Killer On A Hot Tin Roof Page 19

  But there was something else nagging at me, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Something I had seen or heard–or both–that didn’t quite jibe with the facts. I frowned with the effort as I tried to force my brain to grasp it.

  Then the elevator arrived, and all I could do was shake my head and get on board. Whatever that elusive discrepancy was, it had gotten away from me.

  As I walked along the third floor hall, one of the doors ahead of me swung open and Dr. June Powers stepped out into the corridor. She looked drawn and haggard, and I wasn’t surprised. She didn’t see me at first, but then she noticed me and stopped short.

  “Ms. Dickinson,” she said as the door clicked shut behind her. She heard it and looked around. “Damn it,” she said. “I hope I haven’t locked myself out. I was just going down to the vending machines to get a candy bar. I didn’t have a chance to eat any lunch today.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “How’s your father-in-law?”

  “Still stable. Still in serious condition.” She didn’t have herpurse with her, but she reached into the pocket of her slacks and pulled out a key card. “Good. I won’t have to call the desk to let me in. I couldn’t remember if I had the key or not.”

  “If there’s anything I can do–”

  “Yes, you make that offer frequently, don’t you?”

  The words were sharp and got under my skin. I was about to say something when she shook her head and went on. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. Of course you try to be helpful. That’s your job.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “And I should apologize for what I said to you earlier, too. I know logically that you didn’t have anything to do with Papa Larry’s heart attack. In fact, I’m not really surprised it happened, considering how long he’s been abusing his body the way he does. He smoked for years, in addition to the drinking, and the man is grossly overweight. Cancer, heart attack, stroke … something’s bound to do him in before too much longer if he doesn’t change his ways. It may be too late already.”

  She had the sort of sanctimonious disapproval in her voice that always gets on my nerves. I’d never had any trouble with smoking or drinking, since I’d never smoked and was only a light social drinker, and as long as I watched what I ate, my weight wasn’t a problem, but I understood that some people didn’t have it as lucky. It was easy to tell somebody else what they ought to do, I thought. It was a lot harder to figure out what you ought to do to improve your own life, and then stick to it.

  But I didn’t want to get in an argument with June. She had been through enough today already. Instead, I said, “Did your husband stay at the hospital?”

  She nodded wearily. “Edgar thought I ought to come back here and rest for a while. Then I’ll go back and let him have abreak. I’m afraid our participation in the festival has come to a premature end.”

  “I’m sure nobody will hold that against you,” I told her.

  She looked at the key card she held in her hand. “Well, I’m going to go get that candy bar, and then maybe try to take a nap. We’re going to be putting in some long hours sitting with Papa Larry.”

  I nodded, smiled, and moved on toward my room while June went the other way toward the alcove where the vending machines and the ice machine were. Thinking about it made me remember that Tamara had been on her way there with the ice bucket from her room the previous night, just before Ramsey and Nesbit came along and arrested her.

  When I got to my room, I realized that I was tired, too. I stretched out on the bed for a while and dozed off. I might have had dreams, but if I did, I don’t remember any of them.

  I woke up and checked the time, since I wasn’t sure how long I had slept. It was almost five o’clock, I saw to my surprise. But I’d been up very late the night before, I told myself, and hadn’t slept all that well when I’d finally got to bed. It wasn’t any wonder that I was tired.

  I stood up, stretched, and walked over to the French doors. I pushed the curtains back, unlatched the doors, and stepped out onto the little balcony. The skylights above the garden were dim and gray, telling me that the sky was overcast, which of course wasn’t uncommon here in New Orleans, as close to the Gulf as it was. The humidity was nearly always high, and that meant clouds.

  Resting my hands on the ornate railing around the balcony, I looked down at the thick vegetation below me. I didn’t see anyone moving around on the paths. I was sure that word had gotten around the hotel about Howard Burleson’s body being found there, and I figured that people didn’t regard the placeas being nearly as romantic as they might have before. It would take awhile, a week or so, maybe, before the natural turnover of guests meant that most of the folks staying here wouldn’t think of the garden as a murder scene. Then it would be busy again with people drinking, talking, and romancing.

  Actually, I did hear someone talking, but only faintly. I thought at first that the voice originated down in the garden, but then I realized that it was coming from somewhere else. I wasn’t sure where that could be, but then I looked along the row of balconies and saw a pair of French doors standing partially open. Somebody in that room was talking, I realized, and the high-ceilinged atrium caught the words, amplifying them and causing them to echo slightly. But the echo also distorted them a little.

  But that didn’t stop me from catching the word “Tennessee.”

  My hands tightened on the railing. There was something familiar about that voice, all right, and when I made out “tin roof,” I suddenly knew what it was, even though it was so impossible it might have made me physically stagger if I hadn’t been clutching the railing so hard.

  The man talking was Howard Burleson.

  CHAPTER 19

  I stood there listening, hanging on to the railing for sanity. There was no way Howard Burleson could be alive. I had seen the blood on his head, gazed into his eyes that held no life. The body had been taken away, and it wasn’t coming back.

  Yet there was no doubt in my mind about what I was hearing. And as I realized the only way I could be hearing him talking right now, everything else shifted around in my brain and then locked down into place. I knew who had killed the old man, and I had a pretty good idea why.

  And I knew that if I didn’t act fast, the only proof might be gone forever.

  I turned and ran back into my room, ran to the door and jerked it open. A moment later I was down the hall, knocking on the door of Michael Frasier’s room.

  He was slow to answer. I knocked again, harder and more insistently this time and, after a moment, he jerked the door open. “What is it?” he demanded in a surly voice.

  “I just wanted to see how you were doin’ after what happened today,” I said. “I’m sure sorry that things didn’t work out for you at the festival.”

  He started to close the door. “I’m fine. Now, if that’s all …”

  I put a hand on the door to stop it. “You know, you were right,” I said.

  “Right? About what?”

  “Since you didn’t do your presentation, this whole ugly business about Mr. Burleson will blow over after a while. I don’t know much about academia, but I do know human nature. You learn a lot about it when you’re in the travel business. And folks will always move on to something else, as long as there’s nothin’ to remind them of what happened.”

  I was babbling a little, but he just nodded and said, “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I appreciate the concern. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m busy–”

  “Doin’ what? If I remember the festival schedule correctly, you don’t have anything else lined up.”

  I didn’t care about his plans for the rest of the festival. What concerned me was what he was about to do right now. I could make a pretty good guess about that and, as I talked, I tried to look past him into the room, searching for confirmation that my hunch was right.

  I found it in the little palm-size digital recorder that I spotted lying on the table next to his computer.

  “Actually, I
thought maybe I could talk my way into the symposium that’s being held tomorrow,” Frasier said. He frowned in thought for a second, then pulled the door wide open. “Would you mind coming in for a minute, Ms. Dickinson? I’d like to talk to you about Dr. Burke.”

  That request surprised me. I didn’t know what Will had to do with this. I wanted to find out, though, and, more importantly, I wanted to get my hands on that recorder. I said, “Sure,” and stepped into the room. “What about Will?”

  Frasier closed the door and started pacing. “I know he has a lot of influence with the festival committee and the other professors. He could get me into that symposium. And if I’m notmistaken, you have a lot of influence with him. You could persuade him to speak up for me.”

  “I’m sure you could talk to him yourself, and he’d be glad to help.” I edged toward the table while Frasier walked over to the French doors, which stood open onto the balcony. I kept talking to cover any sounds I made as I slipped my hand over the little recorder and then slid it off the table. “Why don’t I go find him and tell him you want to talk to him?” I started toward the door. “You just wait right here–”

  He turned and lunged across the room after me. I realized then that it had been a trick, that he’d gotten suspicious of my visit and had been waiting to see if I went for the recorder. I let out a little yelp and raced for the door, but he was too fast for me. His hand closed around my arm and jerked me back. He flung me across the room so that I landed on the king-size bed and bounced a little on the thick mattress.

  “You bitch!” he said in a low, furious voice as he loomed over me. “What do you think you’re doing? Stealing my recorder?”

  “I … I’m sorry,” I said, desperately trying to think of some explanation. “I’m a kleptomaniac! I can’t help myself! I see something like that and I just pick it up!”

  He didn’t believe me, of course. Heck, I wouldn’t have believed me, especially if I were trying to hide the evidence that I was a murderer.

  Which was exactly what Dr. Michael Frasier was. He had killed Howard Burleson.

  He reached down and shoved his hand in the pocket of my trousers, going after the recorder. I swung a fist at his head, but he ducked, shoved me down against the mattress again, and yanked the recorder out of my pocket, ripping the fabric in the process.

  “All right,” he said through gritted teeth. “You want to hear what’s on here so bad, I’ll let you listen to some of it.”

  He pushed the PLAY button on the recorder, and I heard Howard Burleson’s reedy voice again, saying, “… showed Tom the manuscript. I never dreamed he would really like it, but he did. He said it showed real promise.”

  Frasier clicked the recorder off and said, “Real promise. That’s what my career held once. And it was going to again, once I became famous for discovering the hidden author of one of the most famous plays of the twentieth century. I guess that’s why I was listening again, one more time, before I erased what’s on the chip. I wanted to pretend that the dream hadn’t been ruined forever.”

  “You did record Mr. Burleson’s story,” I said. “You lied about that. You lied about a lot of things.”

  He looked like he wanted to hit me. I was judging the angles to see if I could kick him in the groin when he controlled himself and backed off a little.

  “I was lied to first,” he said in a voice that trembled with anger. “That damned old man made a fool out of me. He made me believe his story, when it was all a pack of lies.”

  “He didn’t know Tennessee Williams?” I figured it might be better to keep Frasier talking, to let him get as much of it off his chest as he would. Somebody else might come along and knock on the door and, if they did, I planned to scream my head off.

  “He probably did,” Frasier said. “He claimed to have photos of the two of them together, but he was coy about that, wouldn’t show them to me. Williams could have picked him up in Italy, or vice versa. No doubt about that. It was the whole Cat on a Hot Tin Roof business that was a lie.”

  “How do you know? You saw the pages–”

  He made a slashing motion with his hand. “Fakes! He justcopied a few pages from a published version of the play to have something to fool me with. He was supposed to bring the whole thing with him, but he didn’t do it.”

  “You said he just brought samples,” I said.

  A cold smile curved his mouth. “That was going to be part of the surprise. I planned to display the entire manuscript at my presentation, but when I asked him for it last night, he admitted that he didn’t have it. He said that something had happened to it, that it had disappeared somehow, back in Atlanta, and he’d been afraid to tell me. That was when I started to suspect that he was trying to pull some sort of scam. He had already weaseled quite a bit of money out of me, along with all the attention. He was going to let me get up there and make a fool of myself in front of all my colleagues.”

  That didn’t sound like Burleson to me. I had heard him talking about writing that play, and whether it was true or not, I would have bet money that he believed it was.

  “Maybe he really did lose the rest of the manuscript,” I suggested. “That was no reason to … to …”

  “To kill him?” Frasier smiled down at me again. “No, I suppose not. But I lost my temper when we were talking about it in the garden. He had already wandered off again, after he told me he didn’t have the manuscript and we’d argued about it, and that’s where I found him. I didn’t really mean to hurt him. I just got so mad I hauled off and hit him, and when he went down all I could see was my career in ruins, so I hit him a couple more times. You see, I’m not really a killer.”

  “But since he was already dead, you got the idea of framing Dr. Paige for it,” I guessed.

  “As far as anyone knew, she had a lot more to gain from his death than I did,” Frasier said.

  “So you spied on her and waited for your chance, and after the cops arrested her, you went to her room and burned a fewlittle scraps from one of the manuscript pages, just enough to leave some evidence the police could find. You were able to get in because she’d left the deadbolt out to keep the door from closing all the way while she went to the ice machine. When you left, though, you let it shut and lock behind you.”

  That was the thing I’d been struggling to grasp earlier. I’d seen Detective Nesbit use a key card he’d gotten from Dale Gillette to open Tamara’s door and hadn’t really thought anything about it at the time. But when Tamara mentioned leaving the deadbolt out, that had jogged something in my memory. The discrepancy meant that somebody had been inside Tamara’s room between the time of her arrest and the time when Ramsey had found the ashes in her sink.

  Anyway, I realized now, nobody could have burned several whole pages from a legal pad in that bathroom without the smoke setting off the fire alarm. With the ventilator fan running, though, it might have been possible to burn a few tiny scraps and leave the ashes in the sink as evidence. All of that had come together in my mind as I stood on the balcony of my room earlier listening to Howard Burleson’s voice on the recorder. I knew at that moment that Frasier had lied about not recording Burleson’s story, and if he had lied about that, he could have lied about everything else, too.

  Frasier shook his head as he glared down at me. “I didn’t expect anyone to figure out what happened, and certainly not you.”

  I didn’t waste time feeling insulted. I had bigger problems.

  So did Frasier. He went on, “Now what am I going to do with you?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Will knows I’m here. He’ll be comin’ along any minute lookin’ for me.”

  “I don’t think so. I have a better feel now for when someone’s lying to me … and you’re lying, Ms. Dickinson. I don’tknow how you found out about it, but you wanted to get your hands on that recorder. You think that’s going to prove somehow that I’m a killer.”

  “You just admitted it to me.”

  He chuckled. “That’s not proof.”
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  “But I bet it’ll be enough to get Tamara Paige off the hook for that murder charge,” I went on. “And I reckon Ramsey and Nesbit will start lookin’ a lot harder at you. No matter how careful you were, they’ll find a fingerprint or something else to prove you were in Tamara’s room. They’ll figure out that you planted that evidence–and why.”

  His jaw tightened. “You’ve just talked yourself into taking a dive off that balcony out there.”

  I went cold all over.

  “Yeah, you were upset because of the murder happening on a tour you set up,” he said. “You figured it was going to ruin your business. So you committed suicide. Jumped right off your balcony into that garden. Our rooms are close enough, nobody will be able to tell that you came from here instead of there.”

  “That … that’s only a three-story drop,” I said. “You can’t be sure a fall like that will kill somebody, especially with those plants down there.”

  He nodded. “You’re right. That’s why I think I’d better break your neck before I toss you through the doors and over the railing.”

  My eyes darted toward the French doors. The balcony was narrow enough so that he could do that, all right. He could get a running start and give me a good hard shove from inside the room, so that no one would see what he was doing. Someone on another balcony might see me fall, but I knew how unreliable eyewitness testimony could be. Chances were, they wouldn’t be able to swear which balcony I’d fallen from.

  Frasier held up the recorder. “Then I’ll erase what’s on here, and no one else will ever have any reason to suspect me. Like you said, it’ll all blow over, and I can carry on with my career. Sure, there’ll be a stain on it, at least for a while, but I’ll come up with something else to rebuild my reputation.”