Killer On A Hot Tin Roof Read online

  “Better that than remembering me as a complete fool. Anyway, you know good and well that some other controversy will come along and make people forget about this one. That always happens.”

  Will shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “No maybe about it. After everything that’s happened, it’s better just to forget about it. And that’s what I intend to do.” Frasier looked at the festival volunteers. “Sorry.”

  One of the men sighed. “I suppose there’s no way we can force you to go on stage and make your presentation, Dr. Frasier. But we’re all very disappointed by your decision.” He looked at the other volunteers. “I suppose we’d better make an announcement about the cancellation and post a sign for anyone who shows up later, so they’ll know what’s going on.”

  The volunteers went off to attend to those matters. Frasier gave Will and me a defiant glare and said, “I suppose you’ve lost all respect for me, haven’t you?”

  I figured that telling him I’d never respected him in the first place would just make things worse, so I kept my mouth shut. Will just said, “It was your decision, Michael. I respect that.”

  Frasier muttered, “This never would have happened if not for that bitch Tamara. I’ll never forgive her.”

  I thought that with a first-degree murder charge hanging over her head, Tamara Paige had a lot more important things to worry about than whether or not Frasier forgave her. Again, though, it wasn’t going to do any good to point that out.

  Still muttering to himself, Frasier left the museum. With his presentation cancelled, nothing else was scheduled thereuntil the afternoon. So as soon as one of the volunteers got on the public address system and made the announcement, the rest of the festival-goers started to filter out of the place, except for a handful who remained to look through the museum itself.

  “We might as well go back to the hotel,” I said to Will.

  He nodded, looking a little glum. “Yeah. Between the murder and that scene Callie and her husband made, the festival’s not getting off to a very good start.”

  I would have added the commotion during the opening ceremonies the night before to that list. And Howard Burleson had had a busy evening, first disappearing and then getting himself killed.

  We left the museum and started back toward the St. Emilion. The streets were a little busier now as more tourists were out and about. This wasn’t the height of tourist season in New Orleans, which was probably one reason the festival was scheduled for now.

  “I probably ought to go see Dr. Paige,” I said as we walked along past the picturesque buildings.

  “Why?” Will asked.

  “Well, I feel a certain responsibility toward her. She’s a member of my tour group, after all, and when one of the folks you brought with you is in trouble, you want to help out. At least, I do.”

  “And you still don’t believe she’s guilty,” Will said.

  I shrugged. “I know all the evidence points to her. I want to make sure she has a good lawyer, though.”

  Will nodded and said, “I can understand that. I’ve known Tamara for several years and always liked her. I don’t want her being railroaded if she’s really innocent.”

  I heard the wail of a siren somewhere behind us. We stopped and turned to look. An ambulance came along thenarrow street, moving fast but not at breakneck speed. It couldn’t go too fast here in the French Quarter. The ambulance went past us with lights flashing and ambulance whooping, then turned a corner up ahead. A moment later, the siren stopped.

  As the echoes faded, I realized that the ambulance had turned onto the same street where the hotel was located.

  “Oh, shoot,” I said.

  Will looked over at me. “What? You don’t think it has anything to do with our group, do you?”

  “The way things have been goin’, I wouldn’t count on it,” I replied grimly. Then I started hurrying along the sidewalk, almost breaking into a run. Will came after me and caught up easily.

  We didn’t say anything else until we rounded the corner. Then I saw the ambulance parked in front of the St. Emilion with its lights still flashing.

  “We still don’t know–” Will began. Then he stopped short. He knew as well as I did that this couldn’t be anything good.

  We found a crowd of people in the hotel lobby. The excitement of the ambulance’s arrival had brought them out. I spotted Dale Gillette among them and went over to him.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Is that ambulance here for one of my tour group?”

  He nodded. “I’m afraid so, Ms. Dickinson. It’s–”

  Before he could finish, the elevator doors opened and the crew from the ambulance wheeled out a gurney with a big mounded shape on it that I recognized, even before Edgar and June Powers hurried out of the elevator behind the paramedics. One of the guys from the ambulance went ahead, clearing a path for the gurney. As it came closer, I saw the oxygen mask strapped over Dr. Lawrence Powers’s face.

  “Papa Larry,” I breathed.

  “Evidently he had a heart attack,” Gillette said. “That’s what I was told, anyway.”

  The gurney rolled past us, with Edgar and June following closely behind it. “This is all your fault,” June was saying bitterly to her husband.

  “How is it my fault?” Edgar asked.

  “I don’t know, but it is.”

  I fell in step beside Edgar and said, “If there’s anything I can do to help, Dr. Powers–”

  “You’ve done enough,” June snapped. “Getting the police involved and stirring up everything with that murder probably put too much strain on Papa Larry’s heart.”

  I thought that was completely unfair. I hadn’t had any choice but to get the police involved once I found Howard Burleson’s body. And I figured getting drunk as a skunk, not to mention having to put up with the bickering between his son and daughter-in-law, had put a strain on Larry’s heart, too.

  I didn’t say anything, though. June was all worked up, so I just let it go. I stopped and watched the ambulance guys wheel the gurney on out of the hotel and load Papa Larry into the ambulance. Silently, I said a prayer for him.

  Even if he survived this, he was still going to need all the help he could get.

  But then, that was probably true of us all.

  CHAPTER 18

  There was nothing I could do for Larry Powers, so I figured the best thing would be for me to concentrate on something I might be able to affect. I called a cab to take me to the New Orleans police headquarters so I could see Tamara.

  Will insisted on coming along and, to tell the truth, I didn’t argue with him much. I knew I’d feel more comfortable if he was with me.

  The cab driver knew where the police department was located, not surprisingly, and took us to the office on South Broad Street. Inside, an officer at the reception desk called Homicide to see if Detectives Ramsey and Nesbit were there. As it turned out, they weren’t. The officer offered to take a message for them, but instead I asked where a female prisoner who had been arraigned this morning on a murder charge would be held pending a bail hearing.

  “Y’all lookin’ for that lady professor who killed the old man in the Quarter?” the cop asked.

  “You’ve heard about the case?” I said.

  The cop grinned. “Sure. Word gets around about somethin’ like that. Most of our homicides are bar fights, one drug dealer shootin’ another drug dealer, robberies gone wrong, things like that. I don’t recall ever hearin’ about a homicide involvin’

  Tennessee Williams before. Y’all friends o’ that lady professor?”

  “That’s right,” Will said.

  “She’s been transferred to the custody of the Criminal Sheriff’s Office. They’ll have her over at the South White Street facility. You know where that is?”

  We didn’t, of course. The officer gave us directions, and we found another cab.

  The place was as dreary and depressing as any jail anywhere, a sprawling building with bars on many of the windows a
nd a fence topped by barbed wire on the roof. We went through plenty of red tape and metal detectors inside before I was allowed to see Tamara.

  Will had to wait outside in an ugly little anteroom while I went into an even smaller room that was even uglier. It was divided in two by a counter with a single chair on each side. A wire-mesh-reinforced glass wall rose from the middle of the counter, and there was a phone on each side of the glass. After a few minutes, the door on the other side opened and a deputy brought Tamara in. She wore a short-sleeved white jumpsuit and had the sort of downcast expression you’d expect to see on the face of a prisoner, especially one facing serious charges. They didn’t come much more serious than murder, I supposed.

  She managed a smile when she saw me, though. We picked up our phones at the same time, and I said, “Hi.”

  “It’s good to see a friendly face in here, Ms. Dickinson, or at least a nonhostile one. Thank you for coming.”

  “Call me Delilah,” I said. “They treatin’ you all right?”

  Tamara shrugged. “As well as can be expected, I suppose.”

  “Do you have a lawyer yet?”

  “I had a court-appointed one to handle the arraignment.

  She’s supposed to do the bail hearing, too. After that, I’ll try to find a defense attorney of my own.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Assuming, of course, that I can make bail and get out of here. Since I’m from out of town, the judge may consider me a flight risk and deny bail.”

  “We’ll try to see that that doesn’t happen,” I promised. I lowered my voice a little and went on, “Do you know why they arrested you?”

  “Something about some evidence they found in my hotel room. Ashes in the sink in the bathroom? That’s crazy. I didn’t burn anything in there.”

  “Ramsey and Nesbit found a little scrap of partially burned paper that looked like it came from a legal pad. Frasier said those pages from Howard Burleson’s manuscript came from a legal pad.”

  Tamara closed her eyes for a moment and rubbed her temples with her free hand. “I never saw any manuscript pages, and I certainly never burned them. I wouldn’t have had any reason to. If they even existed, they were fakes.”

  “You still believe that?”

  “I don’t have any reason not to believe it.”

  “The police think you saw them, realized that Burleson was telling the truth, and killed him and destroyed the pages to keep anyone from bein’ able to prove that the old man wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t do it, Delilah. I don’t know what else to say. I didn’t do it.”

  “It’d sure be helpful if you had an alibi.”

  “But I don’t. I told you, I went back to my room, couldn’t sleep, and decided to work out for a while. I was alone the whole time.”

  “Well,” I said, thinking back to the night before, “you stepped out to get some ice from the machine, because that’s what you were doing when I ran into you. Did you leave your room any other time?”

  “No, that was the first time I’d been out of the room for several hours and, as you said, I just stepped out. The room was just down the hall from the ice machine, so I threw the deadbolt to keep the door from closing and walked down there with the ice bucket.”

  I knew what she meant. I had done the same thing in hotels many times myself.

  “It doesn’t sound like you’ve got an alibi,” I admitted with a sigh.

  Tamara shook her head. “Not even a ghost of one. But I give you my word, Delilah, I didn’t kill that old man.” She smiled faintly. “It would be nice if at least one person believed that.”

  “I do,” I said without hesitation.

  “Now all you have to do is convince everyone else.”

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t see any way to do that. There wasn’t much in the way of physical evidence, just that bit of ash from the sink in Tamara’s bathroom, but it pointed straight at her.

  “I’ll do my best,” I told her anyway. “I’ll see about getting you a better lawyer for the bail hearing, too.”

  “I should warn you, I’m not a rich woman.”

  “I’m not, either, but I want to do whatever I can to help.”

  I said a few more encouraging words, then told her goodbye and left the depressing little room. If it was that depressing for me, I thought, how much worse must a cell be for Tamara? I could get up and walk out, but she couldn’t.

  “Was she able to tell you anything that might help?” Will asked as we made our way back out of the jail.

  “Not really. She says she didn’t kill the old man and thatshe never saw any manuscript pages from that play. She still doesn’t believe that Burleson really wrote it, either.”

  “What about bail?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see. I promised that I’d try to get her a defense lawyer, and not just a court-appointed one.”

  Will nodded. “If you need help with the money, I’ve got some savings.”

  “You’d dip into your savings to help Tamara?”

  “We’re friends,” he said, and I felt an unexpected pang of jealousy. I knew that Tamara had once been involved with Michael Frasier. I wondered if there had ever been anything going on between her and Will. She was a pretty attractive woman, after all. But I didn’t want to come right out and ask him.

  Anyway, I’d offered to help pay for a good lawyer, too, just because I thought she was innocent. Maybe Will felt the same way. I sure as heck didn’t want to generate any more drama on this trip. There had been way more than enough already.

  We took another cab back to the hotel. When we got there, we went to Dale Gillette’s office and Will knocked on the door. Gillette told us to come in.

  “Have you had any word about Dr. Powers?” I asked him.

  “Yes, I called the hospital and checked on him a short time ago,” Gillette said. “They wouldn’t tell me anything, of course, since I’m not a relative, but I persuaded them to page Dr. Edgar Powers, so I was able to talk to him. He told me that his father is in serious but stable condition.”

  I was glad to hear that Larry hadn’t died from the heart attack, at least not yet. He wasn’t one of my favorite people in the world, nor were June and Edgar, but I didn’t want any more members of my group dying. And despite Larry’s bull-headedness and fondess for the booze, I sort of liked him. He was a colorful character, and we Southerners have always had afondness for colorful characters. The plays of Tennessee Williams are proof of that.

  Gillette went on, “We’re still getting quite a few calls from reporters for you, Ms. Dickinson. You might want to consider issuing a statement to the press.”

  That didn’t sound like a good idea to me. I didn’t want to reinforce the idea even more of my name being linked to murder. That couldn’t be good for business.

  I thanked Gillette for his suggestion anyway, without promising to do anything about it, and Will and I left the office. By now it was past noon–almost one o’clock, in fact–and it had been quite awhile since the unfinished breakfast buffet that morning. I said, “Why don’t we get some lunch?” and Will was in total agreement.

  Neither of us was in the mood for something from the hotel’s restaurant, so we left the St. Emilion and started wandering the streets of the French Quarter. We found a little Cajun place a couple of blocks away, not much more than a hole in the wall, but it was doing a brisk business, even past the lunch rush. We stood in line for a few minutes to get a table, and when the food came, we found out why the café was busy. The crawfish gumbo, the rice and red beans, the blackened fish, all of it was delicious, and spicy enough to bring tears to your eyes. I must have drunk nearly a gallon of sweet tea during the meal to try to put out the fire.

  We didn’t make a deal not to talk about the murder while we were eating or anything like that, but the subject didn’t really come up. Maybe we were both just tired of trying to figure out if Tamara Paige was really guilty, and, if she wasn’t, who had killed Howard Burleson. We tal
ked about other things instead: books, movies, our families, the same sorts of things anybody would talk about during a pleasant lunch with someone they cared a lot about.

  It was such a nice interlude that when we were finished, I didn’t really want to go back to the hotel. “Can’t we just sit here and sip sweet tea for the rest of the afternoon?” I asked Will with a smile.

  “I wish we could,” he said, “but there are readings tonight, and I’m supposed to take part. I’m going to be reading one of Williams’s short stories, and I ought to look it over beforehand.”

  “All right,” I said with a smile and a sigh. “Can’t keep an English professor away from the books for very long, can you?”

  Will laughed. “You think that afterwards we could go back to that same place where we ate last night?”

  “I’ll call them when we get back to the hotel and see if I can get a reservation for us,” I promised.

  And this night was going to end differently, I told myself. No drunken theater professors, no cheating wives, no alleged mobsters from New Jersey, and, most of all, no dead bodies or cops. Instead, I was thinking that I might just ask Will to have breakfast with me in the morning … room service breakfast.

  As we walked through the hotel lobby a short time later, someone called Will’s name as we passed a group of festival-goers sitting on one of the sofas. “Dr. Burke, can we get your opinion on something?”

  I saw the two argumentative professors in the middle of the bunch, and when Will smiled at me and said, “This is liable to take awhile,” I knew exactly what he meant.

  “I’m gonna go on up to the room,” I told him. “I’ll see you later.”

  As I went toward the elevators, I glanced along the broad corridor that led to the atrium and the indoor garden. I was tempted to go out there and look again at the place where I’d found Burleson’s body, but I knew it might still be cordonedoff as a crime scene. Besides, the forensics team from the police department would have been all over it and taken any possible evidence with them. I stopped at the elevators instead and pushed the button.

  Where the murder had taken place wasn’t that important, I told myself as I waited. The garden was just a convenient spot where the killer had managed to get some privacy. Would Burleson have gone out there with just about anybody he knew? I suspected he would have. The old man had been friendly and garrulous, and he hadn’t seemed to have a suspicious bone in his body. He was the sort of old-fashioned Southern gentleman who would talk to anybody, anywhere, about anything. Luring him to the scene of his death wouldn’t have been a problem.