Killer On A Hot Tin Roof (25 page)

“Will Burke knows me well enough to know that I’d never kill myself,” I said.

“But he won’t be able to prove that, will he? And since the police don’t suspect me of anything, there won’t be any investigation targeted at me.”

Who knew an English professor could be so blasted diabolical?

He leaned over the bed. “Don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be.”

The heck with that. I was gonna make killing me as difficult as I possibly could.

So I kicked him in the balls.

He let out a strangled howl of pain and doubled over. I lunged off the bed and grabbed at the recorder, wrenching it out of his hand. Before I could make a run for the door, though, he flung out an arm and caught hold of the collar of my blouse, then slung me backward. I hit the floor and slid along it, although I didn’t go very far because the carpet was so thick it slowed me down.

Frasier was between me and the door now, so I knew I couldn’t get out that way. Instead, as I scrambled to my feet and he stumbled toward me, I headed for the balcony instead. I planned to get out there and start screaming so loud that they’d hear me all the way out in the lobby. Frasier wouldn’t dare kill me then.

He caught up to me just as I reached the doors and looped an arm around my neck from behind, silencing any scream I might have let loose. I rammed my elbows back at him, tryingto break free as we staggered out onto the balcony. I still had the recorder clutched in my fingers, so I let fly with it, flinging it out into the atrium so that it would fall into the garden. Frasier cursed bitterly in my ear when he saw me do that.

Then I clamped onto the railing with both hands and held on for dear life as he tried to drag me back into the room. I had to keep us out here where somebody might see us. If he got me in the room again, he would break my neck, just as he had threatened a few moments earlier.

It was a deadly struggle, but one fought in silence except for a few grunts and the sound of our shoes scraping on the floor of the balcony. I kept waiting and hoping to hear somebody yell, “Look! That man’s trying to kill that woman!”

But it didn’t happen. It was dinnertime. Most folks were out eating somewhere. Frasier’s arm tightened on my neck. He was going to choke me to death, right here in the middle of a crowded hotel.

But that would leave too many marks, and the coroner would be able to tell that I’d died of asphyxiation, not a broken neck–and Frasier still hadn’t given up on his plan to make my death look like suicide. He hammered his other fist against the side of my head. The blow stunned me enough to make me go limp. Frasier started dragging me back toward the room. He could get away with punching me in the head. Any marks that left could be put down to an injury suffered in the fall. I was still trying to fight, but I wasn’t doing much good now.

We had just gotten back to the French doors when I heard Dale Gillette exclaim, “Oh, my God!”

Frasier let go of me and twisted around. I slumped to the floor, half in the room, half on the balcony. My vision was a little blurry from being choked, but I saw Gillette standing in the hall with the key card he had just used to unlock the doorstill in his hand. Behind him stood Dr. Ian Keller, who bellowed, “I told you I saw him trying to kill Ms. Dickinson!” Keller started to push past Gillette with his fists clenched.

Frasier panicked and turned to flee from Keller, who charged into the room like a maddened bull. I don’t know where he thought he was going to go. The balcony didn’t offer anyplace to hide. But I grabbed his legs anyway, just to eliminate any chance of him getting away.

That was all I intended to do. I didn’t mean for him to fall forward, crash into the railing, and flip right over it. I swear I didn’t. But once he started to fall, there was no way I could hold him. With a terrified yell, he disappeared.

That yell lasted just a second before it ended in a loud thump. I winced, knowing what that meant.

I hoped the crazy son of a gun hadn’t landed on anybody. He had already hurt enough people here in New Orleans.

A
s it turned out, Frasier hadn’t landed on anybody. He had come down at the edge of the marble walk around the outside of the garden. Another couple of feet and some shrubs would have broken his fall.

As it was, he broke his back and his left leg and gave himself one heck of a concussion. The doctors figured he would be paralyzed from the waist down, probably for the rest of his life.

That wouldn’t keep him from going to prison, though.

Ramsey and Nesbit were mad at me, of course, especially Ramsey, but they found the recorder where I’d tossed it down into the garden. As Frasier had pointed out, the fact that Howard Burleson’s voice was on there, talking about how he’d written
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
didn’t really prove anything, but the way he’d tried to kill me did, especially since the forensics team was able to match the DNA of a hair they had found in Tamara’s bathroom with Frasier’s DNA. Faced with that, he confessed to killing Burleson in a fit of rage after the old man told him that the manuscript, except for a few sample pages he’d been keeping in a separate place, was gone.

According to what Frasier told the cops, Burleson had beenkeeping the rest of the manuscript in a hollowed-out old family Bible he used as a hidey-hole. When Burleson went to get it before leaving for New Orleans, he found that it was gone, but he’d been afraid to tell Frasier. At least, that was what Burleson had claimed later, when he had broken down and let it slip to Frasier. Frasier had lost his head, assumed that everything the old man had told him before was a lie, and wound up killing him. That had been a crime of rage.

Framing Tamara Paige for the murder was more cold and calculated, an idea that had come to Frasier once he realized that he had beaten Burleson to death.

Frasier had come close to getting away with both of those crimes, as well as killing me, but Ian Keller had spotted us struggling on the balcony and gone for help. Luckily, he had run into Dale Gillette on the same floor and had been able to convince Gillette to open Frasier’s door. It was a good thing for me that Dr. Keller looked so much like a mobster. He could be pretty intimidating when he wanted to.

The rest of the festival went off without any problems. The last I heard, Callie and Jake Madison had reconciled and put Callie’s infidelity behind them. It probably helped that Callie resigned her position at the university and found a job at a college in Florida, and Jake moved his construction company down there, too. Dr. Larry Powers recovered from his heart attack, gave up drinking, and lost weight. Will kept me informed and told me that he was doing fine. That wasn’t the case with his son and daughter-in-law. Junebug and Edgar split up. Probably the best thing for both of them, if you ask me.

I never found out if Ian Keller killed those two fellas in New Jersey. The law said he hadn’t, and his brother is still in prison, serving that twenty-five-to-life sentence for the crimes, so there you go. All I know is that he’d saved my life, and I am grateful to him for that.

And there was one more thing that happened, the day after we all got back to Atlanta from New Orleans …

The sun was bright and warm enough for a spring day that I was glad to be standing in the shade of a tree next to the gravesite where the burial service for Howard Burleson had just been concluded. The lush green hills of the cemetery rolled away around us as Will and Tamara Paige and I waited to speak to Natalie Drummond. Natalie was a brunette in her thirties. She stood with her husband’s arm around her as she shook hands with the mourners.

There weren’t very many of them. Not a lot of Burleson’s family had shown up for the funeral, and I thought that was a shame. Not very surprising, though, considering what he had told us about how they’d never accepted him.

When the others had left, Will and Tamara and I went over to introduce ourselves and pay our respects. Natalie managed a smile as she shook hands with us.

“I was hoping you’d come,” she said. “I’ve heard about what you did for my grandfather, Ms. Dickinson.”

“I’m not sure I did anything,” I replied with a shake of my head.

“You found out who killed him and made sure that the man will pay.” Natalie sighed. “And it’s all so senseless.”

“Murder usually is.”

“Yes, of course, but I meant in this case, it was because … because of that manuscript …”

She started to cry. Her husband tightened his arm around her and said, “Honey, please don’t do this to yourself. I’ve told you and told you, it’s not your fault. You were just trying to help him.”

Will frowned and said, “Wait a minute. What are you talking about, Mrs. Drummond?”

“The manuscript,” Natalie said. “The one that Grandpa Howard hid in that old Bible.”

“There really was a manuscript of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?
” Tamara asked.

Natalie nodded. “I didn’t know what it was at the time, though. I just saw that it was a bunch of papers.”

Will’s voice held a hush that had nothing to do with our surroundings as he asked, “What did you do with them?”

“Well, I thought they might be important, and it didn’t seem like an old Bible was anyplace to keep them, so I took them and put them in our safety deposit box. I was going to tell Grandpa Howard, but then … but then I got busy and it slipped my mind, and I never did think to tell him before he left to go to New Orleans with that awful Dr. Frasier.”

I could see why she blamed herself for her grandfather’s death. She’d had a hand in it, all right, but only indirectly, and certainly not intentionally. Anyway, the ultimate responsibility lay with the man who had struck Howard Burleson down, and he was still in the hospital in New Orleans, destined never to walk–or breathe free air–again.

“You put the manuscript in your safety deposit box?” Will said.

Tearfully, Natalie nodded again. “That’s right. But I have it …” She put her hand into the big purse she carried and brought out a manila envelope. “Here. There are some pictures in it, too, of Grandpa Howard as a young man, with a man who might be Tennessee Williams.”

She held the envelope out to Will and Tamara.

They looked at each other for a long moment. Finally, Will said, “You’re the expert, Tamara. You’re the one who’ll have to authenticate it … or discredit it.”

She swallowed. “I know.” Looking at Natalie, she asked, “Are you sure you want to give this to me, Mrs. Drummond?

If I examine it, I’ll probably be able to prove that your grandfather either imagined the whole thing or was deliberately lying about it.”

“I know,” Natalie said. “But I’m convinced he believed in it. If he was wrong, well, he didn’t mean any harm by it. He just wanted to have created something lasting and important. I can understand that.”

So could I. I suppose everybody has felt that way at one time or another. We all want to leave our mark on the world. One way or another, we all manage to do so, even though sometimes it’s nothing more than a memory, and a smile on the face of someone who loves us.

And I think that matters a whole lot more than figuring out who wrote some dumb ol’ play … don’t you?

F
or a quarter of a century, this annual festival in New Orleans has celebrated not only the lasting literary legacy of Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams, but also that of Southern literature in general. Although I’ve taken a few liberties with the way the festival is scheduled and run (strictly for dramatic purposes, of course; I hope the subject of the festival would understand), for the most part, I’ve tried to present an accurate picture of this wonderful conference, as well as of the French Quarter, in which it takes place.

Each year, scholars and celebrities from all over the country gather in New Orleans for a series of discussions, lectures, presentations, and performances related to Tennessee Williams and other literary figures. The festival’s website can be found at www.tennesseewilliams.net, where you can learn about the Friends of Tennessee, the organization that sponsors the festival, as well as other literary-oriented activities throughout the year.

The St. Emilion Hotel, in which most of this novel’s action takes place, is fictional, although it’s loosely based on the Bourbon Orleans, which serves as the host hotel for the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival (www.bourbonorleans.com). Petit Claude’s, the jazz club where Delilah and her companions find Howard Burleson, is fictional as well, but New Orleans and especially the French Quarter have a long tradition of such clubs, dating back many years, such as the Famous Door, Dixie’s Bar, and El Morocco. The Famous Door is still there (www.thebestofbourbonstreet.com), and the best-known jazz club currently operating is probably Preservation Hall (www.preservationhall.com), which has been in existence for almost fifty years. There are many other clubs that can be checked out at the tourism websites listed below. The café where Delilah and Will have dinner is based on the Louisiana Bistro (www.louisianabistro.net), one of the most highly rated restaurants in a city known all over the world for its wonderful food.

As for the French Quarter itself, as well as New Orleans in general, it remains one of the premier tourist destinations in the country. The website frenchquarter.com provides information about the history of this colorful area, as well as hotels, dining, nightlife, and other celebrations, such as Mardi Gras.

There’s more to New Orleans than the French Quarter, of course, and to learn about the many attractions and opportunities the city offers to visitors, check out www.neworleanscvb.com, the website for the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, or www.neworleansonline.com, the city’s official tourism website.

All the characters and incidents in this novel are entirely products of the author’s imagination.