Murder Shoots the Bull (4 page)

Arthur and Sophie Sawyer got up, walked toward the door, and waved to us.

“She’s very pretty,” I said. “I can’t believe Arthur’s messing around, though. I mean, surely not.”

Mary Alice and Bonnie Blue smiled at each other.

“This child needs to get out of the house more,” Bonnie Blue said.

“Don’t be so cynical.” I watched Arthur and Sophie as they slowly crossed the parking lot. He had his hand under her elbow. Supporting her, I realized.

“That lady with Arthur’s having trouble walking,” I added.

Bonnie Blue and Mary Alice turned to look.

“Hmmm,” Bonnie Blue said. “Maybe she’s got osteoporosis. Broke her hip.”

“Could be,” Mary Alice agreed. “That’s what’s going to happen to Patricia Anne. We were at the movie the other day waiting in line and I noticed she’s already getting one of those dowager humps.” She curved her shoulders. “Like this.”

“I was trying to sneak your popcorn in.”

“Well, I couldn’t take the popcorn and the Cokes both.”

“It’s tacky sneaking food into a movie.”

“Well, folks wouldn’t do it if they didn’t charge an arm and a leg.”

“It’s not like you couldn’t afford it.”

“Y’all look.” Bonnie Blue brought us back to the subject, Arthur and his lady friend. “She’s having trouble getting in the car.”

Arthur helped Sophie Sawyer sit sideways on the seat, then picked up her legs and placed them in the car.

“I hope he’s not selling her any life insurance,” Sister said.

I don’t know why, maybe it was the gentleness of the way Arthur was helping Sophie, but I had a sudden memory of a weekend camping trip that the four of us, Arthur, Mitzi, Fred, and I, and our five children had taken years before. The children were still small, and we had rented two popup camper trailers, packed practically everything we owned in and on them, including the kids’ bicycles, and gone to Wind Creek. It was summer, but after supper we built a fire to toast marshmallows.

The children, worn out from a day of swimming and playing, didn’t complain when we washed the stickiness from them and put them to bed in the campers. The four of us sat by the fire talking, tired and happy. A slight breeze came up, and the smoke kept following us.

“Let’s go swimming before we go to bed,” Mitzi said. “Wash off this smoke.”

And, daringly, we stripped to our underwear and walked into the warm water of the lake, our young bodies firm and beautiful.

Sister poked me. “She’s having one of her fugues,” she explained to Bonnie Blue. “Does it all the time.”

“Must have been a good one, the way she’s smiling.”

“It was.” I could still smell the campfire.

Sister pushed her chair back. “I’m going to get us all some bread pudding.”

Bread pudding is one of the specialties of the Hunan Hut, moist, with just the right amount of raisins, and a lemon sauce on the side. Southern Chinese, I suppose. And delicious.

“Tell Bonnie Blue about the investment club while I’m gone. Both of you want lemon sauce?”

Bonnie Blue and I nodded yes.

“What investment club?” she asked.

I told her what Mitzi had told me.

“Joy McWain?” she asked. “The cheerleader with the big thighs in the commercial?”

Where on God’s earth had I been? I admitted that I had never seen the commercial.

“Those red satin underpants would put your eyes out,” Bonnie Blue said. “It was something.”

It must have been.

“Here you go.” Mary Alice set bowls of bread pudding before each of us and sat down. “What do you think, Bonnie Blue?”

“It looks great.”

“I mean about the investment club.”

“It sounds like something I need to get into. I don’t have any more sense than Daddy does about money. Somebody comes in, says, ‘Abe, I’ll give you ten dollars for that picture you’re working on,’ he grabs the money and growls. Buries it in the backyard in a Mason jar.”

Bonnie Blue’s father, Abe Butler, is one of Alabama’s foremost folk artists. If he was really doing this, and Bonnie Blue seemed serious, his backyard would be loaded.

“That could be dangerous,” I said.

“Nah. He’s got him a great big Rottweiler out there. Calls her Sugar Pie.” Bonnie Blue took a bite of her bread pudding. “Umm. This is good.”

“Maybe you ought to unearth a couple of jars and invest
it for him,” Sister suggested. “It’s not drawing interest out there in the yard.”

“Sister!” The woman has the morals of an alley cat.

“What? It’s going to be hers one day anyway.”

Bonnie Blue took a sip of tea and looked at her glass thoughtfully. “You remember
Jaws?
”

We nodded.

“Remember Jaws’s teeth?” She paused while we remembered the teeth closing on the boat with Richard Dreyfuss in it. The look on his face.

“Now think Sugar Pie.”

We got the picture.

“Like I said, it sounds like something I need, though. When’s it meeting?”

“Wednesday morning at the Homewood Library.”

“Now y’all give me a break. You know I’ve got to work.”

“You could take off for a little while,” Mary Alice said.

Bonnie Blue pointed a fork at her. “No way. I get commissions.”

Our table was near the front door. When it burst open and a man rushed in yelling for someone to call 911, we jumped a mile.

The restaurant was instantly quiet.

“911! I need some help!” With that, he turned and ran out.

It took only a second for the shock to wear off and for me to realize it was Arthur.

“Call 911!” I was out of the door, running behind him across the parking lot toward his car. The passenger door was open and I could see Sophie Sawyer lying across the front seat.

He tried to crawl across her, tried to lift her.

“Wait,” I yelled. I ran around and opened the driver’s door. As it opened, Sophie convulsed, her back arching high.

By this time, several people from the Hunan Hut, including Mary Alice, had come up.

“I’m a doctor,” a man in white tennis shorts said. I moved away from the door and he took my place. Someone had called 911; we could already hear the sirens.

“What’s wrong with her?” Mary Alice asked me.

“Something bad.”

Something terrible. By the time the paramedics got there, Sophie was no longer convulsing or breathing. But her body was still contorted.

“Do, Jesus,” Bonnie Blue said watching the ambulance drive off carrying Sophie’s body and Arthur who still clutched her hand. “I hope it wasn’t the peanut stuff.”

“Heart,” the doctor in white tennis shorts said, tapping his chest.

There was a collective sigh of relief from the lunch crowd.

“Should we follow them?” I asked Sister. “Take Arthur’s car home?” I had the shakes. Sudden death tends to do that to me.

“We’d better leave it here. I don’t know of anything we can do.”

“Lord, lord,” Bonnie Blue said.

We walked back to the Big, Bold, and Beautiful Shoppe in silence, each lost in her own thoughts.

“Call me tomorrow and let me know how Cedric turns out,” Bonnie Blue said, handing over the plastic hang-up bag.

“Did I tell you he’s got a little mustache?” Sister asked. “One of those little pencil-thin ones.”

Bonnie Blue grinned. “You go, girl.”

Which we did.

The day was September warm, but I was cold. I wasn’t ready to go home, to think about Sophie Sawyer dying as I
watched. I suggested to Mary Alice that we run by both our houses, get our tennis shoes and go to Overton Park.

She frowned. “For what?”

“Just to walk some. Maybe play a little tennis. Nothing strenuous. We could just bat the ball back and forth.”

Mary Alice looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “You want to play tennis?”

“Sure. I need to move around some. I’ve got the shakes.”

“I don’t do tennis. People who do tennis have heart attacks and die like that woman Arthur was with.”

“They do not.”

“Bucky Jasper did. Ran up to hit the ball and just quit running. Fortunately he fell into the net.”

“Who’s Bucky Jasper?”

“You mean who
was
Bucky Jasper. This man who lived down the street from me. I went to Savages and got the family a cheesecake.” Mary Alice turned on her left turn signal for my street. “The neighborhood sent flowers. A big wreath of gladiolas and Gerbera daisies.”

“That was nice.”

“Actually, it was kind of tacky. Shaped like a heart.” She pulled into my driveway. “He’d still be around if he’d been doing aqua aerobics instead of tennis. He’d have better knees, too.”

“Bucky had bad knees?”

“How should I know, Mouse? I hardly knew the man.”

“But he shouldn’t have been playing tennis.”

“Obviously. He should have been taking a nap instead.”

She and I grinned at each other. I got out of the car after making her promise that she would call me, too, to report on her date with Cedric.

“Just don’t let him get in your hot tub,” I cautioned. “You nearly lost Buddy Johnson that way last spring.”

“But Buddy’s old.” She gave a wave and put the car in reverse.

And Cedric had been at Dunkirk.

She started to back out of the driveway, let down her window and called, “I forgot to give you this. Debbie sent it.”

It was the e-mail from Haley.

“She’s doing fine,” Sister says. “Got roaches. Wants you to send her some of those Combat things. She can’t find them in Warsaw.”

I simply had to get my own computer.

“I
’m telling you, I’ve still got the shakes. I came home and sat in the sun for about an hour just to warm up. I went over to Mitzi’s but she wasn’t home. Not that I know what I would have said to her. They’ve got real problems, Fred.”

Fred and I were sitting in the den. We’d had the Stouffer’s we hadn’t eaten the night before and watched
Wheel of Fortune
. He’d read Haley’s letter (which contained a lot more than the information that there were roaches in Warsaw), and had heard all the details of Sophie Sawyer’s death.

“I’m sure she was just one of Arthur’s insurance clients, honey,” he said.

I shook my head. “Arthur was stroking her hand like this.” I brushed the fingers of my right hand across my left to demonstrate.

Fred said, “Rich client.”

I said, “I don’t think so. You should have seen the way
he helped her to the car like she was a piece of precious glass. He was hovering.”

Fred said, “She probably told him she was having chest pains. Where’s the TV zapper? It’s time for the ballgame.”

He could have at least
acted
interested.

After the ten o’clock news, I got him up from the sofa where he was snoring, and we went to bed. Sometime during the night, I woke up and went to the bathroom. The lights were on over at Mitzi and Arthur’s. I wondered sleepily what was going on, and felt bad that I hadn’t called to see about them. I’d check in the morning, I told myself.

But in the morning, I put off calling. There had been such an air of intimacy between Arthur and the woman, I wasn’t sure what was going on between the two. Regardless of what Fred said, Arthur was not just selling her insurance.

I fixed coffee, microwaved some oatmeal, and handed Fred a can of Healthy Request chicken noodle soup for his lunch as he went out the door. Wifely duties done, I settled down with my second cup of coffee and the
Birmingham News
.

I usually glance over the front page, read “People are Talking” on the second, and then turn to the Metro section. Which is what I did this morning. I was reading about a local judge who claimed he couldn’t help it if he kept dozing off in court because of narcolepsy when Mitzi knocked on the back door.

“Have you seen it?” She pointed to the paper in my hand when I opened the door.

“Seen what?” I was so startled at her appearance, it took me a moment to answer. Mitzi looked rough. She had on a pink chenille bathrobe which had seen better days and she was barefooted. No comb had touched her hair. It was totally un-Mitzi-like. I might run across the yards looking like this, but not Mitzi. She’s the neatest person in the world.

“About the death.”

“What death?” I don’t know why I asked. I knew, of course. I moved aside and she came into the kitchen.

“Sophie Sawyer’s poisoning.”

Mitzi walked to the kitchen table and sat down as if her legs wouldn’t hold her up anymore.

“Sophie Sawyer was poisoned?”

“Arthur said you were there yesterday.”

“I was.” I sat down across from Mitzi, my heart thumping faster. “She was poisoned?”

“Second page. Crime reports.” Mitzi propped her elbows on the table, leaned forward and put a hand over each ear as if she didn’t want to hear my reaction.

I turned to the second page. The first crime report, one short paragraph, had the words—SUSPECTED POISONING DEATH—as its heading. Sophie Vaughn Sawyer, 64, had been pronounced dead the day before after being rushed to University Hospital from a nearby restaurant. Preliminary autopsy reports indicated that she was the victim of poisoning. Police were investigating.

Goosebumps skittered up my arms and across my shoulders. Sophie Sawyer murdered? Someone had killed the lovely woman I had seen at lunch the day before? I read the paragraph again. Since it was so brief, the news of the death must have barely made the paper’s deadline.

“God, Mitzi, I can’t believe this. It’s awful. Who was she? One of Arthur’s clients?”

Mitzi’s head bent to the table. Her hands slid around and clasped behind her neck.

“His first wife.”

“His what?” Surely I hadn’t heard right. Her voice was muffled against the table.

But she looked up and repeated, “His first wife.”

The words were clear, but they didn’t make sense. Arthur’s first wife? Arthur and Mitzi had been married forty
years. Fred and I had lived next door to them for much of that time, and no one had ever mentioned a first wife.

So I said something incredibly stupid. I said, “Are you sure?”

Mitzi smiled, not much of a smile, but her lips went up at the corners.

“I’m sure. They were high school sweethearts, and the day after they graduated they ran off to Bremen, Georgia, and got married.”

“But why haven’t you ever mentioned it?”

“They never even lived together, Patricia Anne. Their parents had fits when they found out. Arthur’s folks thought he was too young and wouldn’t go on to college like they had planned, and Sophie’s folks were the Vaughn Foundry family. I’m sure they thought Sophie had married way down the social scale.” Mitzi looked around. “Where’s the Kleenex?”

I handed her a paper napkin.

“So what happened?”

She wiped her eyes. “So they had it annulled. Arthur went to the university and met me, and Sophie married a man from Chicago.” She paused. “They really were too young.”

“Of course they were,” I agreed, still in shock.

“So it was just something we didn’t talk about. You know?”

The phone’s ring made me jump. I got up and answered it. It was, of course, Mary Alice.

“His mustache is not the only thing pencil thin,” she chortled.

“I’ll have to call you back.” I hung up.

Mitzi looked up. “Mary Alice?”

“Just wanting to tell me about her date last night.”

I picked up the coffee pot, surprised to find my hands shaking. I poured us each a cup of coffee and sat back down.

“Is that why you’ve looked worried the last few days? Because Sophie’s been back in town?”

Mitzi seemed surprised. “Have I looked worried?”

“Worried to death.”

“No. Sophie’s never been a problem for me. Truthfully. That was over a long time before Arthur and I got married. I guess if I’ve looked worried, it’s because Bridget and Hank are thinking about moving to Atlanta. I just can’t bear the thought of not seeing Andrew Cade every day.”

Every day? The thought zipped through my mind that this might be the reason for the move. But I dismissed it. Mitzi would never be an interfering mother-in-law.

“Anyway,” Mitzi put a teaspoonful of sugar into her coffee and stirred it around and around, staring into the cup, “the phone rang about midnight last night. It was Arabella, Sophie’s daughter, saying the police thought Sophie was murdered.” She looked up with tears in her eyes. “It’s awful, Patricia Anne. I’ve never seen Arthur so upset. When he came in from the hospital, he was crying like a baby, and Arthur doesn’t cry. You know that.” She shivered, took the spoon from the coffee and laid it carefully in the saucer. “God, my teeth are chattering.”

What could I say? I nodded, remembering the gentleness of the hand-stroking and the helping into the car. Maybe first loves really do stay with us.

“He went over there, to Sophie’s apartment, when Arabella called. Bless his heart, he felt like he had to. But there wasn’t a thing he could do. Arabella and Sue were there.”

“Sue?”

“Sue Batson, Sophie’s other daughter. I think she’s the reason Sophie came back to Birmingham. She was in real bad shape, you know.”

“Sue?” Some pronouns needed clarifying here.

“Sophie, Patricia Anne. She was diabetic and was having
all kinds of circulatory and eye problems. And Sue’s husband is a doctor.”

“Lord, Mitzi. I’m so sorry.”

“And facing it so bravely, Arthur said.” Mitzi held the paper napkin to her eyes. “I guess that’s the only blessing in this whole thing. She won’t have any suffering to go through.”

“Not much of a blessing.”

Mitzi shook her head no.

“Do they have any idea what happened? The doctor at the Hunan Hut said it was her heart.”

Mitzi shook her head no again. “They haven’t come up with a final report, just that they think it was poison.”

I thought of Sophie lying across the seat of Arthur’s car, the convulsions wracking her. Poison? I felt cold again.

Woofer came out of his doghouse and ambled over to the oak tree that he has left a white line around over the years. He marked his territory again, stretched, and lay down in the sun.

But Mitzi wasn’t going to let me escape. She took several sips of coffee and continued.

“I said, ‘Lord, Arthur, maybe it was something she was deathly allergic to, especially with her diabetes.’”

I nodded. “Arthur was eating some peanut stuff. A lot of people are allergic to peanuts, just being around them. And there’s all kinds of stuff like monosodium glutamate in Chinese restaurants.”

“He said no. It was some kind of poison.” Mitzi put her cup down. “And you know what was ironic? Sophie had told her girls that if anything happened to her, they were to call Arthur, and he was the one who had to call them.”

“Sounds like she was scared something was going to happen.”

Mitzi shrugged. “She knew she was sick.”

“True.”

“But he said that last night he felt like he was just in the way. There wasn’t anything he could do for Arabella and Sue. Maybe comfort them a little. Sue and her husband live down in Pelham. She pretty much fell apart.”

“That’s understandable.” I looked at the newspaper again. One tiny paragraph stating the fact that a woman had died a violent death. Somehow there should be more. There were sixty-four years here of loving, and child-bearing, of work and fun, and, yes, suffering.

The phone rang again. I ignored it. The answering machine would pick it up.

“Mary Alice again, you think?” Mitzi asked.

“Probably. Let me pour you some more coffee.”

“No, but thanks. I have to go. I need to go get myself cleaned up. Get myself pulled together.” Mitzi pushed her chair back. The phone quit ringing; the machine picked up.

I followed her to the door. “Where’s Arthur this morning? Is he at home?”

“He’s gone to the office. He said he had some work he had to do. I don’t think he’ll stay long, though. He’s too upset, and neither one of us got a wink of sleep last night.” Mitzi turned and hugged me. “Thanks for listening.”

“Anytime. Call me if you need me to do anything. And, listen. Don’t worry about Bridget moving to Atlanta. It’s just a couple of hours drive.”

“Two hours too far.”

I watched her go over and pat Woofer before she opened the gate and went into her own yard. Amazing. I had lived next to Mitzi and Arthur for almost forty years and thought I knew the basic facts of their lives. Well, scratch that belief.

The phone rang again. I almost didn’t answer it because I needed time to sit down and digest what Mitzi had told me. But, figuring it was Mary Alice and that she would call every five minutes, I picked it up and said hello.

“Aunt Pat?” Debbie whispered.

“What’s the matter? Why are you whispering?”

“Because Lisa’s in the bathroom.”

“Lisa who?”

“Lisa, your daughter-in-law Lisa.”

“Lisa? What’s she doing here?”

“She’s left Alan.”

Granted, my nerves were already shot from Mitzi’s visit. Now, with this news, I was so shocked, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Alan is our middle child and he and Lisa were married the week they graduated from college. They have two sons, Charlie and Sam, and a nice house in the suburbs of Atlanta. They are our good yuppie children who are leading the great American middle-class life.

“Aunt Pat? You okay?”

“She’s at your house right now?”

“In the bathroom. She’s real upset. She may be throwing up.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Do you think you could come over here, though? Just act like you’re dropping in?”

While I was trying to absorb this information, Debbie whispered, “Gotta go,” and the phone went dead.

And there I was on the horns of a mother-in-law dilemma. If Lisa had wanted me to know about their separation, she could have come to my house. Instead, she had gone to Debbie’s. On the other hand, what in the world was she doing in Birmingham, anyway? Just a few weeks earlier, she and Alan had been at Haley’s wedding and had seemed lovey-dovey. Maybe too lovey-dovey?

I didn’t balance on the horns long. Resisting the urge to crawl back in the bed and pull the cover over my head, I brushed my teeth, combed my hair, checked on Woofer who was enjoying rolling over and scratching his back in the grass, and was off to Debbie’s in all of five minutes.

Debbie answered the door with a bright and loud, “Why,
Aunt Pat, what a surprise. Come in. You’re not going to guess who’s here.”