Dixie Diva Blues (21 page)

“Almost done,” Bitty said when she’d added a pair of red suspenders embroidered with tiny little white clocks to my outfit. “Since I can’t find a Fedora, this will have to do. Put it on your head to hide your hair.”

“An Atlanta Braves baseball cap? Are you kidding me?”

“It’s blue like the suit, and has red detailing. I’ll just tie your hair back and stick it up inside the hat, and you’ll look just like a man.”

Those are not the nicest words anyone has ever said to me. I put my hands on my hips and glared at her. “Tell me again why we need to do something this stupid?”

“Stop whining, Trinket. It’s very unattractive as well as unproductive.”

“Spoken like a true mad scientist. All right. Am I ready now? Can we get this over with?”

“Hm.” Bitty tapped the side of her jaw with an immaculately manicured nail. “You look like Dancing Jimmy. I think I can fix that with some makeup.”

“Dancing Jimmy—do you mean that old guy who used to perform those shuffle-steps in Overton Square?”

“That’s the one. I didn’t think you’d remember him.”

“How could I forget? I lived in Midtown Memphis for a while, remember? I always felt sorry for him. He shouldn’t have had to dance for hand-outs.”

Bitty looked at me over her shoulder. She was headed to her bathroom for her makeup kit, and I figured I might as well give in and go along with the program. It was faster than arguing with her and then giving in anyway.

“I think Dancing Jimmy liked the attention,” she said, “and I know he liked the wine he bought with those hand-outs. I always thought he looked pretty happy.”

“Well, maybe he was. I don’t know. How could someone be happy with living off the kindness of strangers?”

“Well good heavens, Trinket, I do the same thing and
I’m
happy.”

I stared at her. She’d retrieved her makeup kit and was headed toward me with a handful of stuff that would no doubt make me break out in a rash later. I tried to wrap my head around a possible meaning for her assertion, but as with so many things she throws out into the conversational wind, it went right past me. I sighed and gave in.

“All right, Bitty. I’ll bite. Just how do you depend upon the kindness of strangers to make a living? You can’t mean your ex-husbands. You knew them pretty well before you divorced them. I assume so, at any rate. And you can’t mean your bankers, because you make it a point to know almost everything there is to know about them just in case they ever decide to run off with any of your money. Besides, Mr. Parker is old as the hills and couldn’t dodge an oncoming train, much less run away with pilfered funds.”

She plunked down the makeup bag on the foot of her bed and beckoned me over. I went obediently and sat down for her to do whatever it was she intended to do. Before she answered my question she opened her case and studied the contents, then chose a brush and told me to close my eyes.

“I mean those thieves on Wall Street, of course. Everyone knows they’d all just as soon steal your money as invest it, and no one ever dares say a word to them about it. Not even the government.”

“Um hm. Okay. I’m trying to make a connection between Wall Street thieves and you depending upon the kindness—oh wait. Of course. They’re Wall Street
strangers
who invest your money.”

“Exactly. Well, not so much anymore. I don’t trust them after all that nonsense that happened in ’08. Hold still, Trinket. I don’t want this to look too obvious.”

Since I had no idea what she was doing, I supposed I didn’t want it to look too obvious either. I held as still as possible. When she finished, she stepped back and stared at me with a critical eye. Chen Ling looked at me and growled.

Bitty shook her head. “Not quite. There’s something . . . oh, I know! Be still until I get back, Trinket. I have to get some glue.”

Alarmed, I echoed, “Glue?”

“Just eyelash glue. Don’t worry.”

Those famous last two words should have tipped me off. They didn’t. It wasn’t until Bitty had sacrificed first a pair of false eyelashes, then hair from two of her makeup brushes that she was satisfied with her efforts. She smiled as she stepped back again to inspect her efforts.

“You’ll do,” Bitty pronounced. “A perfect mustache! Take a look.”

“I don’t want to look. I don’t care. I just want this to hurry up and be over with.”

“I swear, Trinket, I don’t know what’s come over you lately. You’ve lost your sense of adventure.”

“You don’t suppose that has anything to do with the fact that I keep running into dead people? My sense of adventure played out long before the last corpse.”

“It’s not as if you’re the one who killed him, so stop carrying on about it. Now I’ll get ready and we can go. I think the storage facility is right there across from where the old Walmart used to be. Or is that a motel? I forget. Never mind. We’ll find it.”

Sometimes Bitty still amazes me. Okay, she still amazes me a lot of the time. Yet, like the proverbial lemming, I found myself taking it all in stride as I followed her toward the edge of that distant cliff. Oh, I knew there was a cliff ahead of us. There always is. It would be more amazing if we
didn’t
end up in a heap at the bottom of some metaphorical precipice.

With that attitude, there was bound to be disaster just ahead.

All-Rite Storage facility
sits on Highway 7 near the intersection with Highway 311. It is a small cluster of rectangular metal units that are unattractive but cheap. Weeds sprout up from cracks in the pavement, and a half-hearted attempt to plant flowers in a bed at the front by the office apparently didn’t work out. Weeds are nearly waist-high, up to the bottom of a single, dingy window. A battered pick-up sat out front.

We were in my car since Bitty pointed out that anyone choosing this storage facility obviously did it only because of the price, and her Mercedes would tip off the guy supposedly sitting at the desk reading dirty magazines.

“Your car looks more appropriate, Trinket,” she said, and I didn’t argue. I’d do almost anything to get this over with in a hurry. I’d already had to confiscate her loaded .45 and bolt cutters, and despite her protests, they were still at her house.

A bell jangled when I opened the office door, but the attendant didn’t bother to look up at us for a moment. Instead, she pecked busily at the keys of a laptop computer. I smiled. There went Bitty’s theory about storage facility attendants.

Bitty, however, is nothing if not flexible.

Putting on a bright smile, she said, “Hello. So sorry to bother you when you’re so busy, but we’re here to put some things into storage unit seven, and we forgot the key.”

After a few more pecks on the laptop the girl looked up. She was young, probably still in high school, and wore glasses. She pushed them up on the bridge of her nose with one finger and peered at us.

“Number seven?” She looked over at a wallboard that held keys and numbers. Then she looked back at us, then back to the board.

“Yes, it’s right there. See?” Bitty pointed at the board.

The attendant still hesitated. “Well . . . I do see the master key, but we’re not allowed to give them out. Security, you know.”

“But this is the renter of the unit.” Bitty punched me in the ribs with her elbow and I waggled a finger, then pointed to my throat as I had been instructed to do by the mad maestro conducting this farce. Bitty flashed another 600-watt smile. “Mr. Hazen has laryngitis. He brought me along to help out. Now, may we please have the master key? I’ll return it promptly.”

I nodded my head and stroked the fake mustache Bitty had attached above my top lip. It itched. I think I must be the only woman in the world allergic to mink. Or maybe the only one who’ll admit to it.

“Let me just call Mr. Stack to check first, okay?” the girl said, and gave us a quick smile as she picked up the receiver of an old black desk phone. It actually had a dial on it.

While the girl spoke in a low tone to someone I presumed to be the owner or the manager, I tried to keep from scratching my mustache. The longer it stayed on my lip the worse it itched. I was about two seconds away from ripping it off when the girl hung up the phone and turned in the chair to look at us.

“Mr. Stack agreed to let you have the key,” she said, and reached up to the board to pull it free of the metal hook.

I noticed that her hand had begun to tremble violently. She had trouble removing the key, but finally got it off the hook and held it out to Bitty. She gave a little jump when Bitty reached out for it, and jerked back as soon as it was in Bitty’s hand.

Odd behavior, I thought, even for a high school girl.

When we got outside I interrupted Bitty’s triumphant gloating of ‘how easy it had been to get the key and how she’d told me all along that she had good ideas,’ to say, “Did you see that girl’s reaction after she hung up the phone?”

“What?”

Bitty looked slightly cross that I had interrupted her self-congratulatory narrative. I ignored that and repeated, “That girl had an odd reaction after she talked to her boss.”

“So? I would, too, if I had to work in that shabby office. The newest thing in there is probably the attendant. Did you see that old phone? Positively prehistoric.”

I sighed. “Bitty, I think we should just return the key and leave. This was almost too easy. She didn’t even ask for identification.”

Bitty was about three steps ahead of me, and had rounded the corner and paused in front of a unit with a corrugated metal door. A number 7 was painted above it in black, sun-blistered paint that had slightly peeled.

“This is it,” she said. A lock had been set into the door. In my limited experience, most storage units were secured with padlocks instead of actual bolts and locks. Maybe this was supposed to be safer. The deadlock seemed pretty secure.

I took two steps back from the unit. “Be careful, Bitty. It may be rigged.”

“Be what?”

“Rigged. You know, with explosives or something.”

“You’ve been watching too much TV again. What is that from,
NCIS
?”

“Maybe. Or
CSI
. Or even
Bones
. Criminals do all kind of odd things.”

“If it was set to explode, it would have blown up Larry Whittier and Rob would never have been charged with his murder, Trinket.”

She had a point. I shrugged. “They could have come back, you know.”

Bitty stuck the key in the lock, and carefully turned it. I saw her flinch a little as the lock clicked, but there was no explosion. She looked over her shoulder and gave me a smug smile, then yanked on the handle that lifted the metal door. It rolled upward easily, with no explosions, no alarms, no booby-traps.

I moved closer to look inside, but didn’t go into the unit. It was dark and empty except for a small file cabinet and several cardboard boxes stacked against the far wall.

“Be careful, Bitty. I still have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach about this.”

“You probably need more fiber in your diet,” she said as she crossed the concrete floor to the file cabinet. “I’ll get you a basket of Sharita’s bran muffins.”

“I don’t need bran muffins,” I muttered. “I need my head examined for going along with any of your crazy schemes.”

“What?” she said over her shoulder. “Don’t mumble, Trinket. I can’t hear you. Help me with this. I think the drawer is stuck.”

“It’s probably locked. I don’t want to come in there. It’s dark.”

“For heaven’s sake then, turn on that light. Above your head,” she added when I looked on the wall for the switch. “That string.”

I looked up. A long piece of twine dangled from a single light bulb screwed into an electrical base. Fancy. I had to walk to almost the middle of the unit before I reached the string, and when I tugged on it the bulb flickered on. It didn’t help much.

“Now come help me get this drawer open. It’s caught on something.”

Bitty struggled with the top drawer of the metal filing cabinet. It was one of those plain gray ones, definitely the economy version. The entire cabinet shuddered with her efforts. Since it didn’t explode or set off an alarm, I went to help her.

We worked with the drawer for several minutes, and managed to get it partway open. It was hung on something that I couldn’t see, but could feel if I stuck my hand into the drawer. Whatever it was felt cool to the touch, and had all kind of buttons on it. Some of them could be pressed, like a lever.

“It’s caught on a metal piece,” I said, and crouched down to peer into the drawer. As I ran my hand over the thing, I could tell it was cylindrical, like a pipe. My heartbeat increased. A bomb? I tried to pull my hand back out, but the lip of the drawer hung up on my wristwatch.

“Bitty . . . this may be a bomb.”

“Oh, stop joking around, Trinket. That can get very annoying.”

I looked at her over my shoulder and I guess she could tell by my face that I wasn’t joking. She put a hand to her throat.

“Are . . . are you sure?”