Mint Julep Murder (27 page)

They clustered around the wet bar.

Laurel’s lake-blue eyes were thoughtful. “Not a very handsome fellow. Something about his mouth. Unpleasant, don’t you think?”

Annie stared down at the flyer. Was there a suggestion of insolence in that slack face? She could envision a taunting smile on it.

“So I wouldn’t have warmed to him.” Laurel’s husky voice was dismissive. She pressed her hands delicately against her temples. “But I do believe I saw him at the party.” Her hands fell away. She turned them palms up. “I simply can’t be sure. I know he wasn’t one of the partygoers I later interviewed.”

Miss Dora brushed back a shaggy lock of silver hair. “I’ve never seen him before. If he was at the party, I didn’t notice him.” A pause, then the crusty voice continued with
a minuscule hint of embarrassment. “I was concentrating on the green ribbons.”

Annie wasn’t surprised. The name tags Festival participants wore were distinguished by occupation: red ribbons for authors, blue for booksellers, green for publishers. But she admired Miss Dora’s honesty.

Annie looked at Henny, her last hope.

Henny lifted her eyes from the flyer. “Quite interesting. No, Annie, I’m afraid I didn’t talk to this fellow either.”

Annie’s shoulders slumped. She’d counted on her trio. And she’d been so certain that X had to have been at the party, that X had some connection, some way, to Kenneth Hazlitt.

“But,” Henny’s voice quivered with eagerness, “you’re on the right track.” Henny yanked her shoulder bag closer, opened it, went straight to a back compartment, and lifted out folded sheets. She scanned the first page, turned to the second. Her finger stopped. “I knew it. Look at this—”

Henny slapped the paper down on the wet bar on top of the dead man’s picture.

Her carnelian-red nail pointed to Number 43 on the list:
Bill Smith, Room 503, Marriott.

“That name was on my list to check. There was no Bill Smith registered at the Marriott.” Henny pointed to the neat check marks in the margins. There was no check mark by Number 43. “This was the only name on the entire list that we were unable to find. So—”

It was tenuous. Detective Wheeler could easily shrug it away. They had no proof the fake name had belonged to X. But there was a false name, and Laurel thought she remembered seeing the dead man at the fateful party.

If he had been there, someone would have noticed him.

They all spoke at once.

Annie pointed at Henny’s neat list. “The people you talked to, we’ve still got their names—”

Max said briskly, “Someone will remember him. And if we can find anyone X talked to—”

Laurel slid the list aside, picked up the photo. “We can easily copy this, make as many flyers—”

Miss Dora produced a thick black pen. “We can add this question to the flyers: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? and show—”

Henny picked up her purse. “We’ve no time to lose. Laurel, Miss Dora, let’s go down to the hotel business center. We just have time to get the flyers made before the Author Breakfast begins. Everyone will be there. And so will we.”

Annie’s hand hovered over the basket of breakfast breads.

Of course, she was aware that the body finds it harder to extract fat from bagels—or at least this was the propaganda happily shared by bagel makers.

Did she believe it?

Did she, this morning,
care?

Her fingers plucked the warm, buttery, flaky croissant from the basket. But, healthy eater that she was, she ignored the rosettes of butter and plopped a mound of marmalade atop the roll.

Max poured fragrant, fresh coffee.

She smiled at him, her eyes warm. And aching with fatigue. But she was on a roll—not just the croissant—and determined to continue her struggle to solve two crimes.

Two very different crimes.

She’d always pegged a poisoner as weak but vicious, unwilling to face down the victim.

It took a kind of courage to lift a gun and shoot. Certainly the victim knew the identity of his murderer.

Poison—indirect, hidden, a deadly trap.

A gunshot—brutal, swift, direct.

Why two such different means of death?

There had to be a reason, a good one.

But maybe they wouldn’t have to learn the reason why. Not if their plan with Laurel and Henny and Miss Dora
worked. Even now, the intrepid threesome should be taking their places downstairs at the Author Breakfast, flyers in hand.

And as soon as possible, Annie needed to talk to Detective Wheeler, find out if the police had made any progress in identifying the dead man. She finished the croissant, licked her fingers, and looked at Max. “Here’s what I want to do.” But before she could explain, a knock rattled their door.

Annie’s sense of comfort fled. It came as no surprise when Max opened the door and she saw Detective Wheeler’s somber face.

Annie put down her coffee cup and stood. After all, she couldn’t be in any worse pickle than she’d been in last night, and she did want to talk to him.

But why did Wheeler look even more grim?

He refused the offer of coffee. In fact, he remained standing, his feet braced, his muscular body at parade rest.

Annie and Max remained standing, too.

Wheeler once again held out the photograph of the dead man. “Mrs. Darling, do you continue to claim you never met the victim?” The detective’s stare was hard and skeptical.

“It is a fact,” Annie said steadily, “that I have never met, spoken to, or seen this man. But, Mr. Wheeler, we think—”

He interrupted. “First, I’d like for you to look at another set of photographs.” He stepped to the wet bar, spread out several color photographs.

Obviously, they’d been shot in sequence.

The first showed the corpse resting on a gurney. It was still fully clothed. Annie hated seeing that small, deadly wound again.

The second was a close-up of the victim’s light blue sports shirt.

The third was a close-up of the pocket on the left side of the shirt. The cloth was thin enough that an oblong shape in the pocket was visible.

The fourth photo showed a hand holding tweezers poised above the pocket.

Two more photos showed the oblong of white cardboard being slipped out.

The seventh photo showed the card, resting above the pocket. The legend, in crimson ink, was quite legible:

A dagger, in equally brilliant ink, pointed at the bookstore’s name.

Annie swallowed. For an instant, she had difficulty breathing. Wheeler’s stare was piercing.

“When the killer was in our suite—” Max began.

Annie shook her head. “No. Max, my card case was in my purse. My purse was with me.” She continued to stare at the dreadful, damning photograph.

Max jammed his hands in his pockets. “Did you put out some cards at the information booth?”

“No.”

And still Wheeler stared at her.

Business cards. Her business cards. Of course, they were available at the store. But that was a ferryboat ride away. How could anyone—certainly anyone here at the hotel—have gone to Death on Demand?

Emma?

Oh, yes, Emma could have one of her cards. “Fingerprints?” Annie asked Wheeler. She wished her voice wasn’t so high and thin.

“Yours. The dead man’s. Some unidentified prints.”

What an overwhelming, shocking, damning piece of evidence: her card, with her fingerprints.

And the dead man’s.

Annie cleared her throat. “The murderer could have taken one of my cards, put it in the dead man’s hand, pressed his fingers against it. Put the card in his pocket.”

“That’s possible.” Detective Wheeler’s tone was arctic. “And how did the murderer get your card?”

Her cards, she showered them about like confetti, always tucking one in a gift basket—

“Oh. Oh!
OH.”
Annie felt like dancing a jig, turning a cartwheel, throwing a party. Well, maybe not a party. Not for a long time. And she never wanted to see a bottle of bourbon again. “Detective Wheeler”—her eyes were shining—“I know what happened. A third set of prints! Of course! Look, here’s how we can prove it …”

Wheeler stood, arms crossed. His impassive face never changed.

Finally, she concluded, “I want to bring all the suspects together at eleven o’clock. All I’m asking you to do is check those prints against the prints of the authors. Will you do that, Detective Wheeler?”

“I can do that.” He didn’t sound impressed. He reached out, swept the photos into a pile. “All right, I will do that. But your fingerprints are on the weapon, Mrs. Darling. You held that gun, palm around the stock, finger around the trigger.”

Annie opened her mouth.

He held up a hand. “I know. You explained it. You were trying to defend yourself.” He slipped the photos into an envelope, neatly bent the clasp. With no change in inflection, he continued brusquely, “Your fingerprints are on the handle to the driver’s door—but they’re smeared. Lab thinks the last person to open that door wore a glove. The car keys also hold your prints—smeared.” Those steady gray eyes bored into hers. “And on the card, there’s a smear from a glove on one edge. Take it all together, what have we got? A possibility you’re telling the truth.”

Annie began to smile.

His next words wiped it right off her face.

“But you’re not in charge of this investigation. I am. And there isn’t going to be a gathering of the suspects for you to interrogate. That may fly in the books you sell. It won’t fly here.”

The door closed behind him with grim finality.

Annie squared her shoulders.

Okay. That’s the way it was. Detective Wheeler had turned down her invitation.

But there was no law that she couldn’t call a meeting of the Medallion honorees in her capacity as author liaison.

And call it she would.

As for the gathering, she’d better come up with more than the provenance of the card in the dead man’s pocket.

She’d better come up with a murderer.

The problem was, she didn’t have a clue.

And only an hour to figure it out.

Annie and Max reached the Green Room, where authors gathered prior to events, at a quarter to eleven.

It was an unremarkable room with an oval conference table, beige drapes, and too much air-conditioning.

Max arranged glasses around the table.

Annie paced.

All right. She was a mystery reader. A world-class mystery reader, right up there in the ranks with Jon L. Breen and Janet Rudolph and Marvin Lachman.

But the inexorable swing of the minute hand of the clock on the wall made it difficult to marshal her thoughts with logic and precision.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Answers. She needed answers. Now.

She reached the end of the room, turned, head down, hands clasped behind her back.

Thoughts darted like undisciplined goldfish. Headstrong, mercurial goldfish.

Kenneth Hazlitt loved to be the center of attention.

Jimmy Jay Crabtree needed money.

Poison.

A gunshot.

Public.

Private.

Willie Hazlitt left the suite door unlocked for his convenience.

Alan Blake thought it was amusing that the police suspected Annie of Kenneth’s murder.

Jimmy Jay accused Annie of being in his room. What was missing from his room?

The bourbon bottle was poisoned before the Mint Julep party began.

The maid’s master keys made it easy to get into any room on the fifth floor.

The tell-all novel was based on the lives of the five Medallion winners.

The Death on Demand card was found in the victim’s pocket.

Kenneth was murdered at the Dixie Book Festival.

An unidentified man died in Annie’s car.

Annie stumbled to a stop.

She’d received the message, never questioned it, gone straight to her car.

The murderer had the gun, actually shot twice as she came near.

But didn’t shoot
her.

The murderer had an opportunity and didn’t take it. The murderer was satisfied to see Annie embroiled in the second murder, suspected of it as she was a suspect in the death of Kenneth Hazlitt.

Annie was the link between the two slayings.

“Max …” There was wonder and excitement in her voice.

Then the door opened.

In came the Dauntless Trio. Henny triumphantly waggled a note card before handing it to Annie. Laurel hugged her warmly. Miss Dora raised her cane in a victory gesture.

Detective Wheeler followed right on their heels. Wheeler’s face was a dull red. “Mrs. Darling, I told you—”

“And I’m telling you, I have to do this. So, be my guest, Detective Wheeler.” Annie faced him squarely. “Or leave.”

Wheeler’s jaw ridged with anger.

Annie knew it hung in the balance. She could read in his eyes the temptation to arrest her. He could do it, of course, arrest her for murder. Certainly, he had enough evidence to justify it. And he was furious at her meddling in his investigation.

“This”—and it was close to a snarl—“this better be good, Mrs. Darling.” He strode past her and slammed into a chair, then stared stonily toward her.

Annie glanced down at the note card.

By God, it
was
going to be good.

The conference room was like a morgue, silent and chilly, the vents whooshing out icy air.

Annie shivered and faced her audience.

Willie Hazlitt slumped back in his chair, his arms folded. His color was better today, but deep lines bracketed his mouth and his eyes darted from face to face.

Annie was surprised he’d come. But her call had made it clear she suspected one of the authors. And even if Willie didn’t like her, he certainly would want to know if one of the Famous Five turned out to be his brother’s killer.

Annie cleared her throat and ran a hand through her hair. “I appreciate everyone coming. I know all of you are eager to help the authorities in their search for Kenneth Hazlitt’s murderer.”

Leah Kirby’s silk dress rustled. “I beg your pardon! You called and asked me to come to the Green Room prior to the Festival luncheon program. What does that have to do with Kenneth?”