Mint Julep Murder (15 page)
Authors: Carolyn G. Hart
His initials were scrawled in huge letters.
Annie smoothed the curling sheet. She’d never before felt that she was touching dynamite. “Wow!”
“You know what Wanda Dillon said?”
Annie shook her head, took a big gulp of tea.
“She said, ‘That proposal’s pure Kenneth. I swear the man never had any brains. He dealt with authors! He knew what they’re like! Brilliant, fractious, volatile. That proposal was like handing a five-year-old a loaded gun. He probably hadn’t looked past the party at the Festival. Of course, nobody—but nobody—would have skipped that party. And Kenneth always wanted each party to be bigger than the last one.’ ”
“So Wanda wasn’t in love with her boss.”
“Willie indicate she was?” Max was surprised.
“No. Not at all. But when a man gets murdered, you have to wonder. About everything.”
“Including Willie.” Max’s lip didn’t exactly curl when he mentioned the younger Hazlitt, but it came close.
Annie lifted her glass to hide her quick smile. “Frank Saulter’s going to slip me some information about Willie.”
Max had the satisfied look of Poirot at the scene of a crime. “I’m already there. The guy’s a flake. Wanda said Handsome Willie has never been able to hold a job and he’s always in debt. Kenneth refused to bail him out of his latest money problem. He insisted Willie come home and go to work.”
Annie noted the discrepancy in Willie’s version and Wanda’s. But a man had to save face. Especially a man like Willie.
Max continued, his voice neutral. “Wanda said Willie was dancing around trying to fit in. He didn’t even complain when Kenneth refused to okay Willie coming into the principal of a trust left by his mother. Apparently, Kenneth was the trustee.”
Annie recalled Willie’s quiet words on the beach. Sometimes people liked limits. Maybe Willie had gone his own way as long as he wanted to. And then …
“It’s too bad he hasn’t been back long enough to know everybody his brother might have quarreled with.”
Max was unconcerned. “Don’t worry, Wanda Dillon knows where the bodies are buried. Kenneth’s wife left him because he was running around on her. He was dating this gal who’s in the Caribbean, but he kept trying to pick up a waitress at the cafe across the street. He was always in trouble with the IRS, and he wanted a dime’s worth of stuff for every nickel. And I got the lowdown on everybody he was crossways with. Look at the last three pages of his bio.”
Annie took the sheaf of papers. She turned to page five. The heading was succinct:
A
LIBIED
Sue Ellen Hazlitt Peters
(former wife)— Works Friday afternoons at a Waldenbooks in Fountain Valley, California. Was there yesterday.
Michael and Jennifer Hazlitt
(children)—Competing in a swim meet in Santa Barbara, California.
Wanda Dillon
(KH’s secretary)—At the offices of M. J. Press in Atlanta, Georgia.
Jason Gustafson of Gustafason Printers—
Having his hair cut in Peoria.
Cheryl Holt
—Swimming at hotel pool in the Bahamas.
Ed Wherry
—Deep-sea fishing in the Gulf of Mexico.
And there were names that were new to Annie:
Thomas Brinson
(M. J. Press employee fired last week)—On a Greyhound bus en route to Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Harry Lowell
(former boyfriend of Cheryl Holt)—In an Atlanta bar with his new girlfriend.
Venita Jones
(local zealot who’d picketed Mint Julep P over the publication of
Black Voices in Today’s South)
—Being interviewed on a local talk-radio program. (She advocated stamping all library books with a G or E.)
Annie looked at Max. “G or E?”
“Good or Evil.”
“My, my,” Annie said mildly. “How generous of Ms. Jones to wish to share her moral discernment with the world.”
Annie didn’t bother to read the rest of the list. She looked at Max gravely. “You’re saying nobody with any kind of motive—likely or absurd—could have been at the party yesterday?”
“Yes.” Max lifted his glass. “Of course, this isn’t to say I might not have missed somebody who managed to harbor a grudge without anyone else ever knowing about it. But, Annie, I don’t think so. Wanda Dillon’s known Kenneth since they were in grade school. She liked him, but she wasn’t an adoring secretary. It was a job, a pleasant one, that’s all. And, her alibi’s rock solid. An insurance salesman was there talking to her until after five o’clock Friday. So, unless the killer was a mad poisoner who picked that bottle of whiskey at random, we have to look at the people with access to that hotel suite between nine
A.M.
Friday when the bellman placed the whiskey bottles on top of the wet bar and half-past five when Kenneth poured that drink.”
Annie nodded, but absently. She closed the file on Kenneth Hazlitt and put it on the table. “This isn’t going to help us, Max. Not this time.”
Max scowled. “I know it isn’t good news, but now we know we have to look here.”
Annie reopened the file and smoothed the top sheet. “I don’t mean that. I mean I don’t think it matters”—she flipped through the single-spaced sheets, dense with facts about the life, loves, interests, pursuits, and despairs of Kenneth Alvin Hazlitt, late resident of Atlanta, Georgia—“what we find out about him. That’s the conventional wisdom,
that the reason for a victim’s death can be found in his life. But not this time.” She picked up her tea, welcomed the sharp fresh taste, and thought again how dreadful to lift a glass, then die. “Oh, sure. Who he was mattered. It mattered that he didn’t mind trampling on other people’s feelings.” She picked out the sprig of mint, nipped it between her teeth. “Probably he didn’t have a lot of imagination, even if he was a publisher. Anyone with even a shred of sensitivity would have realized how appalled those five authors would be by his book idea. Maybe more than appalled. Maybe dangerously angry. Kenneth thought it was wonderful. It mattered that he liked to entertain on the cheap, but he pampered himself. It mattered that he liked to show off. But what really matters now is what’s in here,” and she picked up the packet Max had prepared about the authors.
“We have to find out every scrap we can about our Famous Five, Max. One of them’s a murderer.”
Henny Brawley hung up the house phone. Busy signal. Should she take her materials up to Annie and Max’s suite? Or leave it at the desk? Hmm. It was critical that they be apprised of the tentative conclusions she, Miss Dora, and Laurel had drawn. Decisively, Henny patted the poster board covered with encircled numbers and pulled a hotel notepad closer.
In their fifth-floor suite, Max sprawled comfortably on the couch, the phone cradled between his ear and shoulder. “Miss Perkins, this is Theobald Fortune of Amalgamated Insurances. We have received some new information about the automobile-pedestrian accident on September 7, 1990, which leads us to question—”
Max broke off, listening to the dial tone in his ear.
He raised an eyebrow.
Miss Perkins didn’t want to talk.
Max sat up, returned the receiver to the base. He
pushed up from the couch and crossed to the circular table near the wet bar. It was covered with papers. He glanced from pile to pile, then picked up a fax copy of the petition filed in the wrongful death suit naming Regina Perkins as the defendant.
The case had been settled out of court.
It was over and done with.
So why did Jimmy Jay Crabtree’s estimable Miss Perkins slam down her phone?
It could be as simple as continuing distress at accidentally having killed a child.
But it takes a special person to refuse to hear about “new information.”
Or a person to whom “new information” might be very bad news indeed.
Max thumbed through the petition. The investigating officer was Jed Robert MacDougal of Marietta, Georgia.
Max returned to the telephone and punched information in Atlanta.
Annie peeked into the Dolphin Room. Leah Kirby had a full house. All of the listening faces were rapt. Gently, Annie closed the door. She settled on a bench facing the room and opened Max’s packet. As he’d indicated, there were copies of five autobiographies taken from the entries in
Contemporary Authors.
The copies were in alphabetical order. She found Leah Kirby’s essay next to the last.
She studied the photograph. It was a close-up. Leah had looked directly into the lens. Her eyes were filled with intelligence, sensitivity, and a hint of sadness. She was, quite simply, a breathtakingly lovely woman.
Leah Vixen Kirby:
I look back on my childhood as a time of enchantment, a time of perfection, a time of magnificence. I remember my father as a booming voice and a hearty laugh. He died when I was seven, so his face is misty in my memory. I have photos. Now, even the pictures
from the end of his life are younger than I am. His face is so unlined. I wonder what he would have been had he lived to be old? He was a lawyer. Does that tell me much? Does it tell me anything? The last time I was home, I met one of his contemporaries, a man now graying and thin, with a drooping mouth and a raspy voice. He said that my father was a brilliant lawyer, who could make cogent, compelling arguments, that my father was absolutely honest, “straight as a string,” that he was competitive, argumentative, clever, amusing, that he was a good companion.
I only know that he was and then he was not, that I lived in a circle of safety until one day my mother wept and said Daddy had gone to heaven to be with the angels.
I cried and demanded that he come back to me, to us.
But he didn’t come.
No matter how hard I prayed and pled.
That was when my enchanted childhood ended.
My mother turned into a gray and listless woman, who outwardly lived—she was a good and capable nurse—and inwardly died.
And I was alone.
I read. And read. And read.
Books, books, books.
They became my life; they are still my life.
Why do I write?
I think I am searching. I am trying to find once again the enchantment, the glory, the magnificence.
I find it for a space, for the space of the lines that I write. Once again, then, the world is glorious, and I am both enchanted and an enchantress.
I go back in time to an era that answers my hunger for great emotion. It is not a simpler time. No. I go back to an era of passion and heartbreak,
of triumph and despair. I go back to lives both magnified and diminished by the turbulence of events.
Books. My books. The books of others. In them, I have felt alive.
What does that containment of vitality mean to my everyday life, the life that is not compounded of words? Throughout the days and years I have moved like a ghost, there but not seen, not comprehended and surely not comprehending. This has cost me dearly. My first marriage ended in divorce. My children owe more to my housekeeper than to me for their upbringing. I think perhaps they have forgiven me. They dutifully return for holidays or invite me to their homes. But if they ever lived in an enchanted time, it was not of my making. I do not know that I can forgive myself.
And always, the words absorb me, redeem me, bless me.
But in recent years, I have begun to live beyond my books, and for this I thank my husband, Carl Kirby, whose gentle love and kindness and support have permitted me once again to feel that I live within enchantment.
I cannot help but wonder if I shall write books beyond my present imagining because of Carl.
Annie’s nose wrinkled. Of course, to be fair, the woman obviously had been asked to discuss her life as a writer.
But talk about self-absorption city!
Yet the autobiographical piece answered one question for Annie. Yes, Leah Vixen Kirby had the ego necessary to kill.
Applause boomed from the meeting room. The doors opened and people streamed out. Annie went against the tide.
Leah Kirby was the center of an admiring buzz of readers.
Annie wondered if she ever got tired of the adulation.
The author took a minute with each reader as she signed books. She made an effort to smile. But Annie felt it definitely was an effort.
As the last admirer reluctantly moved away, the writer saw Annie. Her face went quite blank for an instant, then smoothed into polite inquiry.
“Yes?”
Annie reminded herself of flies and honey and vinegar. She made her voice cheerful. “You are certainly a great favorite, Mrs. Kirby.”
“Yes.” There was no excitement in her answer. Not even pride. Simply acceptance, and a profound weariness. “Sometimes I feel”—she paused, pushed back a strand of that vivid hair—“as if I’m swarmed by piranhas, each wanting a piece of me, demanding more and more and more.”
There was an edge of desperation in her voice.
“If you feel that way, why did you come?”
Those huge green eyes glittered with sudden anger. “Because I have to. If I didn’t come, my sales would drop. And that’s the death knell in publishing. No one would publish my books.”
Her books, her books, her books.
“But if you’d rather be left alone—”
“That’s so stupid.” Contempt flashed in Leah’s eyes. “You don’t understand.” Her voice was insultingly patient. “I have to write. I
have
to. But then everyone wants to know more and more and more about you and they pick up little pieces of your life and carry them away and twist them and they come back ugly and deformed.”
“Is that how you saw the book Kenneth Hazlitt planned to write?”
Just for an instant, Leah’s face twisted with fury, a witch’s version of her immense beauty. Then she took a deep breath and managed a brittle smile. “I’m sure Kenneth’s novel would have been a wonderful tribute to authors for whom he had great reverence. I feel so honored—”
Annie forgot about flies and honey and vinegar. “Oh,
come off it. He was going to describe your sex life in lurid detail. Who’s the young handsome author you’re having an affair with?”
Leah glared at Annie. Then she snatched up her notes from the lectern and plunged down the platform steps. Annie turned and kept pace.