the sinks. By the time Tammy Sue woke up and came out of the guestroom, the whole house smelled as if a lemon tree had been grafted onto a pine.

The first thing she did was call the intensive care waiting room and talk to Aunt Maude. “Yes, ma’am,” I heard her say. “Okay.” And then, “Is Olivia still there?” When she hung up, she leaned over the counter as if she were too tired to stand up.

“Any change?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He’s still unconscious. Where’s Mrs. Crane?”

“She had a couple of errands to run. She should be back in a few minutes. You want some tea with a lot of ice in it?”

“That would be great.”

“Then why don’t you go sit down in the den, and I’ll bring you some.”

“Thanks. Do you have any Tylenol or aspirin?”

I opened the kitchen cabinet and handed her the Extra Strength Tylenol bottle. She took two and walked into the den as if all of her muscles were stiff. When I came into the den, she was stretched out in Fred’s recliner.

“I didn’t know it was possible to get this tired,” she said, taking the tea. “This should help, though. Thanks, Mrs. Hollowell.”

“You’re welcome, Tammy Sue. You want a snack of some kind?”

“No, thanks.” She took her Tylenol and drank some of the tea. “At least Olivia’s gone from the hospital. Maybe she’ll stay gone for a while.” Tammy Sue stared into her glass as if it were a crystal ball. “I know she means well, but she’s driving me crazy. She’s not the easiest person to get along with at the best of times, and God knows this isn’t the best of times.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I am, too. She’s so crazy about my brother, Buddy, that sometimes I think she’s going to get him. Which is fine with me.” Tammy Sue put her glass on the table and shrugged. “What do I know? They might be the happiest couple in the world. But right now she keeps saying that it’s her fault that Larry was hurt, and that there’s something she has to tell him. I keep asking her what, but she says she has to tell Larry.”

“If she knows something about who attacked him, she needs to tell the police, not wait around.”

“Of course she does. I can’t imagine what she thinks she knows anyway. Probably nothing.” Tammy Sue rubbed her hands down the side of Fred’s robe. “On the other hand, she and Larry own two apartments on Valley Avenue that he rents out to acts that come into town. She handles them, and I know that that Russian guy was staying there. She told the police, but I think they already knew. So I keep thinking maybe she does know something.”

“Maybe she’ll talk to Buddy.”

Tammy Sue shrugged again. “Maybe. I doubt she really knows anything, though. Olivia gets melodramatic if she stubs her toe.”

The back door opened, and Sister called hello. “Well, aren’t you looking better,” she said to Tammy Sue.

“No. I look like hell, but I do feel a little better.”

“Well, that’s good. Are you ready to go back to the hospital?”

“Just let me get dressed.” Tammy Sue headed down the hall.

“She does look like hell,” Sister whispered.

“I heard that,” Tammy Sue called.

It didn’t bother Sister at all. “What big ears you have, child,” she said.

“The better to hear you with.”

These two were going to be all right.

T
wo things happened the next morning. Larry Ludmiller regained consciousness and Dusk Armstrong went missing. I heard about Dusk from Mitzi, who came running over as soon as she saw that I was home from walking Woofer.

“She’s been gone since yesterday,” Mitzi said, slightly out of breath. “Flora Gibbons just called and told me. They’ve called in the police and everything, and Flora says that Bernice is beside herself with worry.”

“Well, Lord, I guess so. I talked to Bernice yesterday afternoon, and she said then that she didn’t know where Dusk was. She wasn’t worried about her, though, just thought she was out somewhere. She was upset because the big grizzly bear they keep in their foyer had been knocked over.” I suddenly remembered
something. “Oh, my Lord, Mitzi, she said the bear looked as if it had been attacked by wild animals.”

Mitzi and I sat down at the kitchen table and looked at each other.

“Wild animals?”

“That’s what she said.”

“That sure doesn’t sound good, does it?”

I shook my head. “It sounds like there was a hell of a fight going on in that foyer.”

“While Dusk was being kidnapped.”

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. But I had a good idea that Mitzi was right. And Dusk, tiny as she was, was a superb athlete. She would have given any would-be attacker a good fight.

“It’s got to all be connected in some way.” Mitzi said. “I don’t see how, though, do you?”

I got up, grabbed a Post-it pad and pencil from the junk drawer, and sat back down. Every teacher learns about visual aids in Education 101. I informed Mitzi of this as I set to work.

“This is Griffin Mooncloth,” I said, writing his name on the first slip and sticking him to the table.

Mitzi nodded. “Draw an
X
on him. He’s dead.”

I drew an
X
. Then I wrote Dusk on a slip and put it right below Griffin’s. Day’s went to the side of that trio. Then I wrote Larry, Tammy Sue, Buddy, and Olivia, and I stuck their slips to the table at an angle so Mitzi and I could both see them.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk.”

“Well, Larry couldn’t have killed Griffin Mooncloth because the same person tried to kill him. Draw a half
X
across him, Patricia Anne, for half dead.”

I drew the half
X
. “But he could have, and somebody
could have been taking revenge on him.” I pointed to Day Armstrong’s name. “Maybe her.”

“Do you think she was in love with him?” Mitzi pointed to Griffin’s name.

“Maybe.”

We studied the names. Then Mitzi said, “Why don’t we do it this way?” She moved three slips to the top, Griffin, Larry, and Dusk. “The murdered, the half-murdered, and the missing. Now what connection is there?”

“Griffin was married to Dusk, and he rented an apartment from Larry.”

“Hmm. And you learned how to do this in Education 101?”

“Sometimes it works. You want some coffee?”

Mitzi nodded that she did. I stood up and looked down at the names on the table. The answer was there somewhere, I knew. I just couldn’t see it.

That was when the phone rang, and Mary Alice told me that Larry had regained consciousness. He was still in intensive care, though.

“Does he know who hit him?” I glanced down at the names, ready to move one.

“He doesn’t remember a thing, Virgil says. He doesn’t even know what he was doing at the theater. I told Virgil I saw this movie on Lifetime not long ago, and the actress who used to be the bionic woman was wandering around in a supermarket with blood all over her blouse, except she didn’t know about the blood because she had on a coat, and she didn’t know who in the world she was, not even after her husband came to claim her and took her home. It took her months before she realized that he was the one who tried to kill her. Her husband. At least I think that’s what happened. So,
it’s not unusual not to remember. And I saw a story on
20/20
where the woman was in a wreck and never remembered her husband, and he had to marry her again.” Sister paused for a breath. “They’re real happy.”

“Does Larry know who Tammy Sue is?”

“I hope so. It would be strange having to date your husband, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it would. Sister? I’m going to hang up and think about this.” I slid the phone onto the cradle. “Larry Ludmiller woke up,” I told Mitzi. “He doesn’t remember anything.”

“I’m not surprised,” she said. “I saw this movie on Lifetime—”

I poured our coffee while I heard about Lindsay Wagner’s amnesia again. Funny, but neither of them could remember the ending. Something to do with the husband being no good, though.

“Tell me about Olivia,” Mitzi said, pointing toward her name with the end of the sugar spoon.

“I’ve only met her a couple of times, but she doesn’t seem friendly. She’s apparently in love with Buddy Stuckey, who doesn’t return her affections.” I put a teaspoon of sugar in my coffee and stirred it. “Tammy Sue said yesterday that she thinks Olivia might run him down, though. Stay after him until he gets so used to her that she moves into his life permanently.”

Mitzi nodded. “That’s what happened to my brother. His wife grabbed on to him like a tick before he was even out of high school. Everywhere he went, there she’d be. He never stood a chance.”

“Is he happy?”

“I think he is. He just sits back and lets her adore him.”

“There are all kinds of marriages, aren’t there?” I said, thinking of Marilyn and Charles Boudreau who had “worked something out.”

“Thank goodness.” She tapped Tammy Sue’s name with her fingernail. “What about them?”

“They seem to be fine. So far.” I told Mitzi about Tammy Sue’s plans for a Martha Stewart home when Larry got well.

“Probably won’t last long,” she said sensibly. “I made one of those wreaths last Christmas. Took me forever, and I stole so much holly from yards, it’s a miracle I didn’t get arrested.”

I also told her what Tammy Sue had said about her mother’s housekeeping. “Said you could eat off the floor it was so clean, and she ironed Virgil’s underwear. I think it upset Mary Alice. If that’s what Virgil’s expecting, she knows she’s in trouble.”

“Huh. Mary Alice doesn’t have anything to worry about. All she has to do is parade around in those purple boots and Virgil will be happy. Every marriage is different.”

“True.” We grinned at each other.

“What about the Elvis impersonator here?” Mitzi pointed to Virgil, Jr.’s name. “Seems to me that it’s a little strange to dress up like Elvis all the time.”

“Being strange doesn’t make you a murderer, thank God.” I looked at the name, too. “Besides, he doesn’t have a motive.”

“How about the others?”

“Day and Dusk are the only two that I can see who have a motive. And we know that Day had the knife.”

“And Larry could have seen her.”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” I agreed. But
even as I said it, doubt was jiggling in my brain like lines on a seismograph. She had been protecting someone when she put the switchblade in my purse. Someone she loved.

I reached over, tore off another Post-it sheet and wrote Bernice on it.

Mitzi’s eyes widened. “Bernice? Why?”

“Protecting her daughter. If she knew that Griffin Mooncloth was harassing Dusk, she might have done him in.”

“No way, Patricia Anne. She brings blueberry muffins every third Sunday for the coffee we have after church.”

“We’re just throwing out thoughts here, Mitzi.”

“Well, unthrow that one.” She reached over and carefully unstuck each name from the table. “This is giving me the creeps.”

“Me, too,” I agreed. “Let’s go send Haley an e-mail. The baby’s moving.”

“Really? Oh, she’s into the best part of being pregnant, where you know it’s real.”

And that’s what we did. After Mitzi had left, though, I pulled the Post-its apart and stuck them back on the table. Muffin came to sit in my lap while I studied them.

“Dusk Armstrong is missing,” Sister announced as she came in.

“I know. Mitzi told me. It’s scary.” I was sitting in the den, a book open in my hands, and deep in thought. If you had asked me what book I was reading, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you.

“Probably ran away. I’ve always thought she was in
volved in the Russian guy’s murder.” Sister looked over my shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“Reading.” I closed the book. Actually I had been thinking about what Mitzi and I had been talking about, how different every marriage is. “Do you think Mama was happy?” I asked.

“Our mama?”

“Of course our mama. Do you think she was happy married to Papa?”

“What are you reading?”

I held the book up and showed her it had nothing to do with my question. “Mitzi and I were talking about marriage, and I just started remembering things. Like her throwing a plate at him one time.”

Sister laughed. “She dumped a whole boiler full of black-eyed peas over him once. Don’t you remember that?”

I didn’t. “Where was I?”

“Out playing, I guess.”

“What did Papa do?”

“Scraped a lot of them off and ate them.” Sister chuckled. “He’d made one remark too many about her smoking.”

“Smoking? Cigarettes?”

“Out in the garage all the time. I think she finally quit because it was too cold out there in the winter-time.”

“Are you making this up?”

“Of course I’m not making it up. And close your mouth, Mouse. They were ordinary people just like you and me. And, yes, I think they were happy most of the time. Papa admired her feistiness.”

“Mama smoked?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mouse. Why are you worried about that now?”

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “It’s just that suddenly there are so many changes. You and Virgil getting married, Haley and Philip having a baby, Marilyn and Charles.”

“Speaking of which, Virgil and I had a long talk last night.”

“And?”

“It ended up with him picking Bubba Cat up and kissing him several times on the nose.”

“You’re kidding.”

“He swears he loves cats, that Neena, his wife, was allergic to them. He says that’s why she had to keep the house so clean, too.”

“Makes sense. Were you wearing your purple boots?”

We grinned at each other.

“I’m going over to the hospital to check on Larry and see if Tammy Sue wants to get out for a while. You want to go?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Sure you do. You’re just sitting around here moping. Go put on something decent. I want to go by Parisian and look at shoes, too.”

“Mama smoked?” I asked again as I stood up.

“Lucky Strikes.” Sister threw a pillow at me.

How could I not have known that?

“Selective memory,” Sister said as we cruised down Twentieth Street a half hour later, and I posed the question. “Don’t worry about it.” She turned on her left signal. “I don’t remember high school.”

“Really? Was it traumatic or something?”

“Of course not. I just don’t remember it.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Only when I go to the reunions.” Sister drove slowly down Sixth Avenue. “Damn, I wish somebody would come out of a parking place. I hate the deck.”

But the deck was what we had to settle for. Both of us were out of breath by the time we got to the intensive care waiting room.

Tammy Sue was asleep on a sofa, Aunt Maude was crocheting, and Buddy, in his Elvis suit, was looking through a
Sports Illustrated
. Aunt Maude looked up and put her finger to her lips.

“How are things going?” Mary Alice whispered.

Aunt Maude put her crocheting down and motioned for us to sit down. “He’s in and out of it. They’re giving him something for pain that’s making him sleep. It’s regular sleep, though.”

Buddy twisted the magazine into a knot. “That’s what I’m going to do to the bastard’s neck who did this to him.”

“Oh, hush, Buddy. Lord have mercy.” Aunt Maude nodded her head toward Tammy Sue. “This is the first time I’ve seen her sleeping this hard.”

We sat down. It was a good day in intensive care. There were only three other people in the waiting room.

“I know you’re exhausted,” Sister said.

“I am. Buddy’s going to take me home in a few minutes. We’re just waiting for Olivia to show up.”

“And then we’re leaving,” Buddy added.

“And Larry doesn’t have any idea what happened?” I asked.

“None. The last thing he remembers is eating breakfast. Said he had chocolate chip pancakes.” Aunt Maude smiled. “He never had chocolate chip pancakes
in his life, but the detective said that sounded good, and he wanted the recipe.”

“Tim Hawkins?”