Southern Discomfort

I had never been in Gladys McGee's living room before, but I could have described it beforehand: everything beige and rose and pretty. Every blonde oak tabletop polished, every piece of glass shining. Beige wall-to-wall, a beige couch in front of a fireplace that had never burned a single log, a rose-flowered wing chair on either side of the couch, a blonde oak coffee table in the middle, and a pink glass ashtray in the middle of the table. Polished brass candlesticks on the sidetable. Pink candles.

A pink-faced Cindy saying, 'Mom, please don't do this!'

Cindy's recently married, less-recently pregnant sister saying, 'I can't believe you're going to do this to us. What is the point?'

'The point is that your father may have been deliberately poisoned.'

Gladys sat in one of the floral-upholstered wing chairs and looked with bewilderment from one daughter to the next. 'Don't you girls care?'

'Mo-ther.' Ginger sighed with exaggerated patience. 'Dad had a heart attack. Two doctors said so.'

'Not two American doctors,' Gladys said stubbornly. 'Dr. Bhagat was born in New Jersey, for God's sake!' said Cindy.

'Cindy Elaine McGee, I will not have you use the Lord's name in that manner!'

'But, Mom—'

'But me no buts, young lady.'

I was seated in the other wing chair and she turned to me with stubborn determination. 'You remember, Deborah? Just week before last, at your reception—you yourself remarked what a shock it was to everybody when Ralph just dropped dead, remember? And I told you he'd had the summer flu?'

'Yes, but—'

'It was just like what happened with Herman. Nadine says that's what he thought he had at first—summer flu. And here they've found him full of arsenic! If he'd gone on and died, I bet they'd be thinking it was a heart attack, too. Am I wrong?'

'No,' I admitted. Ginger gave me a disgusted look and Cindy appeared on the verge of tears.

Gladys leaned forward with a confidential air. 'I never did trust that Tink Dupree. He swore it was an honest mistake, but three years in a row? He was just lucky Ralph kept him out of jail. Am I wrong?'

I didn't know what Gladys was talking about, but she was happy to explain.

Ralph had prepared the Coffee Pot's taxes ever since the Duprees bought the place. Last year, he discovered that Tink and Retha Dupree were running an unlicensed sandwich stand at a flea market every weekend and sequestering their profits. It wasn't a regulated market, just a crossroads out in the country where people gathered on pretty Saturday mornings and sold stuff out of the back of their cars. Since it was so informal and since vendors didn't pay sales taxes on their wares, the Duprees assumed they were somehow exempt, as well. Or so they claimed.

They had been doing this for three years before a horrified Ralph realized they'd been charging expenses to the Coffee Pot, which he'd dutifully listed, which in turn lowered their apparent taxable profits, thereby making him an unwitting accomplice.

'Ralph said if ever one of those hotshot state auditors took a good look at their books, they could say that Ralph was cooking the figures and maybe pull his license. Ralph was really mad about it because never in a million years would he've done anything to risk that.

'He told Tink and Retha that if they didn't make voluntary restitution, he was going to turn them in. I forget how much money it took before they were straight with the state.'

'Get real, Mother,' said Ginger. 'Even if the Duprees were mad at Dad, there's no way Tink Dupree would wait almost a year to put arsenic in Dad's iced tea.'

'Well, who else would have a reason to?' Gladys asked.

'Nobody!' Cindy howled. 'He wasn't poisoned. He had a heart attack.'

Gladys leaned over and patted her younger daughter's knee. 'I know it's hard for you to understand how somebody could deliberately hurt Dad, but you have to be brave, sweetie.'

She turned back to me. 'And another thing, Deborah. Ava Dupree says she ran Bass off and that he's gone back to Georgia, but how do we know that's what happened to him? Has anybody heard pea-turkey from him since Ava says he left?'

'I don't believe this,' Ginger kept muttering. 'I do not believe this. Tommy's parents are going to have a cow. This is the tackiest thing anybody's mother ever did.'

'Dad would just hate it,' Cindy moaned.

'Seems to me certain people have forgotten what else their father would have hated,' Gladys said with a significant look at Ginger's bulging tummy and an equally accusing look at Cindy. 'Am I wrong?'

'This is totally different,' Ginger said huffily. 'What Cindy and I did or did not do isn't going to be in the newspaper or on television. This will.'

Gladys pursed her lips. 'He'd hate it even more if Tink Dupree got away with killing him.'

Nothing the girls said was going to dissuade Gladys, and, in a cockeyed way, I didn't blame her. Herman had ingested poison, so had Bannerman; and both, like Ralph, had eaten frequently at the Coffee Pot. If my husband had died as unexpectedly as Ralph had, maybe I'd be putting two and two together same as she was.

'The thing is,' I told her, 'I can't give you an exhumation order. You'll have to talk to one of the superior court judges.'

As I left, she was dialing Ned O'Donnell's home phone. I suggested she inform Dwight or Bo Poole and I gave her Gordon O'Connor's name and number as well. As happy as he'd been to hear about Bannerman's arsenic, he'd