Grand Ole Opry Murders, page 7
“I heard somebody breathing on the other end and thought it was some pervert who found out where I was staying. I started to cuss him out but then he—she—spoke.”
“He? She? Which was it?”
“I couldn’t tell. It was weird ... whoever it was had to be disguising his—her voice. Anyway, the caller said, ‘Look under your door,’ then hung up.”
“So you were meant to see the note right away,” I said, pointing to the slip of paper.
“Uh-huh. It was under the door. Here—take a look at it.”
She held the paper out. I took it and opened it up.
The handwriting, a childlike scrawl, was in pencil. It read:
Old City Cemetery—now.
Urgent. Rawlings Sanders.
“Do you know anybody by that name?” I asked. The question seemed to amuse Dolly.
“Silly!” She laughed. “Rawlings Sanders didn’t write the note; it’s the name on a tombstone! You Yankees don’t know anything!” She grew serious once more. “Whoever wrote this must want me to meet him at the Sanders monument.”
“Whoever wrote this?” I echoed, amazed. “You must recognize the handwriting!”
She shook her head. “I don’t. Do you?”
“No, I don’t, but you can’t look me in the eye and say you don’t know who wrote this!”
“But I’m telling you I don’t know!”
“It doesn’t make sense! Nobody would expect you to respond to a wild request like this unless he was pretty sure you’d know who sent the message.”
Dolly studied her hands and avoided meeting my gaze. “I ... I’m not sure,” she said after a brief silence. “I don’t want to say until I’m positive ...
“All right, then ... but what do you want me to do?”
“Please come with me, Gene,” she said, putting a hand on my arm. “I’m scared to go there alone.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Are you nuts, Dolly? You’re not really thinking of obeying this thing, are you? You’re liable to end up like Amanda!”
“I know it’s dangerous, but I have to go! If I can find out who killed my sister! ...
“It’s insane! You’d better turn this note over to the police!”
“No! I won’t!” She stopped, a sudden hardness appearing in her eyes. But Dolly was instantly contrite. “I’m sorry, Gene, I’m just very upset, you understand.”
I nodded. She looked into my eyes, raised a hand to my cheek and gently caressed it. “Please,” she pleaded, “please go with me ...
I tried to say no, but Dolly’s delicate lips framed the word “please” again.
“All right,” I murmured, “I’ll come with you.”
She whispered, “Thank you,” as our lips came close together, and met. It was a long time before we ended our embrace.
14
DOLLY PUT ON A LACY white blouse and a pair of black satin pants that I couldn’t take my eyes off. She slung a bag over her arm and was ready.
I got behind the wheel, wondering what the hell to do about our tail. Should I shake it? But if it were the police, they’d know I’d done it deliberately, and that might cause complications later. On the other hand, it wasn’t going to look too cute to them, either, leading them to the gates of a graveyard. I ended up doing nothing. If the cops decided to horn in on our nocturnal expedition, Dolly would simply have to show them the note, that’s all there was to it.
I parked the Thunderbird on Fourth Avenue South and followed Dolly to the cemetery’s main entrance on Oak Street. The night was chilly and river fog still clung to the ground. Dolly had brought a sweater with her, which was smart. As we stopped in front of the low iron gates of the cemetery, she wrapped the garment around her shoulders.
Though the gates were locked, they weren’t high and the iron fence on either side of the massive stone pillars in which the gates were set looked easy to climb.
“Do you think we could shinny over that?” Dolly asked, pointing to the fence. I nodded. She walked over to it, telling me to give her a boost, and I did. A few seconds later, we were both standing inside the cemetery. Dolly clasped my hand and drew me close. I could feel her shivering.
A wide central path stretched arrow-straight into the depths of the graveyard; it was lit by street lamps that shone feebly in the mist. The scene reminded me of the sinister Avenue of the Dead in Middle Eastern fantasies.
We walked down the broad main thoroughfare, hand in hand. It ran about five hundred feet before it reached a circular parking lot in front of a massive central administration building that loomed ominously out of the fog. There was no breeze at all, and the only sounds disturbing the stillness were footsteps and the sibilant whisper of our breath.
“That’s where we’re going,” Dolly said, pointing to the right. “The Ann Rawlings Sanders grave is just off the circle, practically next to the flagpole.”
“Who was she?”
“She was a girl who used to meet her lover on a bluff overlooking the Cumberland. The two of them got into a lovers’ quarrel, and she leaped into the river and died. You’ll see the rock she jumped from: They used it for her tombstone.”
We continued to walk. When we reached the parking circle, Dolly tugged me gently and I followed her around the right-hand perimeter of the curve. I saw a massive unhewn gravestone in the distance and asked Dolly if that was it.
“Yes,” she replied, “but I don’t see anybody waiting for me.”
“Neither do I.” In spite of the fog, visibility was somewhat better at the grave because floodlights were trained up on the stone, bathing the area in a frozen mortuary glare. On top of the monument a metal frame that looked a little like a pagoda had been mounted. In it was suspended a wrought-iron lantern.
“The lamp,” said Dolly, “was put there by Ann’s lover because she’d always been afraid of the dark. They used to light it every night and extinguish it in the morning, but now they use spotlights. I don’t think that’s nearly as nice ...
She leaned against a nearby tree trunk. I stood next to her, bracing palm-flat against the bole with one hand. A cricket shrilled, then was still. We waited a long while. The only noises were the suspiration of our breath and the occasional muted rumble of a distant vehicle. At last, Dolly looked in my eyes. She smiled.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
We looked at each other for a moment, and then we kissed.
“I guess,” said Dolly, a long time later, “nobody is going to show up.”
“The fact that I’m here may be keeping them off.”
“Uh-huh. I thought of that.”
“Well, what do you think? Should we go back to the motel? You’ve got a busy day ahead of you.”
“Give it another ten minutes,” said Dolly, looking at her watch.
“Okay. While we’re waiting, let’s talk.”
“About what?” she asked. I hesitated. Dolly looked at me quizzically. She touched my cheek gently with the tips of her fingers. “What about, Gene?” she whispered.
“About you and Josh.”
Her delicate caress became a brittle touch.
“Why did you split up?”
“Why does anything come to an end?” she asked. The warmth had left her voice. “One day you’re in love, the next day everything is bleak, dead—who knows why?” She turned away. I saw her begin to tremble. Opening her purse, Dolly rummaged inside, withdrew a hip flask half-full of amber liquid. She unscrewed the top, gestured with the bottle and raised it to her lips. “I snitched it,” she confided, then took a small sip and passed it to me. I never got my hands on it. Dolly’s eyes suddenly widened and a look of horror appeared in them. She snatched away the flask and began to back off.
“Dolly, what’s the matter?”
“Don’t come near!” she said in a choked voice, then whirled and swung the flask against a gravestone with all her might. Splinters flew in every direction, yet she continued to dash the bottle against the marker until there was nothing left but the jagged neck, which she ground against the granite, pulverizing the glass.
“Dolly!” I yelled. “What’s wrong?”
The last shard fell from her fingers, and she dropped to her knees. Slipping off a shoe, she began pounding the larger fragments of glass into powder. She cut herself several times and her wrist and fingers grew wet with blood.
I grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her to her feet. She threw her arms around me and clung as tightly as she could, sobbing. She shook uncontrollably.
“Gene,” she cried, “the liquor—it’s burning my throat ... Then she started to gasp for breath.
I picked up Dolly in my arms, and she clutched my shirt so tightly that it pinched. Her bloody fingers made a crimson smear on the cloth.
Dolly’s body was feather light. I carried her as quickly as I could, staggering back down the Avenue of the Dead toward the main entrance. She hung limp and lifeless in my arms ...
“Halt!”
As I reached the gate, two figures suddenly appeared out of the fog and blocked my path. I found myself standing face to face with a pair of uniformed patrolmen.
15
I COULD HAVE KISSED them both.
“Quick!” I gasped, “we’ve got to get her to a hospital! She’s been poisoned!”
I carried Dolly to the patrol wagon and one of the cops opened up the door for me. I handed the other the keys to the Thunderbird and a few seconds later, both cars headed off for Nashville General.
They took her to the emergency room. In other circumstances, the usual red tape might have held us up, but the combined facts that it was a police escort and that the patient was Dolly Boulder got the hospital staff hopping; I answered the questions while they put Dolly on a table and wheeled her out.
A few minutes later, Joe Cass arrived. His eyes were heavy with interrupted sleep, while his hair was a rumpled mess. The deputy was in no mood to be friendly. “What in holy hell where you doing breaking into that cemetery in the middle of the night?” he demanded.
I outlined the events of the evening for him. The look of disbelief grew upon his face as I talked, but I really couldn’t blame him. I probably wouldn’t have bought it, either, if I were him.
“That’s a pip of a story!” he said when I was finished. Turning to one of the patrolmen who had escorted Dolly to the emergency room, Cass ordered him back to the graveyard to verify the business about the bottle.
“Get whatever you can in the way of splinters. Have the lab run a check on prints,” Cass told the cop, who left at little less than a run.
Cass regarded me sourly. “The chances of getting a usable print are about zilch,” he grumbled. “Why the hell would she want to go and smash it? It’s crazy!”
“Not if she were trying to protect somebody.”
“Yeah,” he said. “For all I know, you were the one who really knocked it apart.”
“Me?”
“You come running out of the cemetery with a sick girl in your arms. You say she swallowed poison, then broke the bottle so nobody could identify its owner. We’ve only got your word for it ...
“Look, Joe—don’t make things so complicated. I knew damn well you were tailing us. Would I try anything stupid?”
“You might, figuring we’d have to believe your story, since it’d be too wild for anyone to invent and imagine he could get away with.”
I waved a deprecating hand at him. “Joe, you’re just pissed because they hauled you out of bed. Why don’t you check on the note? That’ll confirm my story.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a man over at the motel looking for it.”
“It’s not at the motel! I saw Dolly put it in her bag while we were riding over in the car.”
“Well, it’s not there now.”
“What?”
“Either everything you’re telling me is a bunch of crap, or else Dolly wanted to make absolutely certain that nobody would know, who was after her. There was no note in her bag.”
Cass was sitting on a wooden bench beneath a large circular clock that read 4:15. I got up and began to pace.
“Maybe if you can get me writing samples of the rest of the Clan’s handwriting,” I said, “I could identify who wrote the note—I can still see it pretty clearly in my mind.”
“Uh-huh,” Cass said unenthusiastically. “And another thing about this note story—”
“Now what?”
“We’ve had every one of you under observation. If somebody slipped that note under Dolly’s door, he must have been invisible.”
“You’ve kept tabs on all the Boulders and—?”
“And—except for Pearl—they all were either in their rooms since two o’clock, or are otherwise accounted for.”
I asked him to run it down for me, which he did. Josh left Tootsie’s to get Pearl at the Opry, let himself in with a key through the back door of the Ryman, stayed for fifteen minutes, left alone; he drove back to the Ramada, went to his room, hadn’t been seen since. Brian, observed waiting outside Hilary’s room, later returned to his own room. Samson hit several bars after Tootsie’s, finally sacking out in the VW bus. Pearl was missing. She was seen entering the Opry, but not leaving it. Cass admitted she might have got out another way without his man knowing.
A phone call for Cass came as he was finishing off the catalog of the Clan’s whereabouts. He listened for a few seconds, then hung up.
“Okay,” he said, “they found the glass like you said—smashed to hell except for one or two chips that might be big enough to get a couple of prints from.”
“So you’re starting to believe me?”
“Who said?” Cass grunted. “It’s easier to give you the benefit of the doubt. For now.”
Two minutes later, the other cop called in to say that the note in the strange handwriting was not in Dolly’s bedroom. I could have told him that without looking.
“Can you make a guess,” the deputy asked, “who Dolly is protecting?”
I shook my head. “She’s fiercely loyal to the Clan, but there’s a limit to how far a person will turn the other cheek. It doesn’t make sense.” I held up a finger to make a point. “Now that I think of it, Joe, we can’t even really assume that Dolly was the intended victim. She said she ‘snitched’ the flask. Maybe it was meant for someone else, but she drank it by accident ...
“Okay,” said the policeman, “but how about that note? If that wasn’t a lure, what is? Who wrote it? What was the reasoning behind it—assuming that there really was a note.” I began to protest but he gestured impatiently. “The worst thing about it, Gene, is that there’s no way it could have been slipped under her door. She would have seen it when she entered the room. Afterward nobody was observed near the door until the time you showed up. Now, go figure that out!”
I couldn’t. We not only had a poison that left no trace, but also a mysterious note-writer who apparently could become invisible at will.
“Have you gotten any results,” I asked, “on the nature of the poison?”
He shook his head. “It’s a real bitch—we had to send a specimen out to a lab upstate: They’ve got a computer that’s supposed to be able to read out just about any toxin. All we can do is wait.”
“How long?”
“Today. Tomorrow. When it comes, it comes.”
Cass’s philosophy was no help in coping with Dolly’s illness. Every passing orderly got the third degree from me, but none of them knew how she was doing. At last, I decided I might just as well wait in ignorance at the motel as at the hospital. I left the phone number with the night nurse in case she received news of Dolly’s condition within the next few hours.
It was 5:30 when I got into the Thunderbird and drove back to the Ramada. I didn’t return to my room. I hated to admit it, but I needed Hilary’s help.
I pounded on her door for several minutes before I could rouse her. When she heard it was me, she cursed and told me to beat it, but I stood my ground and eventually she opened the door.
A stream of invective greeted me at first, but then she saw me and faltered. “What in hell happened to you?” she asked. “You look awful!”
“Can I come in?”
She nodded and opened the door. The room was dark, and Hilary was wearing nothing but a short, see-through negligee, all rose lace and silk. “I don’t have a robe,” she said, “so you’ll have to pardon how I look. You’ve seen women before.”
I was too tired to pay more than passing notice. I started in on the events of the evening, omitting no detail. When I was finished, she sat quietly on the edge of the bed, regarding me curiously.
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
“If Dolly pulls out of this, there’s liable to be another attempt on her life. If she doesn’t, I want whoever did it.”
“Let me get this straight: You’re asking me to meddle in the Clan’s private tragedies? Aren’t you afraid I’ll turn everything into a big intellectual game?”
“Hilary,” I said earnestly, resting my hands on her shoulders, “I feel rotten for what I said last night. I was an S.O.B., I admit it.”
“Please don’t touch me,” she said, looking at my hands on her shoulders. Hilary rose, walked to the dresser, squeezing the knuckles of one hand in the other.
“All right,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “It’s obvious you care enough about her to swallow your pride. I’ll try not to take advantage. Now the first thing we need to know is where Dolly got the hip flask. Next, where’s Pearl? Third, bring me the press clippings.”
“What about Brian?” I asked. “Did he have anything valuable to tell you last night?”
“Oh, not much,” Hilary drawled, “only that Josh and Pearl have been bedmates for months. That Amanda spent six months in a rest home after her husband died. She tried to kill herself, used to have hysterics if anybody even said the word ‘picnic’ in front of her. What else? Charlie Lisle is gay, hates women, wants Samson’s body. Samson never says yes—or no. Josh walked out on Dolly because she used to make him punch a time clock—which is the third answer I’ve gotten to that question. Finally, Brian thinks Amanda was going to marry Josh out of spite.”
