The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

But whatever Violet was going to say was lost in a long sigh. She slumped to the floor in a dead faint.

Myra May left Raylene to tend to Violet and dashed out to the ramshackle garage where she parked Big Bertha, her large green 1920 Chevrolet touring car. With 29,012 miles on her odometer, Bertha was cruising on her third carburetor and sixth set of tires, and she occasionally suffered from the hiccups. But the red-painted spokes in her wheels were bright, her green canvas top was sound, and her chrome-plated headlights twinkled. When Myra May climbed behind the wheel and revved Bertha up to her top speed of thirty-five miles an hour, she always imagined that the car was smiling.

But Bertha wasn’t smiling now, and it wasn’t Myra May behind her wheel. It was Rona Jean Hancock. She was sprawled across the front seat, the top buttons of her red dress undone, her legs splayed in an unladylike way, her head bent back at an awkward angle. On her left leg, she was wearing a silk stocking, held up by an elastic roll garter just above her knee. The right leg was bare, and her other silk stocking was wound tightly around her neck.





TWO


Sheriff Norris Investigates



“Thanks for being willing to talk to me, Violet,” Buddy Norris said, as he sat down on a straight chair next to the sofa where Violet lay.

Buddy was a lean, gangly man with brown hair and blue eyes, a look-alike (many said) for Lucky Lindy, who had flown his Spirit of St. Louis all the way to Paris, only to lose his firstborn son to a kidnapper and murderer just two years ago. The mildness of Buddy’s expression—he rarely frowned—was somewhat contradicted by the pale thread of a scar across his cheek, a souvenir of a knife fight at the Red Dog juke joint over in Maysville. He was wearing the khaki shirt and pants that passed for the Cypress County sheriff’s uniform, with the nickel-plated star pinned to his pocket flap.

He flipped to a clean page in his notebook, checking his wristwatch for the current time, seven thirty a.m., and jotting it down with the date. “So you saw that the garage doors were open and went to see why,” he said. “Is that how it happened, Violet?”

He was feeling a little awkward. A couple of years ago, Buddy had been sweet on Violet Sims, who once was one of the two young ladies he most wanted to get to know. (The other one was the girl who was out there in the front seat of Myra May’s car with her stocking wrapped around her neck, waiting for Lionel Noonan to drive up in his funeral parlor hearse and take her to Monroeville for an autopsy.) But Buddy had given up on Violet when she made it clear that she wasn’t interested in going out with him, although she said it in such a sweet way that he couldn’t feel hurt by the rejection. She simply preferred to spend her free evenings with Myra May and Cupcake in their flat over the diner.

So he had turned his attentions to Rona Jean, who maybe wasn’t as pretty as Violet but had seemed sweet and eager to please him (at least in the beginning), which was always a compliment to a fellow. He and Rona Jean had gotten along just fine, for a while. He felt a fist of hot anger tighten in his belly when he thought of what somebody had done to her, and then a quick, warm wash of sadness that was accentuated by the strains of “Goodnight, Sweetheart”—Rona Jean’s favorite song—from the radio downstairs. But this wasn’t the time or the place to dwell on that. He had to put his mind to his investigation and let nothing interfere. He poised his stub of a pencil over the page and waited.