Killer On A Hot Tin Roof Read online

  I spotted a man walking along one of the paths and recognized him as Dr. Ian Keller. With his size and his sort of shambling gait, he suddenly reminded me of a bear, especially in that wild setting. He appeared to be cutting through the garden on his way to somewhere else, because he went into one of the doors on the far side and disappeared.

  Movement on the other side of the atrium caught my eye. Directly across from me on the third floor, I saw a man and a woman step out onto their balcony. There was a dim light in the room behind them, shining on the woman’s blond hair. She wore a long, slinky, sexy blue nightgown. It plunged deep enough for me to see the dark valley between her breasts as she rested her hands on the balcony railing.

  “Well, somebody’s gettin’ frisky tonight, at least,” I murmured. Feeling like I was intruding, I started to step back into my room and close the curtains.

  Then the woman across the way half-turned, and the light was behind her head so that I could make out the broad jaw. Callie Madison, I thought. Obviously she had made up with Jake.

  Then the man stepped out of the shadows and took Callie’s hand to lead her back into the room, and all I could do was stare and mutter to myself, “Well, I’ll swan.”

  Dr. Andrew Jeffords–yeah, the winner of the Orville Redenbacher look-alike contest his own self–took Dr. Callie Madison in that sexy nightgown back into that hotel room, shut the French doors, and closed the curtains, leaving me on the other side of the atrium wondering crazily what the heck was in that popcorn.

  CHAPTER 8

  This was hardly the first time there had been some hanky-panky going on during one of my tours, of course. Folks who are inclined toward carrying on like that will find a way to do it, even if they’re with a bunch of tourists, including their spouse. I’d just as soon have them control their urges, because cheating on your husband or wife has a way of causing all sorts of commotion if the cheated-on partner happens to find out.

  Other than that, though, it’s really none of my business. Adultery’s not like using drugs or getting drunk in public or shoplifting, three other activities that clients sometimes engage in that get my dander up. Nobody’s going to get arrested for adultery and cast my agency in a bad light. I’d rather folks not do it, but I can’t stop them.

  Sometimes, though, the choices people make leave me flabbergasted, and this was one of those times. Callie Madison was young and attractive, and yet there she was, right over there on the other side of the atrium, fooling around with a fella at least thirty years older than her who looked like somebody’s kindly old grandpa. Dr. Jeffords had to have some qualities that I had missed.

  Then I remembered the comment Tamara Paige had made on the plane about Dr. Jeffords being the head of the English Department. I didn’t know much about university politics, just things that I’d heard Will say, and I wondered if a department head would have enough power to make a subordinate want to sleep with him. One thing I was reasonably sure of: the university would frown on what was happening over there. Enough so that Dr. Jeffords would certainly lose his job, and Callie Madison might, too.

  “None of your business, none of your business,” I told myself as I closed the French doors and the curtains and started to get ready for bed.

  I was still dressed except for my shoes when a knock sounded on my door.

  Maybe Will had decided he couldn’t stay away from me tonight after all, I thought, as I went to the door and put my eye to the peephole.

  But I didn’t have to decide what I would do if that turned out to be the case because when I looked through the little lens, I had a nice foreshortened view of Dr. June Powers. She looked upset about something, which made sense, otherwise she wouldn’t have been knocking on my door at this time of night.

  I turned the deadbolt, unfastened the chain, and opened the door. “Dr. Powers,” I said, resisting the impulse to call her Junebug like her father-in-law had. “What can I do for you?”

  “Have you seen Papa Larry?” she asked. “I mean, my father-in-law, Dr. Lawrence Powers?”

  “Well, I saw him over at the theater, while that reception was going on before the festival’s opening ceremonies, but not since then,” I told her. “I was just downstairs in the lobby a few minutes ago, and I didn’t see him down there.”

  “I was there, too, as well as at the bar, and I can’t find him.”

  She sounded plenty worried. I couldn’t believe the tour had had a second old man go missing on the same night. Not that Dr. Lawrence Powers was anywhere near as old as Howard Burleson. I figured Papa Larry was around sixty, maybe sixty-five.

  “I’m sure he’s all right,” I said. “He’s bound to be around the hotel somewhere. Is your husband looking for him, too?”

  “Edgar?” June gave a disgusted snort and shook her head. “Edgar is worse than useless in a situation like this, Ms. Dickinson. I didn’t even waste the time telling him about it. He’d probably try to run some sort of computer simulation to find his father. If you can’t solve it with an equation or a formula, he’s not interested.”

  Her voice had the ragged edge of hysteria in it, to go along with some bitterness and resentment directed toward her husband. I wanted to calm her down, because the last thing I needed was to have another client making a scene tonight. I said, “I’ll help you look for him. Just let me get my purse.”

  I slipped my shoes on, grabbed my bag, and stepped out into the hall. Once I was sure I had my room key card, I let the door close behind me. As we started toward the elevators, I said, “I suppose this has something to do with your father-in-law’s drinkin’?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, he wanted a drink on the plane, and you didn’t want him to have one. I got the impression that he’s under doctor’s orders to give it up.”

  She sighed. “That’s right. He’s had ulcers and stomach cancer. The cancer is in remission, but he’s not supposed to drink. The alcohol could start his stomach bleeding, and … and …”

  “I understand. It could be mighty bad for him.”

  “He’s an old fool!” she said suddenly as we reached the elevators. “He says he’d rather go out on his own terms than have to give up everything that he loves. He says that living like the doctor wants him to is no way for a man to live.”

  “Somebody ought to have a talk with him.”

  “Like his son? Yes, it would be nice if Edgar cared enough to do that, wouldn’t it? If he could be bothered to try to make his father understand that we love him and want to have him around for as long as possible. Is there any way to quantify that, Ms. Dickinson? Because if there’s not, there’s no way for Edgar to express it.” She jabbed a finger against the elevator button and started to laugh humorlessly. “Have you ever seen the TV show with that scientist who’s incredibly smart but has no idea how to interact with the people around him? Well, that’s not a situation comedy, Ms. Dickinson. That’s a documentary, and it might as well be about Edgar.”

  Edgar Powers hadn’t struck me as being quite that bad, but I didn’t really know the man at all. Just like I didn’t know his wife or his father. But I was getting to know Junebug a little better than I might have wanted to. I’m not unsympathetic to my clients’ personal problems, Lord knows, but I’m not their therapist, either, despite the fact that some of them seem to regard me that way.

  The elevator dinged, and the door slid open. “Let’s check the bar again,” I suggested. “If he wants a drink, that’s the most likely place for him to be. Maybe you just missed him.”

  “Papa Larry’s pretty hard to miss,” June said. “But I don’t suppose it would hurt anything to try.”

  It was getting close to midnight, but the St. Emilion’s bar wouldn’t close for a couple of hours yet. It was still pretty crowded. Most of the tables and booths arranged around a horseshoe-shaped bar were occupied. June and I started at one end and began to work our way around to the other. Not everybody in here was from our group, of course, and not all of them wer
e in New Orleans for the literary festival, either. I was aware that some of the men were checking us out, probably wondering if we were going to stop so that they could offer to buy us drinks.

  We passed a table where one of the professors was gesturing emphatically as he said, “It’s clear that Williams was jealous of Inge, and that’s what led to the falling-out between them.”

  The professor on the other side of the table waved his hands in the air and said, “No one’s denying that Williams was jealous of the success Inge’s plays had on Broadway during the early to mid-fifties, but it’s an overstatement to call the cooling off of their friendship a falling-out. I mean, Inge dedicated The Dark at the Top of the Stairs to Williams and suggested to Audrey Wood that Williams write the introduction to the published version.”

  “Yes, and you’ve read that introduction. It’s clearly not the work of someone who had any affection remaining for Inge.”

  “But that was all on Williams’s side. I believe that Inge still genuinely liked Williams and brought up the subject of writer’s block simply out of concern for him.”

  “I think it’s more likely that Inge was deliberately trying to poison the relationship–”

  I leaned over the table and said, “Excuse me, boys.”

  They both looked up at me in surprise.

  “Y’all have been arguin’ for, what, eight or ten hours straight now, so I reckon you can pick it up again without any trouble. I just need a minute of your time. Do you know Dr. Lawrence Powers?”

  “Of course,” one of the men responded. “Everybody knows Larry.”

  “Have you seen him in here tonight?” June asked tensely.

  Both men frowned, looked at each other, and then shook their heads. “We’ve been here ever since we got back from the opening ceremonies,” one of them said. “I don’t believe Dr. Powers has been in the bar at all.”

  “I agree,” the other one said. “No sign of him.” He looked across the table and raised a finger. “But that brings up the interesting point of which director achieved the consistently finest presentation of Williams’s work.”

  And then both of them said simultaneously, “Elia Kazan.”

  While they were looking shocked that they had found something they couldn’t argue about, I said, “Thanks, fellas,” and motioned with my head for June to follow me. As we resumed our circuit of the bar, I heard one of them say, “Of course, Kazan’s best work was on the screen.”

  “How can you say that? His stage productions of Williams’s plays are clearly superior!”

  The rest of the argument was lost–thankfully–in the hubbub of conversation that filled the bar. It took another minute or so for June and me to check out the other tables and booths and the stools along the bar itself. Papa Larry was nowhere to be seen.

  The restaurant was closed, so we knew he wasn’t in there. June said, “If he wandered off from the hotel, he could be anywhere in the French Quarter. We’ll never find him!”

  “Now, don’t give up yet,” I told her. Something obvious occurred to me. “You’re sure he’s not in his room?”

  “I went by there to check just before I came to your room. He didn’t answer, and I knocked and called out to him, both.”

  “Maybe he was in the bathroom, or really sound asleep.”

  June shook her head. “I’m certain he wasn’t there. I knocked for a good five minutes. He would have heard me. And that was the second time I’d been there. I went by earlier to check on him, and he didn’t answer the door then, either. That’s why I started looking for him.”

  “You always look in on him like that at night?”

  “I do,” she said, giving me a defiant frown as if she expected me to try to make something of it. “His health isn’tgood, and Edgar won’t look after him. Somebody has to do it. Anyway, I’ve gotten in the habit of checking on him every night. We live in the same house, you know.”

  I hadn’t known that and, again, didn’t consider it any of my business.

  That didn’t stop June from going on. “It’s the old family home, the house where Edgar grew up. After Lucille passed away–that was Edgar’s mother–we moved back there to keep an eye on Papa Larry. He was already in bad health.”

  “All right, let’s try to figure out where else he could be.” I didn’t want to have to wander around the French Quarter with June at this time of night, poking our heads into every bar and club. That prospect didn’t sound appealing at all, or very safe, either.

  Something else occurred to me. I said, “Come on,” and motioned for June to follow me.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as she fell in step beside me.

  I started down the corridor toward the garden. “Waiters from the bar circulate through the garden in the atrium.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “So you didn’t look there earlier?”

  She shook her head. “No. I didn’t even think about it.”

  The garden was a pretty big place, relatively speaking. The hotel took up an entire city block, after all. And there were a lot of trees and shrubs and bushes packed in there, with narrow flagstone paths winding through them. I wondered if it was possible to get lost in there. I pictured a drunken Papa Larry lumbering around, unable to find his way out.

  “Should I call his name?” June asked as we started along the first path we came to.

  “No, if he’s drinkin’, he’ll know that somebody’s lookin’ forhim and he’s liable to hide,” I said. “There are tables in here. We’ll check them.”

  “What if he’s somewhere in that … that jungle?”

  I thought about it and said, “If we don’t find him at one of the tables, we’ll go back upstairs and look down from my balcony. If he’s in here, we ought to be able to spot him.”

  I didn’t mention having gazed down at the garden earlier, just before I accidentally spotted Callie Madison and Dr. Jeffords. At that time, the only one I’d seen moving around the garden was Dr. Keller. Dr. Powers could have been at one of the tables then, shielded from my view by its umbrella.

  June and I twisted and turned through the garden for a couple of minutes, passing several of the tables where hotel guests sat drinking and talking. At one of the tables, a man and a woman were kissing, but the man wasn’t Papa Larry. As we turned a corner around some flowering bushes, I saw a white-jacketed waiter coming toward us, an empty tray tucked under his arm. He smiled and nodded and stepped aside so that we could get past him on the path.

  I stopped instead and asked him, “Have you seen a big fella sitting alone at one of the tables in here? He’s balding and has a little beard.”

  He didn’t stop smiling as he said, “The hotel staff has a policy of discretion, ma’am–”

  “For God’s sake,” June interrupted. “He’s my father-in-law, not some cheating husband. He’ll be pouring booze down his throat and he has stomach cancer. It could kill him. Now do you want to talk to me about discretion?”

  That shook the smile off the waiter’s face. He half-turned and waved the empty tray in the direction we’d been going along the path. “He’s up there. I just delivered a rum and cola to him. But I swear I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to.”

  I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, but June didn’tlook like she was in any mood to be forgiving. I figured we’d better go on and deal with her father-in-law rather than standing around fussing at a waiter, so I just nodded and said, “Thanks. Come on, June.”

  She glared at the waiter but followed me. We went around a couple more bends in the path, then saw the table in a little open area on the left, with a bright yellow umbrella above it. Dr. Lawrence Powers slouched in a wrought-iron chair that looked like it was bending a little under his weight. He had a half-empty glass in front of him.

  “Papa Larry!” June cried.

  His bleary eyes widened in surprise as he looked at us. Quickly, he lifted the glass to his lips and guzzled down the rest of the drink, even as June hurrie
d forward to try to snatch it out of his hand. She got the glass, but only after it was empty.

  “Too late!” he said triumphantly. “Too late, Junebug!”

  “My God, Papa Larry,” she said, her voice shaking. “You’re drunk.”

  “Gloriously, uproariously drunk, for the first time in ages! And it feels wonderful, you hear me, wonderful! My brain is fueled and lubricated again, girl. You know a brain as creative as mine can’t run on your damned milk!”

  “You old fool,” she said between gritted teeth. “You’re going to kill yourself, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Then I will die a happy man and go to be with my Lucille.” He put both hands flat on the table and went on. “Have you ever been happy, Junebug? Has that cold-blooded son o’ mine ever truly made you happy? I don’t think so. Leastways, I never heard any evidence of it through the walls at night!”

  I had to bite my lip to keep from saying something about how Papa Larry had directed too many Tennessee Williamsplays in his time. He was spouting dialogue that sounded like it came from a play, and not a very good one, at that.

  But the thing of it was, he was drunk, and somebody who’s drunk is usually dead serious. He meant what he was saying, even if he was being overly dramatic about it, and his words found their target, too, because June turned pale with anger and hurt. She said, “Let’s get you back up to your room, Papa Larry. You’re going to be lucky if you wake up in the morning. We’ll need to get you to a doctor tomorrow. I’ll call your oncologist in Atlanta and get a referral–”

  “I don’t need a doctor! I feel fine!”

  I said, “We want to keep you feelin’ fine, Dr. Powers. It’s late, and you need some rest.”