The Sassy Belles. Beth Albright
I don’t remember the drive over there. I don’t think I breathed even once in the five minutes it took me to arrive at the familiar cracked driveway. You had to angle your car just right to get in and out of it so as not to bottom out. I wasn’t thinking of any angling as I ripped right in behind Harry’s Mercedes and Vivi’s powder-blue convertible Thunderbird. Harry was standing beside her car. The shock of what I’d just heard was stealing my breath, but I knew they both needed me. I opened my car door and turned and touched my high heels to the cement.
“Tell me again—what the hell happened?” I heard Harry say to Vivi. “Go slow this time. I need every detail.”
The consummate lawyer. Even when his own brother could be dead, Harry was in full lawyer mode.
“For God’s sake, Harry, you aren’t takin’ a freakin’ deposition are you?” Vivi reacted in pure Vivi form. “Your damn brother, my lover, is dead, Harry! Dead! Dead! Dead!”
Vivi is a tactless wonder. “I did it, but it was an accident! I thought he was enjoying it. He was yellin’ and moanin’ and…Harry, he just stopped,” she said. “I don’t know if I suffocated him or what, but oh, my God, he’s dead!” She was crying and trembling, pushing the red, wiry frizz away from her eyes.
By now, Harry was visibly shaken. He pulled off his wire-framed glasses and dragged his long fingers through his thick salt-and-pepper hair. He was in his late thirties, but if you keep yourself so bottled up all the time you go gray before you know it. Harry was bottled and corked.
“Vivi,” he said slow and steady, “is Lewis still at the Fountain Mist?”
“Well, Harry,” Vivi answered with as much sarcasm as she could muster, “unless you believe in the walkin’ dead, he’s still right there where I left him, buck naked.”
“Vivi, if Lewis is actually dead, you need an attorney,” I interjected. “My God, we need to call an ambulance! The police.”
“Well, y’all,” Vivi said, “aren’t I lookin’ at two lawyers right now?”
Harry and I stood, looking dumb and stupid, first at each other, then at Vivi. Still, Harry looked the most confused. The most disoriented. I could tell he was trying to process how this little development might impact that precious blossoming political career.
He and his brother, Lewis, had never been close and Harry had spent a lifetime bailing Lewis out of one mess after the next. Lewis was the baby of the family. He was good-looking, but in a Field and Stream sort of way. He was the polar opposite of Harry. Harry was prep-school gorgeous. Straight out of GQ. Lewis was two years younger, with a loud, center-of-attention boom of a voice that could really get irritating. Actually, overall, Lewis was quite irritating. Why in the world Vivi would shack up with him was beyond me. I looked at her and, despite her mascara-stained eyes, her sheet-white skin and runny nose, well—honestly, my thought was that Vivi could do better than Lewis. But what I loved in Vivi was her wild streak. She was one of the few people who really lived in the moment. Hell, Vivi lived for the moment. And I was sure that’s what attracted Lewis.
After a long, awkward silence in the warmth of the late morning sun, Vivi spoke. “Well,” she said, as if she had been picked last to play kickball, “since I don’t really have a turkey wishbone handy for y’all, somebody be my damn lawyer already! Do we need to play eeny meeny miny moe or what?”
Harry answered first. “No matter what, not reporting a death in a timely manner is a real crime, so if we don’t call the police and an ambulance, we will all need lawyers.”
I took out my cell.
“Here, honey, let’s get this over with. You need to call the ambulance first, even if you think he’s dead.”
I handed the phone to her as I rubbed her shoulder and then looked over at Harry. He had turned around and was leaning against Vivi’s car, running his fingers through his hair over and over—his nervous tic. He looked lost in thought—as though floods of terrible memories were coming back, like waves crashing a shoreline. I wanted to say something, but had no good words at the moment. My thoughts turned back to Vivi. She was waiting for the 911 operator to answer.
Vivi had been through this before. No, she hadn’t ever killed anyone, but short, steamy love affairs were basically on par for her. At one point, she’d been married to a congressman who lived full-time in Washington. He was twenty years older than Vivi and totally unattractive, but another blue blood just the same. The marriage didn’t last too long, though no one ever thought it would. Vivi would never leave the South. That would be like asking cotton to grow up North. Vivi just couldn’t be planted anywhere else. But the congressman had to live in D.C. With all that time apart everyone knew it would just grow stale. And it did after just a few short years. Besides, Vivi loved to be…well, let’s call it social. Yes, social was a perfect word for Vivi Ann McFadden. I’m not saying that she was a party girl, but she loved, thrived actually, on social interaction. Okay, Vivi was a party girl. She was an only child of wealth and privilege and most of the time she took the privilege part too far.
She never gave anything much thought. She just flew by the seat of her pants, or anyone else’s pants. Her free spirit was enviable. She swore like a sailor, even during high school, and had the reputation as a bit of the wild child of Tuscaloosa. She was popular and, no, not just with the men. Everyone loved her because she was so damn funny. The only little problem was that if Vivi thought it, it popped right out of her mouth before it ever stopped to register at her brain. Vivi never learned that some things should be thought but not actually said. Sometimes that got her into trouble. But she had such a hilarious personality she stayed at the center of the most sought-after social circles.
As I listened to her choke out her story to the 911 operator, I could tell that this event with Lewis would change her.
* * *
Harry and I left Mother’s with Vivi to go to the police station. I suggested to Harry that he could go on to the Fountain Mist and meet the ambulance, but he insisted he would prefer to stay with us. He didn’t seem to want to see Lewis, dead or alive. I tried my best to persuade him, but he wouldn’t budge. After all the years that had gone by, six, I think, since he and Lewis had even spoken, Harry just didn’t want to be the one to ID the body. If he got there first, it would be just him and poor, dead Lewis. And Harry didn’t want that, not after the way things had been between them. So he led the way to the police station downtown. After that we would all go together to the motel.
My emotions were in overdrive. Vivi was my best friend since third grade, my sister in every way, and Harry was my husband, my college sweetheart, though we had had our share of troubles. Between these relationships, the fact that Lewis was dead and the fact that I’m an attorney, too, well, I’ve never felt so stuck in such a messy fix as this. I didn’t know which feeling to feel, never mind knowing the right thing to say or who to say it to. We were all in shock for different reasons, and the trip to the police station was a silent one.
We arrived at the station in minutes. That’s the good thing about Tuscaloosa—everything is only minutes away. We got out of our cars and walked into the little building. It was on the corner of the street that faced the Warrior River. We stepped inside and I stood next to Vivi and held her hand as she talked to the police. Harry stood on her other side, trying with every fiber in his being to hold it together, to cover his emotions. Luckily for him, it was something he’d being training himself to do for ages now—even with me. A politician should be stoic, composed, unruffled—and I can tell you, he was great at that.
The little balding officer sat in front of us, diligently taking down Vivi’s half sentences and descriptive details of her last breathless moments with Lewis. When she finished, the pudgy officer looked up with his mouth open and eyes bugging through his tiny square glasses and eventually spoke. “Ahem. Anything else, ma’am?”
Officer Dooley knew Vivi. He used to work detail for her mother at the gate of the famous McFadden plantation and had known the family for years. Tuscaloosa is a small college town, where everyone knows everyone and has probably