Midnight clear, p.1
Midnight Clear, page 1
MIDNIGHTCLEAR
A CALLAHAN GARRITY MYSTERY
KATHY HOGAN
TROCHECK
For Sallie Gouverneur, agent, friend, despot, coconspirator. Vaya con Díos!
Contents
1
We had a real dime store when I was a… 1
2
“Well, stranger!” Edna threw the back door open and enveloped… 9
3
We sat up past midnight. Brian drank bourbon, I asked… 18
4
In the morning there was an oil puddle
in the… 26
5
Maura and I decided to play house. Clean
the house… 35
6
Ferd Bryce was still alive as far as directory assistance… 41
7
The two of us watched the phone and
the back… 48 I ran to the dining room and peeped out the… 57
9
Edna scampered down the attic steps as
quick as her… 65
10
The piece of paper with Ferd Bryce’s phone number was… 72
11
Mrs. Jimmy James walked right up to the side of… 88
12
The nameplate on his desk identified my
interviewer as Detective… 98
13
Ferd was huffing and puffing by the time
we found… 107
14
Mac was sitting on the kitchen floor, helping Maura build… 116
15
Edna wouldn’t let anybody near the phone, even though we… 122 “Yount?” Ferd’s back was toward the door. He scraped the… 134
17
The house was empty when I got home.
There was… 142
18
It was only 7 A.M when the doorbell rang.
We… 149
19
Edna stirred the pot of grits. The hand that
held… 159
20
Deavers’s right hand kept rifling the pages of the file… 170
21
Instinct, memory navigated. It had been a long time since… 176
22
Chuck Ingraham’s law offices were on the wrong side of… 184
23
I swiped the Polaroid of Brian while the
security guard… 197 Ferd’s telephone greeting was a chest-racking cough. He gave me… 204
25
By the time I got to the drugstore to pick… 219
26
I called Mac from the line in my bedroom. 229
27
I found Edna on the front porch, her bony
butt… 232
28
Bucky called L. D. Lawrence on the
speakerphone, so I could… 243
29
Thank God for computers. Bucky gave the clerk the case… 249
30
Sometimes I forget about my gun. Mostly, I don’t need… 259
31
Cheezer looked relieved when I emerged
from the church. “I… 273 The luck ran out at the Panda Inn. 279
33
Maura waved at me when she saw me
coming in… 290
34
Bucky Deavers’s face darkened when he saw me enter room. 298
35
They had a fax machine in the lobby of the… 307
36
I was thinking about that phone call the
bartender at… 314
37
Edna was on the phone. “Ferd? Annette’s
taken Maura. What… 323
38
The address was in Hapeville, for a place
called Silver… 331
39
Ferd knocked once, lightly on the kitchen
door, then stepped… 340 I called L. D. Lawrence from my cell phone. The secretary… 351
41
I felt the truck take a hard fast left that… 369
Epilogue
Edna’s camera worked well. We have the photos to prove… 383
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Kathy Hogan Trocheck Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
We had a real dime store when I was a kid. Not a Kmart or a Target, but a Woolworth’s, where you could buy wonderful things like a live goldfish and bowl for your brother, or a bottle of eau de toilette in a satinlined box for your mother, or a ceramic ashtray in the shape of a clown’s head for your dad. One year, instead of the usual box of chocolate-covered cherries, I bought my mother a plastic snow globe for Christmas. Only I was so excited about spending a whole dollar on her that I made her unwrap her gift two days early.
I shook the globe hard and little white flakes of something that looked like snow swirled around in the perfect little world encased in plastic. Inside that snow world there was a tiny church with a white steeple, and a green fir tree, and a minuscule ice-skater. “See,” I told Mama. “It’s a snowstorm.”
When the snowflakes settled, I grabbed the globe out of her hand and went to shake it up again. Even then, I guess, I preferred a world in constant motion. But the globe flew out of my hand and bounced off the mahogany chest of drawers. The plastic covering cracked, fluid seeping out all over the bedroom carpet. I don’t remember crying, but I can remember being certain I had spoiled Christmas.
“Never mind,” Mama told me. “I like it better this way. Who ever heard of snow in Atlanta at Christmas?”
For years, the snow globe came out with the Christmas decorations and it held a place of honor on the coffee table, along with a lumpy red candle my sister made as a Brownie project, and the genuine Italian ceramic manger scene my brother Kevin bought one year when he was flush with money from his newspaper route. The crack was never mentioned, although it grew wider every year until one year, in my early teens, it broke in two in my mother’s hand as she was unpacking it. Edna took the pieces, taped them together, wrapped them in tissue, and tucked them back in the cardboard Rich’s department store box where she kept all her Christmas decorations. It never got unpacked after that year, but she never threw it away, either. I think she thought it would eventually heal itself.
“You’re using up a whole, perfectly good pound
cake for that mess?”
Edna put down her mixer and peered over my shoulder. I was cutting finger-sized slices of pound cake and layering them in the bottom of my grandmother Alexander’s big cut-glass bowl. I was preparing English trifle. You would have thought I was cooking haggis or water buffalo or something. My mother sniffed her disapproval and turned up the volume on the CD player. She knows I can’t stand Perry Como—so there was Perry, blaring in my ears about how there was no place like home for the holidays. Perry didn’t have a clue. His mother probably never came unhinged if somebody cooked something new in their kitchen.
Edna went back to her corner of the kitchen counter, where she proceeded with her Tom and Jerry batter. Edna is famous for her Tom and Jerrys. She got the recipe decades ago from an Italian family in our old neighborhood, and every year since, at Christmastime, we make quarts and quarts of the stuff to give away as gifts and to serve at Christmas Eve dinner, along with the fruitcake and the pound cake and the Coca-Cola baked ham and the ambrosia made with real, honestto-God fresh-grated coconut.
Most people these days don’t even know what a Tom and Jerry is. It’s probably better that they don’t. All those uncooked eggs, along with heavy whipping cream, confectioners’ sugar, brandy, rum, and cognac—a nutritional nightmare. And that’s just the batter. To make the actual drink, you heat up a tot of the batter with a cup of milk—whole milk, of course—and toss in a stout dose of bourbon. Not for the weak of heart, literally.
So the beaters were whirring and Edna was cracking those eggs like a fiend, tossing the eggshells right at me, not caring that she was splattering me with egg yolk and beaten cream. I could complain, but that would be picking a fight, sure as anything.
That’s what you get for getting above yourself, I could hear her thinking as she pelted me with shells. Miss Smarty-pants. Miss Too-good-for-Jell-O-salad. Miss Dried-apricots-in-the-fruitcake.
“This office Christmas party was your idea, you know,” I said loudly.
Her shoulders stiffened, but she didn’t turn around.
Edna and I run a cleaning business called the House Mouse, right out of this same kitchen where we were currently holding our annual Pillsbury bitch-off. The house is a cozy little Craftsman bungalow in an intown Atlanta neighborhood called Candler Park. Well, inside it’s cozy. Outside, the neighborhood is sometimes a little edgier than we would have wished. Last year, we ended up chaining our wreath to the front door after it was stolen twice in the same weekend. But I’m optimistic that things are changing for the better. I’d decided on an Elvis Presley “Blue Christmas” decorating motif this year, with yards of silver garlands and festive strings of blue chasing lights and a spotlit portrait of a pre-Vegas Elvis smiling down from its perch atop the porch roof, and I think even the homeless guys who sleep in the vacant house on the corner were leaving us alone, out of respect for The King.
The girls who work for us love Christmas. Edna had been baking nonstop since the day after Thanksgiving, we’d worn holes in our Perry Como/Andy Williams/Nat King Cole/Bing Crosby CD collection, and the tree in the living room was already swamped with wrapped gifts. Even Cheezer, our on ly male House Mouse and resident oddball, loves the season. Everybody was in the Christmas spirit. Even, for once, me, Julia Callahan Garrity, owner and president of the House Mouse, not to mention Callahan Garrity Investigations.
Usually I think of Christmas as just one long headache. Our clients always want to switch their cleaning schedules around, traffic is a huge hassle, I hate malls and shopping because I never know what to buy anybody, and nobody ever buys me what I really want. I always end up spending too much, eating too much, and pouting too much. Christmas never meets my expectations. It hasn’t, not since the watershed year I was twelve and I got a ten-speed bike and a ski jacket with a fake-fur collar and my first stereo. After that year, Christmas was just something to endure.
This year though, things were different. I found myself humming along with the radio. The girls were healthy and working hard and the House Mouse, for once, seemed fiscally sound. Edna was in good shape, too. We’d started taking regular morning walks around the neighborhood in the fall, and had kept it up until it got too cold for both of us.
I’d finished my shopping, too, and Christmas was still a week away. I had mail-order catalogs and a single marathon power-shopping day at Rich’s to thank for my current sense of well-being.
And my love life was just fine, thank you very much. Andrew MacAuliffe and I had been together more than five years. We’d weathered his fling with his ex-wife and my brush with breast cancer, and more close calls with disaster than I like to recall. We’ve had tough times together, Mac and I, but we’ve finally come to the realization that we’re better together than we are apart. Besides, we had to stay together for the dogs. His black labs Rufus and Maybelline produced a litter of five fat, wiggling puppies a year ago, and one—the runt of the litter, naturally—had stolen into my heart while I wasn’t watching. Of all five puppies, Tammy Faye whimpered the longest, barked the loudest, and peed the most often on the floor. She was irresistible. Since he lives in a log cabin in the woods with plenty of space for the dogs to run, Mac has physical custody, but Tammy Faye knew, and I knew, that she was mine.
This year, for once, I really wasn’t being the Grinch. Edna was the one who was getting all twitchy about this clambake. I was just trying to be practical.
“It would have been a lot easier to just give everybody a fifty-dollar Christmas bonus,” I pointed out to Edna. “Maybe pick up a cheese ball and some chicken wings and call it a night.”
Edna’s lips tightened.
“We promised them a Christmas party. They’re all excited. Ruby went out and bought herself a new hat. Cheezer says he might bring a date. And you know how worked up Baby and Sister are. Neva Jean’s taking them for their hair appointments first thing in the morning. Are you gonna call them up and tell them they got all cut and curled just to sit home and watch Christmas with Kathie Lee?”
“We’ll have the damned party,” I assured her. “But would it kill you if I made something new?”
Nobody in our family ever made anything you could call fancy. Our cooking was substantial, solid, Southern. Nobody ever made anything new. Every holiday dinner, every Sunday supper, had a set menu in our family. Thanksgiving meant turkey, Christmas meant ham, Easter was leg of lamb, Monday night was vegetable soup and corn bread, Fridays meant macaroni and cheese or Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks. I can still remember the heady feeling that pervaded our kitchen that first time in the early nineties when Edna served chicken burritos. You would have thought she’d discovered penicillin.
But I’d had trifle at a dinner party somewhere, and I’d been besotted with it ever since. I’d waited a whole year to try out that trifle recipe. I’d made custard— from scratch. Set aside one of our famous lemon pound cakes to cut up and sprinkle with the twenty-dollar bottle of sherry I’d been hoarding. I bought imported English raspberry preserves, apricots, kiwifruit, strawberries, and fresh raspberries so expensive I had to look the other way when the cashier at the grocery store rang them up.
“The girls don’t like fancy stuff like this,” Edna said, waving her hand at the cut-glass bowl. “It’s pretentious. You’ll make them feel funny. Besides, we’ve got my pound cake and fruitcake, and Ruby’s fudge, and all those boxes of candy customers have been dropping off. All these desserts will put them in sugar shock.”
“I made a veggie platter,” I said stubbornly. “Anybody who doesn’t want my trifle can eat celery and carrots.”
“Fine,” Edna said. “Makes no difference to me. It’s your house. Your business. You do as you please.”
She took a dishcloth, ran it under the faucet, and started mopping up the counters. Then she reached under the sink and got a bottle of Fantastik.
We Garritys are generally nonviolent people. When we fight, it’s usually either with words or, worse, with silence. Not Edna. Her favorite weapon is a bottle of spray cleaner. She spritzed the entire countertop. I had to take my trifle and move it over to the kitchen table to get it out of her line of fire. She took the dishrag and began swabbing the countertop. Her jaw was set, her eyes narrowed. This was war.
I decided to ignore her. With deliberate ceremony I dribbled the sherry over the pound cake and poured over it a thin layer of custard. I was concentrating on cutting up the kiwifruit when I heard the knock at the back door. I looked up. Edna kept spritzing and muttering to herself.
“Knock, knock,” a deep voice called.
Edna dropped the bottle of Fantastik, right on to the floor. Her eyes were riveted to the back door.
It had been years, but I knew that voice.
“Knock, knock,” he called again.
“Who is it?” I answered.
Edna was trying to untie her apron, but she was only knotting it worse.
“Sam and Janet,” the voice boomed out.
Edna’s hand jerked badly and she knocked the cognac bottle to the floor, along with the bag of confectioners’ sugar. When she picked it up her face was covered with a fine white sheen of sugar.
“Sam and Janet who?” She coughed as she said it.
The beautiful bass voice boomed the answer. “Sam and Janet evening ...You will meet a stranger . . .”
2
“Well, stranger!” Edna threw the back door open and enveloped my brother Brian in a hug that left them both breathless.
Brian was a good foot taller than our mother, and he grinned over her shoulder at me. I stood rooted in the doorway, wondering what I should do. How many years had it been since we’d heard from my baby brother? Daddy had been dead a little over ten years. Brian had shown up out of nowhere the day of the funeral, too. Riding a motorcycle, full of tears and apologies for not knowing about Daddy’s long, lingering illness. He wouldn’t stay at Mama’s house that night, said he’d be more comfortable in a motel, but would call in the morning. He’d missed ten years’ worth of mornings by my count.
But by Edna’s reckoning, her baby boy was back, and it was Christmas a week early.
“Look at you,” Edna cried. “You’re skin and bones.” She wouldn’t let go of him, hugged his neck again, rubbed the sleeve of his navy blue nylon windbreaker. He leaned down and picked up a huge plastic sack full of lumpy objects.
