Dixie Diva Blues (6 page)

“Been what?”

“FTA. Failure To Appear. In court, you know.”

“Oh. That sounds so strange, though, to run from a minor charge that would only cost him a small fine at the most. What did he vandalize?”

“The charge was for vandalism of a storage locker on Highway 7. Holly Springs’ police caught him, Rob bailed him out, and then he just took off. Rob has had to look for him twice before, bring him back; he got a continuance, and then was FTA again. It’s crazy.”

“Who is his lawyer?”

“Some guy from Olive Branch. An old friend, he told Rob.”

“Did this Whittier guy ever say why he didn’t just show up in court, pay his fine and be done with it?”

“Now this is where it gets really strange. He told Rob that if he showed up at a court date like he was supposed to, he’d end up dead. And he meant that literally, Rob said. Something about getting on someone’s bad side. Of course, Rob told him that he’d already gotten on
his
bad side, and if he didn’t show up for court the next time his bond was going to be revoked and he’d go to jail.”

“Apparently, that didn’t make much difference,” I mused aloud. “He still missed his court date.”

“And Rob tracked him down to Clarksdale and the Shack Up Inn cabin where the poor guy did end up murdered, like he said. Only not by Rob. This is all so crazy. We’ve been on our phones and computers for over forty-eight hours and still can’t find any trace of Larry Whittier being mixed up in something that would get him killed. He was an accountant, for heaven’s sake! Accountants don’t exactly live a dangerous life.”

“An accountant accused of vandalizing a storage room,” I said slowly. “Did he ever tell Rob why he did that? Or say he didn’t do it?”

“Oh no, he admitted he did it. Only he said there was something in there he really needed and he didn’t have a key so tried to force his way in. That’s when the cops came up and found him with a bolt cutter and cordless drill and arrested him. Vandalism was the charge he ended up with after his attorney got it down from attempted burglary.”

“I take it the storage room wasn’t his.”

“Right. It belonged to someone named Lee Hazen. Only we can’t find any record of a Lee Hazen in Mississippi or the Memphis area.”

“Did you talk to the owner of the storage buildings? They usually require some kind of identification, don’t they?”

Rayna sighed. “I know. All the guy had on him was a work ID that turned out to be fake, and he paid cash. Big surprise.”

“So this Lee Hazen may not even be a real name.”

“True. Rob got a friend from his days as a cop to check on some things for him, but so far he’s come up empty. The guy is trying to juggle work, a family, and then help Rob, so his time is short. Rob won’t let me do the footwork required to track down this Hazen guy and maybe find out just what was in that storage locker that Larry wanted so badly. He won’t even let me go to the Shack Up Inn to question possible witnesses. That would be a critical step in finding information.” She sounded glum when she added, “The Clarksdale police believe Rob is the perp, and all they’re doing is piling evidence against him, not trying to prove him innocent.”

“Bitty said Jackson Lee would help.”

Rayna sighed. “Rob won’t let him rack up any extra expenses.”

Maybe Bitty was right; Rob Rainey was definitely a stubborn man.

“I see,” I said, and lord help me, I did see what was needed. “So you need help in doing the footwork, right?”

“Oh Trinket, I don’t know where else to turn! What else to do! This is all such a mess, and just the thought of Rob going to prison for a crime he didn’t commit—you know how prisoners feel about ex-cops, don’t you?”

“Not very chummy.”

“To say the least.”

“I’ll help you,” I heard myself say. “Where do we start?”

Oddly enough, we started with Bitty.
Since Bitty has Jackson Lee Brunetti wrapped around her well-manicured little finger, we asked her to ask him to talk to Larry Whittier’s former attorney. Maybe something would be said, attorney-to-attorney, that could lead us in the right direction.

At first, Jackson Lee resisted, but as we had suspected, he eventually gave in to Bitty’s persistence.

“Oh, he grumbled and growled about professional ethics and courtesies a bit, but he gave in,” Bitty said as we sat out in Rayna’s garden to one side of the Delta Inn hotel she and Rob owned.

It was pretty cool for a September day, global warming notwithstanding, and we sat out under an old magnolia tree that had probably watched the Yankees burn down the railroad station across the street many years ago. It’s been rebuilt, of course, and is now on the Historical Register; it’s a three-story, red Victorian building complete with cupolas and gingerbread architecture at the doors and windows.

Suffice it to say, Jackson Lee had reluctantly talked to Stephen Ball, the former attorney for Larry Whittier, and did have a bit of information for us to check. Rayna served us lemonade and shortbread cookies on a wrought-iron table surrounded by late-blooming flowers. Bitty talked around a cookie.

“It seems that your client did some accounting for a company owned by the mafia or something like that,” she said while Chen Ling caught all the cookie crumbs Bitty let fall. “Maybe not the real mafia, but a bunch of bad guys that were into a lot of different things like gambling.”

“The
mafia
,” said Rob, looking skeptical.

I didn’t blame him. I shared his skepticism, since it seems unlikely that the mafia would come to Holly Springs. Tunica, perhaps, where all the casinos are, but why Holly Springs?

“Did he actually
say
the mafia?” I asked, and Bitty gave me a blank look.

“Well, he said something like that. Heavens, I don’t remember his exact words, Trinket. He just said that somehow Larry had gotten mixed up with the wrong people, and he wanted to quit but they wouldn’t let him. That’s why he tried to break into the storage room. There was something in there that might be helpful in getting him free of them.”

“Records? Like spread sheets, accounting ledgers, things like that?” Rob wanted to know, and Bitty shrugged.

“I don’t know. All Jackson Lee said is that there was something in that storage unit that Larry needed but couldn’t get to for some reason. The mafia—or whoever—must have put it in there so he couldn’t get it. So it must have been some kind of ledger or accounting records, I suppose.”

“Isn’t everything on computer these days?” Rayna murmured. “Why keep hard copies of incriminating papers when you can store it all on one little disk?”

“We don’t know that’s what was in that storage unit,” said Rob. “It could be hard copies of accounting records, or a computer disk, or even one of those small hard drives.”

“Or it could have nothing to do with accounting at all,” I said. “What if he found out something about someone not even related to business and tried to blackmail him? He could have anything— photos, proof of their crimes, or even burgled items that he took and wanted to stay hidden.”

Rob shook his head. “Not Larry. He was a little guy, and always seemed too timid to say boo to his own shadow. That’s why it surprised me so much that he wouldn’t show up for his court appearances. He just didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d break the law, or even jaywalk.”

“Well,” said Bitty, frowning at a chip in her fingernail polish, “obviously you didn’t know him very well. Or maybe he just ran into a guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Some people are like that, you know.”

I looked at Bitty and thought of all the scrapes she’d gotten into, especially the ones that involved me, and how she had never taken no for an answer, either. “I suppose it takes one to recognize one,” I said in what I thought was the barest of whispers, but she heard me somehow and reached over to smack me on the arm with her napkin.

“Don’t be hateful, Trinket.”

I would have smacked her back, but she was armed with a pug, so I refrained. Getting gnawed on by an elderly dog with only three fangs can be brutal. Trust me. It was less painful to just roll my eyes at her and smirk. She blew a raspberry at me. We can be so juvenile at times.

“Anyway,” Rob said to end our regression to the third grade, “we know a lot more now than we did before. My thanks to Jackson Lee, Bitty. I know it was hard for him to do something he felt was borderline ethical.”

Bitty flapped a hand, showering more cookie crumbs down on Chen Ling’s delighted little head. “Oh, it was nothing, Rob. Really. He didn’t mind doing it at all. You know attorneys always talk among themselves when it doesn’t compromise their current cases anyway. I still wish you’d let him pay for someone to investigate this for you. He knows a guy who—”

“No, Bitty.” Rob shook his head. “I can’t allow Jackson Lee to take on my debt. I know he’s already cut his usual fee down to almost nothing to represent me.”

“
Professional courtesy
, he said. You’ve helped him a lot in the past, and you’ve been really good about bailing Divas out of jail. You should change your mind.”

Bitty stuffed the last of the shortbread into her mouth while Chen Ling’s tongue flicked out to catch crumbs. It’s like watching the crocodile from the animated
Peter Pan
movie slap the water and lick his chops while waiting for Captain Hook to tumble into his jaws. I did say I’m hopelessly repetitive about old movies and TV shows, didn’t I?

At any rate, while Chen Ling was rewarded with a few more crumbs, Rob looked over at Rayna and said, “I don’t want any Divas running amok trying to solve this on their own, okay?”

Rayna gave him an innocent look that didn’t fool him at all. “Why, I don’t know what you mean, honey.”

Rob scowled. “Yes, you do. Asking Jackson Lee to talk to Larry’s attorney is as far as I want you to go on this. You almost got yourself killed the last time you tried to help solve a murder, and I’m damned if I’ll go through that again.” He paused to look at each of us sitting there. Bitty and I gave him the same innocent gaze Rayna had.

“Why, we would
never
,” we said in unison, and then glanced at each other and paused.

“Yeah. I’ve seen what you’d ‘
nevah
’ do,” said Rob, “and I don’t ever want to see it again. You Divas are beginning to think of yourselves as some kind of over-the-hill
Charlie’s Angels
, and you’re way out of your league.”

Bitty sat up so straight in her chair that I thought Chen Ling was going to tumble right out of her lap and onto the grass. “Over-the-hill?” she repeated in a soft but deadly tone. “Did I just hear you correctly, Robert John Rainey?”

Rob has enough sense of self-preservation to realize he’d made a dreadful mistake. He began to backtrack. “Well, I didn’t mean that literally, of course.
Charlie’s Angels
were just a lot young . . . were all smart . . . were really expert at martial arts. None of you can take care of yourselves like that. That’s all I meant.”

It didn’t work on Bitty. Her eyes narrowed to slits, and if she could have tucked her Botox-filled eyebrows into a deep frown she would have done so. Instead she gave him a lofty stare that said so much more than even those two little words would have done. Fill in the blanks on your own.

I have mentioned that Bitty is a consummate Southern Belle, haven’t I? If not, or if forgotten, trust me that she is one of those females who can express so much with what she doesn’t say, or how she says it, that is peculiar only to women brought up as a belle. It has nothing to do with money and everything to do with what I refer to as the “Scarlett Syndrome.” Scarlett O’Hara of
Gone With The Wind
fame being a prime example of a Southern Belle. Not that Melanie Wilkes wasn’t also a prime example; she just chose a different method of getting her way and putting people in their places.

At any rate, Rob recognized that he had transgressed and only dug himself a little bit out of the conversational hole, so he resorted to mumbling something about having to fix a stopped-up toilet as he got up to leave. Bitty took a final shot at him. “I’ll have you know there is
nothing
over-the-hill about any of us. Personally, I can out-do any TV angel!”

The last sentence was said to Rob’s departing back as he took off up the bricked pathway to the hotel’s side door. I’m sure he heard it, but for his personal safety decided not to acknowledge her comment.

“Well,” said Rayna as she looked at me and Bitty, “what should I do next?”

“Get a seventies-style haircut and learn judo,” Bitty said sharply. “Honestly, it really does irritate me that men in general—I’m not singling Rob out—think women are just plain useless if they’re out of their twenties. After that, too many of them think we’re only good for little more than cooking or cleaning. Or sex.”

I looked at Bitty and wondered if she realized that no man had ever considered her good for cooking and cleaning. They would have been sorely disappointed if that’s what they expected.

“Look,” Rayna said, “while I’m certainly not defending Rob—after all, I was included in that ‘over-the-hill’ comment and he can forget about getting any of that last thing you said any time soon—he’s been under a lot of strain. It’s not just his freedom or lack of that he’s worried about, but his business and all the money we have tied up in this place, too. We could lose it all if he’s convicted of murder and goes to jail.”