Dixie Diva Blues (8 page)

“Me? Why me?”

“Because you’re the only one insisting this is the right place. Go ahead. Get out and try the door. Maybe it’s not so bad on the inside.” I figured the inside would look just as bad as the outside. The shack was built of wood planks that had weathered over the years, and the front porch sagged on one end. In fact, the entire structure sagged at one end.

“Do you think they have valet parking?” Bitty asked, squinting through the windshield. “Maybe I should try honking a few times.”

“You’re stalling,” I said. “Go on. Step on up there if this is the right place.”

“Well, I will,” said Bitty. “Give me something to cover my hair. I can’t get my hair all wet. I just got it done. Bonnie would be upset with me.”

I made a rude noise and she looked at me with narrowed eyes. “What?”

“You’re scared to go to the door because you know this isn’t the right shack,” I said. “You’re afraid zombies are waiting inside. Admit it.”

“I’ll admit nothing of the kind.” She looked back out the windshield. The loose board banged in another gust of wind, and she jumped slightly. “Clayton gave me a book this summer about how zombies are real. Do you think zombies are real?”

“I think Clayton just likes to tease you,” I said in reference to one of Bitty’s twin sons. “You make it irresistible at times. I was kidding about the zombies.”

Bitty’s shoulders hunched forward and her knuckles were white around the car’s steering wheel. “Well, I still say this place looks haunted.”

Truthfully, I was getting a bit exasperated with Bitty. Her stubbornness can go too far. So I said, “There’s only one way to find out. Go knock on the front door. If no one answers, we’re at the wrong place. If Jack Nicholson answers, you’ll have the satisfaction of being right.”

Bitty gave me an uneasy glance; her face was illuminated by the dashboard lights, so I knew mine must be, too. When I put both hands to my face and opened my mouth wide to imitate the painting
The Scream
, she said something very rude. I laughed, of course. Teasing Bitty is always an amusing pastime.

“Well,” Carolann said after a moment more of sitting in the car and staring out the windows produced no new solution, “
I’ll
try the front door. If this is the right place, surely someone will be here to greet us, give us keys, or whatever. Right?”

“You’d think so,” I said, and heard Gaynelle give an exasperated sigh.

“If they are, they must have walked or flown in,” she said. “No other cars.”

“Maybe the parking area is behind the shack?” Carolann suggested.

I barely refrained from banging my head against the car window. If Bitty didn’t give up and admit she’d turned down the wrong road, we would most likely be found in a day or two, four stranded women still arguing about whether or not we’d made a wrong turn. I cleared my throat and tried for tactful.

“Bitty. It’s dark. And storming. Your car is stuck in the mud, and we didn’t bring enough candy bars to last us through the winter. So here’s the deal: admit nothing. Just call Triple A and get us towed out of the quicksand.”

Bitty looked at me, glanced in the rearview mirror, then back at the shack. Rain beat on the car in a steady drum. Finally Bitty took out her cell phone. She punched a few buttons, and when someone answered said, “Triple A? I’m stuck in the mud in Clarksdale . . .”

We arrived at the real Shack Up Inn
within forty-five minutes. Apparently tow trucks are a thriving business in Clarksdale, because one showed up within ten minutes of Bitty’s call. He pulled the heavy Mercedes out of the mud hole and onto firm asphalt, and gave us directions. We were only off by about a mile.

“My poor Franklin Benz,” said Bitty, looking at her mud-spattered car when we finally got out in the right parking lot. She names her cars after settlement checks from her ex-husbands. She has three cars and a house, all paid for with divorce money. It’s not that she doesn’t have the stamina to stick to her marriage vows; it’s just that she marries the wrong kind of man. Jackson Lee is the first man she’s been close to that doesn’t want something from her other than fidelity and love. By now, Bitty is understandably skittish about marriage. I don’t blame her. My one and only marriage ended with a fizzle instead of a bang like Bitty’s last divorce, and it was still traumatic.

“All it needs is a good washing,” I comforted Bitty, “and the Benz will be as good as new.”

She sighed. “I know. It’s just sad to see it so mistreated.”

“Come on, Bitty.” Gaynelle held out her hand. “I hear the tinkle of ice cubes. They’re playing our theme song.”

While Gaynelle ushered Bitty toward the door of the Cotton Gin and the source of music and libations, Carolann and I met with one of the employees, and then headed off carrying our overnight bags and sacks of groceries. The shack is situated beyond the cotton gin and near what may have once been a barn; tall shapes like silos loomed against the night sky beyond. The Robert Clay shack was ours for the night; it has peeling red paint and a sagging front porch, and like all the other shacks, a tin roof. Rain hissed lightly against metal as we stepped up onto the porch.

As Rayna had said, there were about nine or ten shacks in a crescent line behind the old cotton gin. I had seen a sign at the plantation entrance—a stone’s throw from Highway 49—that named the Hopson Plantation as the first in the country to be fully automated from the planting of cotton to the harvesting and baling of it. That was back in the 1930s. I guess that somewhere down the line someone had decided it was more fun to fix up and rent out shacks than it was to plant cotton and be at the mercy of Mother Nature for a paycheck.

“This is a fabulous idea,” Carolann said. “I wish I’d thought of it. Aren’t these
cute?!”

She was right. Our cabin was decorated in shabby chic/poverty. Something that a prosperous sharecropper might have. Of course, the words
prosperous
and
sharecropper
in the same sentence are a definite contradiction in terms.

The front screen door had holes in it, and I didn’t know whether they’d been put there recently or a few decades back. Inside, old floors and walls had been basically left alone. Dark horizontal plank walls ran above vertical boards painted white; wainscoting extended all down one wall, and an old church pew provided seating. Next to it sat an old plaid couch. Across from the couch an old piano squatted against the wall, and next to it was a bar with stools, lights, and a corrugated metal overhang. The tiny kitchen had modern conveniences like a microwave, refrigerator, and coffee pot. An old mirror hung over the battered piano. The bathroom was decorated with wash basins and corrugated metal—and despite Bitty’s fears, a nicely working toilet—and supplied with clean linens. A color TV was tuned to a Sirius station that played only the blues. Fitting, I thought. The kitchen sported old flour sacks made into tea towels, original fixtures either well-maintained or well-copied, and the entire effect was old-style charming. There were two double beds in the back, in a room decorated with battered old mirrors; the beds were covered with shabby but clean bedspreads.

Even after a week, however, the main room held a faint smell of gunpowder. That surprised me. Maybe the porous wooden walls retained odors. Or maybe I’m just highly suggestible.

“Oh my!” Carolann said in a gasp, and I turned to look at her. She was staring at the faintest outline of what must have been police chalk. Someone had tried to scrub it all away, but here and there could still be seen the outline of a body. A darker stain on wood floor and red carpet must be where Larry Whittier had bled to death from a bullet that had nicked his aortic valve. The coroner’s report had been specific on the details of his death, but the results from the police lab down in Jackson still hadn’t come in yet. They were pretty backlogged.

“You know,” I mused as I peered out a window and looked toward the former gin now turned into a bar and music hall, “someone had to have seen or heard something the night Larry Whittier was murdered. It’s what, maybe twenty or thirty yards to the gin?”

Carolann came up behind me to look out the window. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Unless the band was playing so loud no one heard the shot.”

“I guess that’s possible,” I said. “But the next shack is only about twenty feet away. Wouldn’t they have heard something and reported it?”

“Who did report it?” Carolann asked, and I turned to look at her.

“That’s a good question. Who and when. According to Rob, he couldn’t have been unconscious for very long, but the police were already here when he came to. How did they get here so fast? Did something happen to make someone suspect there was going to be trouble? Or were the police that close by? I think we need to read the police reports.”

Carolann looked surprised. “We can do that?”

“Well, Rob’s attorney certainly can.”

“Rob’s attorney certainly can do what?” Bitty asked as she and Gaynelle came in the front door.

“Put up with you,” I said, and Bitty smiled.

“Why yes, Jackson Lee puts up with me very well. But that wasn’t what you were saying at all, I’m sure. What’s up?”

She flung her purse to the seat of a carved wooden stool and looked around the room with her hands on her hips. “I have to admit, this is a bit better than I expected,” she said. “It’s even . . . charming. In a shabby sort of way. Wait—I do believe that is an actual antique console piano!”

Bitty immediately crossed to the piano and began inspecting it with the same fervor a pest exterminator has for finding termites. She picked up and set down several old-looking knickknacks, then pulled the heavy-looking furniture out from the wall a bit to look behind it.

“We’ve lost her now,” I said. “She’ll be sniffing out antiques for the next hour.”

“I got her relaxed, it’s up to you to decide what to do with her,” said Gaynelle as she crossed the small main room to the plaid couch. Flopping down on it, she looked up with a smile. “So. Where was he murdered?”

“Look under your left foot,” I said, and Gaynelle bolted up from the couch like she had sat on a hot stove.

“What? Where? Is that . . . is that the chalk outline of his body?”

It is a rare occasion that one catches Gaynelle Bishop off-guard like that, and I must admit that I rather enjoyed her reaction. As I’ve said before, her thirty years as a school teacher rendered her almost invulnerable to any kind of prank. She has sailed calmly and serenely through quite a few situations that had the rest of us babbling and hysterical.

“Yep. That’s it,” I said. I pointed to the front door, which was the only entry in the front. “Rob came in through that door, saw Larry standing right about here holding a pistol in his hand—down at his side like he didn’t really want to use it—and stopped just in front of the door. Right about here, I’d say.”

I moved to a point right beyond the swing of the door, then turned around to look behind me. There was plenty of space for someone who could have hit Rob on the head before he realized they were there. I looked at the others.

“It happened about ten at night, so we have an hour or so to kill—excuse the pun—before we can see exactly what the killer or killers might have seen. I thought we could do this like a TV crime show re-creation.”

Carolann clapped her hands with enthusiasm. “Great idea! I love it! Oh, shouldn’t we each be a different character or something? I can play Rob. Or the dead man.”

A little taken aback by her zeal, I shook my head. “Uh, no. I don’t think that will be necessary. As long as we get the facts right about who was where, and what any possible witnesses might have seen or heard at the time of the murder.”

“Don’t forget the time difference,” said Gaynelle. She stood well away from the faint vestiges of chalk. “It gets dark a little bit earlier now. Not much, but if we want to recreate this exactly—was it raining that night, too?”

I said, “I don’t know. Does it make a big difference?”

Carolann sounded shocked. “Of course it does! Everything must be exactly like it was the night of the murder, or it will be all off kilter.”

“But we’re just trying to get an idea of what may have happened, and maybe find someone who saw or heard something out of the ordinary. According to Rob, no one saw or heard anything, but now, seeing how close together these shacks are, it seems pretty likely someone just doesn’t realize what they saw or heard might be important. Don’t you think . . . ?”

I let my sentence trail off into silence.

Carolann just stared at me as if I’d been speaking in a foreign language. Gaynelle stepped around the barely visible chalk outline to reach for her purse and cell phone.

“I’ll call Rayna and ask if it was raining,” she said.

I looked around for Bitty in the hope she would agree that a completely accurate re-creation was unnecessary. “Bitty?” I called when I didn’t immediately see her.

“It looks like the pinblock is still good,” her voice said from deep behind the antique piano. “And I think the bridges are pretty sound. It’s even got the old manufacturer’s certificate.”

I surrendered to the inevitable. Apparently we were going to stage a re-creation. I started to ask who was in charge of costumes, but stopped myself just in time. I’m sure one of my companions would have thought that a great idea, too. Sometimes I’m my own worst enemy.