Hermione Wou-ki sat resplendent on a green and gold sofa on the far side of a palatial room. Perhaps it was a ballroom. She was wearing a shimmering, pink silk pantsuit, and her thick, dark hair cascaded free over her shoulders. Her porcelain face and hands gave the impression that one was looking at a doll. A very large and expertly crafted doll. At this great distance that might well have been what I was looking at.
“Ah yes,” she said, “please come in.”
Rufus, who was as powerfully built as a Neanderthal, managed to slip around us and disappear, all in the blink of an eye. As C.J. and I crossed the polished hardwood floor, my nervousness escalated. I felt like I was approaching the queen.
C.J. did not share my state of mind. “Hey Hermione,” she said, her loud voice echoing in the sparsely furnished room, “did you get the invitation yet?”
“To your wedding? Yes, how lovely. Unfortunately, C.J., I’ll be in England then. Prince Harry has a significant birthday coming up, and after all, I am his godmother.”
C.J. squealed with excitement. “Give him hugs and kisses from his Auntie C.J.”
Auntie C.J. indeed! It’s one thing to have a trolley that skips the tracks every now and then, but to have one capable of getting airborne for bizarre flights of fancy is downright admirable. I was going to have to get a list of the big gal’s meds and see if my doc would prescribe me the same. If that didn’t work, I would try and steal her address book.
“I sure will,” Hermione said with a straight face. She turned to face me. “And how are you today?”
“Would you like to hear the polite, Southern version, or the wicked unvarnished truth?”
She patted the sofa beside her as she laughed. “Come, sit with me. C.J., be a darling and pull up a chair for yourself.”
My buddy had to walk practically the length of a football field to get a chair, but she did so without complaining. Hermione made good use of that time.
“I expected you to come alone,” she whispered.
“But I thought you liked C.J.”
“I do. However, this is a very delicate matter. Can she be trusted?”
“Absolutely. I’d trust her with my life.”
“What about my life? Can she be counted on not to gossip?”
“Sure. But you’ll have to tell her it’s not for anyone else’s ears. No, be more direct than that. C.J. is very literal.”
That was an understatement. Once, I sent my assistant to an estate sale to buy a particular French commode I’d seen listed in the inventory list that was published in the Post and Courier. My instructions were that she buy the piece at all cost.
She did just that, paying three times what the commode was worth for resale. This shocked me because normally the big galoot is a savvy businesswoman. But instructions are instructions, and I was counting on her to bring the piece home. I might have remained annoyed at her for a long time had it not been for that fact that as I was cleaning the commode I discovered a “secret” drawer that contained a bundle of letters, tied up with a rose-colored ribbon.
The letters, written in 1848, were to a prominent Charleston housewife from her lover, an escaped slave who managed to find his way north to Pennsylvania. I offered this treasure trove to the housewife’s descendants, who currently live in Charleston. They wanted nothing to do with the letters, and threatened to sue if I even implied to anyone that they might be descended from this escaped slave. So vehemently did they deny any connection that I concluded they were, indeed, the product of this unorthodox union.
Eventually I put the letters up for sale at an auction house, with an international reputation, in New York City. There the letters fetched three times what I had to pay for the commode. Thanks to C.J. It was literally found money.
When my big-spending employee returned with a chair, Hermione Wou-ki wasted no time in getting down to business. “I assume you’ve both heard that Roberta Stanley was murdered.”
“Yes, ma’am,” we said in unison.
“Abby—I believe you gave me leave to call you by your first name?” Her voice rose at the end, forming a question out of what sounded like a statement. Perhaps Hermione was secretly a Canadian. I’ve heard there are a great number of Canadians living in stealth in this country. Someone even suggested to me that these hidden Canadians are planning to take over the U.S. and turn it into their country’s eleventh province.
“By all means,” I said.
“I understand that you are a sleuth, as well as a collector who is held in high esteem by her colleagues.” Again the rising inflection.
“I am? I mean, they really say that?” I was turning into a Canadian as well. A couple of “eh’s” and I would be totally assimilated.
“Abby, in this business tongues wag all the time. Fortunately for you, they wag in admiration.”
“Wow. Who would have thought?” Wisely, I took a moment to bask in the good news. Good news, like a really tasty fortune cookie, is a rarity in my experience.
“Cousin Dewlap changed his skin every year,” C.J. said, apropos of nothing.
“That was your Cousin Monty Python,” I said, and gave her the Timberlake glare. That glare, and my two beautiful children, were all I got out of my twenty year marriage to Buford.
Hermione knew just as well as I did that having C.J. in the room would prolong any conversation. “C.J., would you be a dear and see if you could help Rufus bring us a spot of tea? Oh, and bring those shortbread biscuits Abby is so fond of.”
“Sure thing,” C.J. said, and clomped out of the room just as cheerfully as if she’d been invited on a picnic.
“Gotta love her,” I said. I meant it.
“Yes, she is very special. Abby, I wish you’d come here by yourself—but never mind. It’s too late now. You see, dear, I have reason to believe that I’m next.”
“Next to what?”
Her eyes flickered impatiently, but her voice remained cultured, under control. “The next to die, Abby.”
I leaned toward her, so as not to miss a word. “You mean like Roberta?”
She nodded. “Hopefully not just like Roberta. That is too gruesome to contemplate. I’ve never been a fan of violent death Twenty-three lifetimes ago—or was it just twenty-two—I was thrust into the Roman coliseum, my hands tied behind my back. There were a bunch of us; all Christian, all women and children. And five hungry lions. That, I remember clearly.” A faraway look glazed her eyes. I waited patiently, long enough for the lions to satiate their hunger, before she shook her head, returning to planet Earth. “Sleeping pills in my tea would be much preferred,” she said, without a trace of embarrassment.
“So you know who the killer is?”
“I haven’t a clue. I was hoping you could help me with that. All I have is a possible motive, and I daresay it’s not a very good one.”
“And that would be?”
“Because of my connection to Beauregard.”
Beauregard? Did I detect familiarity that went beyond the usual shopkeeper/client relationship?
“Could you please elaborate,” I said.
“Colonel Humphrey—except that he wasn’t a Kentucky colonel back then—was a world-class big game hunter. Some people think it takes guts to hunt a tiger, but I think all it takes is tiny nuts, if you’ll pardon me being so crass. Yes, the animals are dangerous—there’s no denying that—but in the end the hunter has a gun, something a tiger never has. In my opinion people who hunt large animals that they won’t be eating themselves are trying to compensate for feeling powerless in other areas of their lives.
“Anyway, before he took up hunting in Africa, Colonel Humphrey hunted tigers in India and Burma, and rhinos in Sumatra. My father was a broker for traditional Chinese pharmacists, and hunters from all the world would come to his office and sell various animal body parts that were, and still are, in demand. Bear feet, rhino horns, tiger bones, even tiger penises.” She paused to catch her breath. “Do you know how much a tiger penis can go for to the right buyer?”
I shook my head. I’d done my share of dozing off during college, but I doubt that this subject had been touched on in any of my courses. I’m almost positive I would have woken up for that.
“At least three thousand dollars. In Taiwan there are restaurants that sell tiger penis soup. Wealthy old men eat this soup believing that it will cure their impotence. The tigers they prefer are from northern China, from the Amur River region. There are about only three hundred of these tigers left. It frustrates me to no end that these adult men can’t see beyond their immediate desires. When the last of these tigers is slaughtered, then what will they do?”
“Buy Viagra?”
Her laughter contained no mirth. “Conservationists have been trying to pound that lesson home to them, but without much success. The traditionalists say that this is how it has been done for thousands of years, and that the West simply doesn’t understand. But understand what? Annihilation of a species? I span two cultures, Abby. Unfortunately, I can see both sides.”
“Why is that unfortunate?”
“Isn’t it easier to see everything in black and white? I have just as much faith in Chinese medicine as I do Western, or so-called modern, medicine. I know of so many cases in which patients did not respond to modern medicine but were cured by Eastern practitioners.”
“Yes,” I said, “but things are changing. I think both traditions are becoming open to examining what the other has to offer. Take acupuncture as one example: many pain management clinics in the West now have acupuncturists on staff.”
“That’s good. But I think it’s easier to accept new ways than to disregard old ways. Wild tigers, I think, are doomed. My father is dead now, but I like to think he would have seen the handwriting on the wall and gone into a less destructive occupation. Which brings me back to Beauregard.”
“It does?”
“Abby, Beauregard claims to have repented from his wholesale slaughter ways. My, that is a mouthful. Anyway, I think it’s possible he may possess knowledge of some black-marketing in endangered species, and that’s why his lover was killed.”
“So Roberta was telling the truth. They really are—were—lovers!”
“My dear, surely this does not come as a surprise. Everyone in Charleston knows this.”
“Not everyone. I bet the man who cleans the restrooms at the bus station doesn’t know.”
She looked perplexed, rather than annoyed. For women like Hermione Wou-ki, “everyone” does not mean everyone. Instead, it pertains to all the folks who are at her social-economic level. To be brutally honest, my “everyone” doesn’t include the Trailways janitor either.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was nitpicking. At any rate, I don’t understand how it is that your father’s business connection with the Colonel has anything to do with Roberta Stanley’s death, or you being ‘next’, as you put it.”
Before she had time to explain the obvious to my dim-witted self, we both heard a rather lively conversation between C.J. and Rufus as they approached from the hallway. Hermione leaned so close that her lips almost touched my ear.
“Abby, if anything happens to me, then you’ll be next.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“These people—the smugglers—have a lot of power. More than you can imagine.”