The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

Buddy had been following the news about the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and Nebraska, and thought that nature had suddenly thrown a temper tantrum and was making it very hard for people who just wanted to grow their crops and their cows and their kids and get on with their lives. The federal money sounded like a good idea, even though the smaller headline noted that FDR had “borrowed” it from the $525,000,000 fund to support CCC camps. Buddy hoped the president wouldn’t “borrow” any money from Camp Briarwood, which seemed to be doing good things for Cypress County. He was looking forward to meeting the camp commander at Verna’s house that night.

The lunch rush was just tapering off when Buddy took his usual place at the counter, right in front of the big black Emerson electric fan, where it could blow directly on him and cool him off. The day was hot and sultry and—unless you were sitting in front of a fan—the air wasn’t moving.

He always had meat loaf on Saturdays, but today the liver and onions sounded good, so he ordered that, with mashed potatoes and skillet corn and cabbage slaw and a piece of Raylene’s lemon chess pie, all for thirty-five cents. He ate to the accompaniment of the weather report from radio station WALA (which was supposed to stand for “We Are Loyal Alabamians”) down in Mobile. A ship out in the Gulf had registered a barometric low of 979 millibars, and winds of 85 miles an hour had been reported at a nearby weather station. Hurricane flags were flying for Mobile Bay and the northern Gulf of Mexico. Inland, the forecast was for rain and plenty of it, which was good, Buddy thought. The crops and pastures needed it—as long as they didn’t get too much. There were miles of unimproved roads in the county, and rain turned them into bottomless goo.

The weather report was followed, as usual, by the noon market report: pork bellies were up, feeder calves were down, corn and beans were both down. And then the national news. FDR had just signed something called a “credit union” act, whatever that was. The Yankees had beaten the White Sox 13 to 2 in Yankee Stadium, with Lou Gehrig—who had a .366 batting average for the season—slamming a double, a triple, and a home run. And the mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, had threatened to organize a lynching party for Senator Huey P. (“Kingfish”) Long. “If it is necessary to teach him decency at the end of a hempen rope,” the mayor cried, “I, for one, am willing to swing the rope!” Buddy, who had heard from law enforcement friends in Louisiana that the Kingfish ran a mighty corrupt shop over there, thought that in this case, lynching might be acceptable.

While Buddy listened and ate, he fielded questions about the murder from Mr. Dunlap, owner of the Five and Dime, and old J.D. Henderson, who helped Mr. Musgrove at the hardware store next door. They wanted to know when he was going to catch Rona Jean’s killer and what was slowing him down—as if they thought he should pull the murderer out of his hat, like some vaudeville stage magician or a slick cop in a detective story. Well, real life was nothing like that. In real life, there weren’t any parlor tricks and nobody was standing there, feeding you the clues one at a time so all you had to do was put them together, like a jigsaw puzzle. In real life, each clue led off in a different direction, and there was so much confusion and contradiction (as there was in his head right now) that it was a wonder any crime got solved, let alone a murder.

Finally, he got fed up with the questions. He threw down his fork and yelled, “Will you two just quit the heck pestering me? You’ll find out who killed her when I do, and not a durn minute sooner.”