Killer On A Hot Tin Roof Read online

  “Well … I hate to say it … but Dr. Paige seemed really upset about the whole thing. I think that was just because Mike Frasier was involved in it, though. She really couldn’t stand him after they broke up.”

  Nesbit had been kneeling beside Larry while the questioning was going on, but now he stood up. “Let’s leave the officers here to secure the scene,” he suggested to Ramsey. “I think it’s time we go talk to Dr. Tamara Paige.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “What about the rest of us?” I said. “Are we free to go?” “Don’t leave the hotel,” Nesbit said. “But yes, I suppose we’re through with you for now.”

  “We’ll have men on all the exits,” Ramsey added. “So don’t try to sneak out.”

  I thought his suspicious tone of voice was a little uncalled-for, but he was a detective, after all, I reminded myself. It was his job to be suspicious.

  On the other hand, his real job was to clear the cases assigned to him, and I knew that in order to do that, some cops decided as quickly as possible on the most likely suspect and focused all their efforts on that one person. A lot more times than not, of course, they were right and the most likely suspect was guilty. Most crime was pretty basic and simple.

  But not all of it, and sometimes the real culprit got away with what he’d done because the police paid too much attention to one suspect and pretty much ignored the others. I was afraid that in this case, Tamara Paige was becoming that one major suspect, if she wasn’t already.

  Ramsey crooked a finger at Gillette and went on, “Come with us. We’ll need a printout of all the guests you have staying in the hotel tonight, especially the ones who belong to the same tour group as the victim.”

  “I can get you that,” Gillette said with a nod, obviously eager to please. He wanted the cops–and the trouble–out of his hotel as quickly as possible.

  “Before you go,” June said, “can someone help me with my father-in-law? I’d like to get him back up to his room.”

  Gillette looked at the security guard named Roy, the one who had been a paramedic. “Do you think it’s all right to move him, or should a doctor check him out first?”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m not an EMT anymore.”

  “No, but you know more about it than any of the rest of us,” Gillette insisted. He glanced at the detectives. “If that’s all right with you, Officers …”

  Ramsey shrugged, and Nesbit said, “Sure, go ahead.”

  Roy sighed and knelt beside Larry Powers again. “Let me have your wrist, sir,” he said.

  He took hold of Larry’s wrist for a moment, then nodded and said, “Pulse is good. He seems to be breathing all right.” He held up a finger in front of Larry’s face and moved it from side to side. “Follow this with your eyes. Don’t turn your head.”

  After another minute or so, Roy reported, “He’s still about half drunk, but I think he’ll be okay. No sign of concussion or anything like that. Any unusual pains, sir?”

  “No,” Larry said. “Actually, I feel pretty good right now, considering.”

  Roy grunted. “I doubt if that’ll be the case in the morning. But you’re all right to move now, in my opinion … which, legally, isn’t worth a damned thing, I want to remind everybody. If you move this man, it’s your responsibility, not mine.”

  “All right, get him on his feet,” Ramsey ordered. “We’ve got things to do.”

  With help from Gillette, Roy and the other guard lifted Larry. He was pretty shaky, but he wasn’t in as bad a shape as he had been earlier when June and I were first helping him. June must have realized that, because she said, “Ms. Dickinson and I can take care of him from here.”

  I didn’t really appreciate being volunteered like that, but I’d been willing to help with Larry earlier, so I supposed it wouldn’t hurt me now. If I tripped over another dead body on our way up to his room, though, I was swearing off good deeds forever.

  We flanked Larry like the guards had done and each took an arm. He started moving his feet in a somewhat haphazard manner that somehow propelled him forward. As we moved off along the path, I glanced back. I couldn’t see Burleson’s body now because of the bushes and shrubs, but I knew it was back there, lying still and forlorn in death. Whatever the old man had done in his life, whether his wild story about writing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was true or not, he hadn’t deserved to come to such a brutal end.

  Gillette, Nesbit, and Ramsey headed for Gillette’s office to get those room numbers and other information. June and I stopped at the elevators with Larry. At this time of night, well after one o’clock now, it didn’t take long for one of the elevators to open up when June pressed the button. We stumbled into it with Larry. I was on the side of the car where the controls were located, so I asked, “Which floor are you folks on?”

  “Second,” June replied. I jabbed a finger against that button on the control panel.

  Larry’s room was about halfway along the corridor toward the corner of the building. That seemed a lot farther than it really was when you were trying to make sure that a three-hundred-pound drunk didn’t fall flat on his face with every step.

  When we finally reached the door, June asked a question that maybe we should have thought about earlier. “Larry, you do have your key, don’t you?”

  “I … I dunno,” he said. He turned his head toward me and leered. “Why don’t you check my pockets, Red?”

  “Check ‘em yourself,” I told him, keeping a tight rein on my temper.

  “Yes, Papa Larry, if we let go of you, you’re liable to fall down,” June said. “Just look in your pockets.”

  Larry complied, although he had to check several of the pockets more than once before he came up with the key card. But then he held it up triumphantly and said, “There’s the little rascal! I knew it had to be in there somewhere.”

  I was closer, so I kept one hand under his elbow and used the other to take the key out of his fingers and swipe it through the reader on the door handle. The indicator light turned green. I turned the handle and swung the door open.

  “All right, Papa Larry,” June said. “We’re here at your room. Let’s go on in now.”

  The door wasn’t wide enough for the three of us to go through side by side. June tried to turn sideways and go through first, but Larry jerked loose from us and slapped his hands on either side of the door.

  “I can manage by myself, damn it,” he rumbled. He had reached that inevitable stage of drunkenness where he was turning surly.

  He tried to take a step through the doorway but reeled against the jamb instead. He cursed bitterly as he grabbed at the wall to keep himself from falling.

  The door of the next room along the corridor opened and Edgar Powers stepped out with a frown on his face. He still wore the trousers from his suit and a white shirt, but he had taken off his coat, tie, and shoes, anyway.

  “June?” he said. “I wondered where you were. What’s going on out here? Dad, what’s wrong with you?”

  June’s voice was icy as she said, “So, you finally looked up from your computer and realized that I never came back from checking on Papa Larry. Edgar, I left the room nearly two hours ago!”

  “I was busy working on some simulations with Dr. Shinobi from the University of Tokyo,” Edgar explained. “It’s already morning over there.” He frowned. “Is my dad okay?”

  “No, he’s not okay. He got drunk!”

  Edgar’s frown deepened as he shook his head. “That’s not good. His doctor said–”

  “We all know what my damn doctor said!” Larry roared. “Somebody give me a damn hand here!”

  June motioned to Edgar, who came over and took hold of his father’s arm. With some effort, the two of them managed to get through the door and on into the room. June and I followed as Edgar led Larry to the side of the bed and helped him sit down. As soon as Edgar let go and stepped away, Larry toppled over backward and moaned.

  “I’ll get his shoes off of him, at least,” Edgar said, his face gr
im now. “He may have to sleep it off in his clothes, though.”

  He had bent down and was working on Larry’s shoes when June and I stepped back out into the hall. Fancy windows on the other side of the corridor showed the lights of the French Quarter glittering in the night, and it would have been pretty under other circumstances.

  June crossed her arms and sighed. “Thank you for your help, Ms. Dickinson. I never would have gotten through this horrible evening if it weren’t for you. I might not have found Papa Larry, and there’s no telling what might have happened to him.”

  That was true. If Howard Burleson’s murderer had still beenclose by, he might have killed Larry, too, to eliminate a potential witness, if June and I hadn’t come along when we did. The killer might have balked at trying to get rid of all three of us. And that didn’t even take into account the possibility that if we hadn’t found him, Larry might have kept guzzling down the booze until he’d drunk himself to death.

  “I’m here to help,” I told June. “That’s my job. But I’d just as soon not have to deal with any more drama.”

  “Or dead bodies.” A shudder went through her.

  “Yeah. One of those is more than enough.”

  Edgar came out of the room and eased the door closed behind him. “All right, I got his shoes off and rolled him all the way up onto the bed,” he reported. “That’s the best I can do. He went to sleep right away. How in the world did he manage to get drunk?”

  “How do you think?” June snapped. “He went downstairs, hid out in that garden in the middle of the atrium, and had waiters bring him drinks from the bar.”

  Edgar sighed. “That stubborn old man. He knows better.”

  “Maybe you should have a talk with him.”

  Edgar shook his head at that suggestion. “He won’t listen to me. You know that, June.”

  “So you just give up trying? Is that it? Just like you gave up on our marriage?”

  “What? I never gave up on our marriage!”

  That bitter exchange was my cue to slip away. This argument sounded like one they’d had before.

  I had started to back away when June said, “Wait a minute, Ms. Dickinson. Wouldn’t you call it giving up when a man spends almost every waking minute on his work and has to be dragged off on a vacation, even a trip like this one that’s mostly work?”

  I held up my hands. “You folks better just leave me out of this. My job’s to get folks where they’re goin’ and keep the trip runnin’ smooth.”

  Which it sure hadn’t done so far, I thought.

  “You’re supposed to keep the members of your group happy, right?” June demanded.

  “Well … I suppose.”

  “Do I seem happy to you?”

  Edgar said, “I don’t understand. I do everything you ask me to do.”

  She gave him a withering glare. “My God, Edgar, you didn’t even notice that I never came back to the room in the middle of the night! Something could have happened to me. I could have been mugged. I … I could have met some other man and gone off to bed with him! Did you ever even think about that?”

  To be fair to Edgar, that last possibility probably wouldn’t have occurred to me, either, at least not right away.

  “I did notice you were gone,” he insisted. “When I heard your voices out here in the hall, didn’t I come out right away to check and see what was going on?”

  “Yes, and how long before that was it that you noticed?” she shot back.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Awhile.”

  “And you didn’t come to look for me, did you?”

  “I told you, I was working with Dr. Shinobi, and I was sure you’d be back eventually–”

  That was the wrong thing to say. June said, “Oh!” and turned to stalk off down the hall toward the elevators.

  “Where are you going?” Edgar called after her.

  “I don’t know! I’ll sit up in the bar all night if I have to, before I’ll go back into that room with you!”

  He looked at me. “Ms. Dickinson, isn’t there something you can do?”

  “Yeah, there is,” I told him. “I can go back to my room and try to get some sleep while you folks sort out your own troubles.”

  I left him there, staring after me helplessly as I walked off. He needed more help than I could give him.

  June was still waiting for an elevator to take her downstairs. I pushed the button for one going up.

  “Did you ever see such a clueless, insensitive–”

  “Yes,” I told her.

  “I think all men must be like that.”

  I thought about Will and my friend Mark Lansing and my son-in-law, Luke, and I said, “No, not all of them. Some of them are good guys. Maybe not most of them, but some.”

  “Well, I certainly never met any. Edgar’s hopeless. And Papa Larry’s just as bad in different ways–he always caroused around and neglected his wife and family. He was just as obsessed with the theater and the plays he was directing as Edgar is with his work.” One of the elevators dinged, and the down indicator lit up. “You want to come down to the bar and have a drink with me?”

  I shook my head. “Thanks, but no thanks. I was just about to get ready to turn in when you knocked on my door awhile ago. I just want to get some sleep.”

  “Of course. Well, good night, Ms. Dickinson … and thanks again.” She got into the elevator and pushed the button for the ground floor. “I’m sorry about, well, about the murder.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” I said as the door slid closed, cutting her off from view.

  My elevator arrived a moment later, and I rode up to the third floor. As I got off and started down the hall, I heard the rattle of ice cubes coming from an ice machine that was set in a little vending machine alcove. Dr. Tamara Paige stepped outof the alcove and turned toward me, holding the plastic ice bucket from her room.

  I hadn’t seen her since we all left Petit Claude’s. Will and I had gone on to supper, and I supposed Tamara had returned to the hotel. She had changed out of the dress she had worn to the festival’s opening ceremonies and now had on sneakers and a leotard with sweatpants over it. The sweat stains on the leotard told me she had been working out.

  If anybody had asked me earlier, I would have said that I’d figured she’d come back to the hotel and gone to bed. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. I smiled and nodded.

  “Ms. Dickinson,” she said. “How was your supper with Dr. Burke?”

  “Very nice,” I told her.

  She gave me a sly smile. “You’re just now getting back to your room?”

  No, I’ve been busy tripping over a dead body and being interrogated by the cops, I thought, and that made me wonder why Ramsey and Nesbit weren’t already up here questioning her. They must have still been down in Gillette’s office, gathering that information about the hotel guests. I assumed they would run everyone’s names through their computers.

  And that left me with a sticky little moral dilemma. I liked Tamara, I didn’t believe she was a murderer, and I wanted to warn her that a couple of police detectives would soon be on their way upstairs to question her about Howard Burleson’s death, which, from the way she was acting, she didn’t know a blasted thing about.

  At the same time, I knew that if I told her, and Ramsey and Nesbit found out about it, I could be in fairly serious trouble for obstructing their investigation.

  I postponed the decision by saying, “Some other thingscame up,” then hurrying on, “I thought you would have been asleep by now.”

  “Oh, I tried,” she said. “I just couldn’t get that old man’s story out of my head, though. I still don’t believe him, mind you, but I couldn’t stop wondering if he might be telling the truth. And I’m still mad at Michael for starting all this. People are going to laugh at Mr. Burleson, and that’s going to hurt him. It’s not fair.” She shrugged. “So I did what I always do when I have trouble sleeping. I got up and did some tae kwon do. Sometimes a good hard workout clears my head,
and then I can sleep.”

  “So you’re one of those martial artists, eh?” In that leotard, I couldn’t help but notice the sharply toned muscles in her arms and shoulders. In the clothes she’d been wearing earlier, that hadn’t been so apparent. She looked like she was in good enough shape to kick some serious butt.

  Or hit an old man hard enough, fast enough, and enough times to shatter his skull.

  But that was crazy, I told myself. Tamara was acting like she had no idea Burleson was dead. She had just expressed sympathy for him because she thought Frasier’s presentation was going to wind up embarrassing him. Why would she act like that if she had killed the old man earlier?

  Maybe because she had killed the old man earlier, I thought suddenly. If she was guilty, of course she would act like she didn’t know anything about it. To behave any other way would just be foolish.

  “I’ve been doing tae kwon do for years,” she answered my question. “My work doesn’t give me any exercise, so I had to find some other way to stay in shape, and this seems to work.”

  It worked all right. She was obviously in good shape. But as far as Detectives Ramsey and Nesbit were concerned, that might just be one more mark against her.

  I shouldn’t have thought about Ramsey and Nesbit. The elevator opened again a short distance down the hallway, and with heavy footsteps they came down the hall toward us. Tamara glanced toward them and for a second a look of alarm flickered through her eyes. Was that a sign of guilt? Or just a woman’s natural reaction when she’s standing in a hotel corridor and suddenly sees two grim-faced men in cheap suits striding toward her?

  “Ms. Dickinson?” Nesbit said. “What are you doing here?”

  “And who’s your friend?” Ramsey added with an ominous frown directed at Tamara.

  Lying wasn’t going to do me any good. I said, “This is Dr. Paige.”

  “Just the woman we want to see,” Nesbit said.

  “Yeah,” Ramsey agreed. Then he pointed a threatening finger at me and said, “And if you’ve said anything to her about that murder downstairs, you’re under arrest.”