Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 11 (14 page)

"No, thanks," I said curtly.

"Well, if you feel that way about it, forget I ever mentioned it -- even though you might be missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see El Vez hisself."

I slowed down as I noticed two police cars parked at the end of the building. "I guess they haven't finished the investigation," I said to Estelle. "We'd better go up to the room. It's possible they'll want to question you."

"Me?" she said. "How should I know anything? Once I got back from the hospital, I called you and then got some pretzels and a ginger ale from the vending machines at the end of the hall. I was too worried about Ruby Bee to so much as stick my nose out the door after that until we left this morning."

"So that's what you'll tell them," I said.

The lobby was a good deal busier than it had been at three in the morning. Lines had formed for the optimists who wanted to check in and the disillusioned who needed to check out. Bellmen wheeled luggage carts in the appropriate directions. A mountain of suitcases indicated the arrival of a group on a much larger scale than that of C'Mon Tours.

"It was right crazy when we got here yesterday," Estelle said as we went down the corridor to the elevators. "I kept trying to spot Ruby Bee, but there were so many folks and all these loud announcements and ... "

"And what?" I prompted her.

She sucked on her lower lip. "Maybe I was seeing things," she said at last. "Remember when Tiphini Buchanon kept telling everybody about how she'd seen glowing purple aliens at the foot of her bed? She could describe them from the antennas on their heads right down to the peculiarities of their privates. She never quit believing it, even when her pa had her carted off to one of those sanitariums."

"I must have missed that," I said as I nudged her into the elevator and pushed the button for the eighth floor.

"Lottie Estes had a time with her in home ec, let me tell you. It got to be where every kitchen utensil reminded Tiphini of something else about her aliens. Now I could see how a turkey baster or an oven thermometer might lead to certain ideas, but a spatula? If you ask me, the girl just wanted attention."

Instead of engaging in a conversation fraught with Freudian overtones (and having a hard time making the leap to spatulas, myself), I said, "What are the visiting hours at the hospital this afternoon?"

"Two to four. Remind me to take Ruby Bee her bag so she'll have her toothbrush and nightie. Those hospital gowns might as well be made of wax paper."

"Is it in the room?" I asked. "I didn't see it."

"It's in the closet. When the ambulance fellows were loading her onto a gurney, Stormy offered to take Ruby Bee's and mine to our room as soon as Baggins got us registered. It's a good thing she did. I was so upset I would have left both of them setting in the hall."

When the elevator doors slid open on the eighth floor, we found ourselves facing a pear-shaped police officer. "You staying on this floor?" he said.

Estelle snorted. "Do you think we just came up to admire the view?"

I elbowed her aside and told him our names and the room number, then said, "Miss Oppers and my mother were both part of the same tour as the woman who fell."

"Yeah, then go to your room and stay there. The chief'll get around to talking to you before too long."

"He'd better not be all day," Estelle said. "I'm real sorry about poor Stormy, but we're not going to spend the day inside the room just because she committed suicide."

"That ain't what the chief thinks," said the cop.

8

Cherri Lucinda was no longer in our hotel room, which was the good news. The bad news was about to materialize with all the subtlety of an eruption of swamp gas. Estelle mumbled something about her slapdash makeup job and went into the bathroom to transform herself into a redheaded version of the redneck queen of mascara, Tammy Faye Bakker. I continued onto the balcony and looked out at the bleached flatness that stretched as far as I could see. Ruby Bee had lived all her life in the mountains; she would be disconcerted when she was confined to a bed in a room without a view.

I wished I knew if I could rely on Dr. Deweese's judgment. I certainly wasn't going to call in someone whose practice consisted of patients named Spot and Fluff. Tests at a Memphis hospital would run into thousands of dollars. Ruby Bee's income was apt to be only marginally healthier than my own -- and I'd qualify for food stamps if I bothered with the paperwork at some bureaucratic quagmire in Farberville.

I was trying to think of someone I turn to for advice when I noticed a man on the next balcony. He was sprawled in one of the chairs, puffing on an unfiltered cigarette, sipping coffee out of a Styrofoam cup -- and watching me as if I were a jewel thief who had rappelled from the roof.

"Yes?" I said frigidly.

"That your room?"

"That any of your business?"

He flicked his cigarette over the rail. "Might be, considering I'm investigating a crime. It's a little early for me to leap over there like a comic-book superhero, so I'll take the more routine approach and come around to your door."

I arrived at the door just as he knocked. Rather than usher him in, however, I said, "May I see some identification?"

"I left my badge at home on account of not being used to phone calls at the crack of dawn. My wife damn near whacked me to death when I told her to start some coffee, and I wasn't about to go back in the bedroom and grab my wallet. My name's Floyd Sanderson, and I'm the chief of police. If you want, call down to the desk and ask for Loretta. She's my niece. She don't know the particulars about my freckles and warts, but she can give you a general description."

He was unappealing enough without delving into the specific whereabouts of his freckles and warts. His belly was nearly the size of a beer keg, and his gray hair was cut so short it resembled the stubble on his jowls. His smile may have been good-natured, but his eyes were small and so deeply imbedded in his fleshy face that it was hard to imagine how light found its way to them. His shirt was stained. Much of what he'd had to eat for the last several days was memorialized on his tie.

"I suppose you can come in," I said.

"I thank you kindly," he said, brushing past me. "I don't recollect you telling me your name, missy. Would it be Estelle Oppers or Ruby Bee Hanks?"

"Arly Hanks." I followed him out to the balcony, not pleased with the need to address his broad backside. "Ruby Bee's my mother. She's in the local hospital, so I'm staying here for the moment."

"In the hospital? You be sure and give her my wishes for a fast recovery, you hear? We all feel real bad when someone comes to visit our little of town and fails to have a chance to partake of our hospitality. If our budget wasn't so skimpy, I'd send her a real nice bouquet of flowers."

"You're a prince, Floyd," I said as I put my elbows on the railing. "What can I do to reciprocate this generous, if empty, gesture?"

"We got us a problem, Arly. This morning we had a call that a body'd been found down there and over to your left a tad. Now this body was in real sorry shape. I don't remember much from high school, but I seem to think the formula for a falling body is sixteen feet per second squared." He looked down at the parking lot. "Or per second per second. I was too busy trying to figure out how get into Mary Joleen Wanson's panties to pay much attention. Anyway, it's same as if you'd thrown a concrete block off a balcony, or a golf ball, for that matter. In this particular case, it was a young woman name of Stormy Zimmerman."

"I was aware that something took place," I said. "Why are you convinced it wasn't a suicide?"

"Are you from this town called Maggody?" he asked, going back into the room. He picked up a bobby pin off the chair in which Estelle had been sitting, studied it for a moment, and carefully placed it on the table before sitting down.

Wondering if he and Reverend Hitebred read the same tabloids, I closed the sliding door and sat down across from him. "Why are you convinced it wasn't a suicide?" I repeated.

Chief Sanderson gave me a discouraged look. "Thing is, we got the list of everybody on this Elvis tour, and the two ladies registered for this room are from Maggody. A couple of other witnesses admit to a connection with Maggody, and I ain't gonna pop a suspender if you're from there, too. I'd be in my bed, nice and cozy, if it weren't for all you folks."

"I'll pass that on to the Chamber of Commerce," I said, "but I'd appreciate some candor from you."

"Well, it's like this," he said in a drawl that was almost a Hollywood parody (but then again, he might have ambled off the set of
The Dukes of Hazzard
). "The deceased was sharing a room with a woman named" -- he took out a notebook and flipped it open -- "Cherri Lucinda Crate. She just happens to know the fellow in the next room, who just happens to be the mayor of Maggody. First off, he said he didn't know her from Adam -- or Eve, anyway, that he'd met her in the casino and they'd hit if off real fine. When I said that didn't exactly agree with what she'd told us, he conceded that maybe he'd visited with her a time or two at the club where she works in Farberville, but of course he never dreamed she'd be within a hundred miles of Mississippi. Then I mentioned that the desk clerk had admitted to taking a ten-dollar bill to put him in the room adjoining hers, and he remembered that possibly she might have let drop something real vague about the Elvis Presley Pilgrimage."

"Jim Bob Buchanon?" I said with a grimace.

"Guess you know him, then."

"I know him, and his relationship with Cherri Lucinda is somewhat more intimate than he suggested. I was pretty sure I'd seen her before. I should have recognized her, but she had a towel wrapped around her hair when I went to her apartment to question her about a business swindle. Ruby Bee and Estelle caught a glimpse of her about the same time." I could see no reason to add that Ruby Bee's vantage point had been from the inside of a Dumpster; some things don't invite elaboration.

Chief Sanderson scanned the tray from room service, found a half-eaten triangle of toast, and jammed it in his mouth. "This is where it gets complicated," he went on, spewing whole wheat crumbs with each word. "She swears she wasn't expecting him, which may or may not be true. They went down to the casino and shot craps till dawn, then came upstairs to his room. She told him to go into her room and fetch her bag, then got into the shower. He says her room was empty, but a group of ladies on their way to breakfast heard an argument from inside. They stopped, not sure if they ought to do something. After a few minutes, everything got quiet and they went on toward the elevator. All of a sudden, they heard a scream. One of the ladies was so startled that she fell and twisted her ankle. While one went back to her room to call for a doctor, the rest of 'em stayed out in the hallway, fussing over their friend. They all swear nobody went in or out of any of the rooms between that moment and when a hotel employee showed up. He helped them get the accident victim back to her room, but they were still hobbling along the hall when my deputy got there."

"So," I said in an amazingly reasonable voice, considering I was in the unpalatable position of defending Hizzoner the Moron, "Stormy'd already jumped when Jim Bob went into the room to get Cherri Lucinda's bag. There certainly could be a short lapse between the time she jumped and when the woman in the parking lot saw the body and screamed. That would explain why he said the room was empty."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" he said.

"Yeah," I countered.

"Lots of folks would go leaping to that conclusion, Arly. My deputy did, but she ain't been on the job more than a month. Japonica's a good girl, mind you, and doin' her level best to prove herself. She just didn't think to wait until the witness stopped throwing up in the hydrangeas and started remembering more of what she'd seen."

"Which was?" I said.

"Two people on the balcony. One was the black-haired woman in a negligee. The other was a man. She couldn't make out much about him -- about all she saw was an arm -- but the ladies from Tuscaloosa are real sure no one left any of the rooms on this wing of the eighth floor. We're a backwoods operation, but we would have found someone hiding in a closet or lying under a bed. The only man who could have been arguing on that balcony hustled his butt back into the adjoining room, flopped down on the bed, and lit a cigar."

"I guess it has gotten complicated," I admitted. I thought for a moment, then said, "What if she was arguing with someone on the telephone? I was told that she'd had a fight with her boyfriend. She called him, and he said something that devastated her so much that she decided to kill herself. The ladies mistakenly assumed there were two people in the room.

"That doesn't explain why the witness saw a man on the balcony."

"With coaching, the witness might be convinced she saw Elvis on the balcony. Why was she looking up at the eighth floor anyway? Wasn't she more concerned with stepping in a pothole?"

Chief Sanderson blinked at me. "I hope you're not suggesting I coached the witness, Arly. I've been on the force for twenty-seven years. I may have been accused of being a little too rough with the local boys, but I ain't never been accused of playing fast and loose with a witness to a homicide. All I did was hold her hand till she calmed down, then encourage her to think more carefully about what she'd seen. As soon as she got outside, she stopped to tie her shoe and heard voices from above her. She did what any of us would do, which is look up. She saw a man on the balcony, and the only man she could have seen was Jim Bob Buchanon."

"Arly?" said Estelle as she came out of the bathroom. "Who're you talking to?"

"Chief of Police Sanderson," I said to Estelle, then gestured at her to keep quiet. "I have no problem with Jim Bob coming here to surprise Cherri Lucinda, and I'm sure he wasn't planning to give her a lesson in blackjack strategy after she finished taking a shower. But what's his motive for pushing a stranger off a balcony?"