Death Come Quickly

by Susan Wittig Albert

  In Cumberland, about Cockermouth, the red campion (Lychnis diurna) is called “mother-die,” and young people believe that if plucked some misfortune will happen to their parents.

  The Folk-Lore of Plants, 1889

  Thomas F. Thiselton-Dyer

  In European folk medicine, Geranium robertianum (also known as Herb Robert, death come quickly, stinky Bob, and cranesbill) was used as a remedy for nosebleeds and toothache. The odor of freshly picked, crushed leaves resembles burning rubber and is said to repel mosquitoes. The flower buds were thought to resemble a stork’s bill, and this analogical association suggested that the plant might enhance fertility. It was said to bring good luck, but only if it was not carried indoors. To do so invited death.

  China Bayles

  “Herbs of Good and Ill Omen”

  Pecan Springs Enterprise

  “Karen Prior was mugged?” Startled, I turned away from the front door of my herb shop, where I had just hung up the Closed sign. “Oh, Ruby, that’s awful, just awful! When did it happen? Where?”

  Ruby stood in the open doorway between our two shops, a deeply troubled look on her freckled face. “Last night, a few minutes after ten, in the parking lot at the mall. She was getting into her car when somebody hit her on the head with something heavy and hard—a tire iron, maybe, or a crowbar. I just heard it from Felicity. She called to tell me why she wouldn’t be at our class this evening. She’s with her mother at the hospital.”

  “Sounds like very bad luck,” I said. “Wrong place, wrong time. What do the doctors say?” I went around the counter and began closing out the cash register. “Karen will be all right, won’t she?”

  Karen Prior is a faculty member in the radio-television-film department at Central Texas State University. We met through my husband, Mike McQuaid, who is also on the CTSU faculty, and we’ve been good friends for several years. Karen is a dedicated teacher and a talented documentary filmmaker whose recent film, Fakery: The Truth about Art Fraud, was part of a PBS series. She is an active supporter of the art community in Pecan Springs and served with me on the planning committee for last year’s Children’s Art-in-the-Park Festival. Her twenty-something daughter, Felicity, is a student in one of Ruby’s classes at the Crystal Cave and a part-time garden helper at Thyme and Seasons, my herb shop.

  I looked up at Ruby, who hadn’t answered. “Karen will be all right, won’t she?” I repeated. Karen wasn’t just a friend. She had volunteered to help Ruby and me build the video-recording setup we now use for our workshops and classes, and she showed us how to create DVDs from the video files so our workshop attendees can view them at home—for which I will be forever grateful. It’s not something I could ever do by myself.

  “Felicity says she will.” Ruby bit her lip. “But you know Felicity, always looking on the bright side. If you ask me, China, the situation sounds pretty grim. There’s a brain hemorrhage, apparently. They’ve done surgery to stop the bleeding, but Karen is in a coma. What makes it so hard is that Felicity offered to go shopping with her last night—it was late, and raining. But Karen said no. She was getting Felicity’s birthday present.” She shook her head. “Instead, she got attacked.”

  “I hope the cops get that son of a—” I muttered angrily, pulling the checks and currency out of the register.

  If we haven’t met already, I suppose I’d better tell you that I’m China Bayles and that Ruby is Ruby Wilcox, the owner of the Crystal Cave, which occupies the other half of my building on Crockett Street in Pecan Springs. In another life (that is, before I cashed in my retirement and bought Thyme and Seasons Herb Shop) I was a criminal defense attorney, white-collar crime, mostly. The large Houston firm I worked with defended big bad guys with lots of money and political connections. We didn’t often sully ourselves with common criminals. But when the public defender’s office got hit with a budget whammy, some of us in the firm volunteered for pro bono work. I had dealt with people like Karen’s attacker—dopers, drifters, desperate for any cash they could beg, borrow, or steal. I have a certain tolerance, even a sympathy for them, since I’m naturally inclined to people who are trying to survive outside the system.

  But there’s a limit. My stomach knotted as I thought of Karen, energetic, intelligent, dedicated to her students and her work, now in the hospital, in a coma. Between gritted teeth, I added, “When they get the creep, I hope they sock it to him.” Aggravated robbery, aggravated assault—first- and second-degree felonies, five to life on the first, two to twenty on the second, and a $10,000 fine on both. And there would likely be additional charges, since muggers were usually on parole or on the lam, with outstanding warrants from a half-dozen jurisdictions. I hoped they would hit the creep with everything in the book.

  Ruby leaned against the doorjamb, twisting a curl of carrot-orange hair between her fingers. “Funny thing, though. Well, not funny, of course. Odd, I mean. Weird. The guy didn’t grab her purse, which was on the seat of her car, in plain sight. Felicity said it looks like he just hit her and took off. Hit her more than once, too.”

  Well, attempted robbery, then. He probably got interrupted before he could grab her purse and run.

  “Witnesses?” I took out my Deposit Only stamp and began stamping the checks, fiercely, as if I were stamping the mugger’s face and could disfigure him with one hard whack. “How about surveillance video?” The mall is on I-35, on the east side of Pecan Springs. There had been trouble in that same parking lot a couple of weeks before, and I had read in the Enterprise that the mall management was planning to install additional video cameras.

  “Felicity didn’t say anything about witnesses. Or video.” Ruby looked up as the bell over the front door tinkled and the door opened. In my surprise at the news about Karen, I had neglected to lock it. “But we could ask Sheila.”

  “Ask me what?”

  The woman who came into the shop was wearing a trim, sharply creased navy blue cop uniform, a neat navy tie, and a duty belt loaded with a gun, a radio, a flashlight, a baton, and an assortment of additional cop-shop gear. How Sheila Dawson can run with all that stuff slung around her hips is beyond me, but she can definitely do it. I’ve seen her sprint fifty yards, vault a waist-high stone wall, and bring down a two-hundred-pounder with a flying tackle. She is one tough gal, even when—or maybe especially when—she’s loaded down with cop gear.

  Still, despite her obvious professional qualifications, the first couple of years after she was named chief of the Pecan Springs Police Department were pretty rough. Some of the good old boys had a hard time adjusting to the idea that a woman was in command. But she did what she had to do, the guys got over it (most of them, anyway—there are still a few holdouts), and things are easier now. Not easy, of course. Just easier.

  “Ask me what?” Sheila repeated, taking off her cop cap and smoothing back her sleek blond hair. “What could I possibly know that you two don’t?”

  Next to Sheila I always feel rumpled, disheveled, and dumpy, especially when it’s the middle of July, I skipped this morning’s shampoo, and I’m wearing jeans and my old green Thyme and Seasons T-shirt. Smart Cookie—Ruby’s and my nickname for Sheila—has the impeccably groomed good looks of a Dallas debutante. If you haven’t seen her doing her job, you might think she was a candidate for Miss Texas.

  Mrs. Texas, rather. Sheila and Blackie Blackwell, the former sheriff of Adams County, got married last year, after long, uncertain months of back-and-forth, yes and no, then yes and maybe until they finally got to yes and I do. It wasn’t that they didn’t love each other. It was the question of whether two cops in the family might be one cop too many. They finally solved it with a coin toss, and Blackie retired from his sheriff’s job—gracefully, because he’s that kind of guy. A cop’s cop. Everybody likes Blackie, although some still aren’t too sure about Sheila.

  “Ask you whether there were any witnesses to Karen Prior’s mugging,” I said. “Last night. In the pa
rking lot at the mall.”

  Pecan Springs isn’t a big town, but we’re on the I-35 corridor, with Austin forty miles to the north and San Antonio the same distance to the south. The spillover of big-city crime seems to accelerate steadily, as does the drug traffic coming up from Mexico. We don’t have that many muggings, but I wasn’t sure that the chief would know which case I was talking about. She did.

  “No witnesses,” Sheila replied, “although a couple of women came along after it happened and called 9-1-1. No surveillance cameras in that part of the lot, either.”

  “What part of the lot?” I asked.

  “She was parked on the east side, where the employees park.”

  “That’s odd,” I said. “The employees’ lot? Why would she park that far away from—”

  At that moment, Khat woke up and jumped down from the windowsill where he had been taking his afternoon nap and began to rub against Sheila’s trouser leg, rumbling a deep-throated purr. Khat’s full name—Khat K’o Kung—was bestowed upon him by Ruby, who is a great fan of Koko, the talented sleuth of the Cat Who mysteries. Like many Siamese, Khat is arrogant, conceited, and obnoxiously imperial, a cat who is easy to admire but hard to love. Khat, on the other hand, absolutely adores Sheila. When she drops in, he forgets that he is Top Cat, drops his dignity, and behaves like a smitten kitten.

  “How is Karen?” Ruby put in anxiously. “I just talked to her daughter on the phone, but I’m not sure I got the whole story.”

  “She’s on life support,” Sheila replied, bending over to pick up Khat. “The prognosis isn’t very good, I’m sorry to say.” She rubbed her cheek against his tawny fur, looking from Ruby to me. “Prior is a friend of yours, I take it.”

  “Yes,” I said emphatically, and Ruby added, “Her daughter is one of my astrology students.”

  Ruby teaches classes in astrology and divination. If that sounds a bit weird—well, that’s Ruby Wilcox. A little bit weird, but splendidly so. Today, she was wearing a gauzy orange-and-brown paisley-print Indian-style tunic, orange leggings, and funky orange suede open-toed clogs with three-inch heels. (It’s a good thing she’s not afraid of heights, since she’s already over six feet tall.) Of course, her customers and students don’t consider her weird—after all, Ruby’s Crystal Cave is a New Age shop, the only one in Pecan Springs. If its proprietor wasn’t a little, um, unusual, they would be disappointed.

  “I hope you get the creep who attacked her.” I spoke fervently. “Any leads?”

  “Not yet.” Sheila put Khat down on the floor. “We’ll do everything we can, of course, but these random muggings are tough. Our best bet is the Crime Hot Line, probably. Prior’s ex-husband has already offered a sizable reward, so we’re hoping for a tip.”

  “Ex-husband,” Ruby mused. “I don’t think I know him.”

  “Nate Prior,” I said. “He lives in Austin, works at the Texas Health Department. He and Karen are still on friendly terms.”

  Sheila nodded. “The daughter called him early this morning, and he immediately offered to put up the reward. He says he’ll go higher if that helps.”

  I began sorting the credit card slips by the size of the purchase. For a Thursday, sales had been pretty good. “Ruby said the mugger didn’t get Karen’s purse,” I said. “That’s strange. You’d think he’d want her credit cards, at least.”

  “Sounds like an amateur,” Ruby remarked. “He whacked her, then looked up and saw somebody coming and got scared and ran off.”

  “He might have gotten scared,” Sheila replied, “but he didn’t just whack her once. According to the medical team, he hit her repeatedly, very hard. And he didn’t run off—he drove off. The employees who called 9-1-1 came along just as he was jumping into his car, obviously in a hurry. But they didn’t get the license plate.”

  Hit her repeatedly. I shivered. “I don’t suppose they could ID the car, either.”

  “Not very specifically, no,” Sheila said. “A dark, late-model four-door was the best they could do.”

  “Late-model four-door?” Ruby asked, wrinkling her nose. “It doesn’t sound like the kind of car your everyday, garden-variety mugger would drive.”

  “My thought, too,” Sheila said. “And there’s something else, for what it’s worth. Prior’s daughter told the investigator that her mother received a phone call not long before she left to go to the mall. Felicity got the impression that the call had something to do with a film project that some of her mother’s students are working on.”

  Ruby raised both eyebrows. “Karen went to the mall to meet somebody? I thought Felicity said she was shopping for a birthday present.”

  “That’s what she told her daughter,” Sheila said. “But Felicity remembered the phone call and thought there might be a connection. We’re looking into it from that angle, since—as you say—this doesn’t sound like your everyday mugging.”

  I finished tallying the checks and paper-clipped the calculator tape to the deposit slip. “If you want to know anything about that film Karen’s students have been working on,” I said, “you can ask Ruby. She’s in it.”

  “No kidding?” Sheila asked in surprise, turning to Ruby. “What role do you play?”

  “Myself,” Ruby said modestly.

  “It’s a documentary,” I explained. “Ruby is one of the talking heads. She knows the whole brutal story, beginning to end.”

  “I am an interview subject,” Ruby put in quickly. “Talking heads are on TV.”

  “Whatever.” I pulled a blue bank deposit bag out from under the counter.

  “Brutal?” Sheila asked. “Brutal, how?”

  “It’s a documentary about an old crime,” Ruby said. “One of my neighbors in the San Jacinto neighborhood was murdered, thirteen or fourteen years ago.” She shivered. “She was beaten to death. With a golf club.”

  “A golf club.” Sheila pursed her lips. “What was the victim’s name?”

  “Christine Morris. Maybe you’ve heard about her.”

  “Oh, yes, the Morris case,” Sheila said. “We’re carrying it in the cold case files, although Bubba swears they charged the right man—somebody named Borden, I think. He was acquitted.” Bubba Harris was Sheila’s predecessor. He had been chief since Pecan Springs was just a bump on the Texas map, and not a very big one at that. “Of course, it wasn’t Bubba’s fault,” Sheila added with a touch of irony. “He insists that the jury was bamboozled by some slick, highfalutin defense attorney from out of town.” She grinned at me. She never misses an opportunity to rub my nose in my former profession. “In any event, Borden walked.”

  “Bowen, not Borden,” Ruby corrected her. “Dick Bowen. He lived next door to Christine. After he was acquitted, he moved to Houston. He’s dead now—died a couple of years ago.”

  “And that slick big-city defense attorney,” I put in, “would be Johnnie Carlson.” I bent over to hide the fifty dollars in bills and ten dollars in change that I keep overnight under a stack of bags. I always leave the register open. I’d much rather a burglar get away with the cash than destroy the cash register looking for it. “Johnnie’s dead, too,” I added. “Died several years ago, of a heart attack.”

  “Bowen’s attorney was quite a character,” Ruby remarked with interest. “You actually knew that guy?”

  “For a while, we both worked for the same law firm,” I replied. “He and another attorney—both of them renegades—bailed out of the firm a year or two before I did, and opened their own practice. They asked me to go with them, but at the time, I wasn’t ready to leave.”

  Another attorney. That would be Aaron. Aaron Brooks. The thought of him made me smile. I picked up a dust cloth (made by soaking a microfiber cloth in a solution of equal parts vinegar and water, with a dollop of olive oil and a few drops of lemon essential oil) and began wiping the counter, which is the last thing I do every night before I leave. “Johnnie and
his partner and I were drinking together one evening, some time after the Bowen trial. He told us the story.”

  I remember telling Aaron that I wished I’d been at the trial, so I could have watched Johnnie put on his defense. He had mentored me when I tried my first cases and I always learned from him. In the Bowen case, he used the same strategy that the O.J. Simpson dream team had used to squeeze the Juice out of a double murder conviction: basically, convincing the jury that the cops hadn’t played by the rules. Unfortunately, that happens all too often. And in the Bowen case, Johnnie claimed that his client was innocent of the murder.

  Aaron and I had laughed. “Yeah, Johnnie,” I teased, “innocent as a baby, so pure he floats.”

  Of course, all three of us knew better than that. Sure, there are clients who claim to be totally innocent. But most are totally guilty—and if they’re not guilty of the crime they’re charged with, they’re guilty of something else. (As in, “I did actually cheat on my husband, but I didn’t stab the jerk in the heart with my sewing scissors while he was asleep.”)

  Johnnie answered with a straight—and unusually serious—face, “Not exactly pure, no, which is another part of the story. I had a viable alternative suspect, but I couldn’t proceed. The evidence was admissible, but the judge ruled the usual: marginal relevancy, unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues, danger of misleading the jury.” He turned down his mouth. “Somebody told me later that the judge and the prosecutor always played poker on Friday nights.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said regretfully. “But it’s no great surprise.”

  Regardless of what you might have guessed from watching legal dramas on television, a defense attorney cannot save his client in the courtroom by pulling the real murderer out of his hat at the last moment. Texas, like most other states, operates according to Rule 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence: “The court may exclude relevant evidence if its probative value is substantially outweighed by a danger of one or more of the following: unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, misleading the jury, undue delay, wasting time, or needlessly presenting cumulative evidence.”