Murder Boogies With Elvis (10 page)

“I vote for the cocktail reception,” Miss Bessie said.

“But there’s a problem with that, Bessie. The church is in a state park, so we can’t serve alcohol. I was thinking about talking to the folks who live across the road from the park and seeing if we could set up a tent over there by that little lake.”

I thought about the land across the road from Tannehill State Park. “That’s a cow pasture, Sister, and a pond.”

“No. Farther down where the sign says
FISHING
,
TWO DOLLARS A DAY
. That little gravel road.”

“Still a cow pasture.”

Bonnie Blue frowned in concentration. “Have the reception at your house, Mary Alice. You can set up a large tent in the front yard, and everybody wouldn’t have to be watching where they stepped. Somebody would probably show up dead in the pond, anyway, the way you two have been finding bodies.”

Mary Alice pointed a fork at me. “It’s her bad karma. The only dead people I ever saw were laid out, until Patricia Anne retired. Except for my husbands, that is.”

“Didn’t one of them die on an airplane?” Miss Bessie asked.

“Roger. He didn’t even tell me he couldn’t breathe until we were halfway across the Atlantic. And by that time I could hardly make out what he was saying.”

By this time I had eaten my egg roll. Damned if my karma was going to take the blame for the bodies. I
pointed my fork back at Sister. “It was your son who married Sunshine Dabbs, Miss Smarty. And I’ve got a permanent knot on my head from falling over that turkey she left on your stoop.” I leaned over to Miss Bessie. “See my knot?”

“Hmm,” she said.

Bonnie Blue frowned in concentration. “Can we back up here a minute? The problem is the time and place to have the reception. Right?”

“Just don’t serve potato salad,” Miss Bessie said. “That stuff is dangerous in the summertime, especially when you make a big batch. Folks would be falling out with food poisoning right and left. I was at a family reunion one time where that happened. Lord. Worst thing I ever saw.”

“That’s true,” I agreed. “I wonder if corn salad would be as bad.”

Miss Bessie nodded. “It’s the mayonnaise.”

“Would you two just hush?” Mary Alice said. “I’m sure the caterers will make sure that everything’s fine.”

We concentrated on our food for a few minutes. Then Bonnie Blue said, “Well, if they do have potato salad, I hope they don’t put mustard in it. I hate mustard in potato salad. My auntie always puts mustard in her potato salad and wonders why nobody eats it. She sure knows how to make chicken pie, though. The best crust. Everybody fights over it.”

Another few minutes of eating. The waitress came over and freshened our tea.

“Actually, there’s another slight problem,” Mary Alice said. “Virgil, Jr., is an Elvis impersonator, and he’s going to be the best man.”

Bonnie Blue looked up from her almost-empty plate. “He’ll be wearing a tux, won’t he?”

Mary Alice shook her head. “Virgil says Virgil, Jr., always wears the white jumpsuit on dress occasions. He says nobody will notice it. Now can you believe that for a minute? We’re standing up there, the wedding party at the front of the church all dressed up, with Elvis in the middle, and nobody noticing?”

“Some things you just have to accept,” Miss Bessie said philosophically. “I wish I could remember my wedding. I wonder if there was an Elvis in it.”

“Y’all ever seen a black Elvis impersonator?” Bonnie Blue asked. “Used to be one around Birmingham. Had that white suit and big belt. And sweat! That man squished in his shoes. Looked like a fool marching down Fourth Avenue.”

“Well, hopefully Virgil, Jr., won’t sweat like that.” But Mary Alice looked worried.

“Too bad about what happened to that Elvis at the Alabama the other night,” Bonnie Blue said.

Sister and I looked at each other, but neither of us said anything. We didn’t have to. Bonnie Blue had caught our glances.

“Y’all were there? Should have known.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” I said. “Anybody want some more sweet-and-sour shrimp?”

Sister said, “Get me some.”

As I left the table, I heard her saying, “In the front row. He fell,
splat,
right into the orchestra pit.”

I was in no hurry to get back to the table and hear the saga of Griffin Mooncloth again. I went to the restroom and washed my hands, came back to the buffet, and loitered while the three women at my table still had their heads close together, engrossed, I was sure, in the Russian spy story. Finally Sister looked up as if wondering where I was. I got her some more sweet-
and-sour shrimp and headed back to the table.

“I don’t want to hear any more about it,” I said, shoving the plate in front of her.

“Can’t say that I blame you,” Miss Bessie said. “You sure something isn’t wrong with your karma?”

“My karma’s fine.”

And I really believed that, until later at the Big, Bold, and Beautiful Shoppe.

I keep my credit cards in a little leather card case that Haley had given me one Christmas. It gets lost sometimes in the bottom of my purse, which means I have to dig around for it. That is what I was doing when the back of my hand brushed against something metallic. I paid the lunch bill, and we walked back to the Big, Bold, and Beautiful Shoppe, where Mary Alice wanted to look at some pictures of wedding dresses. Miss Bessie and I sat down to wait and I casually looked in my purse to see what it was that my hand had touched when I was rummaging for my credit cards.

“I’ve got to quit dumping change in my purse,” I told Miss Bessie. “I need a smaller purse, too. This one is heavy as lead.” That was next to the last sensible thing I said. The last sensible thing I said was, “Call Bo Mitchell.”

And then, for the first time in my life, I fainted.

F
ortunately I was sitting in one of the wicker chairs that Bonnie Blue has arranged in the corner of the showroom for people who are waiting for customers. So I just slid to the floor, the room reeling around me. I’m not even sure I totally lost consciousness because I heard Miss Bessie saying, “Patricia Anne?” and then yelling, “Mary Alice!” I remember Bonnie Blue propping my feet up in the wicker chair Miss Bessie had been sitting in and Sister wiping my face with a cold washcloth.

“I’ll call nine-one-one,” I heard Bonnie Blue say.

That revived me. “No,” I said, struggling to sit up but fighting nausea. “I’m all right.”

“What happened?” Sister asked.

Miss Bessie answered. “She just looked funny, said to call Bo Mitchell, and fell out of the chair.”

“Bo Mitchell? She’s a policewoman.” Bonnie Blue rubbed my legs as if I had frostbite.

“Confused,” Sister said. “We’d better get the paramedics over here. It may be a reaction to the Chinese food.” She put the washcloth against my throat. The coldness felt good. “Can you breathe, Mouse? You’re not having a heart attack, are you? Chest pains?”

“Sister,” I said. “I need Bo.”

“Don’t you dare try and sit up,” Bonnie Blue said, holding my feet in the wicker chair.

“But y’all, there’s a switchblade in my purse.”

Bonnie Blue held me even tighter. “And there’s a pistol in mine, but I’m still not gonna let you sit up.”

“You packing, Bonnie Blue?” Miss Bessie looked pleased. “I used to. Damn it was fun.”

Fun? Miss Bessie and a gun wouldn’t do to think about.

Sister leaned over me. “What do you mean there’s a switchblade in your purse?”

“There is.”

She picked up my purse and turned it upside down. Lipsticks, combs, wallet, receipts scattered. And
thunk,
a switchblade knife hit the floor. Six inches long with a brown bone handle with a swirled design, the knife’s switch was a small gold crown. Sister picked it up, mashed the crown, and the blade erupted almost cutting my arm.

“Damn!” I jumped back, dislodging my feet from the wicker chair and Bonnie Blue’s hold, and jarring my whole body as they hit the floor. “Be careful with that thing.”

“Lord have mercy,” Sister said, looking at the knife with awe. Bonnie Blue, Miss Bessie, and I also looked. “It’s rusty,” Sister said.

Bonnie Blue held out her hand. “Let me see that,” Sister handed it to her carefully, and she held it to the window and examined it. “That’s blood, sure as anything. Not rust.”

I had known when I saw the knife where that blood had come from, what the knife had been used for. But how the hell had it gotten in my purse? The room reeled again, but I closed my eyes and willed myself to be steady.

“We’d better call Bo,” Sister said.

Einstein was right about time being relative. I’ll vouch for the old fellow. The twenty minutes that we waited for Bo lasted for hours. Vicki Parker, Bonnie Blue’s assistant, had left for lunch as soon as we had walked in from the Hunan Hut, so Bonnie Blue had to help the customer who came in looking for an outfit to wear to the Museum Ball. Sister, Miss Bessie, and I sat huddled in the reception area, Sister and Miss Bessie in the wicker chairs, and me semistretched out on the love seat. I felt better, not as if I would faint again or throw up, but every now and then I had a cold chill. The knife was back in my purse, which was lying on the end of the love seat. I was very aware that it was there.

“No, honey, that beige won’t get it,” Bonnie Blue said to her customer. “Everybody there’s going to have on beige or black. Let me show you this emerald green we’ve got back here. Cut down to your belly button, but you’ve got the figure for it.”

“I think I had an emerald green dress once cut down to my belly button,” Miss Bessie said, scratching her head through the holes in her hat with a crochet needle she had pulled from her purse. I wished that was all that was in my purse.

Sister got up and walked to the plate-glass window that overlooked Twentieth Street. “I wish Bo would hurry up.” Then to me, “You know we’re jumping to conclusions here.”

“What conclusions are we jumping to?” Miss Bessie wanted to know.

“That this is the knife that killed that Russian spy at the Alabama Theater the other night.” She turned back to the window.

“I haven’t jumped to that conclusion,” Miss Bessie said. “There must be hundreds of thousands of switchblade knives in Birmingham. Any one of them could have ended up in Patricia Anne’s purse.”

Hundreds of thousands? Lord. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate. The first thing that Bo was going to ask me was where my purse had been for someone to drop a knife into it. The Hunan Hut? It had been hanging on my chair there. But one of us had been at the table the whole time. The Angel-sighting Society? The purse had been on the floor by my feet and Sister had been sitting on one side of me and a woman who had introduced herself as a Unitarian minister on the other side. Not likely. Last night at Sister’s? In a chair at the game table where the snacks were. Totally un-watched. I had just picked it up when I left and hadn’t opened it until I got ready to pay the bill at the Hunan Hut.

I shivered again. Surely not. Maybe, just maybe, like Sister said, I was jumping to conclusions.

“Here they come,” Sister announced.

The bell over the door jingled merrily as Bo and Joanie Salk came in. Joanie has been Bo’s partner for only a few months and the two couldn’t be less alike.
Joanie is tall, blond, and hangs loose while Bo is short, black, and tends to be a perfectionist. Bo’s ambition is to be chief of police someday, and the odds are that she will be.

They spotted us and came over. Joanie had a lollipop in her mouth that she pulled out, wrapped in its original wrapper, and stuck in her pocket.

“Thinks she’s Kojak,” Bo said.

Joanie smiled. “I’m hooked on Dum Dum root beer suckers.”

Miss Bessie shook her head. “Just don’t chew them. All of my children used to chew Dum Dums. Stayed at the dentist. Drove me crazy.”

“No, ma’am. I won’t.”

“Ice, too. They chewed ice.”

“You rang?” Bo asked, sitting on the love seat beside me. “What’s up?”

I reached in my purse, pulled out the switchblade knife, and mashed the crown. The blade swooshed out.

Bo jumped back, startled.

“Uh, that’s ugly,” Joanie said. “Where did you get that, Mrs. Hollowell?”

“Found it in my purse. I was looking for my credit card at the Hunan Hut and felt something. When we got here I checked, and there it was.”

“She fainted dead away,” Sister added, leaning forward to see around Joanie, who had knelt in front of me to examine the knife. “Probably not taking her iron.”

Bonnie Blue said good-bye to her customer, who left carrying a garment bag. The woman looked over at us curiously as she went out the door. Then Bonnie Blue joined us. “It’s got blood on it.”

“They think it belongs to a Russian spy,” Miss Bessie said.

Bo and Joanie looked at each other, puzzled.

“The Russian spy who was killed at the Alabama the other night,” Sister explained. “We were in the front row. I guess when he fell, the knife could have landed in Mouse’s purse.”

I tried to imagine that scenario: the man falling into the orchestra pit with a knife in his back, which somehow became dislodged and flew through the air to land in my purse, which had been closed and on the floor under my seat.

“The Mooncloth guy?” Bo asked. “He was a Russian spy?”

“That’s what I heard,” Sister said.

Bo took the knife from me carefully and closed the blade. “I suppose all of you have been looking at this, passing it around.”

We nodded that we had.

Bo handed it to Joanie. “Bag it anyway.”

Joanie reached into the large black leather case that was hanging from her shoulder, took out a plastic bag, and dropped the knife into it.

“And it just showed up in your purse, Patricia Anne?” Bo stood up.

I nodded. “I felt it in the Hunan Hut and didn’t know what it was.”

“Well, we’ll see what we find out. You go on home and get some rest now.”

“And take your iron, Mrs. Hollowell.” Joanie reached in her pocket for her sucker.

The bell jingled their departure.

“Well, that sure didn’t take long,” Bonnie Blue said.

“I guess that’s the end of that,” Miss Bessie added.

Of course we all knew better.

On the way home, Sister asked me if I wanted to stop by the doctor. “You’re still looking peaked,” she said.

I said I didn’t, that I just had a headache. Which was true. Plus the sore throat I’d been battling for a couple of days.

We rode in silence for a few minutes down the tree-lined streets. The green of new leaves contrasted with the darker magnolias and pines. Several people were working in their yards; one man was giving his grass the first cutting of the year. And last night a few snowflakes had fallen. Spring.

“I’m sorry about Marilyn,” I said.

“It’s okay. She told me she asked you not to tell me she was here.”

I glanced around at Sister. She was being very understanding. I must look like death warmed over.

“Did she tell you about Charles Boudreau?”

I nodded that she had. “She said there was no way that she could live with him.”

“I don’t think living with him was what he had in mind.” Sister dodged a pothole and nearly hit a pickup. “Get out of the way, fool,” she yelled at the hapless man driving the pickup. “Did you see that? He almost hit us.”

I closed my eyes and tried to remember my mantra.

“He comes from an impeccable gene pool. His grandfather or great-grandfather, I don’t remember which one, was governor of Louisiana.”

“Hmm.”

“Not the one who wrote ‘You Are My Sunshine’ or
the one who took all his friends to Europe.” She turned onto my street. “Another one. You know, Mouse, sometimes I think Louisiana’s governors are more interesting than ours. Some of ours are just downright dull.”

I tried to remember a downright dull Alabama governor but couldn’t.

“But Marilyn may really be making a mistake. She’s got a bird in the hand here.”

“As compared to two in the bush at UAB?” My heart was slowing down. I could see my house.

“You know what I mean. Now don’t worry about supper tonight,” she continued. “I’ll bring something over around six-thirty. That’s when
Wheel of Fortune
comes on, isn’t it?”

I pulled the visor down, looked in the mirror, and pinched my cheeks. No candidate for Miss America, but I didn’t look like I was about to step through the pearly gates.

Sister turned into my driveway and stopped. “I know you’re upset about the murder weapon being found in your purse, Mouse, but we’ll get you the best lawyers in Birmingham. Debbie will know who they are.”

“What?”

“Not a thing to worry about. Now, how about some nice salmon croquettes for supper? You want dill sauce?” She clicked a button to unlock the door.

“What?” I asked again stupidly. How had we segued from Charles Boudreau’s gene pool to my imminent arrest for murder?

“Dill it is, then. Hop out, so I can go make some calls.”

The murder weapon? The best lawyers in town? What happened to jumping to conclusions?

I didn’t hop out of the car, more like a stumble. Mitzi was waving to me from her yard, and I headed toward her as if she were a beacon of sanity.

“Dumbest thing I ever heard of,” Mitzi said. “To start with nobody knows if that was the knife that killed the Mooncloth guy. And even if it is, you were sitting in the front row of the theater with a hundred people around you who can swear that you were there. Mary Alice shouldn’t scare you like that.”

I was sitting on the sofa with the thermometer in my mouth. “Unf?” I asked.

Mitzi glanced at her watch. “Okay.”

I took the thermometer out. Almost 101. Damn. I was really sick, and I’d been blaming my symptoms on being upset about Marilyn and on Griffin Mooncloth’s murder. Even on the excitement of Haley’s homecoming. The fainting today I had blamed on the switchblade.

Mitzi took the thermometer and looked at it. “Yep. We’re calling the doctor, girl. I knew when I felt your arm that you had a fever.”

“I’ll just take some aspirin. I’ll feel better.”

Mitzi shook her head. “You told me the day before yesterday that you weren’t feeling good. You had me look at your eyes.”

I rubbed the knot on my head, which had almost disappeared.

“That’s not what’s wrong,” Mitzi said, noticing my gesture. “And you’d better go see about it. You don’t want to expose anybody.”

As if I hadn’t exposed a hundred or so people. I reached for the phone to call the doctor.

“I’ll drive you,” Mitzi volunteered.

“I’ve just got the sinus,” I said.