Hickory Smoked Homicide (12 page)

“Not so much,” said Cherry casually. “We’re neighbors, and that’s really all. We talk to each other when we see each other out in the yard.”

“Do you think you can get her to have lunch with you?” asked Lulu. “I’m trying to think of a natural way to ask her some questions, and I know she doesn’t come to Aunt Pat’s much to eat.”

“Oh, sure,” said Cherry, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Piece of cake. I’ll tell her that I’ve got the club schedule and wanted to talk to her about getting in now that we’re not being blackballed anymore. In fact”—Cherry pulled out a cell phone with a rhinestone-studded cover—“I’ll go ahead and buzz her right now. No time like the present. Besides, I’m starving.”

Lulu knew that she hadn’t met Pepper under the best of circumstances at Tristan’s party. Her impression that night had been that Pepper was shrill and shrewish, although she definitely had cause to be. She’d also stood out at the party because, having just followed her husband when he left the house, she wasn’t dressed for a party.

Pepper looked much tidier as she put away some barbeque at the restaurant. But she was just as shrill as she’d been at Tristan’s party. She might be small, but her voice carried across the restaurant to where Lulu was coming out of the kitchen to join them.

Pepper was studying the calendar with interest when Lulu sat down at the booth. Cherry said quickly, “Pepper, I don’t know if you remember Lulu or not. This is Lulu Taylor, who owns Aunt Pat’s.”

Pepper looked up with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Nice to meet you.” She looked back down again at the papers in front of her. “So, Cherry, you were saying that these are the events the club has planned for the fall and spring, right? And Evelyn said that nobody else was standing in the way of us joining?”

Cherry swirled her iced tea around in her glass. “That’s what Evelyn said. I did want to let you know, though,” she said, clearing her throat, “that I’m not quite as crazy about joining the Memphis Women’s League as I thought I was.” Pepper’s mouth dropped open, and Cherry said, “I know, I know, it’s all we’ve been talking about for the last month. Looking at that calendar of events, though? Can you see me doing a bake sale? Or dragging Johnny to a dance? What would happen is that I’d start skipping meetings. Then I’d start skipping the different events. Then I’d conveniently forget to pay my dues.” Cherry shrugged. “Before you know it, Evelyn would be furious with me that she stuck her neck out and got me admitted to the club . . . and then I didn’t do anything. Better just to not join.”

Cherry shot Lulu a panicky look when Pepper started fussing at Cherry to persuade her to join, so Lulu quickly interrupted the tirade. “Pepper, Cherry had been telling me about how y’all were trying to join the club and how Tristan was blackballing you.”

This diversion seemed to work. Lulu guessed it had been Pepper’s favorite topic of conversation for the past thirty days. “She was such a pill, Lulu. I don’t know if you knew Tristan or not, but count your lucky stars if you didn’t. All she wanted to do was mess with people. She’d do her darnedest to figure out what it was that you wanted the most and then try her hardest to block it from happening. It was her hobby.”

“Why didn’t she want you and Cherry in the club?”

Pepper said in a harsh voice, “Simple. She didn’t think we were good enough for the Memphis Women’s League. Tristan thought that by letting us in, they’d be lowering the club’s standards. That’s what Evelyn told Cherry, anyway.”

Cherry bobbed her head in agreement.

“Know what the funny thing is? Tristan thought that I wasn’t good enough for her club, but she thought my husband was good enough to have an affair with.” Pepper gave a grating laugh.

Lulu blinked. Pepper didn’t seem to have any kind of filter to keep from talking about really private things. “I’m sorry, Pepper. I didn’t know your husband was involved with Tristan.” She saw Cherry hide a smile at Lulu’s discomfort over fibbing.

“Well, I knew he was seeing somebody, Lulu. I didn’t know it was Tristan until I followed Loren out that night of her party. I knew he had to be seeing somebody, but I didn’t know who it was. He’s cheated on me before, you see, so I don’t trust him a lick. He was mooning around the house, acting all lovesick and distracted.... I knew
I
wasn’t the cause of it. He’d always change the computer screen whenever I walked into the room and erase his text messages so I couldn’t see who he’d been writing. And he started working late and running lots of errands on the weekends.”

Pepper took a big bite out of her peach cobbler as if to remove the bad taste from her mouth. “Finally, I had enough of his nonsense. When he told me that he was going out that night to meet someone from work, I followed him. He’s never met folks from work at that hour before. Sure enough, he drove right straight to Tristan Pembroke’s house. Now I know that she didn’t want him there—that she was trying to dump him. Who knows why she started going out with him to begin with? Maybe she thought it was funny to screw up everything in my life.” Pepper jabbed viciously at a big peach slice with her fork.

“Maybe he was going there to end things with Tristan. Maybe he’d gotten the message that she wasn’t interested anymore, and he wanted to break off the relationship in person,” suggested Lulu mildly. She wanted to find out exactly how much Pepper knew about what was going on between her husband and Tristan.

Pepper snorted. “More like the other way around. He would have been pleased as punch to continue their affair. When he was pleading with me last night not to dump him, he said that he couldn’t bear any more rejection. That
Tristan
had been trying to end their relationship and hadn’t been answering her door or his phone calls or e-mails. He’d even shown up at some of the pageants to try to talk to her! He said he couldn’t
handle
it if I suddenly ditched him, too. However, that seems to me like something he should have thought about before he cheated. No, he’d still be trying to get Tristan to take him back—if she wasn’t dead.”

“So did you wait for him out in the car outside the party that night?” asked Lulu, trying to act as if she didn’t know the answer to that question already.

“Absolutely not! I marched right in there and dragged his sorry rear end out the door. I gave Tristan a piece of my mind, too, which was
long
overdue. Threw a glass of wine at her, too. I was so mad! Of all the people for him to be messing around with—and he knew exactly how much I hated Tristan! I didn’t care that I didn’t have a spot of makeup on and was wearing my sweat suit. I was that determined to pull him out of there.”

“So, obviously,” said Lulu, “you weren’t at the party when Tristan’s body was found.”

Pepper sighed. “Actually, yes, I was still there. But I wasn’t inside Tristan’s house then—I was out in the car yelling at Loren. We were going to drive home and finish our fight there, but that storm blew in, and it was raining so hard that I didn’t want to drive in it. I just chewed Loren out while we waited for it to let up a little bit. I didn’t even notice the lights had gone off at the house.... Cherry was telling me about that the other day. I was so focused on setting things straight with my husband.”

“How did you find out that Tristan was dead?”

Pepper made a face. “The police came up with a flashlight and shone it right in the car window like they thought we might be in there making out or something. I rolled a window down, and the police said there’d been a murder at the house and the guests were supposed to go to some particular place on the grounds and they’d be asking questions. I asked who it was who’d been murdered, and he said it was Tristan. Then, as soon as the cop left, we started fighting
again
because Loren was putting up such a howling ruckus over Tristan being dead.” Pepper shook her head and picked at her nail polish, which was already chipped to bits on her fingernails.

Cherry said, “Hmm. I wonder who could have done it.”

“Tons of people! Half the town was at her house that night. And I can’t believe she had any real friends.... She was too much of a backstabber. She was the type that couldn’t keep a friend for more than a few minutes without talking about her behind her back. But, you know, in these kinds of cases, they always say they look at the family first.” Pepper shrugged like she didn’t really care who murdered Tristan—she was glad that somebody had stepped up to the plate.

“I thought,” said Cherry, “that they always looked at the husband or boyfriend first.”

Pepper’s eyes narrowed to slits. “What are you trying to say, Cherry?”

Cherry knit her brows as if she was trying to remember what she
did
think—or what she was supposed to think. This, thought Lulu, was the big problem with lying—you ended up losing track of what your position was supposed to be.

“Oh. I don’t know.... I was thinking about those cop shows and what they do when someone goes missing or dies. I was thinking it’s usually the spouse—just on TV, you know . . .” Cherry spluttered as she tried to get back on solid ground again.

“As long as that was all you were thinking,” said Pepper darkly. “Because Loren is a cheat, a liar, a coward, and a sorry excuse for a husband. But he’s
not
a killer.”

Lulu jumped in again. “You think Tristan’s family is behind it? Who were you thinking of?”

Pepper blew out a sigh. “I don’t know. Steffi, I guess, is the obvious choice. I know Tristan treated her as awful as she treated everybody else, and the poor kid put up with it for all these years. Who’d blame her if she finally blew a gasket and couldn’t stand it anymore? I wanted to kill Tristan, and I only spent a tiny amount of time with her. If I’d spent a lifetime with her, I’d never have been able to keep myself from wringing her scrawny neck.”

Cherry said, “I didn’t even know you knew Steffi, Pepper.”

“Oh, sure—I know all of them. Tristan’s sister, Marlowe, is my age, and we went through school together. We always hung out in the same crowd. We were never best friends, but we had the same friends so we ended up doing a lot of the same stuff. So I knew Tristan and Marlowe growing up. And I paid attention when Steffi was born—felt sorry for the baby, actually. Marlowe used to go on and on when we were teens about how terrible Tristan was. And now I know she was telling the truth.”

Lulu poured Pepper a little more tea from the pitcher on the table. “What kinds of things did Marlowe used to say about Tristan?”

“Well, growing up it was all kind of silly stuff, I guess. But it wasn’t silly at the time—you know how everything feels so important when you’re a teenager. Tristan would do things like steal Marlowe’s boyfriends, or tell people something really mean about her sister . . . like a gross habit she had or something. I think she even pulled pranks on her at different times, just to make her feel like a fool.”

Lulu said, “But you haven’t spent time with her as an adult to know if Tristan was still doing things like that?”

“Oh, sure I have. Marlowe and Tristan’s bottling company uses the accounting office where Loren works. I’m sure that’s probably how Loren got to know Tristan—he probably was over there delivering the sad facts about the state of their business and then Tristan turned on the charm and snagged him.”

Pepper looked across the restaurant, but Lulu could tell she wasn’t seeing a thing. “I ran into Marlowe at the store not too long ago and asked her how everything was going. She sounded real, real bitter over the state of the company—said that Tristan was running their father’s business into the ground and taking money from the coffers. I bet you that Marlowe is going to be delighted to take over that company again and get the money flowing.”

“It certainly does sound like a good motive for murder,” said Lulu, nodding. “The only thing is that Marlowe wasn’t in town during the murder. She was out of town for business.”

Pepper gave the grating laugh again. “Out of town for
what
business? They haven’t been able to get any new accounts in forever, Marlowe told me.”

Lulu frowned. “Well, maybe she meant it was a trip for personal business, then. Or maybe she was only trying to make contact with an old account and give it a little TLC. At any rate, she wasn’t in town during the party.”

Cherry’s face was confused. “But she was. I was at the beauty parlor the morning of the party to get my color . . . uh . . . touched up,” she patted her henna-colored locks, “and I saw Marlowe pulling into the parking lot as I was leaving. I’ve seen her at my salon before, so I wasn’t surprised to see her. She was definitely in town that day.”

Chapter 11

It was at Tristan Pembroke’s funeral that Lulu became convinced that ghosts didn’t exist. If they did, thought Lulu, then Tristan would have haunted that funeral of hers with a vengeance.

There were no over-the-top displays of wealth. No elaborate floral arrangements. This funeral was given by an apparently grudging Steffi Pembroke and Marlowe Walters—and really, thought Lulu, who could blame them for being stingy? The two women greeted mourners (and the curious) at the funeral home the evening before. They’d chosen an open casket and had Tristan’s body put in a garish dress that Lulu was sure hadn’t belonged to the deceased. Loren was very emotional and had to leave early. Besides him, the only visibly affected mourner was an old lady who’d worked at Tristan’s father’s company for many years and remembered Tristan as a child.

“Don’t she look natural?” she sobbed. “I never have seen her look more pleasant.”

The funeral the next day was a simple graveside service. Tristan’s minister had insisted on giving a homily, although apparently no one had opted for a eulogy because Steffi and Marlowe remained silent. The minister had also brought along a soloist, who sang “Amazing Grace.” There wasn’t, thought Lulu, a damp eye anywhere. Except, of course, for Loren, whose eyes were red from crying.

After the short service, the mourners milled around a little outside the tented area where there were some tacky funeral sprays that Tristan would have despised. Most of those in attendance had likely come out of curiosity instead of any fondness for Tristan. Loren, however, hugged both Steffi and Marlowe fervently and talked about how much he was going to miss Tristan. Marlowe looked irritated, but Steffi talked to him quietly for a couple of minutes before spontaneously giving Loren a second, sympathetic hug.