Killer On A Hot Tin Roof (23 page)

Tennessee Williams before. Y’all friends o’ that lady professor?”

“That’s right,” Will said.

“She’s been transferred to the custody of the Criminal Sheriff’s Office. They’ll have her over at the South White Street facility. You know where that is?”

We didn’t, of course. The officer gave us directions, and we found another cab.

The place was as dreary and depressing as any jail anywhere, a sprawling building with bars on many of the windows and a fence topped by barbed wire on the roof. We went through plenty of red tape and metal detectors inside before I was allowed to see Tamara.

Will had to wait outside in an ugly little anteroom while I went into an even smaller room that was even uglier. It was divided in two by a counter with a single chair on each side. A wire-mesh-reinforced glass wall rose from the middle of the counter, and there was a phone on each side of the glass. After a few minutes, the door on the other side opened and a deputy brought Tamara in. She wore a short-sleeved white jumpsuit and had the sort of downcast expression you’d expect to see on the face of a prisoner, especially one facing serious charges. They didn’t come much more serious than murder, I supposed.

She managed a smile when she saw me, though. We picked up our phones at the same time, and I said, “Hi.”

“It’s good to see a friendly face in here, Ms. Dickinson, or at least a nonhostile one. Thank you for coming.”

“Call me Delilah,” I said. “They treatin’ you all right?”

Tamara shrugged. “As well as can be expected, I suppose.”

“Do you have a lawyer yet?”

“I had a court-appointed one to handle the arraignment.

She’s supposed to do the bail hearing, too. After that, I’ll try to find a defense attorney of my own.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Assuming, of course, that I can make bail and get out of here. Since I’m from out of town, the judge may consider me a flight risk and deny bail.”

“We’ll try to see that that doesn’t happen,” I promised. I lowered my voice a little and went on, “Do you know why they arrested you?”

“Something about some evidence they found in my hotel room. Ashes in the sink in the bathroom? That’s crazy. I didn’t burn anything in there.”

“Ramsey and Nesbit found a little scrap of partially burned paper that looked like it came from a legal pad. Frasier said those pages from Howard Burleson’s manuscript came from a legal pad.”

Tamara closed her eyes for a moment and rubbed her temples with her free hand. “I never saw any manuscript pages, and I certainly never burned them. I wouldn’t have had any reason to. If they even existed, they were fakes.”

“You still believe that?”

“I don’t have any reason not to believe it.”

“The police think you saw them, realized that Burleson was telling the truth, and killed him and destroyed the pages to keep anyone from bein’ able to prove that the old man wrote
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t do it, Delilah. I don’t know what else to say. I didn’t do it.”

“It’d sure be helpful if you had an alibi.”

“But I don’t. I told you, I went back to my room, couldn’t sleep, and decided to work out for a while. I was alone the whole time.”

“Well,” I said, thinking back to the night before, “you stepped out to get some ice from the machine, because that’s what you were doing when I ran into you. Did you leave your room any other time?”

“No, that was the first time I’d been out of the room for several hours and, as you said, I just stepped out. The room was just down the hall from the ice machine, so I threw the deadbolt to keep the door from closing and walked down there with the ice bucket.”

I knew what she meant. I had done the same thing in hotels many times myself.

“It doesn’t sound like you’ve got an alibi,” I admitted with a sigh.

Tamara shook her head. “Not even a ghost of one. But I give you my word, Delilah, I didn’t kill that old man.” She smiled faintly. “It would be nice if at least one person believed that.”

“I do,” I said without hesitation.

“Now all you have to do is convince everyone else.”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t see any way to do that. There wasn’t much in the way of physical evidence, just that bit of ash from the sink in Tamara’s bathroom, but it pointed straight at her.

“I’ll do my best,” I told her anyway. “I’ll see about getting you a better lawyer for the bail hearing, too.”

“I should warn you, I’m not a rich woman.”

“I’m not, either, but I want to do whatever I can to help.”

I said a few more encouraging words, then told her goodbye and left the depressing little room. If it was that depressing for me, I thought, how much worse must a cell be for Tamara? I could get up and walk out, but she couldn’t.

“Was she able to tell you anything that might help?” Will asked as we made our way back out of the jail.

“Not really. She says she didn’t kill the old man and thatshe never saw any manuscript pages from that play. She still doesn’t believe that Burleson really wrote it, either.”

“What about bail?”

“We’ll have to wait and see. I promised that I’d try to get her a defense lawyer, and not just a court-appointed one.”

Will nodded. “If you need help with the money, I’ve got some savings.”

“You’d dip into your savings to help Tamara?”

“We’re friends,” he said, and I felt an unexpected pang of jealousy. I knew that Tamara had once been involved with Michael Frasier. I wondered if there had ever been anything going on between her and Will. She was a pretty attractive woman, after all. But I didn’t want to come right out and ask him.

Anyway, I’d offered to help pay for a good lawyer, too, just because I thought she was innocent. Maybe Will felt the same way. I sure as heck didn’t want to generate any more drama on this trip. There had been way more than enough already.

We took another cab back to the hotel. When we got there, we went to Dale Gillette’s office and Will knocked on the door. Gillette told us to come in.

“Have you had any word about Dr. Powers?” I asked him.

“Yes, I called the hospital and checked on him a short time ago,” Gillette said. “They wouldn’t tell me anything, of course, since I’m not a relative, but I persuaded them to page Dr. Edgar Powers, so I was able to talk to him. He told me that his father is in serious but stable condition.”

I was glad to hear that Larry hadn’t died from the heart attack, at least not yet. He wasn’t one of my favorite people in the world, nor were June and Edgar, but I didn’t want any more members of my group dying. And despite Larry’s bull-headedness and fondess for the booze, I sort of liked him. He was a colorful character, and we Southerners have always had afondness for colorful characters. The plays of Tennessee Williams are proof of that.

Gillette went on, “We’re still getting quite a few calls from reporters for you, Ms. Dickinson. You might want to consider issuing a statement to the press.”

That didn’t sound like a good idea to me. I didn’t want to reinforce the idea even more of my name being linked to murder. That couldn’t be good for business.

I thanked Gillette for his suggestion anyway, without promising to do anything about it, and Will and I left the office. By now it was past noon–almost one o’clock, in fact–and it had been quite awhile since the unfinished breakfast buffet that morning. I said, “Why don’t we get some lunch?” and Will was in total agreement.

Neither of us was in the mood for something from the hotel’s restaurant, so we left the St. Emilion and started wandering the streets of the French Quarter. We found a little Cajun place a couple of blocks away, not much more than a hole in the wall, but it was doing a brisk business, even past the lunch rush. We stood in line for a few minutes to get a table, and when the food came, we found out why the café was busy. The crawfish gumbo, the rice and red beans, the blackened fish, all of it was delicious, and spicy enough to bring tears to your eyes. I must have drunk nearly a gallon of sweet tea during the meal to try to put out the fire.

We didn’t make a deal not to talk about the murder while we were eating or anything like that, but the subject didn’t really come up. Maybe we were both just tired of trying to figure out if Tamara Paige was really guilty, and, if she wasn’t, who had killed Howard Burleson. We talked about other things instead: books, movies, our families, the same sorts of things anybody would talk about during a pleasant lunch with someone they cared a lot about.

It was such a nice interlude that when we were finished, I didn’t really want to go back to the hotel. “Can’t we just sit here and sip sweet tea for the rest of the afternoon?” I asked Will with a smile.

“I wish we could,” he said, “but there are readings tonight, and I’m supposed to take part. I’m going to be reading one of Williams’s short stories, and I ought to look it over beforehand.”

“All right,” I said with a smile and a sigh. “Can’t keep an English professor away from the books for very long, can you?”

Will laughed. “You think that afterwards we could go back to that same place where we ate last night?”

“I’ll call them when we get back to the hotel and see if I can get a reservation for us,” I promised.

And this night was going to end differently, I told myself. No drunken theater professors, no cheating wives, no alleged mobsters from New Jersey, and, most of all, no dead bodies or cops. Instead, I was thinking that I might just ask Will to have breakfast with me in the morning … room service breakfast.

As we walked through the hotel lobby a short time later, someone called Will’s name as we passed a group of festival-goers sitting on one of the sofas. “Dr. Burke, can we get your opinion on something?”

I saw the two argumentative professors in the middle of the bunch, and when Will smiled at me and said, “This is liable to take awhile,” I knew exactly what he meant.

“I’m gonna go on up to the room,” I told him. “I’ll see you later.”

As I went toward the elevators, I glanced along the broad corridor that led to the atrium and the indoor garden. I was tempted to go out there and look again at the place where I’d found Burleson’s body, but I knew it might still be cordonedoff as a crime scene. Besides, the forensics team from the police department would have been all over it and taken any possible evidence with them. I stopped at the elevators instead and pushed the button.

Where the murder had taken place wasn’t that important, I told myself as I waited. The garden was just a convenient spot where the killer had managed to get some privacy. Would Burleson have gone out there with just about anybody he knew? I suspected he would have. The old man had been friendly and garrulous, and he hadn’t seemed to have a suspicious bone in his body. He was the sort of old-fashioned Southern gentleman who would talk to anybody, anywhere, about anything. Luring him to the scene of his death wouldn’t have been a problem.

But there was something else nagging at me, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Something I had seen or heard–or both–that didn’t quite jibe with the facts. I frowned with the effort as I tried to force my brain to grasp it.

Then the elevator arrived, and all I could do was shake my head and get on board. Whatever that elusive discrepancy was, it had gotten away from me.

As I walked along the third floor hall, one of the doors ahead of me swung open and Dr. June Powers stepped out into the corridor. She looked drawn and haggard, and I wasn’t surprised. She didn’t see me at first, but then she noticed me and stopped short.

“Ms. Dickinson,” she said as the door clicked shut behind her. She heard it and looked around. “Damn it,” she said. “I hope I haven’t locked myself out. I was just going down to the vending machines to get a candy bar. I didn’t have a chance to eat any lunch today.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “How’s your father-in-law?”

“Still stable. Still in serious condition.” She didn’t have herpurse with her, but she reached into the pocket of her slacks and pulled out a key card. “Good. I won’t have to call the desk to let me in. I couldn’t remember if I had the key or not.”

“If there’s anything I can do–”

“Yes, you make that offer frequently, don’t you?”

The words were sharp and got under my skin. I was about to say something when she shook her head and went on. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. Of course you try to be helpful. That’s your job.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“And I should apologize for what I said to you earlier, too. I know logically that you didn’t have anything to do with Papa Larry’s heart attack. In fact, I’m not really surprised it happened, considering how long he’s been abusing his body the way he does. He smoked for years, in addition to the drinking, and the man is grossly overweight. Cancer, heart attack, stroke … something’s bound to do him in before too much longer if he doesn’t change his ways. It may be too late already.”

She had the sort of sanctimonious disapproval in her voice that always gets on my nerves. I’d never had any trouble with smoking or drinking, since I’d never smoked and was only a light social drinker, and as long as I watched what I ate, my weight wasn’t a problem, but I understood that some people didn’t have it as lucky. It was easy to tell somebody else what they ought to do, I thought. It was a lot harder to figure out what
you
ought to do to improve your own life, and then stick to it.

But I didn’t want to get in an argument with June. She had been through enough today already. Instead, I said, “Did your husband stay at the hospital?”

She nodded wearily. “Edgar thought I ought to come back here and rest for a while. Then I’ll go back and let him have abreak. I’m afraid our participation in the festival has come to a premature end.”

“I’m sure nobody will hold that against you,” I told her.

She looked at the key card she held in her hand. “Well, I’m going to go get that candy bar, and then maybe try to take a nap. We’re going to be putting in some long hours sitting with Papa Larry.”

I nodded, smiled, and moved on toward my room while June went the other way toward the alcove where the vending machines and the ice machine were. Thinking about it made me remember that Tamara had been on her way there with the ice bucket from her room the previous night, just before Ramsey and Nesbit came along and arrested her.