“Come on, Sally, whatever you say goes no further.”
“Sean, I really don’t know anything.”
He decided to try a different tack. “Why don’t I throw out some possibilities, and then you can jump in if they trigger anything?”
She looked doubtful. “Well?”
“Battle was a wealthy man. People benefit from his death, right?”
“But I suppose Mrs. Battle would get most of it. And Savannah has her trust fund. I don’t think she needs any more money.”
“Eddie?”
Sally glanced in the direction of the carriage house. “They don’t appear to be scraping dimes together. And I know for a fact that Dorothea Battle makes big bucks.”
“How do you know that?” asked Michelle.
“My best friend does her nails. Dorothea likes to brag.”
“Well, some people never have enough money,” suggested King.
“I just don’t see that being the reason,” said Sally stubbornly.
“If not money, then what else?” He stared pointedly at the young woman. “I guess you probably haven’t been here long enough to know about Bobby’s adulterous past.”
“Oh, I know more than you think,” blurted out Sally. “I mean—” She stopped and looked at her dirty boots.
“It’s okay, Sally,” assured King, hiding his pleasure that she’d bit on his bait so quickly. “Do you know a lot about that because maybe Bobby made advances toward you?”
Sally shook her head. “No, it was nothing like that.”
“So what, then?” pressed King. “It really could be important, Sally.”
She remained silent a bit longer and then said, “Come on with me.”
They walked past the stables and servants’ house and down a paved roadway, eventually arriving at a large brick two-story building with eight old-fashioned wooden garage doors. There was an antique gas pump with a glass bubble top out front.
“This is Mr. Battle’s private garage. He has, or had, a collection of antique cars. I guess Mrs. Battle owns them now.” She pulled out a key and they entered.
The floor was covered in a black and white checkerboard pattern. The shelves held dusty trophies from antique car shows. In front of seven of the doors, sitting perfectly aligned with one another, were vintage cars ranging from a Stutz Bearcat to an imposing vehicle with cloth top and a round grille that the placard on the stand in front proclaimed to be a 1906 six-cylinder Franklin.
“I’d heard that Bobby collected old cars, but I didn’t know his collection was this extensive,” said King as he looked around.
“He has a bunch more on the second floor. There’s a special elevator that takes them up and down,” said Sally. “He used to have a full-time mechanic to take care of them.” She walked down to the last space and stood. King and Michelle joined her. There was no car here. They looked at her questioningly.
She hesitated for an instant. “Look, you didn’t hear this from me,” she said. They both nodded in agreement. “Well, there used to be a car that sat right here. It was huge, you know, one of those big Rolls-Royces you see in the old movies?”
“What happened to it?” asked Michelle.
Sally hesitated again, as though debating whether to tell them.
Sensing this, King said, “Sally, you’ve gone this far.”
“Okay, it was over three years ago. It was late at night, and I’d slipped down here just to look around. I wasn’t supposed to have a key, but the mechanic who used to work here took a liking to me and gave me one. I was inside looking around when I heard a car coming. It was then that I noticed that one of the cars wasn’t there. The door started opening and I saw the headlights. I was scared to death and sure I was going to be fired if they found me here. I ran and hid over there.” She pointed to a tower of fifty-gallon oil drums that sat in one corner. “The Rolls pulled into the garage and the motor was cut off. Mr. Battle got out and he looked bad. I mean really bad.”
“How could you tell? Wasn’t it dark?” asked King.
“There’s an automatic trigger on the doors. At night when the doors go up, the lights come on in here.”
“When you say he looked bad, how do you mean?” asked Michelle. “Sick? Drunk?”
“No, like he was really upset, worried.”
“Did you ever find out what about?” asked King.
“No. Anyway, like I said, he looked bad, but then all of sudden he started smiling and then he started laughing. Laughing! Well, he did, until she showed up.”
“She who, Remmy?” said King.
Sally nodded and said in a hushed tone, “If she’d had a gun, I think Mr. Battle would’ve been dead a long time ago.”
“What happened then?” asked Michelle.
“They started arguing. Well, at first, she just was screaming at him. Not much of it made sense. But from what I could hear, there was another woman involved.”
“Did it seem like Remmy knew who?” asked King sharply.
“If she did, she never mentioned her name, at least not that I heard,” said Sally.
“What did Bobby do?”
“He started yelling, told her it was none of her damn business who he slept with.”
“And to think I was halfway admiring the man,” said Michelle in disgust.
“Well, he said something else I’ll never forget,” said Sally. She paused, drew a quick breath and looked at them anxiously.
“Go ahead,” said King. “I don’t think anything will surprise us now.”
“Mr. Battle said he wasn’t the only one in the family who practiced that philosophy.”
“Of sleeping around?” said King, and Sally nodded.
Michelle and King looked at each other. “And you think he was referring to Remmy?” she asked.
“I just assumed he was. But Mrs. Battle always seemed so proper and…”
“Supportive of her husband,” suggested King.
“Yes, exactly.”
“Public faces can often be deceiving,” he commented.
“And the Rolls?” asked Michelle.
“It just disappeared after that night. I don’t know what happened to it. In fact, Billy Edwards—he was the mechanic who used to take care of the cars—he was gone too. That’s when Mr. Battle lost interest in his collection. He never came down after that, as far as I know.”
“You never saw this Billy Edwards before he left?”
“No, his place was cleaned out the next day. I don’t know who came and took the car. It must have been at night, or else someone would have seen it driving off.”
“Thank you, Sally, you’ve been a big help.”
They left Sally and headed back to the front of the house.
“So what do you make of that?” asked Michelle.
“It creates lots of questions. Who was Bobby seeing back then? Was the reference to sleeping around actually directed at Remmy? And why get rid of the car?” King looked pensive. “I wonder if there’s any chance of tracking down this Billy Edwards and asking him about it.”
“What about going directly to Remmy?”
“She’d want to know how we found out about it. And Sally’s obviously not good at hiding her feelings. One look from Remmy and she’d crack. We may have to at some point, but for now we’ll look for another way.”
“We keep uncovering more questions and no answers,” said Michelle.
“At some point the tide has to turn. We just may not like the answers we find, though.”
Chapter 39
Dorothea and Eddie Battle weren’t home, so King and Michelle drove to the Aphrodisiac that afternoon to speak with Lulu Oxley about the murdered exotic dancer, Rhonda Tyler.
The parking lot was already filling up with the lunch crowd when they arrived. As they walked past one of the bar areas, they caught glimpses of the nearly naked ladies dancing and the men staring and catcalling.