The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady Page 3

  But that was when Rona Jean had proved to be too . . . “dangerous” was the word that came to mind. Not the kind of woman Buddy wanted, or could afford, at this point in his life. Still, Rona Jean was dead now, and it was his job to find out who had killed her. It didn’t seem quite respectful to use her personal name when he was asking questions about the last hours of her life.

  “I was, yes,” Violet said slowly. “But I didn’t see her when she left. I was upstairs here, reading. Cupcake was asleep in her crib. Myra May had gone down to check on the shift change and do a last-minute check on the kitchen, the way she usually does. Rona Jean went off at eleven, and Lenore—that’s Lenore Looper, she’s Alva Looper’s middle daughter—was scheduled to come on. Myra May always likes to see that the next girl is ready to take her shift on the switchboard before the other girl leaves. Otherwise, there could be a gap, which wouldn’t be good.”

  Buddy looked down at the words close friends with Violet. “Myra May came right back upstairs after the shift change?”

  Raylene slid Buddy a puzzled glance, as if she was wondering what that had to do with anything. He was glad she didn’t put the question into words, for he couldn’t have answered if she had. He was remembering once when Myra May saw him talking to Violet and had gotten kind of bent out of shape about it, to the point where she put his cup down hard on the counter and splashed hot coffee on his hand.

  There was a moment’s silence. Violet looked away, her lower lip caught between her teeth, and Buddy could tell she was thinking about his question. She frowned a little.

  “Right back upstairs? Well, I guess maybe not. There’s always stuff to do in the kitchen. Sometimes one or the other of us is down there until midnight.” She looked up and managed a small smile. “Breakfast for twenty-five or thirty doesn’t get cooked by wishing it would, you know, Buddy. There’s plenty of night-before work that goes into it.”

  “I reckon,” Buddy said, and wrote midnite in his notebook, after Myra May. “Well, I guess that does it for me, for now anyway. I’ll maybe think of something else later.” He pocketed the notebook and pencil. “You get some rest, now, Violet. Y’hear?”

  “Thank you,” Violet said, but she didn’t immediately take his advice. She raised herself up on one elbow and put out her hand, catching at his sleeve. In a low, fierce voice, she said, “You go out there and get whoever did this, you hear, Buddy? Rona Jean might’ve been a little wild, but she was a good girl at heart. I was hoping—” She fell back, closing her eyes. “She . . . she didn’t deserve to die like that. Nobody does.”

  Buddy stood looking down at Violet, wondering what Violet had been hoping. But Raylene took his arm and walked him to the door. “If there’s any way Myra May and I can help,” she said in a low voice, “please let us know.”

  Buddy nodded. “Thanks. Deputy Springer will come in later this morning and take everybody’s fingerprints. And maybe—”

  “Fingerprints?” Raylene asked blankly. “What do you want our fingerprints for? We didn’t—” She stopped, frowning.

  “I understand,” Buddy said. “But we’ve already found prints in the car, and Wayne—Deputy Springer, that is—will likely find more. We need to get the prints of everybody who has ridden in that car in the last few months so we can eliminate them. Any prints that are left might belong to the killer.” That was how it was supposed to work. Buddy had yet to see it work that way in practice. There were always unmatched, unidentified prints left over, which pretty much rendered the process useless, practically speaking.

  “Oh,” Raylene said. “I see.”

  “It would also help if you and Myra May and Violet could come up with a list of the people Rona Jean knew—who maybe had some kind of connection with her. People she worked with, especially.” Usually, he’d ask about family, but in this case, he already knew the answer. Rona Jean had been an orphan. She had told him once that she had nobody on this earth. “I’ll ask Bettina Higgens for a list, too,” he added.

  “Poor Bettina,” Raylene said with a sigh. “This is going to be so difficult for her. She and Rona Jean were as thick as thieves.” When Buddy frowned, Raylene took a breath and added, “I didn’t intend anything special by that remark, Buddy. It was just a way of speaking. If you come in for lunch, we’ll have the information for you then.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Buddy said. But before he went back to the garage, he took a moment to jot down Bettina’s name and the phrase thick as theives. (Buddy had not been at the top of his class in spelling, and the i-before-e rule always confused him.) He was well aware that Raylene hadn’t consciously intended anything special. But everybody knew that she had the “gift,” as Aunt Hetty Little put it. She saw things other people didn’t see. Buddy couldn’t help wondering whether she might know something she didn’t know she knew.

  Back at the garage, Lionel Noonan had pulled his black 1930 Packard into the alley, and he and Wayne were waiting for Buddy to tell them it was okay to put Rona Jean into the hearse for her last ride.

  Buddy took one more look. Her bright red lipstick was a streak of garish neon in a face that was pale as death, and her scarlet nail polish made her fingers look as if they had been dipped in blood. “All right, boys,” he said with a sigh. “Load ’er up.”

  THREE

  The Dahlias Bloom in Beulah’s Beauty Bower

  “I just can’t believe something like this would happen in Darling.” Earlynne Biddle lowered herself into Beulah’s haircutting chair and smoothed the pink shampoo cape tied around her neck. “Rona Jean was a hardworking girl and polite to her elders—well, mostly, anyway. She didn’t have a mother to keep her on the straight and narrow, but she wasn’t any wilder than other girls her age, far as I could see. I cannot imagine who would want to up and strangle the poor thing.”

  “I always feel so sorry for girls who don’t have a mother,” Beulah Trivette said sadly, combing through Earlynne’s wet brown hair. “Seems like they get off on the wrong foot in life.”

  Beulah thought of her own daughter when she said that—dear little Spoonie, who always said she wanted to grow up and be a beautician, “just like Mommy.” Spoonie’s ambition delighted Beulah, for she believed there was no higher calling than making women beautiful. She considered herself an artist and had an abiding pride in what she’d accomplished, especially considering that she’d had to cross over from the wrong side of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad tracks to do it, and then take the Greyhound bus to Montgomery and get a job as a waitress to put herself through the College of Cosmetology, where she learned every single thing she needed to know “to make the ordinary woman pretty and the pretty woman beautiful.”

  Now, she owned her very own Beauty Bower, which occupied what had once been a screened porch across the back of the house that she and Hank bought on Dauphin Street. Hank had enclosed it, put in electricity and a new hot water heater, and installed twin shampoo sinks and haircutting chairs and mirrors. Beulah added the finishing touches, painting the wainscoting her favorite peppermint pink, wallpapering the walls with fat pink roses, and spatter-painting the pink floor with blue, gray, and yellow.

  A couple of months after she opened, business was so good that Beulah advertised for a beauty associate, and Bettina Higgens had applied. Bettina wasn’t the prettiest blossom in the garden. Her brown hair was stringy, she was thin as a rail, and she had never been to beauty school. But Beulah saw the hidden talent in Bettina’s nimble fingers and the desire in her heart, and knew that she had what it took to make women beautiful. What’s more, she was reliable, very reliable. Within a couple of weeks, the two were working elbow-to-elbow at the shampoo sinks, eight to five, six days a week.

  Except this morning. The reliable Bettina wasn’t there.

  “Strangled? Rona Jean Hancock?” Leona Ruth Adcock had just come into the Beauty Bower and was hearing the news for the first time. Her eyes were large in her narrow face. Sh
e looked around for a moment, then demanded shrilly, “Well, don’t everybody talk at once.”

  “Yes, strangled,” Bessie Bloodworth confirmed, looking up from the Ladies’ Home Journal she was reading. “With her own stocking. Silk chiffon, I heard. Havana heel.”

  “Havana heel,” Leona Ruth muttered under her breath.

  Beulah glanced up at the clock and saw that it was just after nine. “I’m running a little behind this morning,” she told Leona Ruth. “I’ll do you as soon as I finish Earlynne and Bessie, Leona. I hope you don’t mind waiting.” She reached over and turned up the radio, which was broadcasting a weather report—something about a storm out in the Gulf. But whatever it was, she’d missed it. What came up next was her favorite Irving Berlin ballad, “Say It Isn’t So.”

  Saturday mornings were always busy at the Beauty Bower, with ladies getting beautiful for Sunday church. But the Bower was one of the best places in town to find out what was going on (right up there with the diner and the party line, depending on which branch of it you were on), so Beulah figured that this Saturday was going to be even busier than usual. And since Bettina wasn’t there to help out, she would be doing all the shampoos and sets herself. It was going to be a long day, and another hot one, in a weeklong string of hot, steamy days. Beulah was glad for the big fan in the ceiling and the other two fans strategically placed on the counter and the floor.

  “Take your time, Beulah. I’m not in a tearing hurry.” Leona Ruth took off her purple straw hat and white summer gloves and went back to the subject. “Who found her? Where?”

  “Violet Sims,” Aunt Hetty said from under the hair dryer. “In the backseat of Myra May’s old Chevy.” She frowned. “Although what that girl was doing in Myra May’s garage after eleven o’clock at night is a mystery.”

  “It was the front seat,” Beulah corrected, “and she’d just come off her shift at the Exchange.” She knew it didn’t matter, though. Leona Ruth never met a fact she couldn’t ignore. She would rummage up the family secrets of every sausage she ate and pass them along to everybody at her table, and if a fact or two didn’t fit her story, she changed them or just left them out. Beulah picked up her scissors. “Earlynne, how short do you want to go today?”

  “About here, please.” Earlynne held a finger up to her ear. “I’m working at the plant this summer, and it’s like a blast furnace out there.” Earlynne’s husband, Henry Biddle, was the manager at the Coca-Cola plant, and she worked in the office. She glanced at Beulah in the mirror. “Poor Bettina must just be beside herself, Rona Jean being her roommate and all.”

  “That’s the good Lord’s truth.” Beulah began to snip. “Bettina said she was up all night, worrying. Rona Jean gets off the switchboard at eleven, and it’s no more than six blocks’ walk. But she never got home.”

  Bettina had telephoned just as Beulah was sitting down to breakfast, to say she couldn’t make it in to work that morning. Myra May had just called Bettina to tell her the tragic news about Rona Jean. She was sobbing when she relayed the story.

  Beulah had been shocked almost speechless. “Oh, Bettina, honey,” she gasped. “What a horrible thing to happen! I am so sorry!”

  She was, too, very sorry—but at the same time, maybe just the teensiest bit not surprised. Of course, it went without saying that murder, right here in Darling, was utterly unthinkable. But Beulah had felt from the very beginning that Bettina was making a serious mistake to ask Rona Jean to move in with her, even if it did cut the rent in half. The two girls were both in their early twenties, but they were badly mismatched, personality-wise. Bettina was shy and didn’t make friends easily (at least with people her own age—she was fine with the ladies at the Bower), while Rona Jean was just the opposite. She wasn’t any prettier than Bettina—her face was plain as a tin pie plate and her brown hair wouldn’t any more hold a curl than a horse’s tail. But she had . . . well, what Beulah would call a buxom figure, which made her popular with a certain kind of boy. As a result, Rona Jean always had more dates than she could shake a stick at, while poor Bettina didn’t go out with a boy more than once in a blue moon. Beulah had felt that there was bound to be some friction and unhappiness over this disparity, sooner or later. Now wasn’t the time to say so, though. Now was the time to stand by Bettina, in her hour of greatest need.

  “I want you to go right back to bed, Bettina,” Beulah instructed. “You’ve had a terrible shock. We’ll miss you, but the Bower will survive without you for a day or two—or however long you have to be gone.”

  Of course, it was a terrible time for Bettina to be away from her comb and scissors. With the new CCC camp going great guns outside of Darling, people had more money to spend, there were more doings to attend, and the beauty business had picked up. For instance, there was a dance every Saturday night at the camp, so the younger girls were coming in this afternoon to get their hair done. And coming up on Wednesday was the Fourth of July, always an exciting event in Darling, with a parade around the square and speeches on the courthouse steps and fireworks at the fairgrounds. Beulah knew that Monday and Tuesday would be a madhouse, with all the ladies wanting to look their best for the Fourth.

  “Oh, I won’t be out that long,” Bettina said quickly. “Just a couple of hours, I hope. The only reason I can’t be there this morning is that Buddy Norris is coming over to ask me some questions.”

  “Buddy Norris?” Beulah asked blankly. Then she remembered that Buddy had recently been elected sheriff. It was a little hard to think of him with that much responsibility, though. He’d always been kind of a big kid, zooming around on that red motorcycle and not very serious. “Questions about what?”

  There was a moment’s silence. “I don’t know.” Bettina’s voice was apprehensive. “I guess about Rona Jean. About—you know. Who it was might have wanted to . . . kill her.”

  Beulah laughed lightly. “I don’t know what makes Buddy Norris think you know anything about that.” She paused, then couldn’t help asking, “You don’t, do you?” What a silly question. Of course Bettina didn’t know anything. What could she possibly know?

  There was another silence. Bettina took a breath. “Anyway, I’ll be in as soon as the sheriff is finished with his questions. I hope it won’t be too long.”

  Now, Earlynne met Beulah’s eyes in the mirror. “Murder is a terrible thing,” she said in a significant tone. “I sincerely hope Bettina isn’t involved.”

  “I can’t think of a reason why she should be,” Beulah replied evenly, plying her scissors and comb.

  “The two of them were living together, weren’t they?” Leona Ruth put in. To Beulah’s annoyance, she got up, walked across the room, and plunked herself down in Bettina’s empty haircutting chair, where she turned one of the fans directly on herself.

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean Bettina is in on any of Rona Jean’s secrets.” Quietly, Beulah reached for the fan and moved it to its original position. She didn’t like to disagree with her customers—clients, she preferred to call them. She believed that true beauty came from within. It was produced by a harmony of spirit, and disagreements were definitely inharmonious. But Leona Ruth was disagreeable and mean-spirited. She could start an argument all by herself in an empty room, and Beulah had long since given up on making her truly beautiful. The most she could do was keep Leona Ruth’s hair curled, and even that was a challenge.

  “Well, I hope not.” Leona Ruth pursed her lips and looked down her long, thin nose. “If you’re interested, I can tell you that Rona Jean herself was keeping a secret or two.” With a knowing look, she hummed a bar or two of “Say It Isn’t So.”

  “A secret or two?” Bessie lowered her magazine and regarded Leona Ruth with a frown. “What makes you say that?”

  “Oh, no special reason,” Leona Ruth replied with an elaborate carelessness. Shoving with the toe of her leather lace-up pump, she rotated Bettina’s chair so she could look at Bessie.
“Everybody has secrets, Bessie. Lots of them.”

  Aunt Hetty pushed up the hair dryer, scowling. “Other folks’ secrets have nothing to do with Rona Jean Hancock getting murdered, Leona Ruth. If you are going to tell us something, say it straight out. Don’t imply. It isn’t polite.” Aunt Hetty, who was past eighty and Darling’s acknowledged grande dame, was probably the only person in town who dared to talk snippy to Leona Ruth, who wouldn’t dare make a retaliatory move against Aunt Hetty.

  Leona Ruth folded her arms across her thin chest. “You ladies may not be aware of this,” she replied defensively, “but Bettina and Rona Jean live in that little yellow house behind me, on the next street over from Rosemont. My bedroom window looks right across the alley into their kitchen.” She dropped her voice. “And their bedrooms.”

  Beulah stopped snipping. Earlynne took a breath. Aunt Hetty’s eyes narrowed.

  “So?” Bessie asked. “What are you saying?”

  “I am saying that I am an eyewitness,” Leona Ruth said. “I can see—”

  “Ladies,” Beulah intervened hurriedly, “I really don’t think this is any of our business.” She knew that—morning, noon, and night, every day including weekends—gossip was Darling’s number one favorite entertainment. It even topped Will Rogers’ Sunday night radio show. But she didn’t believe they ought to be gossiping about Bettina (who wasn’t there to stand up for herself) and Rona Jean (who was dead and gone). And she hated to encourage Leona Ruth, who would go straight home and get on the party line, where she’d start spreading her story to all her friends and fellow gossips. She turned up the radio a little louder, hoping to discourage the conversation.

  It didn’t work. Leona Ruth just raised her voice. “So I can see who’s been helping Rona Jean with the dishes, and what they were doing when they finished,” she said triumphantly. As an afterthought, she added loudly, “She did pull down the shade in her bedroom, but that all by itself ought to tell you something.”