Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 04 (27 page)

"Gwenneth's still missing," Frederick reminded her. "No one can do anything for Kitty, Buddy, or Hal, but we've got to find Gwenneth before something happens to her."

I listened to them from the middle of the dance floor, gnawing on my lip as I tried to see through the professional facades. Based on what I was observing, Carlotta was frightened, Frederick was genuinely distraught about the missing girl, and Anderson was depressed and defeated by what he'd seen in the mirror.

I caught myself wondering if my emotions were reflected so precisely. Plover didn't seem to think so, but he was hardly the person to offer a critique.

Ruby Bee put a cup of coffee in my hand. Estelle carried a tray with more cups to the others. Harve wandered over, and in an attempt at optimism, slapped me on the back and said, "We're only missing the blond actress, so I'd say we're making progress."

"Buddy Meredith wouldn't agree with that," I said, slurping coffee and sighing. "How in the hell did he end up at Robin's cabin, Harve? We don't have a local chamber of commerce that passes out maps detailing points of interest. Except for Fuzzy, the others couldn't have known about the road and the shack. How could any one of them have taken Meredith's body there?"

"It's not exactly something that comes up in your basic conversations," Harve said. He went to the bar and put down his coffee cup to dig a cigar butt out of his shirt pocket. I stared blankly at his back as I recalled a remark from an earlier conversation.

"Are you okay?" Plover asked, nudging me.

"I need to make a telephone call, but not from here. Hold down the fort while I go to the PD." My frown deepened. "And I need to hunt up something in my notebook, too. I knew there was a reason for all my copious scribbling."

When I arrived at the PD, I made the call, then took out my notebook and found the page of notes from the interrogation of Hal Desmond. What I'd thought would be there wasn't, and I made myself sit still until I remembered the gist of my first conversation with him, when he and Carlotta had dropped by the PD to discuss the schedule.

Even though I knew Plover and Harve were waiting impatiently for my return, I leaned back in the chair and mulled over my theory until it made sense. The motive was obvious, and after staring at my notes a while longer, the means became obvious, too. All I lacked was proof.

I walked back to Ruby Bee's, my fists in my pockets, and entered the barroom. Fuzzy was snoring peaceably. The remaining three members of Glittertown Productions, Inc., were in the same booth. Ruby Bee moved behind the bar, refilling coffee cups for Harve and Estelle. Plover was pretending to ponder the selections on the jukebox, but his shoulders were rigid and he snorted periodically.

I went to the booth. "I want to know precisely where each of you was the night of Kitty's murder," I began coolly. "This time let's skip the evasions. Carlotta?"

"Gwenneth was in the room, so I went to the launderette and used the pay telephone to call my friend at Cinerotica," she said. "Kitty and Buddy were shrewd enough to figure it out. I needed to make sure he'd shredded any paper trail."

"And then?"

"I went to Anderson's room."

"Why?"

"I took him a check to reimburse him for something he picked up before he left California. I like to keep the books up to date so I can tell if we're on budget."

"Cocaine is one of your standard production costs?" I said.

She shrugged. "Preproduction, actually. Hal insisted it was necessary to boost his creative flow."

I looked at Anderson. "Will you confirm this?"

His eyes lowered, he nodded. "After she gave me the check, we just relaxed for a while, talking about the town and the script."

"Sure you did," Frederick said, smirking.

"Don't be so quick to cast the first stone," I said to him. "Darla Jean told me the truth about your evening in a motel in Farberville. Sergeant Plover suggested we book you on contributing to the delinquency of a minor, but I lean toward handing you over to Darla Jean's father. Who knows? He might use a shotgun to make you marry her. I wonder how she'd do as a Hollywood hostess. I'm confident that she knows how to make cornbread, but I wouldn't count on her for anything fancier than that."

"Don't be ridiculous. You're not gonna encourage her to tell the world that she got blind drunk and screwed the night away with someone she barely knew."

"She did get blind drunk, didn't she?" I glanced over my shoulder at Harve and Plover, who were only a few feet away and clearly interested. Ruby Bee was glued to the nearer end of the bar, and Estelle was leaning at such an angle she was apt to topple off the barstool. I explained for their benefit. "I called Darla Jean from the PD to make sure I'd heard her story correctly. After she drove him to a drugstore, Frederick bought a bottle of whiskey and insisted they take a motel room. He started pouring booze down her, and even though she protested that she wasn't like slutty Robin Buchanon, he forced her to have sex with him."

"I didn't force her. She wanted it," Frederick said. "Now she may claim she didn't, but at the time she was a hot little number."

I shifted my attention to Carlotta and Anderson. "Robin Buchanon was a rather unique individual who lived in the shack where Meredith's body was found earlier this afternoon. You may not care about a decrepit, abandoned shack, but Frederick was interested enough to ask Darla Jean for details. He then poured more whiskey down her until she passed out. When she awoke later, a second bottle mysteriously had appeared in the room. She can't remember anything about the trip home except for a brief episode of vomiting. She's just grateful she made it home at midnight and the car was parked in the driveway the next morning."

Frederick grinned. "So what if I drove home? She was crosseyed, and I was doing her and the car a favor."

Carlotta looked as if she wished she had her clipboard on which to make notes. "Are you saying Frederick got the girl drunk intentionally? It's sleazy, but it's a long way from -- "

"Murder?" I suggested. She nodded, watching Frederick as if he were a cobra poised to strike. "I'm afraid so. He left Darla Jean unconscious in the motel, came back here to kill Kitty and Meredith, and put Meredith's body in the trunk. He bought another bottle of whiskey, and after he'd finished with the girl, took her home and waited until she was inside the house. He then had the use of her car for several hours."

Cigar smoke drifted over my shoulder. "Why not leave both bodies in the motel room?" Harve asked. "Seems a sight easier."

"Easier, but not as ironic," I said. "Buddy Meredith had escaped his rural roots and gone off to the big city. Frederick must have felt it was only justice to allow the body to decompose in a piss-poor excuse for a shack. Lots of maggots and big green bottle flies. A godawful stench. Rats and other vermin to gnaw on it. A charmingly ironic location for Buddy Meredith's final scene, don't you think?"

"And why would I do that?" demanded Frederick.

"Because he abandoned your mother," I said more gently than I'd intended to. "Did she point him out at the movies? Did she tell you how he'd run off the night before they were supposed to be married?"

"You're full of it, Chief Hanks. I told you I lived in San Diego, not St. Louis." He was inching toward the outside edge of the seat, but Plover stepped forward and impassively blocked the egress.

"Who said anything about St. Louis?" I said.

"You must have said something," he said. He assessed his chances of getting past Plover, then slumped into the seat.

I continued. "We will track this down, eventually, over the phone or in person, if we have to. Your grandfather denied your existence in order to appease his guilt, but we'll find your birth certificate. You can change your name, but not your little baby footprints on the birth certificate. You let Hal send you to an orthodontist to get rid of the gap between your front teeth, and send you to a speech coach to correct your 'hayseed' accent. Correct, but not erase entirely, I might add. No one from San Diego does anything as quickly as 'a snake gain through a hollow log.' That's a colloquialism indigenous to the Ozarks region. You must have learned it from your mother."

"Nice Mr. Meredith refound his accent," Ruby Bee said from behind the bar. "And you know, I was thinking Frederick looked familiar, but I've never seen him on television. It must have been a passing family resemblance, like -- "

"Like all the Buchanons have," Estelle interrupted. "This wasn't near as ugly, but there was something about the shape of the head and ears. I saw it, too."

"Didn't hear you mention it," Ruby Bee said with a sniff.

"You neither, Miss Automatic Recognition," Estelle countered.

"You can dig through records until your toes turn up," Frederick said, resuming his smirk. "Hey, you ought to team up with Carlotta and write screenplays. Then you could watch your fabrications in living color."

Carlotta slid out of the booth and looked down at Frederick. She no longer resembled the confident, efficient assistant who could put a film into production by sheer force of personality. Her face was damp, her eyes red and swollen, her voice ragged. "Did you kill Hal, too? And Gwenneth? Is there some twisted reason to kill all of us because your father didn't marry your mother?"

"Ask her," he said, cocking his thumb as he aimed his forefinger at me. "We may end up with a regular miniseries."

"I don't think he killed Gwenneth," I said. "I'll admit I don't know where she is at the moment, but Frederick seemed to have a real obsession with the kid sister characterization."

"Somebody has to watch out for her," he said. "She's such a stupid thing, letting Hal use her whenever he was in the mood. She's going to look fifty before she's thirty, and be waiting tables forever after. Can we get this over with? I'd like to find her, even if she's screwing somebody else."

I looked at Anderson, but I was struggling to connect something he'd said with an elusive idea. It finally came to me, seconds short of a migraine. "Becky Hopperly died when her son was ten years old or so. We'll know for sure when we get the death certificate and a copy of the coroner's report, but her father went into a guilt-stricken decline when he heard about it. He told a neighbor it was fitting for her to die for her sins -- and we know which sin he felt most strongly about. Maybe she died during an abortion. Not the kind done in a sterile clinic, but the kind done in a kitchen for a few dollars."

"Done by a butcher!" Frederick exploded. His boyish features almost distorted out of recognition, he began to pound on the tabletop. "She couldn't afford a clean, decent place, because her father refused to send a few goddamn dollars. While my mother was bleeding to death on a table, the butcher patted me on the head and said I would have had a baby sister. Would have! I would have had a mother if her old man hadn't written her off! She died because everyone abandoned her -- Meredith, her father, and even the fat pig who bought his way into her bed with groceries and a little something to help with the rent. He always gave me a quarter when he left."

"Did he look like Hal?" I asked.

"He looked like a fat pig, lady," Frederick said with a snarl. He ducked his face for a moment, and when he lifted it, he was once again the innocent, boyish heart-throb who had kept the local girls in a tizzy with his freckles and pectorals. "It was a long time ago. I wouldn't recognize the guy if he walked through the door in a pastel polyester suit. I hope you've got some evidence tucked away somewhere to back up these slanderous accusations. My reputation's important in the industry, you know. Once you're tagged as a homicidal maniac, it's impossible to work."

"I've already shown motive and opportunity," I said, as always unnerved by the sudden transformations at which these people -- better yet, chameleons -- were so adept.

"What about Hal?" Carlotta said.

"Yes, what about Hal?" Frederick said, mocking her. "I can assure you he didn't knock up my mother in St. Louis twelve years ago. He was much too busy making porn movies and snorting coke to bother with a sad country girl trying to survive in a cold-water tenement on the wrong side of the river."

"Maybe I'll think of something while you're sitting in a cell," I snapped.

Plover went through the door and returned with a trooper, who took Frederick out of the murkiness of the barroom and into the relentless glare awaiting him outside. Carlotta was slumped against Anderson's shoulder, crying, while he numbly stroked her hair.

"And then there were two," I murmured, watching them from across the darkened expanse of the dance floor.

"We're back up to three," Plover said. "I just got the word that Gwenneth D'Amourre was spotted at the supermarket. She was very perturbed that they didn't carry a particular brand of hairspray. The checker reported as much to the manager, who hustled her off."

"Then she's okay," I said as we went over to the bar. "I wouldn't go so far as to say she's in good hands, but I'm not going to worry about her. We need to concentrate on nailing our homicidal friend. Impound the car Darla Jean drove that night and test the exterior of the trunk for Marland's fingerprints" -- I waited for a twinge of nausea to pass -- "and the interior for blood. Once it's matched with Meredith's, we'll have a decent case. Still a gawdawful mess, but at least it's a beginning."