The silent hall was not silent anymore. As we left the conference room, the law came in the back door. It was represented by a heavy-set man in a plaid jacket who was taller and older than Arthur, and two men in uniform. As I stood back against the wall, temporarily forgotten, Arthur led them down the hall and opened the door to the kitchen. They crowded around the door looking in. They were all silent for a moment. The youngest man in uniform winced and then wrenched his face straight. The other uniformed man shook his head once and then stared in at Mamie with a disgusted expression. What disgusted him, I wondered? The mess that had been made with the body of a human being? The waste of a life? The fact that someone living in the town he had to protect had seen fit to do this terrible thing?
I realized the man in the plaid jacket was the sergeant of detectives; I’d seen his picture in the paper when he’d arrested a drug pusher. Now he pursed his mouth briefly and said “Damn,” with little expression.
Arthur began telling them things, going swiftly and in a low voice. I could tell what point in his narrative he’d reached when their heads swung towards me simultaneously. I didn’t know whether to nod or what. I just stared back at them and felt a thousand years old. Their faces turned back to Arthur and he continued his briefing.
The two men in uniform left the building while Arthur and the sergeant continued their discussion. Arthur seemed to be enumerating things, while the sergeant nodded his head in approval and occasionally interjected some comment. Arthur had a little notebook out and was jotting in it as they spoke.
Another memory about the sergeant stirred.
His name was Jack Burns. He’d bought his house from my mother. He was married to a school teacher and had two kids in college. Now Jack Burns gave Arthur a sharp nod, as clear as a starting gun. Arthur went to the door to the meeting room and pushed it open.
“Mr. Wright, could you come here for a minute, please?” Detective Arthur Smith asked, in a voice so devoid of expression that it was a warning in itself.
Gerald Wright came into the hall hesitantly. No one in the big room could fail to know by now that something was drastically wrong, and I wondered what they’d been saying. Gerald took a step toward me, but Arthur took his arm quite firmly and guided Gerald into the little conference room. I knew he was about to tell Gerald that his wife was dead, and I found myself wondering how Gerald would take it. Then I was ashamed.
At moments I understood in decent human terms what had happened to a woman I knew, and at moments I seemed to be thinking of Mamie’s death as one of our club’s study cases.
“Miss Teagarden,” said Jack Burns’s good-old-boy drawl, “you must be Aida Teagarden’s child.”
Well, I had a father, too: but he’d committed the dreadful sin of coming in from foreign parts (Texas) to work on our local Georgia paper, marrying my mother, begetting me, and then leaving and divorcing Lawrenceton’s own Aida Brattle Teagarden. I said, “Yes.”
“I’m mighty sorry you had to see something like that,” Jack Burns said, shaking his heavy head mournfully.
It was almost like a burlesque of regret, it was laid on so heavily; was he being sarcastic? I looked down, and for once said nothing. I didn’t need this right now; I was shaken and confused.
“It just seems so strange to me that a sweet young woman like you would come to a club like this,” Jack Burns went on slowly, his tone expressing stunned bewilderment. “Could you just kind of clarify for me what the purpose of this-organization-is?”
I had to answer a direct question. But why was he asking me? His own detective belonged to the same club. I wished this middle-aged man with his plaid suit and his cowboy boots would melt through the floor. As slightly as I knew Arthur, I wanted him back. This man was scarey. I pushed my glasses back up my nose with shaking fingers.
“We meet once a month,” I said in an uneven voice. “And we talk about a famous murder case, usually a pretty old one.”
The sergeant apparently gave this deep thought. “Talk about it-?” he inquired gently.
“Ah… sometimes just learn about it, who was killed and how and why and by whom.” Our members favored different “W’s.”
I was most interested in the victim.
“Or sometimes,” I stumbled on, “depending on the case, we decide if the police arrested the right person. Or if the murder was unsolved, we talk about who may have been guilty. Sometimes we watch a movie.”
“Movie?” Raised beetly brows, a gentle inquiring shake of the head.
“Like ‘The Thin Blue Line.’ Or a fictionalized movie based on a real case. ‘In Cold Blood’…”
“But not ever,” he asked delicately, “what you would call a-snuff movie?”
“Oh my God,” I said sickly. “Oh my God, no.” In my naivetй, I said, “How could you think that?”
“Well, Miss Teagarden, this here is a real murder, and we have to ask real questions.” And his face was not nice at all.
Our club had offended something in Jack Burns. How would Arthur fare, a policeman who was actually a member? But it seemed he would be working on the investigation in some capacity.
“Now, Miss Teagarden,” Jack Burns went on, his mask back in place, his voice as buttery as a waffle, “I am going to head up this investigation, and my two homicide detectives will work on this, and Arthur Smith will assist us, since he knows all you people. I know you’ll cooperate to the fullest with him. He tells me you know a little more about this than the others, that you got some kind of phone call and you found the body. We may have to talk to you a few times about this, but you just have patience with us.” And I knew from his face I had better be willing to turn over my every waking minute, if that was required of me.
By this time I felt that Arthur Smith was my oldest and dearest friend, so much safer did he seem than this terrifying man with his terrifying questions. And he stepped out from behind his sergeant now, his face blank and his eyes cautious. He’d heard at least some of this conversation, which would have sounded almost routine without Burns’s menacing manner.
“Miss Teagarden,” Arthur said brusquely, “will you go into the room with the others now? Please don’t discuss with them what’s happened out here. And thanks.” With Gerald presumably grieving in the small conference room and Mamie dead in the kitchen, I had to join the others unless he wanted me to stand in the bathroom.
With a medley of feelings, relief predominating, I was pushing open the door when I felt a hand on my arm. “Sorry,” murmured Arthur. Over his shoulder, I saw the plaid back of Sergeant Burns’s jacket as he held open the back door to admit uniformed policemen loaded down with equipment. “If you don’t mind, I’ll come to see you tomorrow morning about this Wallace thing. Will you be at work?”
“Tomorrow’s my day off,” I said. “I can be at home tomorrow morning.”
“Nine o’clock too early?”
“No, that’s fine.”
As I went in the larger room where my fellow club members were clustered anxiously, I thought about the intelligence pitted against Arthur Smith’s. Someone was painstaking and artistic in a debased and imaginative way. Someone had issued a challenge to whoever cared to take it up. “Figure out who I am if you can, you amateur students of crime. I’ve graduated to the real thing. Here is my work.”
I felt an instinctive urge to hide what I was thinking. I wiped my mind clean of my nasty thoughts and tried not to meet the eyes of any of my fellow club members, who were all waiting tensely for me in the big room. But Sally Allison was a pro at catching reluctant eyes, and I saw her mouth open when she caught mine. I knew beyond a doubt she was going to ask me if I’d found Mamie Wright. Sally was no fool. I shook my head firmly, and she came no closer.
“Are you all right, child?” John Queensland asked, advancing with the dignity that was the keystone of his character. “Your mother will be terribly upset when she hears…” but since John, who was after all a wee mite pompous, realized he had no idea what my mother was going to hear, he had to trail off into silence. He asked me a question with a look.
“I’m sorry,” I said in a tiny squeak. I shook my head in irritation. “I’m sorry,” I said more strongly, “I don’t think Detective Smith wants me to talk until he talks to you.” I gave John a small smile and went to sit by myself in a chair by the coffee urn, trying to ignore the indignant looks and mutters of dissatisfaction cast in my direction. Gifford Doakes was walking back and forth as if he were pacing a cage. The policemen outside seemed to be making him extremely nervous. The novelist Robin Crusoe was looking eager and curious; Lizanne just looked bored. LeMaster Cane, Melanie and Bankston, and Jane Engle were talking together in low voices. For the first time, I realized another club member, Benjamin Greer, was missing. Benjamin’s attendance was erratic, like his life in general, so I didn’t put any particular weight on that. Sally was sitting by her son Perry, whose thin slash of a mouth
