Killer On A Hot Tin Roof

Books by Livia J. Washburn

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N
EW
O
RLEANS AND THE
T
ENNESSEE
W
ILLIAMS
L
ITERARY
F
ESTIVAL

B
lanche DuBois was wrong: you can’t depend on the kindness of strangers.

Not that I want to sound pessimistic, and let’s face it, by the end of
A Streetcar Named Desire,
Blanche is more than a little nuts, anyway. But if you really want to be disillusioned about the human condition, try being a travel agent for a while.

I looked at the group of people gathered in the airport concourse and did my dead-level best not to shout, “Will all of y’all just shut up?”

Because that wouldn’t have been professional, you see.

So instead I turned to Dr. Will Burke and said, “They’re your colleagues. Can’t you do something about them?”

He sighed. “I’ll try. But remember, they’re literature and theater professors. Drama comes naturally to them.”

I’ll say it did. At the rate they were going, I’d be a little surprised if we made it from Atlanta to New Orleans without some of them killing some of the others.

Unfortunately, given my track record with these literary-themed tours, that possibility wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounds.

You may have read about me in the newspapers. Delilah Dickinson. Red-headed, with a temper to match (just don’t remind me of it, if you know what’s good for you). Divorced, approaching middle age too doggoned fast, owner of a semi-successful small business, a travel agency specializing in literary tours. I’d come up with the idea a couple of years earlier, after leaving a big agency to go out on my own, and, for the most part, it had worked out just fine.

I say for the most part because on a couple of tours, some pretty bad trouble had cropped up, and by bad trouble, I mean murder. Those cases had been solved and the killers caught–with some help from me, if I do say so myself–but naturally, the violence and scandal involved made folks remember them a lot better than they did the dozens of other tours I’d conducted that had gone off without a hitch.

You can’t blame anybody for being interested in other people’s troubles. It’s part of the human condition, if you want to get all high-flown and philosophical about it. But the reputation those tragedies gave my agency made it an uphill struggle to keep things running in the black. I’d managed to do that, with a lot of help from my only two employees–my daughter, Melissa, and her husband, Luke–but it hadn’t been easy.

Now I had a tour headed for another easy, the Big Easy, N’Awlins its own self … if we ever got off the ground.

Will held up his hands to get the attention of the approximately forty people who stood there with their carry-on bags around their feet. He was about my age, although his tousled blond hair gave him a bit of a boyish look. The glasses counteracted that by making him appear slightly professor-ish. We had dated off and on for a couple of years, ever since he’d found himself in the middle of my first tour–and first murder case–and I suspected it was because of his influence at the university that I was able to get the job of arranging to take this group of professors, spouses, and/or significant others to New Orleans for the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival.

You see, that’s why I had Blanche DuBois on my mind.

The loud conversations that bordered on arguments were still going on. The members of the group didn’t pay any attention to Will as he stood there waving his hands a little. He said, “Uh, excuse me, everyone?”

“You’re gonna have to speak up,” I told him. “Just pretend they’re a bunch of unruly students in a lecture hall.”

He glanced at me. “None of my students ever get that unruly. They pay attention to me. I give good lectures.”

“Then pretend they’re a bunch of third graders who’re actin’ up.”

Will frowned. “I don’t know how to do that.”

I sighed and shook my head. I’d never been a teacher myself, but I had driven carpool plenty of times when Melissa was a kid.

“Hey! Y’all settle down, or I’ll tell the pilot to go on to New Orleans without us!”

That shut ‘em up. Of course, it might have offended them, too, but right then, I didn’t care all that much.

An austere-looking man with white hair, glasses, and a wrinkled face stared at me and said, “I beg your pardon, Ms. Dickinson?”

I was about to apologize and explain why I’d yelled at them when it struck me how much he looked like Orville Redenbacher, the guy from the old popcorn commercials on TV. That made it hard to think of anything to say.

Will, bless his heart, jumped right in. “I think what Ms. Dickinson is trying to say, Dr. Jeffords, is that we all need to show a little more decorum. You know how it is with airports now. The extra security and all that.”

“Oh.” Dr. Jeffords blinked, then slowly nodded. “Oh, yes, of course.”

That was pretty slick of Will, I thought. You can ask folks to do almost anything in an airport now, and as long as you look properly solemn when you mention “the extra security and all that,” they’ll go along with it.

I put a smile on my face and said, “I just think you should save all these spirited discussions for the panels when you get to New Orleans, so the other people attending the festival can get the benefit of them, too.”

Another man said, “But Dr. Paige claims that the hurdles on which Brick breaks his leg have no ethnological significance.”

A slender, attractive woman in her mid-thirties, with short dark hair, gave what my mama would have called an unladylike snort. “They’re hurdles on a high school track,” she said. “They have no ethnicity, so how can they have any ethnological significance? You might as well argue that they’re gynocentric.”

“Well, they could be,” another man said. “If you consider Brick’s obvious homosexuality and his later reaction to Maggie, the hurdles could be seen as a barrier over which Brick has to leap. When he fails to make that leap, when he fails to clear the threat of Maggie’s sexuality, so to speak, or all female sexuality, as it were, then he’s left a physical cripple–”

“He’s disabled,” yet another of the professors interrupted. “You can’t say ‘crippled.’ He’s physically disabled, which serves as a counterpoint to the emotional disability which he’s already displayed by his incipient alcoholism, as well as his failure to reconcile his feelings toward Skipper–”

The man who had first brought up the hurdles said, “Yes, well, that line of argument merely reinforces my theory, which is never refuted in the text of the play, that Skipper was actually black, which again raises the issue of ethnological significance. The hurdle that Brick fails to clear is not his sexuality, but rather his racism!”

“Oh, surely you can’t believe that!” the first prof said. “Thehistorical aberration alone is enough to discredit the entire idea. Brick and Skipper were roommates in college. A black man wouldn’t have been attending the same college as Brick during that time period.”

The first professor sniffed and sneered. “It’s what the playwright meant, whether it’s historically accurate or not.”

Everybody started talking at once then. I looked at Will and asked, “Did you understand all that?”

He nodded and said, “Unfortunately, yes. And they’re back at it again, aren’t they?”

“Let ‘em fuss,” I said. “I don’t guess it’s doing any real harm, and at least I can count heads while they’re busy arguin'.”

When I had done that, I realized that there weren’t forty of them after all. I only had thirty-eight members of the tour accounted for.

Two were missing.

“You know everybody who’s supposed to be here, right?” I asked Will.

“I think so.”

I held out the clipboard with the passenger list on it. “Then go through this and tell me who’s not here yet.” I glanced at the giant electronic bulletin board that showed all the arrivals and departures of the flights. Our flight to New Orleans was still supposed to be on time, which meant we had about ten minutes before the boarding call. Having a couple of missing tourists now was cutting it closer than I liked.

Will took the clipboard and started glancing back and forth between the list and the group of people gathered in front of us. I could tell he was checking them off in his mind.

After a minute or so, he handed the clipboard back to me and said, “The only ones who haven’t shown up are Michael Frasier and whoever he’s bringing with him.”