Divas and Dead Rebels, page 1
Trinket and her pals are, once again, caught in the middle of a murder scene…
“Professor Sturgis is dead.”
“Hah!” replied my cousin/best friend/partner in mayhem. “I’m not that lucky.”
“It’s true,” I said as I pointed to her son’s dorm room closet. “Look for yourself. But I warn you—it’s not a pretty sight.”
My warning did not deter Bitty Hollandale from peering into the closet where the dead professor was propped against a shoe rack. She immediately recoiled. “Good lord! I thought you were joking . . . it . . . how horrible!”
I didn’t say “I told you so” although I could have. I was still too rattled myself to take a verbal swing at Bitty. What I’d thought was an untidy pile of clothing tumbling out of the closet turned out to be a professor with whom Bitty had just quarreled that very morning. This was not a good thing.
Bitty peered at him again, and asked after a moment’s silence, “But what is he doing here—in Clayton’s closet?”
“You’re asking me? How would I know?”
“Well, you’re the one who found him.”
I gave myself a mental slap to the forehead. “That doesn’t mean I know how he got here.”
“Fine. So now what do we do?”
Since my previous experience at finding dead men in closets was limited to one, I wasn’t really up on all the protocol involved. So I decided to try what hadn’t happened the last time I’d been presented with a similar scenario: “Leave him right here and call the police.”
Bitty was horrified. “We can’t do that! He has to be found somewhere else.”
I rolled my eyes. Apparently, this time was not going to be much different than the last time. I wasn’t that surprised.
Virginia Brown’s Novels from Bell Bridge Books
The Dixie Divas Mysteries
Dixie Divas
Drop Dead Divas
Dixie Diva Blues
Divas and Dead Rebels
The Blue Suede Memphis Mysteries
Hound Dog Blues
Harley Rushes In
Suspicious Mimes
Return to Fender (2013)
General Mystery/Fiction
Dark River Road
Historical Romance
Comanche Moon
Capture the Wind
Divas and Dead Rebels
Book 4 of the Dixie Diva Mysteries
by
Virginia Brown
Bell Bridge Books
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
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Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-196-8
Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-205-7
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 by Virginia Brown
Hound Dog Blues (excerpt) Copyright © 2004 by Virginia Brown
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
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:Edrd:01:
Chapter 1
“Professor Sturgis is dead.”
“Hah!” replied my cousin/best friend/partner in mayhem. “I’m not that lucky.”
“It’s true,” I said as I pointed to her son’s dorm room closet. “Look for yourself. But I warn you—it’s not a pretty sight.”
My warning did not deter Bitty Hollandale from peering into the closet where the dead professor was propped against a shoe rack. She immediately recoiled. “Good lord! I thought you were joking . . . it . . . how horrible!”
I didn’t say “I told you so” although I could have. I was still too rattled myself to take a verbal swing at Bitty. What I’d thought was an untidy pile of clothing tumbling out of the closet turned out to be a professor with whom Bitty had just quarreled that very morning. This was not a good thing.
Bitty peered at him again, and asked after a moment’s silence, “But what is he doing here—in Clayton’s closet?”
“You’re asking me? How would I know?”
“Well, you’re the one who found him.”
I gave myself a mental slap to the forehead. “That doesn’t mean I know how he got here.”
“Fine. So now what do we do?”
Since my previous experience at finding dead men in closets was limited to one, I wasn’t really up on all the protocol involved. So I decided to try what hadn’t happened the last time I’d been presented with a similar scenario: “Leave him right here and call the police.”
Bitty was horrified. “We can’t do that! He has to be found somewhere else.”
I rolled my eyes. Apparently, this time was not going to be much different than the last time. I wasn’t that surprised.
My name is Trinket Truevine, and my cousin Bitty Hollandale and I have lately made it a habit to become entangled in murder cases. Bitty, who is five-two without her stilettos, likes to claim that if not for her and me and our group of friends known as the Dixie Divas, no murder committed in our hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi would ever get solved. You can imagine how well that goes over with the Holly Springs Police Department.
I had no reason to believe it would be any different with the campus police at Ole Miss in Oxford.
It’s mind-boggling how Bitty and I seem to end up in the company of so many dead people lately. Who would have thought that our visit down to the University of Mississippi would create another scene from Sixth Sense? A phrase from that movie, “I see dead people,” was taking on a whole new meaning.
And now Bitty intended a replay of a past transgression that hadn’t gone well at all. I shook my head rather vigorously.
“No. I’m not doing anything you suggest. I remember how it turned out the last time I found a dead-man-in-a-closet and listened to you. I don’t want to go through the same thing again.”
“For heaven’s sake, Trinket! I was never married to this man. It’s not at all the same thing.”
“Bitty, it’s much too close for comfort.”
She looked bewildered. “Why? This isn’t even in my house. It’s a dorm room.”
“It’s a dorm room that belongs to your sons. People saw or heard you and the professor arguing this morning. Several hours later he’s dead. You know they’ll make that short leap to the next logical conclusion.”
Bitty blinked her baby blue eyes at me. I could tell she hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. Sometimes she does that just to annoy me, but maybe finding her son’s professor—who had just flunked him—dead in Clayton’s closet robbed her of enough common sense to follow the dots.
I sighed. “We really have to call the police, Bitty.”
“Oh no, we don’t,” she said emphatically. “The police might think Clayton had something to do with killing him. You don’t suppose Sturgis died a natural death, do you?”
I made myself look at the body again. It was an ugly sight, and I winced. Professor Sturgis had a wire coat hanger tied so tightly around his neck that it could barely be seen beneath folds of skin. The loop jutted incongruously along his collarbone. His face had turned deep purple, his eyes bulged and his tongue stuck out one side of his mouth. Since his hands were tied with duct tape, I rather doubted it was a natural death.
“No,” I said bluntly. “Not unless he had a heart attack while someone was killing him.”
“Oh.” Bitty looked back at the closet and put her hands on her hips. “Well, can you believe the nerve of that man? Coming here to my son’s room to be murdered!”
“I’ll call the police while you mourn the professor’s loss, dear,” I said dryly. “I hope you can manage to contain your grief long enough to explain to law enforcement that you really didn’t mean any of those things you said to Professor Sturgis outside his office today. Where everyone at Ole Miss could—and probably did—hear you.”
She looked thoughtful. I hoped she intended to give in and do the rational thing. I should have known better. After a short silence, during which I was sure I smelled smoke and heard the faint crackle and pop of brain waves, she crossed the room and seized a canvas-sided bin like those motels use for dirty laundry. This one had Motel 6 printed on white canvas in bold black letters. It had probably been confiscated from the motel by a student. There could be any number of reasons it had ended up in her sons’ dorm room.
“Here, Trinket,” she said, and rolled it right up to the closet. “Help me get him into this laundry cart. He’s not that tall. He should fit, don’t you think?”
“I’m not doing this,” I said. “This is obstruction and tampering with evidence and disturbing a crime scene and probably a half dozen more charges.”
“Don’t be silly. No one will ever know he was even in here if we move him somewhere else.”
< br /> “And where do you suggest? In front of the Lyceum? Out in The Grove?” I said, naming two very public areas of the large campus. “This isn’t Weekend at Bernie’s, you know. We can’t haul around a dead man as if he were still alive.”
“This is no time to be talking about movies. Here. You take his legs, and I’ll get his . . . oh, his . . . well, maybe we should just wrap him in a blanket or something before we stuff him in the cart.”
“I . . . am . . . not . . . moving . . . him.”
Bitty ignored my carefully enunciated refusal. She tugged at Professor Sturgis until she managed to get him a few inches out of the closet. I recited one of the police codes I’ve memorized about tampering with evidence. Bitty dropped the professor’s feet to the floor. I quoted police code about disturbing a crime scene. Bitty took the blanket off one of the twin beds and draped it over Sturgis. I mentioned obstruction charges. Bitty rolled Sturgis up in the blanket and tucked in one end like a burrito.
By that time she was panting. Her blonde hair stuck to perspiration at her temples and neck. She straightened up and looked at me where I stood with my arms crossed over my chest and my mouth set in a determined line.
Her eyes narrowed, and I swear they turned as red as her scarlet lipstick. I thought for a second I saw steam come out of her ears. Then she said, “If you don’t help me get him out of here so my son doesn’t get charged with murder, I’ll tell everyone in Holly Springs that in our senior year you got so nervous when Danny Ray Bell tried to give you a hickey on the neck that you threw up on him.”
I shrugged. “So? Do you think anyone will care what happened thirty-five years ago?”
Bitty looked disgusted. “You have no shame. I’d just die if something like that was said about me.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You’d lie your way out of it.”
“True.” She thought a moment, then a smile of pure evil curved her collagen-filled lips. “Help me, or I’ll buy your parents two round trip tickets to Cairo.”
“Illinois or Egypt?”
“What do you think?”
I gasped. “You wouldn’t!”
“Try me. They’d love riding a camel along the Nile.”
I narrowed my eyes at her, but she didn’t back down a bit. She knows how to get to me, and using my parents—who are reliving their youth and forgetting their bodies are still pretty much in their seventies—was a very effective threat. I went for cajolery: “Bitty—think about it. We aren’t in Marshall County. We’re in Lafayette County. This is Oxford, not Holly Springs. We don’t know the local police here. If you move this body and get caught, you’re liable to end up in jail.”
“I’m less likely to get caught if I have someone helping me,” she said tartly. “And besides, do you really want your nephew to be blamed for something he didn’t do?”
“Of course not. But neither do I want his aunt—me—to go to jail for something she got caught doing.”
Technically, her twin sons are my second cousins. In the South we find it much easier to refer to such close blood relatives as aunt, uncle, niece or nephew rather than go through tortuous explanations. Not that Bitty always observes the finer points.
“Don’t be selfish, Trinket. Here. Grab his feet.”
I looked down at Professor Sturgis. For a smallish man, he had really big feet. Or big shoes, anyway. They stuck out from under the blue plaid blanket, cordovan wingtips with the scuffed soles showing a lot of wear. There was no way I wanted to touch him.
When I stood there staring, Bitty said, “Oh for heaven’s sake, Trinket. When did you get so squeamish? Here. I’ll cover him up so nothing shows. We’ve got to hurry and get him out of here before someone else shows up. Otherwise, it’ll be a big mess.”
“It’s going to end up in a big mess anyway, Bitty. Trust me. I know these things.”
“As long as it’s a big mess somewhere besides my sons’ dorm room, I don’t care. Now, are you going to help me or not?”
I wanted to say “or not,” but I didn’t. That’s a big character flaw of mine; I don’t always act in my own best interests.
After Bitty had Professor Sturgis completely covered from view, I found myself hefting him off the floor as far as I could get him. Don’t ever wonder if the phrase “dead weight” isn’t realistic. I can relate from my own experience that an inert object such as a corpse is heavy, bulky and troublesome to move around.
Bitty and I huffed, puffed, muttered really ugly words, and finally got the former professor up and over the side of the laundry cart. Then Bitty dropped her end. He didn’t sink down into the cart as we had hoped. Instead, Professor Sturgis contrarily stuck over the side like a tree limb. Apparently, after death the body goes through profound alterations. Like rigor mortis. The professor’s covered head and shoulders caught on one side of the cart while his feet and ankles jutted out on the other side. He’d become a straight, nearly inflexible plank.
Bitty looked exasperated. “Isn’t it too soon for him to be so . . . rigid?”
I counted back the hours since we’d last seen him. Somehow, in the time between our noisy encounter with the professor and our unpleasant discovery of him, he’d been murdered. “Six hours, more or less,” I replied. “Time enough, it seems.”
“Well,” said Bitty. “What do we do now?”
“Call the police,” I suggested again, even though I knew she’d ignore me.
She did. I could almost see the cartoon light bulb go on over her head.
“I know . . . we can pile up laundry all around him so that it looks like we just have a lot of dirty stuff to wash. Help me strip these beds. Oh, and we can use the boys’ clothes as filler if necessary.”
“Why not packing peanuts? Then we can just wrap this entire contraption up in brown paper and mail it to an address in New Guinea.”
I swear, I think Bitty actually considered it for a moment before shaking her blonde head so hard I heard her teeny, tiny little brain rattling around inside all that space.
“Won’t work. Unless we stick him in a freezer, he’s liable to start drawing flies fairly soon.”
“Bitty, really—aren’t you being terribly inconsiderate with Professor Sturgis? I mean, he’s dead, Bitty. Murdered. Someone killed him right here in your sons’ dorm room, and you’re acting more like he’s an inconvenience than a victim.”
Busily stripping sheets and blankets off twin beds, Bitty didn’t answer for a minute. She piled the linens atop Sturgis and stuffed what she could down into the cart so that it looked overflowing. Then she leaned so far into the cart that her voice sounded like it came from a deep well: “Yes, Trinket. I have thought about the professor’s untimely death. But if I dwell on it, I won’t be able to do what’s necessary to keep my son from being accused of his murder. I have to prevent that first.”
I had to say it. Someone would eventually, and it’d be best coming from me.
“But what if Brandon or Clayton did kill him?”
Bitty never paused in tucking linens around the body. “They didn’t. I’m sure of it. For one thing, I doubt Sturgis was killed in here at all.”
“And how did you come to that conclusion?”
“Because,” said Bitty as she straightened up and looked at me, “Sturgis has a wire coat hanger tight around his neck, and my boys don’t use those. They have only wooden hangers in their closets. See?”
When she pointed, I looked and saw that she was right. Not a single wire hanger could be seen.
I nodded. “Very good, Holmes. You’re getting better at this deduction stuff.”
“Thank you, Doctor Watson. Now here—help me push this cart out into the hall.”
That’s how I found myself pushing a dead professor in a stolen laundry cart down a hallway to an elevator. As luck would have it, a student caught the elevator doors right before they could close and slipped inside to stand next to us. I focused on shiny walls and what was probably a hidden camera in the ceiling, while Bitty flashed the young man a smile. She can’t help herself. She was born a belle. Belles flirt with any unrelated male of all ages, whether they even mean to or not. Of course, it wasn’t a flirtation of the come-on, sexual type; Bitty may be many things, but she’s not a pervert or deviant. We are in our early, early fifties, after all, and the student was around the age of her sons, in his late teens or early twenties.
