Thursday, late afternoon
WHEN EARLA SHOWED RANNIE INTO THE DEN, MARY WAS AT THE BAR, regal and serene, in a raw silk blouse with a bow at the neck and a pale gray skirt. Mary filled a highball glass from a greatly depleted gallon bottle of Dewars and kissed Rannie, who then settled into the striped armchair across from Daisy. The older woman had a sodden handkerchief and cigarette clenched in one hand while the other reached gratefully for the replenished highball.
“You guessed, didn’t you? About Augusta? It wasn’t my secret to tell, you understand that, don’t you?” Daisy was wearing pilled wool slacks and scuffed leather pumps. The heavy gold necklace over her turtleneck looked like an eighteen-karat-gold choke chain. She gazed up at Rannie with bleary, pink-rimmed eyes.
“Guessed what?” Mary sat down on the loveseat with an equally plentiful glass of vodka.
“Poor Augusta! I can’t believe it. It’s just too too awful!” Daisy let out a loose wheezing cough. Tears spilled down her leathery tan cheeks and a quarter inch of cigarette ash landed on her bosom. Her red lipstick was smeared across her mouth like a wound.
“Dear, try not to upset yourself so.” Mary patted Daisy’s knee consolingly. “Chaps again, my Lord! I couldn’t believe it when I turned on the news the other night—Rannie, help yourself to whatever you’d like, there’s wine in the ice bucket…. Did Nate know the poor woman?”
“Ms. Hollins was his English teacher,” Rannie said and left it at that.
“I don’t believe for one second it was suicide. Augusta wasn’t the sort to go leaping off some roof. Since the moment she knew Larry was murdered, she was desperate to leave that school. She was frightened. I spoke to her Sunday; she was planning to resign.” Daisy coughed into her handkerchief. “Larry was leaving her considerable money. Not that Augusta cared a fig about that. You saw the way she dressed, like some folksinger.” Daisy squashed out her cigarette, then stared at Rannie. “You know you’re making me very nervous, sitting there empty-handed.
“Besides, Augusta was Catholic,” Daisy went on while Rannie obediently poured herself a glass of wine. “Well, half-Catholic. They all think you burn in hell if you kill yourself, you know.”
“When exactly did Ms. Hollins learn she was his daughter?” Rannie asked.
“Oh, ages ago. While she was at Wellesley. She’d always been suspicious that her mother had fed her a cock-and-bull story about her father. So she made it a point to find out the truth. Larry was thrilled when she contacted him. I remember she’d pop down to New York for the weekend to visit him. From the very first time they laid eyes on each other, they connected. She’d stop by to see me, too, sometimes.”
“Whose daughter?” Mary asked, patting her silvery pageboy in place with her free hand.
“Larry Tutwiler’s, Mims. The woman who was found dead at Chaps was Larry’s daughter. Larry and Laura’s daughter.”
“No, really, Daisy! And she was teaching at Chaps, too? How extraordinary! I don’t think I ever met her. Was she ever at the club?”
Bit by bit, Daisy laid out the entire story in a fairly coherent fashion considering what the alcohol-level in her blood had to be. According to Daisy, Laura and Augusta hadn’t enjoyed a close or easy relationship, Laura unable to relate to her bookish, socially clumsy daughter, a girl who was horsey but not a horsewoman. “‘Why isn’t she boy crazy?’ Laura would ask me.”
To Rannie’s ear, it sounded as though Mr. Tut was by far the more empathetic parent, although Daisy’s unwavering allegiance was to Laura. “She was the one left in the lurch. I would never agree to see Larry socially.”
“Are you sure he never tried to reconcile with Laura after the baby was born?” Rannie said, remembering Tut’s leave of absence.
“Laura never said so. Neither did Augusta. Wouldn’t Larry have told Augusta rather than let her go on thinking he’d abandoned the two of them?”
Not necessarily, Rannie thought but kept silent. Mr. Tut was a gentleman and gallant; if Laura had spurned him, she also had willfully denied her daughter a father. Perhaps Mr. Tut thought it would be too painful for Augusta to know the depth of her mother’s selfishness; easier to keep the blame squarely on his shoulders.
“Did Augusta tell her mother?”
“Yes, eventually. Laura said if Augusta planned to see Larry, that was her business. Really, what else could she say? But Laura remained positively adamant about never seeing him herself. ‘That chapter of my life is over,’ she told me.” Daisy turned to Mary. “We were all closing in on our sixties by then, and I think the real reason was she didn’t want him to see her old.”
“Sixty? Old!” Mary scoffed, before thanking Earla, who appeared at the door of the den to announce dinner would be ready in five minutes.
“Oh, I know, Mims! It sounds young to me now too. But Laura was vain. She made Augusta swear never to show Larry any photos.”
Ms. Hollins’s brief marriage—“some fellow from Wyoming” Daisy said in a way that made it seem sheer folly to wed anyone west of the Hudson—broke up not long before her mother’s death. “Augusta was teaching English at a girls school in Atlanta; then when a position opened at Chaps, Larry persuaded her to apply and move to New York.”
“Did anyone at Chaps know he was her father?” Rannie inquired, remembering David Ross’s oblique remarks about skeletons in Mr. Tut’s closet. Perhaps this information was David Ross’s “bargaining chip.”
“I wouldn’t imagine either one of them went around broadcasting that,” Daisy answered tartly.
“The police? Do they know?”
“Yes. She told the police right away when Larry’s body was found. I must say, from Day One, Augusta suspected murder.” This time the word sounded bitter on Daisy’s tongue. “The last few weeks before he died, she often stayed at Larry’s—he suffered terribly, you know; pancreatic cancer is not a pleasant way to go. She was a good daughter. Anyway, Augusta insisted a police officer come to the apartment while she packed up her belongings. I thought she was being ridiculous, paranoid…. And now she’s dead, too.”
Daisy lit another cigarette and composed herself, swiping at tears with her hankie while Rannie again suffered remorse over the memory of tailing Ms. Hollins down West End Avenue. Then, just when Rannie assumed that was it, end of story, time to eat, Daisy delivered more interesting tidbits. The night Mr. Tut died, Augusta Hollins had met Daisy for dinner and a movie. Rannie recalled running into Ms. Hollins on Riverside Drive, stealth smoking. Hadn’t she mentioned plans that had kept her out late? Yes, Rannie could hear Ms. Hollins, the regret in her voice over not being with Tut.
“She was upset. She’d seen Larry, oh, not half an hour before I picked her up. Augusta was odd: She knew Larry had money and was very stubborn about never wanting any. Well, he’d just told her he’d changed his will recently and, like it or not, she was getting two million dollars. He said she could give it away, even burn it, for all he cared, but he insisted on providing for her.”
Rannie sat, absorbing all of what Daisy was saying…. So Daisy was Ms. Hollins’s alibi. Tim had said she was investigating ass-backwards. Well, there was no way to work in the next question subtly so Rannie simply asked flat out, “Do you remember what time you met Augusta that Monday evening?”
Daisy was not so crocked that she didn’t stiffen slightly and peer quizzically at Rannie. “Right before six,” she said with certainty. “We had a reservation at Ouest. Dreadful food and hideously expensive. I like to eat early. Mims knows that.”
“Earla will be ready for us in just a moment, dear,” Mary assured her and she stood and began transferring empty glasses and a plate of untouched Triscuits and Wispride to the bar.
Daisy rose too. The elasticized waistband on her slacks was less than an inch under her bustline. Mary took hold of her friend’s arm, Rannie following them in the direction of the dining room, unsure about who was propping up whom.
“Mary, I can’t stay; I really should be getting home,” Rannie said.
“You’re sure? What a shame when Earla’s made such a lovely dinner.” Mary helped Daisy take her place at the mahogany table. “Now no more talk of anything upsetting,” she instructed as Earla appeared, bearing a Wedgewood bowl of what appeared to be a ball of off-white knitting yarn. Accompanying the spaghetti was a gravy boat of watery tomato sauce and a salad of limp iceberg lettuce and carrot curls.
“Good-bye, dear.” Mary tilted her face to accept a peck on the cheek.
Rannie gathered her jacket and purse.
“Be sure to save room for dessert,” she heard Mary telling Daisy. “It’s your favorite.”
“No! Earla’s Jell-O Surprise!” It sounded as if Daisy’s mood had brightened considerably.
Rannie closed the door to the apartment. For years now she’d been trying to determine what exactly the “surprises” were, suspended in the only gray Jell-O she’d ever encountered. Nate said Magic Lucky Charms, and for all she knew he was right.