The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

As he went up the walk, he thought about that, with some discomfort. Rona Jean had been ruthlessly, heartlessly murdered, and he was responsible for finding her killer and seeing that he got exactly what he deserved: a one-way ticket to Kilby Prison in Montgomery and the seat of honor in Yellow Mama, Alabama’s electric chair. Buddy had never wanted to see an execution, but by damn, when this one happened, he intended to have a front-row seat.

But Buddy was uncomfortably aware that some people in Darling—Rona Jean’s roommate might be one of them—were likely to say that he ought to excuse himself from the case because of his relationship to the victim. They might think it was more . . . well, intimate than it was. They might even want him to call in the state police to handle the investigation, which he was definitely not going to do. And it wasn’t just because he had kissed Rona Jean a time or two maybe, or maybe even three or four. This was his first important investigation as sheriff—his first real, live murder investigation—and there was no way in hell he was handing it off to anybody else.

So after he had seen Rona Jean’s body bundled into Lionel Noonan’s hearse and headed for the Monroeville Hospital where Doc Roberts would do the autopsy, Buddy had left Wayne to finish up the fingerprinting and phoned Mr. Moseley to ask if he could drop in for a few minutes to talk.

Benton Moseley had represented the district in the legislature up in Montgomery and was a mover and shaker in the Alabama Democratic Party, and he sometimes drove over to Georgia, to Warm Springs, where he met with President Roosevelt and other Southern politicos. Back home, he was one of Darling’s three lawyers. They rotated the job of Cypress County attorney—not a very big job and certainly undeserving of any lawyer’s full-time attention—among them. This year, it was Mr. Moseley’s turn, and Buddy had decided he’d better get his advice, just in case somebody made any noise about bringing in the state police.

Mr. Moseley didn’t meet clients on Saturday, but he was in his office doing some research work, and when Buddy had knocked, he’d called, “Come on in, Sheriff—the door’s unlocked.”

Buddy hung his brown fedora on the peg by the door. Then he sat down across the desk, described Violet’s gruesome morning discovery, and outlined his problem—not in detail, but the general gist.

“I understand.” Mr. Moseley pulled his eyebrows together and puffed on his pipe. “And how many times did you say you saw the victim . . . er, socially?”

In his early forties, Moseley was a slender, attractive man with neatly clipped brown hair, regular features, and brown eyes behind dark-rimmed glasses. He had loosened his tie and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt and was leaning back in his chair, smoking. There weren’t many in Darling who smoked a pipe, except Mr. Musgrove, who smoked a corncob stuffed full of Kentucky Planter’s. Mr. Moseley’s pipe was made of polished wood, with a sleek, sophisticated appearance, and his pipe tobacco had the pleasing aroma of vanilla.

“We went out three times.” Buddy counted them off on his fingers. “First was when she invited me to the Methodist pie social. That’s where she went to church, and some of her friends saw us together. Another time, she’d been wanting to go to a dance out at the CCC camp, so I said I’d take her, and afterward, we sat out on her back porch for a while.” That was when Bettina had come out and found them.

“Ah,” Mr. Moseley said. “Yes, well, go on.”

“The third time—” Buddy looked away. “She asked me over to her place for supper. Afterward, we . . . well, we hugged and kissed.” He paused, feeling his face redden. “We fooled around some, too.”

“I see,” Mr. Moseley said, through a cloud of blue tobacco smoke. He looked at Buddy over the top of his glasses. “Did the ‘fooling around some’ include anything more intimate than hugging and kissing?”