I drove directly to Uncle James’s house on Washington Avenue. As I was signaling to turn into his driveway I saw his white Mercedes approaching from the other direction. I waited and pulled into the drive right behind him.
As I got closer to his car I noticed he had company. Jonathan McDowell.
When he got out of the car, James’s face was scarlet and dripping with sweat. Jonathan was dressed in running shorts and a T-shirt that was plastered to his chest with sweat. He looked slightly chagrined to see me there.
“Weezie,” James said. “I thought your big sale was today.”
“It was.”
“And the cupboard?”
“Gone,” I said. “I don’t think it even made it over to the warehouse, Uncle James. I was number thirty-six in the door this morning, and nobody came past me carrying it.”
“Weezie had her eye on some fantastic piece of antique furniture from Beaulieu,” James explained to Jonathan as we all trooped in the front door.
I sat at the kitchen table. I noticed with amusement that Jonathan seemed to know his way around James’s house quite well. Right now he was pouring us all glasses of orange juice from a pitcher he retrieved from the refrigerator.
“What do you think happened to the cupboard?” Jonathan asked, taking a seat at my grandmother’s red Formica dinette table.
“I know what happened,” I said. “Gerry Blankenship has been skimming the best pieces out of the house and selling them off to Lewis Hargreaves.”
“Lewis has a very good eye. Are you sure he has the cupboard?”
I nodded and told them both about the majolica oyster plates I’d traced back to Zoe Kallenberg. “She’s his shop assistant, and she lives in an apartment at Lewis’s house on Abercorn,” I said. “I think she’s been selling off some of the smaller items for him. But I can’t understand why they’re doing this so quietly.”
Jonathan and James exchanged a look.
“Blankenship doesn’t want to attract any attention to what he’s doing out at Beaulieu,” James said. “We went out there the other day and had a look around.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Detective Bradley gave Jonathan a key. It’s all perfectly legal.”
I leaned forward. “Is the house totally empty now?”
“It’s more than empty,” Jonathan said sadly. “It’s been stripped. Every noteworthy bit of any architectural significance has disappeared. Moldings, cornices, mantelpieces, stained glass. All of it’s gone.”
“But why?” I asked.
“It was the only way the paper company could be sure that the county’s historic preservation officer wouldn’t certify the house as a historic landmark.”
“And it worked,” James said. “They’ve got a demolition permit. We saw it. The earthmoving equipment is out there. They’ve already started clearing trees for the new road into the property.”
“Oh no,” I said. “It’s bad enough that Lewis Hargreaves got all the best furniture from the house, but now they’re going to tear that beautiful old house down? I can’t believe they can get away with it. It sucks. This means if they sell everything off and put some hideous paper plant out there, Caroline wins.”
“She’s dead,” James said quietly. “How is that winning?”
“She gets what she wants. Tal’s miserable, and he’s making me miserable. Beaulieu is gone without a trace. And people like Gerry Blankenship and Phipps and Diane Mayhew end up richer than ever.”
“Maybe not,” Jonathan said.
“How can we stop them? You just said it’s a matter of days until they tear the house down.”
“There might be a way,” Jonathan repeated. “If there was enough of a public uproar.”
“From whom?” James asked. “You can’t be involved in anything like that. It’s a conflict of interest with your job.”
“Not me. Not directly,” Jonathan said. “But I know somebody who’d move heaven and earth to save Beaulieu.”
Suddenly I knew whom he was talking about.
“Merijoy Rucker. But what can she do?”
“Given the facts we’ve gathered, she can do a lot,” Jonathan pointed out.
“What facts?” I asked.
James sighed and shook his head. “I really don’t want to do anything that might put Grady and Juanita Traylor at risk of losing their house.”
“What house?” I asked, looking from my uncle to his friend. “What have you guys been up to?”
“Your uncle is quite the detective,” Jonathan said. “He figured out that Gerry Blankenship tricked an elderly couple who used to work for Anna Ruby Mullinax into witnessing the will that allows Beaulieu to be sold to the paper company.”
“Tricked them, how?”
“The husband has had a stroke and is basically a vegetable,” Jonathan said, “and his wife is nearly blind from diabetes. Blankenship had them witness the will without Miss Mullinax present. Heaven knows whether or not she was capable of agreeing to the sale. And then, to ingratiate the couple and keep them quiet, Blankenship moved them into a new house way out in the country, to a house that belongs to the Willis J. Mullinax Foundation—which he runs.”
“But that’s illegal,” I said. “Blankenship engineered the whole thing. The sale of Beaulieu is bogus. We could stop them from tearing it down.” I looked over at Jonathan. “You’re the chief assistant district attorney. Can’t you have Blankenship arrested or something?”
“Maybe,” Jonathan said. “The will and the foundation and all of that is probably a matter for a grand jury to look into. The whole thing reeks of fraud. But what interests me even more is the question of how Caroline DeSantos’s death ties into all of this. My boss hates the idea of having an unsolved homicide on the books. It’s an election year coming up, you know.”
Jonathan got up and rinsed his juice glass out, then placed it neatly in the dish drainer.
“Weezie,” he said, coming back to the table. “Your uncle tells me Tal knew Caroline was having an affair.”
I nodded, feeling my stomach start to knot up.
“How angry was he about that? Angry enough to kill her?”
“No,” I blurted. “He was depressed, it’s true. He told me he knew it was over between them before she died, but it wasn’t that he was angry about that. More like resigned. To the fact that she’d found someone else, and that he’d ruined his own life by divorcing me.”
“He says he was alone the night she was killed. But nobody else can verify that,” Jonathan said.
“She told him she had a meeting. Tal didn’t believe her. He tried to follow her. But he lost her at the light at Victory and Bee Road.”
“But nobody else saw him that night,” James reminded me.
“Tal wouldn’t kill anybody,” I said. “That’s just not him. The man has no convictions. He—he doesn’t feel things deeply enough to kill for. Not love. Not hate. Not jealousy.”
“What about money?” Jonathan asked.
“His family has gobs of money,” I said. “And the firm was doing well. That new paper plant commission would have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“Maybe he knew how fragile the deal was,” Jonathan said. “He was president of the firm. He had to know what was going on out there. Certainly he knew Blankenship was involved in something sleazy, possibly with Caroline’s help.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s a rat bastard. But he’s no killer.”
“He knew his way around Beaulieu,” James said quietly. “He had a key to the plantation house. Think about it, Weezie. Tal had motive, and he had access.”
“But not the guts,” I said. “He didn’t even have the guts to make her buy him real cream for his coffee.”
Jonathan put his palms flat on the table. “All right. Talmadge Evans is innocent. What does that leave us?”
“I think your idea before was a good one,” I said. “Let’s go talk to Merijoy. She was at Beaulieu for the memorial service. And you said yourself,” I reminded Jonathan, “she’s the gossip queen of Ardsley Park.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” James said. “You two go see Merijoy. And after I get cleaned up, I’ll go pay a call on Gerry Blankenship. It might be interesting to see what he has to say about Anna Ruby’s will and the Mullinax Foundation.”