Killer On A Hot Tin Roof Read online

  “It’s a terrible thing, just terrible.” Edgar sounded sincere. June seemed to think he didn’t have any emotions, but I wasn’t sure about that. I figured it was more a matter of the two of them just not connecting anymore. I knew from painful personal experience how that sometimes happened.

  Despite the bad night I’d had, I was actually hungry this morning, so I said, “I’ll see you folks later. I think I’ll get something to eat.”

  “The bacon is excellent,” Edgar said.

  Larry groaned. With his hangover, I wasn’t surprised that the idea of eating didn’t appeal to him right now.

  As I went to the buffet table, I noticed that Callie had filleda plate, gotten some coffee, and gone over to sit with some of the other professors. Dr. Jeffords was at the same table, but he was several chairs away from Callie and didn’t seem to be paying any particular attention to her. She was acting the same way toward him. I wondered just how much practice they’d had at covering up their affair. It could be something new, or it could have been going on for some time. Without coming right out and asking her, I wouldn’t know, and I wasn’t ready to do that just yet.

  I started filling a plate with biscuits, gravy, scrambled eggs, and bacon. The food looked and smelled good. Callie was right about one thing: in spite of death and murder, life went on for those of us who were still here. I was looking forward to digging in and satisfying my appetite.

  It looked like that might have to wait awhile, though, because as I neared the end of the buffet table, a heavy hand suddenly fell on my shoulder.

  CHAPTER 15

  I managed to control my reaction so that I didn’t drop my food and coffee, but the man whose hand was on my shoulder must have felt me jump a little. As I turned, I half expected to see Detective Ramsey or Detective Nesbit–the grip felt like that of a cop–but instead I saw the gruff but worried face of Dr. Ian Keller.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Dickinson,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “That’s all right,” I told him.

  “I just wanted to say that I heard about what happened last night, and I’m sorry.”

  “About Mr. Burleson, you mean?”

  “Yeah, that, too, but mainly about you finding the body like that. I know how upsetting a thing like that can be.”

  The way he phrased that made me wonder. He hadn’t said that he could guess how upsetting it was to stumble over a corpse. He said he knew. I had to ask myself if he was speaking from personal experience.

  But all I said was, “Thank you. It was a bad night, all right.”

  “I’m sure.” He turned his head to look out over the ballroom. “There’s an empty table over there. Would you mind if we had breakfast together?”

  I couldn’t figure out why he wanted to sit with me while we ate, but since I wanted to talk to him anyway, I wasn’t going to refuse. I said, “Nope, that’ll be fine.”

  He smiled. “Good. I’ll get my food and join you in just a minute.”

  I went over to the table Keller had indicated, and, true to his word, he sat down next to me as soon as he had filled his plate. And I do mean filled. It was heaped high with pancakes, eggs, sausage, and slices of ham. He had managed to juggle a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice, too. It was a lot of food, but he was a big guy. It probably took a lot to keep him going.

  I was curious why he wanted to have breakfast with me, so I asked him about it, indirectly. “I’m surprised you didn’t want to eat with some of your colleagues.”

  He shook his head. “Nah. Other than the academic stuff, we don’t have a lot in common. And I get enough of that at the university.”

  “I’m not sure what the two of us have in common. You said you’re from New Jersey, and I was born and raised in Georgia.”

  He grinned. “Jaw-ja. I love that accent.”

  I could have been offended, but I just lowered my voice and said, “Yeah, ya don’t hear dem guys up in Joisey talkin’ like dat, do ya?”

  Keller laughed and slapped the table lightly beside his plate. “You see, that’s what I’m talkin’ about. You’re down to earth, Ms. Dickinson. You have a sense of humor. You don’t take everything so seriously all the time. Like me.”

  “Well, I don’t sit around broodin’, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yeah. There’s enough crappy stuff in life that if you tried to figure out all of it, you’d never have time to do anything else.”

  Even though he still had a smile on his face as he said that, I saw something flicker through his eyes. Something like pain, or regret. I wondered what had caused it. I had a feeling he wouldn’t appreciate me asking about it, though.

  He changed the subject by asking, “Have the reporters been bothering you this morning?”

  “No. I didn’t know there were any around.” I wasn’t surprised, though, considering what had happened.

  “Oh, they’re out there, nosing around about the murder. You must’ve gotten lucky when you came down from your room. You made it in here without any of them spotting you. Just a heads-up, they’re probably gonna be lurking in the lobby when you go out.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” I said with a nod. “It’s not gonna do them any good. All I can say is ‘no comment.’ ”

  Keller grunted. “Yeah, the cops wouldn’t like it if you started spoutin’ off about the case. They can’t really stop you if you want to talk to the reporters, but they can give you a hard time about it. And you don’t wanna be on their bad side.”

  He sounded like a man who’d been given a hard time by the cops in the past, but maybe I was just stereotyping him because he looked a little like a movie mobster, I told myself. I didn’t want to be guilty of judging anybody by appearances.

  We devoted ourselves to the food for a few minutes. It was good, especially when it was washed down by the excellent coffee. I was still tired, but I was starting to feel better.

  When Dr. Keller spoke up again, he said, “So, it was out there in that garden you found the old man, eh?”

  “That’s right,” I said with a slight frown. The fact that he had asked the question took me a little by surprise. Earlier, he had seemed like he really didn’t want to talk about the murder.

  But maybe that was just to put me off my guard, I thought.

  Was it possible that now he was trying to pump me about what had happened and what I might have seen?

  “Who would’ve thought that such an ugly thing could happen in such a pretty place?”

  “You’ve been out there?”

  “Yeah, I cut across there yesterday evening to get back to my room,” he answered without hesitation. “I thought it might save some time. It really didn’t, though. Those paths twist and turn so much, you could probably walk around the garden faster than you can walk through it.”

  That was true. And the way he had admitted so readily that he’d been there ought to be an indication that he didn’t have anything to hide, I thought. I couldn’t really bring myself to accept that fully, though, at least not yet.

  “Have the police questioned you yet?” I asked him.

  He frowned. “Why would they want to question me?”

  “Well, they said they were going to canvass everybody in the hotel, just to find out if anybody saw anything that might have a bearing on the case. And since you were actually in the garden last night …”

  “Yeah, but that was a good while before the murder–wait a minute.” He put his fork down, his eyes narrowing as he stared at me. His jovial manner disappeared in an instant. “You’re questioning me right now, aren’t you? I’ve been interrogated before, lady, and I know a grilling when I hear it!”

  The anger I saw on his big, beefy face made me a little nervous, but I didn’t think he was going to do anything in a ballroom full of witnesses. “You just said you were out there before the murder took place. How do you know–”

  “How do I know when the murder took place if I’m not the killer?” He grunted and shook his head.
“Yeah, that’s the way people think, all right. Always in a hurry to jump to conclusions. Makin’ something out of some innocent comment, or who you’re related to.”

  I hadn’t said anything about who he was related to. I didn’t know anything about any of his relatives.

  But before I could point that out, he went on. “Listen, I don’t know when the old man was killed. He may have been lyin’ there dead when I cut through the garden, for all I know. But I heard it was after midnight when you found him, and I know it was before that when I was in the garden. That’s all I meant. Maybe I didn’t phrase it as clearly as I could have, but don’t go making that out to mean that I’m a murderer.”

  As upset as he already was, I didn’t think this was a very good time to mention that I had known all along he was in the garden because I’d seen him there. He would have taken that as more evidence that I was grilling him, as he’d put it.

  Which, of course, I was.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to offend you, Dr. Keller. It just struck me as strange when you said that, and I wanted to be sure I understood.”

  “You got it clear now?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I think so.”

  “Good.”

  What was really clear was that I was even more suspicious of him now than I had been starting out … but I wasn’t about to tell him that.

  After a moment, he said, “I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to bark at you, Ms. Dickinson. It’s just that I’ve had people make snap judgments about me before, so that’s sort of a pet peeve of mine.”

  “I understand,” I said again.

  At the same time, I spotted Will coming into the ballroom. I was glad to see him. For one thing, I still felt a little bad aboutwhat I’d said the night before. For another, he did look a little like John Wayne to me–metaphorically speaking, anyway–as he started across the room toward the table where Dr. Keller and I were sitting. I would be glad for Will’s company once he got here.

  Then two more men came into the ballroom just a few steps behind Will, and I wasn’t as happy to see them. Detectives Ramsey and Nesbit stopped just inside the room and looked around. Ramsey was wearing sunglasses. He reached up and took them off in a move that looked practiced to me, like he had stood in front of a mirror and worked on his hard-boiled cop attitude.

  The people who were eating breakfast slowly took notice of the two newcomers and the place got quiet again. Ramsey and Nesbit looked past Will, spotted me at the table, and started toward me. Almost every eye in the room followed them. English professors are just as much voyeurs as anybody else. Maybe more so because they can see the inherent drama in any situation.

  Will reached the table. In a low, hurried voice, he said, “Here come those two detectives.”

  “I see ‘em,” I said with resignation in my voice. “I knew I’d probably have to deal with them again today–”

  “They’re not looking for you.” Will’s gaze swung over to Keller. “I overheard them talking to Gillette in the lobby. It’s you they want to talk to, Ian.”

  That surprised me. When I was talking to Ramsey and Nesbit the night before, I had mentioned seeing Keller in the garden, but once they settled on Tarama as their leading suspect, I’d figured they would forget about him.

  I didn’t have time to mull it over. The two detectives came up to the table and Ramsey said, “Dr. Ian Keller?”

  “Yeah,” Keller said, and his tone was harder and flatter than I had ever heard it.

  “From New Jersey?” Nesbit asked.

  “I live in Atlanta.”

  Ramsey said, “But you’re from New Jersey. Don’t try BSing us, Keller. We know who you are. We got your mug shots from the cops in Newark and surveillance photos from the FBI’s RICO task force.”

  I tried not to stare. Mug shots? The FBI? RICO? Wasn’t that some sort of organized crime thing?

  Keller didn’t look happy about being confronted like this, but he didn’t seem too fazed by it. He took his napkin from his lap, folded it neatly, and set it beside his still half-full plate.

  “If you have all of that, then you know that all the indictments against me were dropped,” he said. “My name was cleared. I was never put on trial for anything.” He paused. “Besides, that was twenty years ago, when I was just a young man.”

  Ramsey had that annoying smirk on his face again. “Yeah, twenty years ago,” he said. “Twenty-five to life, that was the sentence your brother got, wasn’t it? So he’s still behind bars, isn’t he, just like you would be if you didn’t have a brother who loved you enough to take the fall for you.”

  Keller slowly shook his head. “Terry committed those crimes, not me. He confessed, and there was plenty of evidence to back up his confession.” He looked over at Nesbit. “You must know all this, even if Dirty Harry there doesn’t want to admit it.”

  Ramsey’s smirk turned into a snarl. Nesbit put a hand out toward him and said to Keller, “We’d just like to ask you a few questions, Doctor. We’ll be talking to all the members of yourgroup about what happened to Howard Burleson. I’m sure you’ve heard about it.”

  “Yeah. But I don’t know a thing that could help you.”

  “You’d better let us be the judge of that.”

  “Yeah, because cops never make a mistake, do they?”

  Ramsey still looked mad, and Nesbit was beginning to get annoyed, too. “Please come with us, Dr. Keller,” he said. “The hotel management has been kind enough to provide us with a room where we can conduct our interviews.”

  I was sure Dale Gillette would have provided whatever the cops wanted if he thought it would get the case cleared up sooner and minimize the bad publicity for the St. Emilion.

  Keller sighed and then scraped his chair back. He managed to smile at me as he stood up. “I’m sorry we didn’t get to finish our breakfast together, Ms. Dickinson, and I regret that little misunderstanding earlier, too. But perhaps now you can see why I’m a little sensitive on the subject.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Ramsey asked.

  “Nothing,” Keller said as he came around the table. “A personal matter.”

  “I wasn’t asking you, Keller.”

  “Dr. Keller.”

  “Yeah? What’d you major in, leg breaking?”

  The whole ballroom was still and quiet now as everybody looked on. At that moment, I felt sorry for Keller. I didn’t know what he had done in the past … I wasn’t even sure that he hadn’t killed Howard Burleson … but I still thought Ramsey was being a jerk. And Nesbit was going along with it. It was entirely possible that Keller hadn’t had anything at all to do with Burleson’s murder, but they were embarrassing him in front of several dozen of his colleagues anyway, after he had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to build a new life for himself.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” he said. He looked around the room and raised his voice as he added, “Sorry for the interruption, folks. Just go on with your breakfast. I’ll see you later at the conference.”

  “Maybe,” Ramsey said. He definitely made the word sound ominous.

  The three of them left, and as soon as the ballroom doors swung closed behind them, the noise of startled conversations welled up. I contributed to it myself by leaning toward Will and asking, “What do you think he did?”

  “You mean, to get in trouble with the law years ago?” He shook his head. “I have no idea.”

  “I’ll bet we can find out,” I said as I pushed my chair back. Like Keller, I had only eaten about half my breakfast, but I wasn’t really hungry anymore. I was too curious for that.

  I knew I was jumping to conclusions, just like Keller had accused me of, and I also knew that if he turned out to be guilty, it wouldn’t be any better for my agency than it would be if Tamara was the killer. Both of them were my clients, part of the group I had brought here to New Orleans. But on a purely instinctive, selfish level, I liked Tamara more than I did Keller, and I could see him being a murderer a lot more
easily than I could her.

  “Wait a minute,” Will said. “I haven’t eaten anything yet.”

  “Well, grab a cup of coffee and a bagel and bring it with you,” I told him. “Of course, you don’t have to come with me …”

  “No, that’s all right, I’m coming. I guess being around you as much as I have, that curiosity of yours is rubbing off on me.”

  A few minutes later, we were in the elevator riding up to the third floor. When we got to my room, I sat down at the desk, opened my laptop, and plugged into the high-speed Internetconnection. It took only a moment to run a search for Ian Keller, New Jersey, and organized crime.

  More than a thousand hits popped up.

  Will leaned in to read over my shoulder. “Most of those pages look like they’re from newspaper archives,” he said.

  “Yeah, mostly the Newark paper,” I said as I scanned over the list on the screen. “But there are pages from the New York Times and other New York papers, too. Must’ve been a pretty big story. I don’t remember ever hearing about it, though.”

  “Yeah, well, it was in New Jersey,” Will pointed out. “And look at the dates. How much attention would you have paid back then to something about organized crime in New Jersey?”

  “None at all,” I admitted. “I had a newborn baby, so all I was thinking about was diapers and crying and feeling like I’d never be allowed to sleep again.”

  “Why don’t you click on one of those links, and we’ll see just what it was Dr. Keller’s supposed to have done?”

  I followed Will’s suggestion and clicked on the first link. It led to a lengthy article about a racketeering investigation carried out by the Newark police in conjunction with the FBI.

  And it wasn’t a pretty story.

  The focus of the investigation was the city’s garbage collection contractor. One of the executives of the company that operated the garbage trucks was a man named Terrence Keller. Terrence Keller and his younger brother Ian were reputed to have mob ties and also to be connected with the IRA and other shady factions. According to the story, the cops and the feds had come up with a couple of witnesses willing to testify that the garbage company had used blackmail, extortion, and intimidation to secure the contract with the city, and that the man in charge of that part of the operation was Terrence Keller. Not only that, but Ian Keller was supposedly the actualmuscle of the outfit and had terrorized a couple of city officials into going along with the deal by threatening their families.