The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

The phone rang again, and Buddy picked it up. The woman on the other end of the line was screaming, half hysterical. It took a while to calm her down long enough to get the details. When he did, he stepped to the door and spoke to his deputy.

“Wayne, Miz Parker out on the Livermore Road claims her neighbor stole her old brown mare, and she’s promising to take a shotgun and go over to his place and settle his hash.” He held out the card on which he’d written the directions. The one drawback to Wayne, so far, was that he didn’t know the country. “You better hightail it out to the Parkers’ and take care of whatever the hell is going on. I’d go, but I need to talk to a couple of suspects in the Hancock case. Oh, and when you get back, stop at the garage where Miss Hancock was killed and look around for some rope. Hemp rope. Doc Roberts says she was strangled with a rope, not the stocking.”

“Oh yeah?” Wayne said, raising both eyebrows. “The stocking was to make it look like a sexual assault, huh?”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t. There wasn’t any sexual assault.” Buddy thought of telling him about the pregnancy, but didn’t—why, he wasn’t sure. Instead, he said, “While you’re there, look around for something the killer could have used to hit her with. She was conked on the right temple, Doc says, hard enough to give her a skull fracture. Maybe a beer bottle, something like that.”

“Got it, boss.” Wayne stood, reaching for the gun belt that was slung on the back of his chair. “On my way.”

Buddy watched him buckle on his belt, feeling regretful. He supposed it would be smart to wear his .38 when he went to see Lassen and Pyle, just in case. And now that he thought of it, he wished he could take Wayne with him, too.


*

Lassen lived at Mrs. Meeks’ boardinghouse on Railroad Street, two blocks from the rail yard and depot, and since it was Saturday, he was likely to be there. The Meeks place was a two-story frame house that had been recently painted a bilious shade of green (a batch of paint Mr. Musgrove had on sale). There were eight small rooms upstairs, on both sides of a long hall, which Mrs. Meeks rented as sleeping rooms (usually two or three to a room, so there wasn’t much space for anything except sleeping) to men who worked at Ozzie Sherman’s sawmill or on the railroad.

Buddy knew the place well, because he’d lived there after his dad got so cranky he thought it would be better if he moved out. The rooms were clean, if crowded, and the sheets were washed once a week, regular. You got out of bed in the mornings to eggs, bacon, oatmeal, hot buttered biscuits, and coffee, and came home in the evenings to beef stew and dumplings or meat loaf and biscuits and sometimes baked ham and mashed potatoes, plus green apple pie or stewed pears or even chocolate cake. And all this, including the room, for just $9.50 a week plus $2 for laundry, extra for ironing. Or $35, if you took it by the month and did your own washing and ironing. It was, Buddy thought, a sweet deal for a man who didn’t much like to cook and do his own washing.