Wedding Bell Blues

by Charlotte Douglas

  “So,” Bill said in his practical way, “what are you going to do about these grandiose wedding plans?”

  “I did call Madame Lapierre’s New York office this afternoon and left a message on her voice mail to warn her that I would not be participating in Mother’s big fat wedding.”

  “Good. That’s a start.”

  I sighed. “And I’m still working up the courage to break the news to Mother in a way she’ll understand and accept.”

  “You always rise to the challenge, Margaret,” he said with such confidence I was beginning to believe I could actually confront Mother without her disowning me, which she’d done once before, when I’d had to arrest the daughter of her best friend.

  “I’m beginning to think George Burns was right,” I said.

  “The comic?”

  “Yeah, he claimed happiness was having a large, loving, close-knit family—living in another city.”

  Bill laughed. “As long as you keep your sense of humor, you’ll be okay. Now, want to hear about my afternoon?”

  I was glad to change the subject. “Any luck on Ashton?”

  “Nothing. It’s as if the man didn’t exist before he showed up in Pelican Bay.”

  “That’s a red flag right there. If he changed his identity, he’s either running from the law or someone who had it in for him. Or both.”

  “My thoughts precisely. That’s why I’ve enlisted Adler’s help.”

  My former partner now worked as a detective for the Clearwater PD. Young enough to be my son, he’d always stirred my maternal instincts. They came to his defense now. “Isn’t he awfully busy with his own caseload?”

  “Not to worry.” Bill patted my hand. “He’s simply going to run Ashton’s name through his databases and see if he gets a hit. Keating’s probably already done that, but I doubt he’ll be sharing anything until the rules of discovery require it.”

  “I’ll try talking to Keating again,” I said.

  “You think he’ll bend?”

  “I’ll use my feminine wiles.”

  “Poor guy,” Bill said. “He doesn’t have a chance.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am serious.” He leaned over and kissed me.

  I enjoyed kissing him back.

  Long minutes later, after I’d come up for air, Bill said, “I went by Grove Spirit House today, but the deputy at the gate wouldn’t let me in.”

  “We need to inspect the crime scene and interview Celeste.”

  “Terry will have to get us access,” he said. “But my trip wasn’t wasted. I did a perimeter check.”

  I recalled the eight-foot chain-link fence and the undergrowth that surrounded it. “Through all those weeds?”

  He nodded.

  “Find anything besides sandspurs, beggar weed, snakes and fire ants?”

  He nodded again. “Someone else had recently trampled the weeds along a section of the fence.”

  “The sheriff’s investigators?”

  “I don’t think so. There were fresh tire tracks in the sandy soil where a vehicle had pulled off the road, just out of range of the surveillance camera. And I could see through the fence that someone had also beaten a path through the grove toward the retreat compound.” He stood. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  He returned a moment later with several digital photos he’d printed out from his computer and handed them to me. Sure enough, someone had recently crushed the weeds between two rows of orange trees. But most interesting of all was a close-up of the top of the fence where the trailblazer had gained entry to the property. Snagged in the exposed ends of the wires was a scrap of fabric, a bright, tasteless plaid that I recognized immediately.

  “That material is the same as the shirt Garth Swinburn was wearing when I interviewed him the day before Ashton was murdered.”

  “You’re sure?” Bill asked.

  “A fabric that ugly is hard to forget. But when I spoke with Garth the day before the murder, he swore he didn’t know where Alicia was.”

  “Looks like he found out.”

  I wasn’t pleased with the way this investigation was headed. I didn’t want to clear one nice kid just to have another one charged. “We’ll have to question Garth again.”

  “I’ll do it in the morning,” Bill said. “Want to come along?”

  I shook my head. “Two of us might intimidate him, make him clam up.”

  “Speaking of clam—” Bill said with a glance at his watch.

  “As in ‘happy as’?”

  He kissed the tip of my nose. “As in supper’s ready.”

  Shortly after seven the next morning, I walked into Iris’s Restaurant in Dunedin and searched the already crowded room for a familiar face. I found her, tucked in a corner at a booth by the window, reading the Times.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Doc Cline looked up in surprise. “Maggie! What are you doing here?”

  “Having breakfast,” I hedged.

  No need to admit that I’d already called her office and home with no results. Doc was a creature of habit, and if she wasn’t at work or home this time of morning, the next likely spot was the family restaurant near her Dunedin residence, a popular eatery opposite the stadium where the Toronto Blue Jays played their spring-training games.

  “Sit,” she said.

  I scooted across from her, and a waitress appeared at my elbow and filled a mug with coffee.

  “It’s good to see you,” Doc said. “It’s been a couple of months, hasn’t it?” Her smile faded. “Don’t tell me. You’re working another murder.”

  “How can you tell?” I sipped my coffee.

  “Besides the hives on your face? Because solving homicides is what you do, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged. “That—and catch dognappers,” I added, remembering how I’d obtained Roger.

  The waitress reappeared and placed a huge stack of pancakes, sprinkled with chopped pecans and sliced bananas, in front of Doc. The ME proceeded to smother everything on the plate with maple syrup.

  Doc, who was pushing retirement, somehow managed to tuck away such a breakfast and maintain the figure and muscle tone of a young female jock. I envied her metabolism and advised the waitress to bring me whole-grain toast sans butter.

  “Tell me about Willard Ashton,” I said. “Terry Pender says you’ve determined that he was poisoned.”

  “Pender’s the defense attorney for that young woman they arrested?”

  I nodded.

  “And you’re working for Pender?”

  I nodded again, while Doc wolfed another mouthful of calories and chewed thoughtfully. She washed it down with a swig of coffee and said, “Guess I can tell you what I know. It’ll come out in discovery anyway.”

  “Probably in the news before that.” I indicated her copy of the Times.

  “Ashton was definitely poisoned,” Doc said. “The symptoms were clear.”

  “Any guess what kind of poison?”

  Her reply was unequivocal. “Belladonna.”

  The ready answer surprised me, since Doc didn’t indulge in casual speculation. “You have the toxicology report already? That usually takes weeks.”

  She shook her head. “The report’s not back, but I know because Mick Rafferty at the crime lab found belladonna in the remains of Ashton’s meal.”

  “Someone spiked his food?” Things weren’t looking good for the home team, since Alicia had already admitted to being the only person who worked in the kitchen and to serving Ashton’s lunch.

  “It’s more complex than that,” Doc said. “Crime-scene techs also found belladonna in the refrigerator.”

  “Why would the murderer keep poison in plain sight, especially if they’d just killed someone?”

  “It wasn’t exactly in plain sight.” Doc had worked her way through half her stack of pancakes. I nibbled dry toast that tasted like sawdust. “Belladonna leaves were mixed in with a bag of fresh basil in the crisper and belladonna berries scattered among
peas in a package in the freezer.”

  I sighed. “No point then in questioning pharmaceutical companies about who purchased the poison.”

  “You’d be like a dog chasing its tail. Belladonna, aka deadly nightshade, is a common weed in this area. Most people have it growing somewhere in their yards, along fences or under trees or shrubs where birds sit and deposit the seeds in their droppings.”

  “If having the means to murder covers everyone with access to the weeds,” I said with sinking expectations, “looks like I’d better concentrate on motive and opportunity.”

  “I’m glad I don’t have your job,” Doc said with obvious sympathy. “Clearing Ms. Langston is going to be tough under the circumstances.”

  “To each his own.” I’d take detective work over performing autopsies any day. “By the way, has anyone stepped forward to claim the body?”

  “Yeah, Ashton’s wife.”

  “His wife?”

  “She came into the office late yesterday to ask when his remains would be released.”

  “She give a name?”

  “Just Mrs. Ashton.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Tall, slender, long dark hair held back by a headband and wearing a tie-dyed granny dress and sandals. We’d have called her a flower child, back in my day.”

  Celeste, the sultry-voiced receptionist, was married to The Teacher? Now that was an interesting turn of events.

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  “Good to see you, Maggie. We never got to do that lunch,” she said with a grin, referring to our standing joke, “but at least we’ve done breakfast.”

  “Sounds like a line from Casablanca.”

  I paid my bill and hurried to the car. I reached for the manila envelope on the front seat and pulled out the photos Bill had given me. In a close-up of the trampled grass on the other side of the fence where Bill had found the scrap of plaid, tall weeds with dull green leaves, bell-shaped flowers and unripe berries that looked like garden peas grew in abundance. I studied the other pictures.

  The entire grove was thick with deadly nightshade.

  CHAPTER 10

  I left Iris’s and drove south on Douglas Avenue to Pelican Bay, then west on Main to downtown and the sheriff’s office substation that had once been the Pelican Bay Police Department.

  Entering the familiar doors created a momentary disorientation and an overwhelming sadness, as if I were visiting a home where I’d lived for years, only to find a new family and their furnishings had taken residence and destroyed all traces of my ever having been there. The old PD had been my family, and now its former members were gone with the wind: Adler and Rudy Beaton to work for the Clearwater PD, Steve Johnson clerking at Home Depot, and Darcy at Pelican Bay Investigations. Chief Shelton had retired, and Lenny Jacobs and the others had found employment in various parts of the state. Several had abandoned law enforcement for less stressful careers. Like children of divorce, we’d never be a true family again. That reality made my heart ache.

  I stopped at the reception desk, once Darcy’s domain as dispatcher, and asked to see Detective Keating. The deputy on duty directed me down the hall, ironically to the same cubicle that had been my former office.

  Keating was seated behind what I couldn’t help thinking of as my desk, but shot to his feet when he saw me in the doorway and greeted me with a toothy grin.

  “Margaret Skerritt! What a pleasant surprise. Come in. Have a seat.”

  With morning sunlight streaming through the window and illuminating Keating like a klieg light, he looked like Tom Selleck in his younger days as Magnum, P.I., but with his hair trimmed and minus the mustache, shorts and Hawaiian shirt. Keating wore instead khaki slacks and a fitted dark green knit shirt with the sheriff’s office logo above the breast pocket.

  “Do you have a minute?” I asked.

  “For you, I have all the time in the world.” He hurried around the desk and made a show of grabbing me a chair from Adler’s desk. Correction, what used to be Adler’s desk.

  Keating was actually flirting with me, which made me instantly suspicious and wonder if he knew I was working for Pender and was hoping to sweet talk me out of any facts of the case he wasn’t aware of.

  I settled in Adler’s chair, but instead of returning to his seat, Keating propped a hip on the desk in front of me, too close for comfort, and continued to beam at me as if I were a long-awaited Christmas present, finally arrived.

  I wasn’t there to play games so went straight to the point. “I need access to the crime scene.”

  He frowned and looked confused, as if I’d spoken in a language he hadn’t understood.

  “The Willard Ashton murder,” I added. “I’m working for Terry Pender, who’s defending Alicia Langston.”

  His expression sobered. “I wondered who’d take her case.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  He shook his head and appeared honestly surprised, which blew my theory on the reason for his flirtation out of the water.

  “Pender’s got her work cut out for her,” Keating said. “Langston prepared the meal that killed Ashton. Her prints are not only all over the serving dish but also on the packages of ingredients from the refrigerator where the poison was found.”

  “Belladonna,” I said.

  Now he really looked surprised. “I’d heard you were good. You don’t waste any time do you?”

  Except right now, conversing with a guy who wouldn’t give me a straight answer. “Has the crime-scene unit released the scene?”

  “They finished up last night. Want me to drive you out there?” His question held all the eagerness of an enthusiastic puppy dog.

  “Thanks, but I prefer to do my own investigation. Conflict of interest. You know how it is.”

  He nodded, serious for an instant, then his wide smile returned. “Then I’ll just have to think of another reason for us to get together.”

  If he thought coming on to me would deter my investigation, he was in for a shock.

  “No need.” I pushed to my feet and headed for the door to avoid the signals Keating was emanating, like a guy who’d been on a desert island for years and I was the first female he’d encountered upon reaching civilization. “I’m sure I’ll see you in court.”

  His face mirrored his disappointment. “But that could be months.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I have a lot of work to do before then.”

  With a wave over my shoulder, I hurried from his cubicle and headed for my car.

  My office was only a few minutes away, and Bill was waiting when I arrived. I briefed him on what I’d learned from Doc Cline and told him we had permission from Keating to visit Grove Spirit House.

  “If Celeste will let us in,” Bill said.

  “We could always go over the fence like Garth did.” I’d climbed many a fence in my patrol days and hoped I hadn’t lost the touch. Or, more importantly, the muscle tone. “Did you talk to him?”

  I sank onto the sofa beside Bill and looked for Roger before remembering I’d left him at home this morning when I’d headed out for an early meeting with the ME. The little bugger had wormed his way into my heart so thoroughly, I missed him when he wasn’t around.

  “Garth admits he was at Grove Spirit House the night before Ashton died,” Bill said. “Even showed me the shirt he tore when he went over the fence.”

  “Going in?”

  “Coming out. He was in a hurry, but I’ll get to that.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “After you talked to Julianne Pritchard that night, her conscience was bothering her, so she called Garth and spilled the beans. She wanted him to check on Alicia right away to see if she was really okay. You must have put the fear in her,” he added with a look of admiration.

  “Only way I could make her talk.”

  “Worked well. She told Garth everything she’d told you.”

  “Even about the emptied honeymoon account?”

  Bill nodd
ed.

  “So Garth could have been truly worried, as he said, or he could have been royally pissed off. Could you tell?”

  “He was agitated when I spoke with him,” Bill said, “but who wouldn’t be if his fiancée has been arrested for murder?”

  “So after Julianne told him where to find Alicia, Garth took off?”

  Bill nodded. “He drove straight to Grove Spirit House, but claims no one would let him in the gate.”

  “So he decided to go over the fence.”

  “Not until he saw the truck pulled alongside it out of range of the security camera.”

  “Those tire tracks you photographed weren’t Garth’s?”

  Bill shook his head. “Garth left his car in the driveway entrance. He says the other vehicle was an older model Chevy pickup with a Florida tag.”

  “Did he get the number?”

  “Just noted that it was one of those specialty tags. Said it had fish or something aquatic on it.”

  “He saw that in the dark?” I was beginning to doubt Garth’s story.

  “He claims he’d taken a flashlight from his car. When he saw the brush beaten down between the pickup and the fence and a similar path through the grove, he decided to follow it, afraid someone was up to no good and scared for Alicia.”

  “Do you believe him?” I asked.

  “He exhibited none of the usual characteristics of lying or a guilty conscience.”

  “Could be a sociopath. They’re hard to shake.”

  “You met him,” Bill said. “What did you think?”

  “Seemed like a guy in love and worried sick about his fiancée.”

  Bill nodded. “Even more so now. That’s why he was so eager to talk. He’s hoping what, or rather who he saw will clear Alicia.”

  “Who did he see?”

  “Garth says he got only as far as a building with a fountain on the walkway when he was confronted by a man with a machete. The guy told him to get out or die. And he said it in Spanish.”

  “So Garth chose to get out,” I said, “which explains the snagged shirt on the fence. I hope he got a good look at the other guy first.”