Wedding Bell Blues (23 page)

Yes, he got the photos he wanted to tell the story he wanted to tell and it would be better without our Miss Sunnye Deye. But what he got wasn't true. Littleboro might not be booming but it certainly wasn't dead.

“And you are going to take this film back to Los Angeles and show the rest of the world this is the American South. See? This is what it looks like. They hang on to their past, revere it, worship it, even.”

Miles Fortune pushed back in his chair, put both hands out toward me. “Whoa,” he said. “I'm not making a statement. Just showing what I saw.”

“You
are
making a statement and it's not true. You're not showing any of the beauty. Only the ruins, the ugly, the neglected.” I thought how dismal the Dixie Dew looked when I'd first come home and how it looked now. Not perfect, but with white paint that glowed, a sturdy new roof, and gleaming copper gutters. Black shutters. My pretty tearoom that got an occasional lunch group of book club ladies. My bank loan in big figures that I chipped and chiseled away bit by bit each month. I was hanging on by the fringe of my living-room rug, which was so worn in places you could see the bare boards underneath. Threadbare. I knew what the expression meant. I wanted to ask if he was leaving. I wanted him to leave.

“All right if I stay on a few more days?” he asked as he started out. “It's not like my room's in great demand.” He sounded a bit miffed. And who wouldn't be? I'd preached him my sermon, waved my birthright flag in his face.

I nodded. If I said a whole lot more, my anger would singe him. “Stay as long as you like.” If he noted the sharp tone in my voice, it didn't show on his face or in the set of his shoulders as he left the room.

What I didn't say was, I hope you scare up a copperhead snake poking around in our “ruins.”

 

Chapter Thirty-seven

I hoped I wouldn't do the same thing when I went back to Motel 3 to see if I could get some answers and try to get Reba out of some of this mess. Was Ossie out looking to re-arrest her?

I cranked up Lady Bug and away we went, even though I didn't know what I expected to find at Motel 3. It was the only place I knew to go, the place where it started with Reba and her wedding supper and Allison playing keep-away with the wallets.

What I saw and heard was Allison on that bulldozer, running it back and forth across the rubble. When she saw me, she aimed that yellow dinosaur in my direction and roared straight toward me as fast as it would go.

Was she trying to run me down? Not if I could help it. I dodged out of her way. She braked the bulldozer to a squeaky stop where it kept on puffing and snorting out black goop until it finally chugged to a silence. Then it seemed to me like that yellow monster sat there and sulked, pouted that it hadn't got the chance to run me over.

Allison climbed down and came over, stomping dirt off her boots, slapping more off torn black leather jeans two sizes too small. Her sweatshirt read
TOM CAT'S KITTEN
but she didn't look like anybody's kitten to me. “They could have cleaned me out,” she said.

“Who? What?”

She took off her hard hat, shook out her hair that now had reddish-pink and blazing-blue streaks in it. More and more it had a look of flames, burning bright down to her coal black roots.

“Ossie and Bruce.” She waved her hand toward the rubble.

“You mean when they checked the scene, bagged evidence, that sort of thing? Like they do on TV?” I wanted to start our conversation on a quiet note. Mama Alice always said you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

“They only took the rinky-dink stuff out of the room, the prescription stuff. What was left”—she waved an arm toward the rubble—“was the rest of his mess. Butch's clothes, his god-awful tacky suit and shoes and stuff. I told them to take it all. Take the whole pile. Of course they didn't. Wouldn't. Would have saved me a lot of paying by the hour to rent this hunk of junk.” She slapped the bulldozer's hood. “Yeah, that bastard. Been using me as a stop-off place between here and Florida.”

For what? I wanted to ask, but didn't. Instead I asked, “Using Reba, too?”

“Yeah.” Allison clapped her hard hat, smothering the flames of her hair. “All for his dirty business.”

“What kind of dirty?” I asked, but she had already walked away, hopped back on the bulldozer and cranked up with a roar that shook the ground under me.

Could Reba be in over her head? Caught up in Swaringen's death and Butch Rigsbee's, too? At least Ossie had the body of Swaringen, but where was Butch's body? I looked harder to try to see that flash of something white I saw last night that I thought might be Butch's suit. Only rubble. No sequins, no white suit.

Allison was into something illegal with Butch the crook along with the murder of Swaringen? Who was the real killer or killers in this business?

I didn't know. So I started home to think on it all, back to my own business. Minding my own business for a change. I wasn't doing much good at anything else.

I got almost to Lady Bug when I saw a flashing of lights, turned to look and noticed the lights going on and off in the office of Motel 3.

I walked over. The door was open, so I went in. That whale of a monster TV was going like crazy, the sound was off, with some black-and-white Western playing. Who was watching it? Allison was on the bulldozer, and there were no cars except mine in the parking lot.

The bedroom door was cracked, so I eased it open all the way and saw somebody in Allison's bed. I walked closer, found myself tiptoeing even on the carpet.

I pulled back the sheet and saw a body. Male. Nude. Butch Rigsbee. Or the dead body of Butch Rigsbee. He was so stark white, his hair looked even blacker. A shock of black hair and a cadaver's smile pulling back from his still sparkling teeth. “Ohhhhhh,” I said.

The smell of Old Spice shaving lotion in that room was strong enough to knock me down. Somebody must have emptied a whole bottle in here. I pinched shut my nose, held my breath and turned to leave. To call Ossie. To get out of here before I screamed or threw up or both.

“Don't move,” a voice behind me said. Allison?

I had not heard the bulldozer stop, but it must have. I felt her behind me. “He's dead,” I said. She started to cry. I felt her crumple, heave deep sobs. Then more sobs. “I know,” I said, turned around and held her, let her cry all over me.

“He was not coming back.” She finally sniffled.

Well, I could have told her that.

“From Florida.” She swallowed a big sob with a wet gulp. “This time. He had a floozy, been seeing her all along.” Allison cried more. “They were going to Cuba to live.”

“You killed him?” I said.

“I had to. He said he was leaving me. All these years. After all I did for him.” She screamed now, leaned over and began to pound both fists on Butch's body. “He said he loved her.
Loved
her! Not me.”

I slipped out of the room to call Ossie DelGardo. This time I told him matter-of-factly what had happened, that I was standing next to the room where there was the very dead body of Butch Rigsbee.

I started to close the door, but not before I saw that Allison had crawled into bed and lay there holding Butch Rigsbee's body, sobbing, sobbing like her heart would break.

My next phone call was to Pastor Pittman. I told him to come to Motel 3. That Allison had killed her lover and would need to talk to someone. Pittman is usually a good listener and probably had a lot of counseling bones in his background.

Then I waited for Ossie. This time he would believe me. I had the body to prove it.

 

Chapter Thirty-eight

Ida Plum is a good listener, too, and this time she didn't scold me for putting my nose in where it didn't belong. She did say she hoped things in Littleboro would calm down after this. That she could do with a little bit of normal for a change.

I thought, So could I. Some everyday, run-of-the-mill ordinary.

But first we had a wedding to cook for. And I was still seething inside when I thought about Miles Fortune and his camera, how he was going to show L.A. all these local yokels.

A kitchen is a good place for therapy. You can get out a lot of frustration, anger and, yes, even grief in a kitchen.

You can beat, chop, sear, broil, whip, scald and more.

When I'm upset I beat up a great cake batter, the fluffier the better, and I bake, bake, bake. I bake breads, rolls, muffins. I steam and sweat and wear down all the worst feelings. The nerve of that man Miles Fortune, poking around to reveal the decaying underbelly of the South. And here's Scott, hammer and nails, paintbrush and ladders, trying to put things back together again. War, I thought. Like me and Ossie. Opposite sides. He sees the ugly, the crime, the un-doers, and me, I see the trying-to-do, fix up, clean up, paint up, do up. Make it better. I'm the polished cotton print in the tearoom; Ossie is the dark shadow on winter's eve.

And here I was baking a wedding cake for him. Ordered by Juanita. Seven layers. Plus the groom's cake in the shape of a police badge, Juanita's idea. So I did the sheet cake first, carved it in the shape of a badge, put it in the freezer to ice later, to have ready for the rehearsal dinner the night before the big “I do.” I was not hosting the rehearsal dinner. The bridal party was going to some fancy digs in Pinehurst. All I had to do was make the groom's cake for that one. The Dixie Dew would hold the reception in the back garden after Pastor Pittman did the service in the gazebo, which was now only the gazebo in progress.

Occasionally I looked out to see if something, anything was rising in the garden. All I saw so far was stacks of lumber and no trace of Scott. I was reminded of my first days trying to fix up the Dixie Dew when the contractor Verna had recommended ordered materials and more materials and didn't show up to do anything with them. Just ran up my bill at Lowe's and elsewhere. That's when I got lucky and Scott came into my life. Maybe even saved my life, as well as my living, and pried me loose from the clutches of Ossie DelGardo more than once.

I mixed icing by the gallon, listened to a radio talk show on NPR, Frank Stasio's
The State of Things
. Radio and newspapers keep me going. I trust them, believe in them, don't need experts who are not experts pontificating on themselves. World news from the BBC I can handle; I don't need the shock pictures. And I love music, bluegrass to classical, one to get my feet going, the other to soothe my soul.

Ida Plum had left to get her hair done but promised she'd come back and help clean the kitchen. “And fill me in on the latest news,” I had called, as she got her purse off the hook in the pantry.

When Ida Plum got back, smelling strongly of perfumed hair “hold it” varnish, she announced, “The latest is that Lesley Lynn Leaford is back in town.”

“What?” I stopped Mama Alice's trusty old KitchenAid mixer midswirl. This was news indeed. “I thought she died.”

“No. It was her daddy who died.”

I scraped the sides of the mixing bowl.

“Not only back in town,” Ida Plum thumped one of my already baked layers onto a dish towel, “but.”

“Skinny and worth a million dollars?”

“Two of the two.” She put the cake pans in the sink.

“So, which one first?” Ida Plum loved to make me pull details out of her. She could be as bad as Verna, drawing out a good story.

“The million dollars.” Ida Plum stacked bowls and stuff in the dishwasher.

“Daddy?” I asked.

“None other. Left her
beaucoup
of the stuff.” She pronounced the French “boo coos.”

“Who'da thunk it?” I made icing rosettes, which I thought too much with the scrolls and swags, but whatever Juanita wanted Juanita was going to get. Maybe marriage would sweeten up Ossie. It couldn't go the reverse.

“Not only money. Tina Marie told me she almost didn't recognize Lesley Lynn.”

“Well my, my,” I said. “Like how?”

“How what?”

“She didn't recognize her how?”

“Seems not only had she lost a couple tons of weight, but had found some world-class plastic surgeon and availed herself of his or her services.”

“My, my,” I said again. Our own Lesley Lynn Leaford. “So that could have been her car I saw at the fairgrounds in Clyde Edgemont's display. It would be a classic.” Then a sudden thought dived into my mind. Could Lesley Lynn have been in the parade after all? Could she have been in the mysterious dark limo? I couldn't imagine her missing a Littleboro parade, Thunderbird or not.

Things did change in Littleboro. And people. Some came back, like me. Wounded and limping but we crawled back.

“Where is Lesley Lynn staying?” I asked above the roar of the mixer. I was out of icing. Somehow I couldn't see her in the other completed room at Motel 3, if the other room was actually rentable.

“I didn't find that out,” Ida Plum said. “Tina Marie had finished my hair.” Ida Plum hung her apron on the same pantry nail my grandmother used. I had a sudden small memory flash of nostalgia. “Reba was there,” Ida Plum said. “Sitting on the floor, painting her nails some god-awful color I can't even describe. Tina Marie had given her outdated nail polish to keep her entertained.”

So Ossie hadn't hauled her in. “How did she seem?”

“Like Reba usually seems,” Ida Plum said. “In her own world. Why?”

“No reason,” I said. “No reason at all.” Except that I did feel good knowing Ossie didn't have his mind set on arresting Reba, locking her up for killing the Swaringen fellow. And now we knew Allison had killed Butch, it was up to Ossie to find out the how and take care of the rest of the business of bringing a killer to justice. Which was Allison. Why did I feel so sorry for her? Love never makes sense. Ask anybody, that's what Ida Plum would say. Cupid's arrows go in many directions.