The Darling Dahlias and the Unlucky Clover Read online

  “Because she didn’t want you to wonder whether she might have a motive.”

  “A motive for what?” Buddy asked, now more puzzled than ever. He felt like a schoolboy who knew he was missing an essential part of the lesson but had no idea what it was or what page it was on. If there was a right idea, he hadn’t got it.

  With a wave of her hand, Ophelia went on as though she hadn’t heard his question. “And because now that he’s dead, she’d like us—or maybe just me—to think that her reason for wanting a divorce is irrelevant. Just a little piece of history that doesn’t matter any longer.” She tilted her head thoughtfully. “Which of course might not be true. It might actually be important.”

  Buddy still felt puzzled. “Well, I don’t exactly—” He stopped. “Why was she getting a divorce?”

  Ophelia thought about that. “She didn’t say why, actually, and I didn’t ask. A divorce is awf ‘ly personal, don’t you think? And I don’t really know her well enough to be her confidante. She was talking to me because she felt she just had to talk to someone, and I happened to be handy.” Another pause. “But she said something that made me think it might have to do with money. She had a lot of it, you know. From her grandmother—that fierce-looking lady in the portrait over the loveseat.”

  Buddy slowed to let Mr. Snipp’s ancient black and brown coonhound amble across the road in front of him. You had to be careful in Darling, where there were as many dogs as there were people, and some of the dogs were old as Moses and blind as bats. If he damaged that coonhound, Mr. Snipp would never forgive him. When the hound was safely on the curb, Buddy accelerated again.

  “I guess I heard word of an inheritance,” he said cautiously, “a long time ago. You say she had money. She doesn’t have it now? Did she lose it in the Crash?”

  In Buddy’s admittedly limited experience, that was the main reason for Darling folk going broke. And even if you didn’t have money invested in the stock market, Black Tuesday changed your life. Any American citizen who had been alive on that day and in the weeks right afterward would remember it forever.

  “The Crash?” Ophelia pursed her lips. “I have no idea, honestly. But that house doesn’t look like a lot of money, do you think? I mean, it’s nice enough, but it’s really pretty dinky—nothing like the Vautier plantation. And of course, she did buy that new Dodge from Kilgore’s. But if I had her kind of money, I’d have a bigger house, over by the country club. And more help in the house. She’s just got DessaRae, who does everything but the laundry. You’d think she could afford more, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, I—” Buddy was about to say that the house looked like a million dollars to him, although he didn’t have a lot of familiarity with the price of real estate. And he had absolutely no idea how many maids a woman ought to have, or how much she ought to pay them.

  But Ophelia was rattling on. “Come to think of it, I wonder why the Whitworths aren’t living on the Vautier plantation. Her grandmother’s place, you know. I’ve seen pictures of that mansion—it’s fabulous, really fabulous. I’ve never heard that she sold it, but I suppose she did.” She rolled down the car window and let the breeze blow through her hair. “Why don’t you ask Mr. Moseley, Buddy? Like I said, he’s her lawyer.”

  “Ask Mr. Moseley what?” Buddy said helplessly, feeling as if he had totally lost track of the conversation.

  Ophelia turned to face him, both eyebrows raised. “Why she wanted a divorce, of course. And what happened to the money. I wasn’t curious before, but I am now. I think you should ask him. See what he says. I’ll bet it would be interesting.”

  Well, if that was what she was talking about, Buddy had an answer.

  “No,” he said firmly. “I am not going to ask Mr. Moseley. I don’t see how Mrs. Whitworth’s wanting a divorce—because of money or any other reason—is connected to Mr. Whitworth’s accidentally killing himself by going too fast down Spook Hill.”

  “Mmm,” Ophelia said. “Well, you just never know, you know.” She put her hand on his arm. “Watch out, Buddy. There’s Mrs. Vanderoy, poor old thing. I’ll bet she doesn’t know where she is.”

  He slowed again. Mrs. Vanderoy was standing uncertainly at the corner, clutching her sweater, her gray hair hanging down over her shoulders like a tangle of fuzzy wool yarn. The old lady had a habit of wandering off whenever she was able to get out of the house by herself. But then he saw her daughter hurrying after her, so he figured she would fetch her mother home. He and Ophelia waved at the pair and he drove on.

  “Anyway,” he said to Ophelia, “Mr. Moseley can’t talk to people about his clients’ business. There’s some sort of rule about that.” He knew that sometimes the rule could be broken, but he didn’t know why or how and he wasn’t going to bother Mr. Moseley by asking.

  Ophelia wasn’t listening. “I happen to know that he’s in Montgomery this week,” she went on. “But Liz Lacy is in the office. She might know something about this money thing. Why don’t you talk to her, Buddy?”

  Buddy sighed. Some women just couldn’t take no for an answer. They were approaching the courthouse square, and he changed the subject. “A minute ago, you said that Mrs. Whitworth’s lying about the divorce business was ‘one thing.’ What was the other thing?”

  Ophelia gave him a look. “You mean to say you didn’t notice?”

  “Notice what?”

  “That bruise on her face—and the scrape.”

  “I saw it,” Buddy said, “but I didn’t—”

  “She covered it up with makeup,” Ophelia said knowingly. “A lot of makeup.”

  “Really?” Not only did women hear different things than he did, they saw different things. He had noticed the bruise, of course, but he hadn’t thought much about it.

  “Really. If it weren’t for that, it would look much worse. Just looking at the bruise, I’d say that somebody hit her a good lick,” Ophelia said. “On the other hand, that scrape—maybe she fell. And she was wearing long sleeves, so we couldn’t see what her arms look like.” She chuckled wryly. “Listen, Buddy, whatever you do, do not get in an automobile with that woman under the wheel. She is the worst driver I have ever seen. She’s been taking driving lessons from that salesman at Kilgore’s, but you certainly can’t tell it. She drives like a maniac.”

  “I’ll try to remember that.” Buddy turned the corner at Hart’s Peerless Laundry. “Do you want to go back to the newspaper office, or are you headed home?”

  “The office will be fine,” Ophelia said. She squinted at him. “You’re not going to talk to Liz?”

  “I don’t have a reason to talk to her,” Buddy said firmly. He pulled up in front of the Dispatch. “I’m going to the sheriff’s office and see if Wayne is back from Noonan’s yet.”

  One way or another, he and his deputy spent a fair amount of time with Lionel Noonan, who owned the only funeral parlor in town. Banks could fail, stores could go bankrupt, even the county could go broke and you might not know until a bridge went out and nobody came to fix it. But the funeral parlor was probably the most essential business in the entire town. Everybody who died had to go there, like it or not. And folks always said that Lionel Noonan could be relied on to do the right thing by a funeral, with the corpse looking as nice as possible under the circumstances, and flowers and music and all the rest. Lionel always said that a funeral was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. He never wanted to disappoint any of his clients.

  “Well, if you won’t, maybe I will.” Ophelia opened the car door. “Thanks for letting me go along, Buddy. Like I said, it was informative.”

  Buddy nodded. He thought she was probably right, although he wasn’t sure exactly what he was going to do with the few scraps of information he had picked up.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DEPUTY SPRINGER OFFERS A THEORY

  The sheriff’s office was located a few doors west of the courthouse square, in a converted house behind Snow’s Farm Supply. The dilapidated old place had been repossessed by the Darling
Savings and Trust a couple of years before, then sold to Cypress County so the sheriff would have someplace to hang his hat, as Roy Burns had put it. If nothing else, the office had a convenient location. It was next door to the Darling jail—two shoebox-sized cells upstairs over Snow’s Farm Supply. If Buddy wanted to climb the outside stairs and see if old Pete Peevy had recovered from his weekend drunk, it was handy.

  Buddy parked the sheriff’s car in front of the office and went up the front porch steps. The resident tomcat, black as the pit, stared balefully at him from the railing, eyes glowing like burning copper. Nobody knew where the cat had come from, and nobody remembered seeing him around town. Which was strange, since most of the town’s cats belonged to somebody—or to several somebodies, since philandering tomcats are generous with their patronage. This one, the scarred veteran of many wars, had shown up the day after they hauled the late Roy Burns out of Horsetail Gorge. In a quavering voice, Jed Snow had joked that the cat was Roy’s ghost, “come back to ha’nt us.” But Buddy thought that it was unlikely that mere haunting was involved. He thought it more probable that Roy had arranged for the animal to watch the new sheriff and report back when he didn’t do things right. He had named him the Beast.

  Buddy opened the screen door, which was loose on its hinge and crooked. “You comin’ in?” he asked the Beast, holding the door. The cat considered, stretched (deliberately dragging it out to make Buddy wait), then leaped lightly down to the floor and went inside.

  To get a little more space, Buddy and Wayne had knocked out the plaster wall between the small living room and the minuscule dining room, turning them into a single reception area with a couple of wooden folding chairs against a wall and a pine-topped counter across the middle. They hadn’t gotten around to painting the walls all one color yet, and the red-and-blue checked wallpaper in the back section clashed with the pink cabbage roses in the front. One door opened onto the small bedroom that was Wayne’s office; another led to the front bedroom, now Buddy’s office. The kitchen was their meeting room and workroom.

  The deputy’s job paid peanuts, so besides being their office, the house did double duty as Wayne’s living quarters. There was an icebox and a little electric Fidelity Rangette in the kitchen where Wayne made grilled cheese sandwiches and cooked his supper—Buddy’s too, sometimes. As a bachelor cook, Wayne’s preferences ran to corned beef hash, Wolf Brand chili, and canned hominy with sausage and onions liberally laced with catsup, molasses, and a glug of cider vinegar.

  Buddy had ordered a folding cot ($2.89 from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue) and Wayne slept on it in the pantry, which Buddy thought was a pretty good plan, all things considered. Having Wayne sleeping on the premises meant that he was handy to answer the telephone or go to the door if a citizen came banging on it in the middle of the night. Which almost never happened, because most Darling folks went to bed early and stayed there, barring emergencies. But it allowed Buddy to brag that the Cypress County Sheriff’s Office was staffed around the clock.

  As Buddy tossed his uniform hat onto the peg beside the door, he heard the clackety-clack of a typewriter. “That you, Springer?” he called.

  The typing stopped. “Not me,” Wayne said. “It’s some guy from the Infernal Revenue Service. He’s here to arrest you for skipping out on your income taxes. I’m letting him use my typewriter to type the summons he’s going to serve on you.” The typing resumed.

  “He’ll have to prove I have an income first,” Buddy countered. He went into the kitchen and filled a white china mug with coffee from the percolator on the back of the stove. Being sheriff might sound like a glamorous job, and Roy Burns had never seemed to hurt for money. In fact, he lived in a very nice house, his wife had a full-time cook and housekeeper, and they owned a vacation cottage down at Oyster Bay, where Roy kept a thirty-foot fishing boat with a monster Evinrude outboard motor.

  Buddy wasn’t so lucky. After he paid Mrs. Beedle for his upstairs room (breakfast included, hot bath once a week, laundry twice a month), there was just enough left to take Bettina to the Darling Diner for Friday night supper and then to the Palace for a movie. Or a movie plus popcorn and a box of Jujubes and two orange Nehi sodas and skip supper at the diner. (Bettina offered to pay half but the thought of such a thing scandalized him. Other guys could mooch if they wanted to, but he had more self-respect. His girl would never pay one red cent out of her pocket.) The night before, they had gone to see a real thriller-diller, King Kong. Buddy figured that the climb all the way to the top of the new Empire State Building had to involve some pretty slick camera trickery, but he couldn’t dope out how they managed to film the fight between the ape and that dinosaur. Bettina had hid her pretty face against his arm all the way through that scene, which was worth the price of admission all by itself.

  He took his coffee into Wayne’s office. A small Silvertone battery radio sat on the shelf behind the desk, playing Rudy Vallée’s hit recording, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.” Wayne had stopped typing and was leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed, doing a pretty good Vallée imitation. Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell, full of that Yankee doodly dum. Half a million boots went sloggin’ through hell—

  “Not exactly the most cheerful song in the book,” Buddy said. He had once heard Wayne singing “Old Man River” while he stirred a pot of fatback, beans, and cabbage and had thought he was good enough to sing on the radio. Come to think of it, “Old Man River” was melancholy too, in a different way. Tote that barge, lift that bale, get a little drunk and you land in jail—

  Wayne broke off. He opened his eyes, dark in his sunburned face, those high cheekbones giving him an enigmatic look. His glance flicked to Wayne, standing in the doorway. “Hey,” he said. “Just heard on the radio that the feds finally got Pretty Boy Floyd.”

  Buddy whistled in surprise. After the Kansas City Massacre the year before, J. Edgar Hoover had named Floyd Public Enemy Number One. Ordinary folks, though, admired Pretty Boy’s lawless ways. In Oklahoma, where he grew up, some newspaper reporter had called him the “Robin Hood of the Cookson Hills,” and the name had stuck. He gave money away, and when he robbed a bank, he also destroyed the mortgage files, effectively shutting down its foreclosures.

  “They cornered him in some woods in Ohio,” Wayne said. “Shot him dead.” He looked down at the Royal typewriter on the table in front of him. “I’m working on the Whitworth auto crash report. Give me ten minutes and I’ll have it on your desk.”

  “Turn up anything interesting?” Buddy asked, sipping his coffee. He grimaced. He wasn’t crazy about Wayne’s coffee, which was strong enough to stop an elephant. But he didn’t dislike it enough to go to the trouble of making another pot just for himself.

  “Maybe.” Wayne gestured to a short stack of photographic prints. “Charlie Dickens brought these over. Pictures he took at the wreck site this morning.” He quirked an eyebrow. “Foot of Spook Hill. I understand you know the place.”

  “Yeah. There’ve been several accidents out there, over the past couple of years.” Buddy frowned. “How did Dickens come to find out about the wreck?”

  He liked Charlie, and sometimes he was a help. He’d put notices and such in the Dispatch for free, and it helped to have the local newspaper on your side when it came to an unpleasant story, like the time he’d dumped Pootie’s load of shine. But he wouldn’t tell you where he’d heard something. “Protecting my sources” was the way he put it, which was frustrating when Buddy thought he really ought to hand that information over. And he could be a nuisance. When something important was happening, he didn’t mind getting in the way.

  “Lucy Murphy called it in to him,” Wayne said. “She called here first, then the newspaper.” He pulled a flat can of Prince Albert out of his hip pocket and a pack of cigarette papers out of his shirt pocket. Deftly, he began to fashion a cigarette. “Gotta say I was glad he showed up. He had his camera with him. Caught some things we might’ve missed.”

  “Yeah? Like what
?”

  “Ruts in the road. They give a clue as to how come Whitworth went over the embankment.” He shook tobacco into his folded cigarette paper. “And the crease in the rear end of his Pierce-Arrow.”

  “Crease?” Buddy frowned.

  “Yeah. A fair-sized dent, actually.” Wayne finished rolling, licked the length of the cigarette to seal it, and stuck it in his mouth. He reached across the table for the stack of photos, leafed through them, and pulled one out.

  “There,” he said, and jabbed a finger at the photo.

  “Huh,” Buddy said. He bent over it, frowning. He was looking at a picture of the rear end of the once-stately old automobile, no longer the proud beauty it had been. It was sitting upright on all four wheels, but the top was smashed against the top of the seats. He shivered. No chance for the driver to survive.

  And there it was. A shallow horizontal dent—a crease, as Wayne put it—a couple of inches above the rear bumper.

  “You think …”

  But Buddy didn’t need to finish the sentence. He knew what Wayne thought. That somebody had driven up behind the Pierce-Arrow, whacked it smartly, and sent it careening down that steep hill. He looked again.

  “This dent could’ve been made any time, you know. Last week. Last month. Before. Not necessarily last night. And not on that hill. Could’ve happened anywhere.”

  “Don’t think so.” Wayne scratched a match against his boot heel and lit his cigarette. “It was pretty muddy out there. There’s mud splatters all over that car. But when I’ve seen him driving around town, that baby has always been clean as a whistle, sparkly and shiny as a new penny.” He pulled on his cigarette. “In fact, Whitworth paid Jake Pritchard to keep it washed and polished. Like he was goin’ to a wedding every day of the week, Jake says.”

  “So you talked to Jake.” That was what Buddy liked about Wayne. He was an independent thinker. When he got an idea, he followed wherever it took him without anybody having to tell him to do one thing or another. Old Roy Burns, he hadn’t liked that in a deputy. He liked a man who didn’t do a thing until he was told to do it, which had frustrated Buddy.