Strange Brew Part 13

Dubberly Brothers Mortuary was easy to spot. It was the second-biggest building in town. The biggest, the Pulaski County Courthouse, was conveniently right across the street. The funeral home was a sprawling three-story white clapboard affair, with sagging white columns and a wraparound front porch. A pair of dispirited palm trees flanked the front walkway leading to the porch, where two men in dark suits stood looking out at the street, chatting and smoking.

Of course, the clock in the Lincoln didn't work and, as usual, I wasn't wearing a watch. It turned out I didn't need one. As I was nosing the Lincoln into a parking s.p.a.ce in front of the courthouse, chimes began pealing out. Past the towering magnolia trees on the lawn, past the Confederate memorial with its cross-eyed Robert E. Lee and startled Stonewall Jackson, a bell tower had been built onto the old stucco courthouse. One, two, three, it finally chimed out fourteen times. Two o'clock. I was right on time.

Edna heard the chimes first. She woke with a start, sat up, stretched, looked around. "We there already?"

"Miss Baby, Miss Sister," I called, turning around to look at the girls.

"What's that?" Sister said. "Where we at?"

Baby yawned and covered her mouth. "This Hawkinsville. Remember, Sister, we come to Hawkinsville for the Eastern Star district meeting, long time ago."

"You talkin' about when Mama was inducted as Wors.h.i.+pful Matron?" Sister said, blinking. "Was that 1967 or 1968?"

"Girls," I said urgently. "I've got to go on into the memorial service now. I'll probably be an hour or so."

Edna unfastened her seat belt. "Go ahead on," she directed me. "The girls and I want to get some lunch, find the best place to buy pecans. We'll take the car, come back and pick you up."

The men on the front porch at Dubberly Brothers stopped talking when they saw the four of us, two white women and two black women, in the huge yellow Lincoln. They kept on smoking, but they didn't bother to hide their stares. It was still a small town, and this was still the Deep South. We must have looked like their idea of a traveling sideshow.

I had an idea.

"You want to do a little detecting, maybe?"

"Yes, ma'am," Sister said, punching Baby's arm. "You hear that? We gone do some private investigating for Callahan."

"You think I'll need a gun?" Edna asked, her hand straying to the bruises on her neck.

"This isn't Dodge City, Ma," I said. "I just want you all to do what you do naturally at home. Poke around town. Give folks a chance to gossip about Virginia Lee Mincey and Broward Poole and his son Jackson. Broward Poole's murder was probably the biggest news to ever hit this town. See what you can find out about their lawyer, too, a woman named Catherine Rhyne."

Edna and the girls nodded in unison. Then Edna held out her hands. I put the car keys in them, but she left her hand extended. "We'll need expense money," she said.

I got out my wallet.

"Twenty apiece would be nice," she added.

I winced but handed over the money and got out of the car. Edna slid over to the driver's side. "See you in a couple hours," she said, waving as she pulled away from the curb.

The front room of the Dubberly Brothers Mortuary smelled like Easter lilies and breath mints. The walls were painted a dark forest green, the carpet was green with little pink flowers, and a tiled fireplace had a gas fire going unnecessarily with the room temperature hovering at eighty-five degrees. With its spindly reproduction Early American settees and chairs and polished mahogany tables, Dubberly Brothers reminded me of a Holiday Inn lobby in Hahira. Only instead of listing wedding receptions and business meetings, the discreet black easel displayed the day's schedule of funerals. Neely, eleven A.M., Dogwood Parlour, Carden, twelve-thirty P.M., Magnolia Room, Mincey, two P.M., Cherokee Rose Room.

I suppressed the desire to tiptoe, and instead walked down the thickly carpeted main hallway. Each of the doors opening off the hall had small bra.s.s nameplates beside it. Dogwood, Azalea, Camellia, and at the end of the hall, the Cherokee Rose Room, whose door was slightly ajar.

The Cherokee Rose Room must have been Dubberly Brothers' smallest chapel. A balding man in a black clerical collar stood behind a wooden lectern. Over near the wall stood a silver-colored coffin draped with an arrangement of white and pink carnations. There were three other small flower arrangements, but it was the carnations that nearly made me choke. Pink carnations for Wuvvy? Red hibiscus would have been better. Or sunflowers, big as a dinner plate.

Four women sat in the middle row of folding chairs. Three of them were elderly, with carefully curled white hair, sensible shoes, and flowered Sunday school dresses. The fourth woman was my age, maybe a little older. She wore a well-tailored chalk-striped navy blue business suit that probably cost more than the sum total of my whole wardrobe of "good" stuff, and she was staring down at her hands, which she'd folded in her lap.

The minister cleared his throat, read a pa.s.sage of Scripture.

"Virginia Lee Mincey is with our precious Lord," he said. "She is perfect in his eyes. She is forgiven."

n.o.body in the room cried, n.o.body coughed. The old ladies nodded their heads in unison; the younger one, whom I a.s.sumed to be Catherine Rhyne, sat still as a statue.

I heard the door open behind me and turned, along with the others, to see who the latecomer was.

Hap Rudabaugh slid into a seat on the aisle in the back row, nodded in my direction, then fixed his eyes on the minister. The old ladies frowned at the sight of him; ponytails and Hawaiian s.h.i.+rts probably weren't de rigueur for funerals in Hawkinsville, but for Hap, who'd left off his customary hiking shorts and flip-flops, this was the equivalent of black tie and tails.

We'd all just settled ourselves again when there was another stir from the back of the room. Now we all frowned in unison.

It took me a while to put the face with the correct name and context. I'd last seen the woman edging past Hap into the next chair at the Blind Possum brewmaster's dinner. Anna Frisch's long auburn hair hung down her back, she was dressed in a perfectly stunning long-sleeved eggplant-colored dress that swirled around her ankles, and she looked as exotic in this setting as an orchid in a pumpkin patch.

Geez, I thought, we could have had a car pool with all this crowd from Atlanta. I spent the next fifteen minutes considering all the possibilities in this roomful of mourners.

It wasn't all that odd that Hap had showed up for Wuvvy's service. He and Wuvvy had been longtime friends, neighbors in the tight-knit Little Five Points community. Wuvvy had accused Hap of selling her out, but that seemed like a long time ago now.

Anna Frisch was a different story. Blind Possum had made a displaced person of Wuvvy, and Wuvvy had probably killed Jackson Poole, Anna's colleague and a co-owner of Blind Possum. What was she doing here?

"Amen," the pastor said. I jerked my head up. The others were standing, milling around and talking quietly. Even Hap edged forward and spoke to the minister, shaking his hand.

Anna Frisch and I were the only ones to hang back. She slipped out of the room and was waiting in the hallway when I followed a few seconds later.

"Your friend, Sergeant Deavers, told me you'd be here," she said quietly. "I hoped I'd see you."

"You could see me in Atlanta if you needed to," I said. "Why here?"

She looked around. We could hear faint voices inside the Cherokee Rose Room.

"This isn't the best place to talk," she said.

"Then call me when you get back to Atlanta," I said, annoyed.

"No..." She hesitated. "All right. I came down because I've got to find out what really happened to Jackson. Deavers says Virginia Lee Mincey killed Jackson. And then killed herself. And that she was his stepmother. It's just unbelievable, all of it. Jackson never talked about this stuff. I didn't know his father had been killed, or that his stepmother had gone to prison."

She took a deep breath. There was a water cooler on the wall, the kind with the little paper cups. She got herself a cup, filled it, and drank the water in one long gulp.

"Why do you care?" I asked, deliberately blunt.

"It's not good business to get involved with somebody you work with," she said dispa.s.sionately. "Especially in the food business. But it happened. We kept it to ourselves. And I guess Jackson kept a lot of things to himself that I didn't know about."

"He never told you about his childhood?"

"Just that he'd lived in a small town in south Georgia and had been sent to boarding school in Virginia when he was in fifth grade. We didn't get around to talking about our pasts. What we were doing was so exciting, we were caught up in that. Opening a new business, starting a new relations.h.i.+p, all that was pretty intense."

"That still doesn't tell me why you came down here," I said. "Had you ever met Wuvvy?"

"I'd never even heard of her until Jackson was killed," Anna said. "Jackson said the tenant at Little Five Points didn't want to move out, so he got our lawyers busy with it. Every day we delay opening there costs us money."

"And you came down here because...?" I prompted.

"Something wasn't right," Anna said. "Jackson called me Halloween afternoon. That woman, Wuvvy, was making a big stink, he said, but there was something else. He wanted to see about it himself. He was supposed to come by my place later that night."

Two of the Sunday school ladies came slowly out of the chapel, clinging to each other's arm, as though they were slightly tipsy. Their thick-soled shoes squeaked with each cautious step, and Anna gave them a brief smile before she resumed talking in a near whisper.

"I still don't understand what you were hoping to achieve down here," I said.

"What about you?"

"I found Jackson Poole's body," I said. "And I talked to Wuvvy. She insisted she didn't kill him. If she did kill herself, I'd like to know why."

"n.o.body's paying you to do this?"

"No."

Anna's gaze followed the women as they wobbled toward the front door. "I'll pay you," she said. "Find out who killed Jackson. And why." She glanced down at her watch. "The funeral home director gave me directions to the house where Jackson grew up. I want to drive by there. He said it was in the middle of a pecan grove. Jackson used to talk about climbing this one tree. It was supposed to be over a hundred years old. I want to see it."

"Was there a funeral for him?" I asked. If there was, Bucky hadn't mentioned it. Or maybe I was too busy to look for the notice in the newspaper.

"No," she said. "He wasn't into that kind of thing. Jackson liked the idea of cremation. It was efficient. He liked efficiency."

She blinked rapidly, looked at her watch. "I've got to get going. I need to be on the road by four-thirty. Got to get back to Roswell to check on a new batch of hefeweizen, and talk about some menu changes with the chef. Will you do it?"

I needed three more house cleaners, four more hours in every day, a full-time bodyguard for my mother, quality time to spend with Mac. The last thing I needed was a murder investigation. But I knew enough about myself to know I'd pick at this thing like a bad scab, anyway. If Anna Frisch wanted to pay me to satisfy my own morbid curiosity, who was I to argue?

"Wuvvy probably did kill your boyfriend," I said. "She probably did kill herself, too. There's probably not much more to it than that. And I don't know a d.a.m.n thing about microbreweries."

"I know enough for both of us," she said, handing me a business card. "Call me when you get back to Atlanta."

18.

Hap came out of the chapel, spotted me, and walked rapidly toward the water cooler, where I was hanging out, waiting for him.

"It's over now, right?" he said, tugging at the narrow black necktie he'd worn with the Hawaiian s.h.i.+rt. "No cemetery or anything, right? Man, it's been a long time since I been to a funeral."

"I got the feeling burial was going to be private," I told him. "Yeah, I'd say it's over."

He yanked the necktie off, opened the drawer of the polished wooden end table nearby, and stashed the tie there.

"Poor old Wuvvy," he said. "Right back where she started. Man, she'd have hated that s.h.i.+t in there. She always said when she went she wanted a big party. No crying, just full-tilt boogie. Who were those people in there, anyway?"

"Old friends, I guess. You didn't know any of them?"

"I don't know anybody who lives outside I-285, Callahan."

"You'd think if Wuvvy meant to kill herself, she'd have written down some specific instructions, about a party instead of a funeral, that kind of thing," I said.

Hap smiled fondly. "Wuvvy was big on ideas, short on follow-through. But what do you mean, if? You don't think she committed suicide?"

The minister came strolling out of the funeral chapel, Catherine Rhyne's arm linked through his. Her eyes swept over us, but she kept going.

I needed to talk to her. But I wanted to talk to Hap, too, away from the noise and commotion at the Yacht Club. "Are you going straight back to Atlanta?" I asked.

"I ain't sticking around here," Hap said emphatically. "This was all Miranda's idea. She would have come, too, but it's our delivery day, and somebody's got to be at the bar. Small towns make me nervous. I keep expecting some hayseed sheriff's deputy to pull me over and tell me, 'You in a heap a trouble, boy.' They probably strip-search people down here for jaywalking."

Catherine Rhyne had stopped at the end of the hallway, in deep discussion with the minister. I wanted to catch her before she left Dubberly Brothers. It was time to abandon my normal tact and ask the questions I needed to ask.

"Did Miranda know about you and Wuvvy?"

Hap did a double take. "What about us?"

It was a guess, but a good one. "I heard things. A long time ago."

He shook his head. "I ain't believing this. Everybody in Little Five Points f.u.c.ked Wuvvy. That's what she was like. If Wuvvy liked you, she slept with you. It didn't mean anything. I have no idea whether or not Miranda knew about it. Not that she'd care."

"Did Wuvvy get in contact with you? After Jackson Poole was murdered? While she was hiding out?"

"No. And I didn't go looking for her, either. Wuvvy was out of control. To tell you the truth, we were kind of nervous, with her running around loose like that. She killed a dude 'cause she thought he'd ruined her life. Maybe she would have come after me and Miranda next. She had that weird conspiracy idea in her head, you know. Everybody was out to get her."

"Somebody did."

Hap's mouth tightened. "That's why you're down here. You don't give a d.a.m.n about Wuvvy. You just gotta play private eye. Who hired you to do that?"

"A seeker of truth," I said whimsically.

"s.h.i.+t," he said. He was still shaking his head as he walked down the hallway. He shoved the front door of Dubberly Brothers Mortuary open, let it close with a resounding bang that made me jump. It was probably the loudest noise they'd heard in here in a long, long time.

Catherine Rhyne was sitting in one of the straight-backed chairs in the front parlor. The room was stifling, but she didn't seem to notice. She stood up as I approached, put out a hand to shake mine.

"h.e.l.lo. Ah'm Catherine Rhyne," she said. The accent was pure South Georgia, thick and sweet as cane syrup, but it spoke of finis.h.i.+ng school, not technical school. "Thank you for coming today. Were you a friend of Virginia's?"

"Yes," I said. It was simpler that way. "She asked me to help her. When the police thought she killed Jackson Poole. But I couldn't. I didn't know how. And then she was dead."

"Good Lord," she said, taking half a step away from me. "Who are you? Why would Virginia want your help?"

Catherine Rhyne was shorter and slimmer than I, with thick dark brown hair that fell to her shoulders and stayed where she meant it to stay. Her eyes were bright blue, and her eyebrows were penciled in a determined arch. The beginnings of dewlaps around her chin told me she was older than she liked to admit, older than I, for sure.

I handed her one of my business cards. The private investigator one, not the House Mouse card.

She read it, knit her eyebrows together. "Virginia told me she'd tried to hire you. But I got the impression you turned her down. It's too late now, don't you think?"

"For Wuvvy, yes. But I have a client who wants to know who killed Jackson Poole and why. And I'd like to know why Wuvvy died. There's still time for the truth, if somebody cares enough."

"Don't call her Wuvvy," Catherine said, cringing. "Her name was Virginia Lee. Did she owe you money? If you'll submit a bill to my office, I'll see what I can do about paying you. There's not really an estate. She didn't have any insurance or anything. But I'm trying to settle her debts. It's the decent thing to do."

I'd been staring at her as she talked. She looked familiar. I thought maybe I'd seen her around Atlanta, a courthouse maybe. She certainly looked like a lawyer. But the context was all wrong.