Spanish Dagger

by Susan Wittig Albert

  I couldn’t argue with that, and anyway, there wasn’t time. A couple of women had come up the walk and were pausing to admire the plants on the rack outside the door. I stood up. “Ronny has to go to the police and tell them what he knows,” I said.

  “But he’s on probation!” Wanda cried, her clown eyebrows shooting high up under her hair. “If he goes to the police, they’ll find an excuse to put him back in jail. They’ll say he knew about it because he bought dope from Fowler, or something like that. They’ll crucify him.”

  “I honestly don’t think—”

  “Of course you don’t. You don’t know what they’re like. They never want to give anybody a second chance.” She was working herself up now, her voice rising shrilly. “But you’re good friends with that police chief. You can get her to check out this story without involving Ronny. You can, I know you can.” She fixed me with her eyes and said, in a commanding tone, “I am depending on you to help him, China.”

  I made a noise low in my throat. “I am not a dependable person.” And I do not like being pushed around, especially by Wanda Rathbottom. “Your son needs to find the courage to tell his story to the authorities. If he doesn’t, he may find himself in jail. It’s a crime to withhold important information in a murder investigation.”

  Wanda’s nose twitched alarmingly. “You mean, you won’t help us?” she cried. “You won’t help Ronny?”

  “Ronny has to help himself,” I said, practicing anger management. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go help my customers.”

  And with that, I stalked away. It was just like Wanda to expect me to wash Ronny’s dirty laundry with the Pecan Springs police. But I must admit that my anger was somewhat dampened by the important bit of information, true or false, that she had passed along.

  Colin Fowler had been dealing.

  Marcy Windsor had known about it.

  And Marcy Windsor owed me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Coca was first used by the ancient Incas of Peru, where coca-induced trance states were part of their religious ceremonies. As time went on, the leaves of the herb were chewed by workers to reduce fatigue and promote a sense of well-being and the plant began to be cultivated. The Spanish conquistadors introduced coca to Europe, and in 1853, its active ingredient was isolated and named cocaine. The drug became enormously popular and was used by such notables as Sigmund Freud, Robert Louis Stevenson, and polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. It was sold over the counter in tonics, toothache cures, and patent medicines; in chocolate cocaine candies; and in cigarettes “guaranteed to lift depression.” Cocaine was banned in the U.S. in 1914, and outlawed under the Dangerous Drug Act of 1920.

  China Bayles’ Book of Days

  The phone rang several times before the girl picked it up. She was not the communicative type, and her mouth was so full of whatever she was eating that she could barely get the words out. No, Marcy wasn’t home right now. When could she be reached? Maybe around seven, when she got back from work. Where did she work? Well, (giggle) she didn’t work at the Good Earth anymore, now that the owner had gotten himself killed. She had a new job at some bookstore. Which one? Dunno. A place that sells kids’ books, maybe?

  Kids’ books. Well, that was a piece of luck, for the Hobbit House, Pecan Springs’ only children’s bookstore, is right next door. If Marcy was working there, her new job involved a very nice promotion with an up-front bonus: the chance to work with Molly McGregor, the creator of the Hobbit House and one of my very favorite people.

  I checked the answering machine and made a note of the calls I had missed while I was outside pulling weeds. Somebody wanted to know how much dried herb to substitute when the recipe called for fresh (an approximate answer: a generous teaspoon of dried herbs for one tablespoon of fresh). Somebody else wondered if there was anything she could plant instead of tarragon, which sulks in our Texas heat (a suggestion: Mexican mint marigold, with its bonus of pretty yellow flowers). And Betty Conrad had called again. This time, she said she needed to talk to me as soon as possible. She sounded urgent, so I tried both the house and the nursery. But there was no answer at the house, and all I got at the nursery was her voice on the answering machine, saying that Sonora was closed, due to the death of an employee.

  I hung up, thinking that Betty had probably decided to cancel her participation in tomorrow’s workshop, after all, and wondering whether I should phone the next person on the waiting list. But since I was only guessing about Betty’s cancellation, there wasn’t much I could do. Maybe she was concerned with something else, like Lucita Sanchez’s criminal record.

  I put out the Closed sign, checked out the cash register (noting with satisfaction that the afternoon was substantially more rewarding than the morning), and said good night to Missy, who was closing up Ruby’s shop. Then I went next door.

  The Hobbit House is located in the big frame house where Vida Plunkett used to live. Molly bought it with the settlement from her divorce and turned it into a treasure house for kids—and for grown-ups who haven’t outgrown their childhood love of Pooh Bear or Jemima Puddleduck or Alice in Wonderland. Molly is not a woman who dallies. She gets around faster than a brush fire with a tail wind, as Pecan Springers like to say. Within three months after she bought Vida’s ramshackle old house, she had converted the third floor into an attractive apartment for herself and remodeled the first and second floors to create colorful rooms with shelves full of books, cozy reading corners, lots of art on the walls, and child-size tables and chairs. On the second floor, a round green door with a shiny brass knob in the middle opens straight into the Hobbit Hole, a large room with green carpet and green walls, filled with toadstools and rock-shaped pillows, especially designed for children—although Molly’s cat, Mrs. T (short for Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, of course) has first pick of places for catnapping. Mrs. T is almost as large as Khat, so the kids respect her choice.

  As the months have passed, Molly and her Hobbit House have made a name for themselves in Pecan Springs. Moms and grandmas adore the place, because it’s such a rich source of interesting, family-friendly books and gifts, and the stock is always changing. Children love to crawl into the Hobbit Hole for weekly story times, or gather in the back garden for an Easter egg hunt or a Halloween haunting or a Christmas-tree-for-the-birds party. Molly does most of the work herself, with only a couple of part-time helpers, so she is always very busy. But she insists that what she does is play, not work, and I don’t doubt her. The evidence is right there in front of us. She has created successful work out of the things she loves most in life: books and children. What better definition of play do you want?

  The bell over the door gave a cheerful tinkle when I went into the shop, and Molly looked up from the tower of fairy tales she was building, Grimm’s at the bottom and the Flower Fairies on top, under a dancing Tinkerbell mobile. Molly has slimmed down quite a bit since she bought the store (it’s all that running up and down those stairs, she says). Her clear, steady blue eyes are her best feature, and her short brown hair is brushed forward against her cheeks, giving her an elfin look. She was dressed in her usual colored jeans—pink, today—and a pink and yellow smock decorated with children’s book characters.

  “Hey, China!” she said happily, dimples flashing. “Nice to see you!” She lost her smile. “I heard about Colin Fowler. How’s Ruby taking it?”

  “About the way you’d imagine,” I said soberly. “It’s tough.”

  “It must be. Very, very tough. Give her my love.” She added a book to the tower, eyed it, and moved it a half-inch. “Will I see you at the papermaking workshop tomorrow?”

  “Oh, you’re coming,” I said. “I haven’t looked at the updated list.”

  She nodded. “Missy called to tell me there was a place. I’m glad. I’ve been wanting to learn to make paper so I can teach it to the kids. Did I tell you? I’m turning the garage into a crafts workshop. It’ll be a place where moms and kids can work together.”

  “Why am I not s
urprised?” I asked with a grin. Nothing that Molly did would surprise me—she barely gets one thing done when she’s thinking ahead to the next project. I looked around. “I’m looking for Marcy Windsor. Is she working here now?”

  She nodded. “That’s how I knew about Colin Fowler. When she answered my ad, she told me she couldn’t get a reference from her former employer because he was dead. She worked for him.” She raised an eyebrow. “Or maybe you know that.”

  “I do. May I speak with her?”

  “May I ask why?” Molly isn’t nosy, just careful. Having hired Marcy, she was already feeling responsible for her.

  “Because she worked for Colin Fowler.”

  She tilted her head. “I hope she’s not in trouble.”

  “SodoI.”

  She thought about that for a minute. “Upstairs,” she said at last. “I always start my kids out by asking them to straighten the bookshelves. They learn the stock that way.”

  Marcy had her own way of learning the stock. She was standing beside a window, reading a page of Anne of Green Gables. She turned guiltily as I came into the room.

  “May I help you?” she asked, replacing the book on the shelf. “Are you looking for something special, or just browsing?”

  “I came to talk to you. It was dark when we met last night, so you probably don’t recognize me. I’m China Bayles, the person you ran into at Good Earth Goods.”

  “Oh, gosh,” she said, flustered. Coloring, she pushed her plastic-rimmed glasses up on her nose and looked away. She was wearing a dark skirt and a white ruffled blouse and her blond hair was loose, caught behind her ears with a pink velvet ribbon. In spite of the acne, she was lovely. She seemed younger and more innocent than she had last night, but that might have been the afternoon sun gilding her hair and the ruffles at her throat. She was Alice in Wonderland, and I was the Red Queen.

  I gestured to a table. “Let’s sit down, shall we?”

  The chairs were suited to seven-year-olds with very short legs, but we sat on them anyway. Marcy tried her hands in her lap, then on the table, and finally ended up by leaning on her elbows, her fingers clasped under her chin.

  “What did you want to talk about?” Her gray eyes were wary, almost hostile. She was obviously wondering whether I had mentioned the circumstances of our meeting to her new boss, and if I had, how she was going to handle it. Lie? Tell the truth and throw herself on the mercy of the court?

  “About what you told Ronny Rathbottom.” This was not a time for beating around the bush. “That Colin Fowler was dealing.”

  I had caught her by surprise. Her mouth made an O and her eyes opened wide. “How did you—?” She gulped. “Who told you that? Did Ronny tell you?”

  “Never mind. Just tell me what you said to Ronny. Exactly.”

  She set her jaw. “I don’t think I should.” Her soft young face tightened. “I don’t want to talk to you at all, if you don’t mind.”

  I looked straight at her. Time for another surprise. “I found Lucita Sanchez this morning. She was very dead.” I made my voice hard. “Somebody slashed her throat, Marcy.”

  “Slashed her—” she whispered. Her face paled and her hand went to her mouth. “Oh, my God.”

  “Now there are two people dead,” I said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Colin Fowler and Lucita Sanchez. Whether you’re in danger depends on how much you know, and whether the killer is aware of it. I might be able to help—if you tell me what you told Ronny.” With a heavy emphasis, I added, “Of course, you could tell the police. You’re going to have to, sooner or later.”

  The police were the least of her worries. “You think the…the killer might come after me?” Her voice squeaked, a childish, frightened squeak.

  I eyed her. I hated to see her frightened. But better scared than dead. And fear is a powerful motivator.

  “He—or they—might,” I said bluntly. “I don’t know who the killer is, so I can’t say. Do you?”

  She picked up a blue velveteen rabbit from the center of the table and turned it in her hands for a moment. Then she clutched it to her chest and looked at me, her lip trembling. “No.” And then, “Not really. I mean, not exactly.”

  Something inside me went cold. I didn’t know what game was being played, but the stakes were high enough to justify a pair of bloody murders. If Marcy knew, if she even suspected who the players were, she could be in a whole lot of trouble. “You’d better tell me,” I said, and softened my tone. “I can only help you—and Ronny—if I know what you know.”

  “Ronny doesn’t know anything,” she said, very fast.

  “But you do.”

  Shaking her head, she shrank back in her chair away from me, shoulders rigid, lips pressed tightly together to keep them from trembling. She was scared, scared of me. And why not? I was the stranger who had jumped out of the dark and scared her silly the night before. For all she knew, I might be the killer. I tried again, hoping to find a key that might unlock her fear, something that might allow her to trust me.

  “Look,” I said. “I’ve known your boss—Molly McGregor—since she opened this place. I own the herb shop next door. Before that, I was a criminal attorney, so I’ve seen what happens when drug deals go bad and people get killed. My husband used to be a cop, so I’ve seen it from the other side, too.”

  She swallowed. I tried another tack. “My best friend, Ruby, was Colin Fowler’s girlfriend. She—”

  She leaned forward a fraction of an inch, giving me a little with her body language. “Ruby…Wilcox?” she asked uncertainly.

  This might be the key. “Yes. Do you know her?”

  She shook her head. Her eyes had misted and her lips had gone soft. “No, but I know that Mr. Fowler…well, he cared about her. He was terribly upset when she broke up with him. Normally, he’d never say a word about anything like that—he kept personal things very much to himself—but I guess I caught him at a bad moment. He told me she’d said she had to get on with her life. He said she was a straight-shooter and that she had every right to kiss him off, but that didn’t make it any easier.” She stroked the rabbit. “He said it still hurt like hell.”

  Ah, romance. The key to so much of life. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to tell her,” I said quietly. “She wasn’t sure he cared, and she’s having a tough time handling his death. Maybe this will make her feel better.”

  “I guess it’s okay. Sure, if it’ll help.” Her eyes still on my face, she rested her chin on the velveteen rabbit, pondered for a moment, then decided to take a chance on me, since I was Ruby Wilcox’s friend. “What I told Ronny was…”

  She stopped, cleared her throat, started over again.

  “I told Ronny I heard Mr. Fowler talking to Mrs. Sanchez about a drug deal they were involved with.”

  “When did this happen?”

  She frowned, concentrating. “Two weeks ago. It had to be on a Saturday, because it was afternoon. The only afternoons I worked were Saturdays. I have afternoon classes.”

  “Where were you when you heard them talking?”

  “I was in the shop, restocking the shelves along the back wall. They were in the back room. The wall is pretty thin.”

  “Was anyone else in the back room with them?”

  “I don’t think so. If there was, I didn’t hear him. Or her. I think it was just the two of them. But I didn’t see her, either. Mrs. Sanchez, I mean. She came in through the alley door when he was updating orders on the computer. I was restocking shelves and I overheard—” She looked at me as if she were expecting me to read her the riot act for eavesdropping. “I wasn’t listening, if that’s what you’re thinking, Ms. Bayles. Not on purpose. I mean, I couldn’t help but hear them. I—”

  “That doesn’t matter,” I said. “What matters is what you heard, not how you heard it. How did you know it was Mrs. Sanchez, if you couldn’t see her?”

  “He called her Lucita. She phoned the store once, about some plants Mr. Fowler bought. That’s how I knew who she was.�
��

  “Did she say which plants?”

  “Over the phone, she did.” Marcy frowned and fiddled with the rabbit’s ear. “Yucky, or something like that. I’m not sure exactly. She said she’d drop them off at his place.”

  “Yucca?” Obviously, the pots in Colin’s backyard.

  “Yeah. Yucca. But that was over the phone. When they were talking in the back room, it wasn’t about that. It was about—” She hunched her shoulders and held on to the rabbit as if it were a life preserver. “It’s been a…awhile ago. I’m not sure I remember exactly.” She swallowed again. “You’re sure she’s dead? You couldn’t be mistaken?”

  “I’m sure,” I said gently. “There’s no mistake. I saw her.” Sprawled on the floor, in a pool of her own warm blood.

  She bit her lip. “And the police don’t know who killed her?”

  “Not a clue. They don’t have any leads in Mr. Fowler’s death, either.”

  She stared at her knuckles. She was gripping the rabbit so hard they were white. Downstairs, Molly had put “Peter and the Wolf” on the CD player, and the melody wafted through the speaker over our heads. “I…I’m not sure I can remember the exact words.”

  “Just the gist of it, Marcy. It doesn’t have to be exact.”

  She took a deep breath. “Well, Mrs. Sanchez said that the next delivery was going to be a big one. Mr. Fowler said he needed to know the details, like when and what and how much.” She stopped, as if she had run out of breath.

  “And she said?” I prompted.

  She gulped for air. “She said it was…it was coke. It was supposed to arrive at night, but she didn’t know exactly when. Any time in the next few weeks, she said. In an eighteen-wheeler, up the ‘main road.’ Three hundred pounds.”