Lavender Lies

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Not yet,” Sheila said. She made a face. “It’s Blackie. He doesn’t think I ought to take it.”

  Ruby scowled. “Well, you can inform Sheriff Blackwell that he has no right to tell you what to do. You’re not married to him. And even if you were, he still wouldn’t have any right.”

  Sheila was quiet for a moment. “If I take that job,” she said at last, “we probably won’t be married.”

  “That,” I said sympathetically, “would be too bad.”

  Blackie Blackwell is a third-generation lawman who inherited his father’s job as sheriff of Adams County. He and McQuaid were friends at Sam Houston State and have graduated to become fishing and poker buddies, so I see quite a bit of him. McQuaid says Blackie is the best lawman he knows, and has asked him to be best man at our wedding.

  “He doesn’t like the idea of having two law enforcement officers in one family,” Sheila said.

  Ruby hooted. “What does he think you are now? The campus mascot? For Peter’s sake, Sheila, you’ve been a cop your whole adult life!”

  “He says my university job is mostly administrative, and I have to agree with him.” Sheila’s eyes were dark. “It’s been a while since I’ve done any real police work.”

  “I perceive a certain professional conflict of interest,” the Whiz remarked, “not to mention an undesirable degree of geographical proximity and political entanglement. Sheriff Blackwell is the elected county sheriff. Chief Blackwell would be the chief of police in the largest town in his county.” She pushed her lips in and out. “If you step on the wrong toes, Sheila, Blackie might not be reelected. If you pull the right strings, he could be a winner. Either way, he may feel that you are capable of exercising a potentially dangerous control over his career.”

  Ruby frowned. I stared. Howard Cosell dropped his jowled muzzle onto Sheila’s foot and gave a ponderous sigh. There was a long silence. Sheila was the first to speak.

  “Omigod,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  I shook my head. “Justine is being very legalistic, not to mention pompous and bombastic. I’m sure you and Blackie can work it out.”

  “I don’t mean to be disheartening,” the Whiz said apologetically. “I felt it might be useful for us to analyze the relationship from a political, rather than a personal, point of view. Romance often blinds us to the disturbing and even ugly realities of our everyday lives.”

  “I can’t wait for you to fall in love, Justine,” Ruby said fiercely.

  “Love is all well and good,” the Whiz replied in a defensive tone, “but marriage exists in political, economic, familial, and social environments. Take our China, for example.” She waved her hand in my direction. “She and McQuaid must deal with the impact of the recent unfortunate events on their relationship. It is likely that not all of the expenses are covered by insurance, and that there are serious financial implications. Indeed, in the many divorce cases I have handled over the years, I have learned that what appears to be a purely personal difficulty between two partners often has its roots in the—”

  She broke off as Ruby rose from her chair, drawing herself up to her full height, putting her fists on her hips and scattering lavender stems on the floor. Howard Cosell looked up in alarm.

  “Justine Ayn Rand Wyzinski,” Ruby hissed, “you are without a doubt the most cold-blooded, hardhearted, fundamentally insensitive woman I have ever met. Why don’t you just whiz on back to San Antonio and abandon us to our pursuit of romance—blind as we are, of course, to the ugly political, social, familial, and economic realities of our everyday lives.”

  The Whiz was pained. “I just think that this is a good time for China and Sheila to step back and—”

  “Ouch!” I said loudly, and put my hand to my cheek. “Oh, rats!”

  “What’s the matter?” Sheila asked.

  “I just bit down on something and my temporary crown came out.” The week before, I had lost a crown on my left molar and the dentist glued in a temporary as an interim measure while the lab made a new one. I explored with my tongue. There was a crater the size of the Gulf of Mexico on the left side of my mouth.

  “You bit down on a splinter of mace,” the Whiz said in an effort to be funny.

  “A piece of pecan shell,” I said crossly. “I should have been more careful when I shelled those nuts. Now I’ll have to stop by the clinic in the morning and see if the dentist can fix it.”

  “The price of crowns is above rubies,” the Whiz remarked in a ruminating tone. “I trust that you have dental insurance.”

  I gave a short laugh. “You forget, Justine, that I no longer charge people out the whazoo for a few words of legal wisdom, like some of my friends. No, I don’t have dental insurance. I had to choose between replacing my crown and replacing the rear tires on my car.”

  Sheila patted me on the shoulder. “Bear up,” she said. “At least you don’t have to choose between McQuaid and your career.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly,

  Lavender’s green.

  When I am queen, dilly dilly,

  You shall be king.

  “Lavender’s Blue”

  Early 19th-century song

  In one of the apocryphal books of the Bible, Judith annointed herself with perfumes, including lavender, before seducing Holofernes, the enemy commander. Once he was under her heavenly scented influence, she murdered him....

  Lavender

  Tessa Evelegh

  For the past fifteen months, McQuaid and I have leased a white-painted five-bedroom Victorian situated on three acres of Texas Hill Country. It is a truly splendid house. The kitchen windows open east into the sunrise, and the master bedroom looks out across green hills toward the sunset. There is a turreted room with windows on three sides for my library of herb books, a large garage workshop for McQuaid, and sunny limestone ledges where Brian collects the snakes and lizards who share his bedroom. As if this weren’t enough, there is a garden, several two-hundred-year-old live oak trees, and a sparkling creek with a mossy waterfall draped with maidenhair ferns. The downside to this near-idyllic situation is that the roof leaks, the kitchen foundation needs some urgent attention, and-the worst part—the house isn’t ours. It belongs to an English professor and his wife, who packed up their three kids and went off to spend an eighteen-month sabbatical in Italy and France. Unfortunately, they are due back the first of January, which means that we will be dispossessed in a little over three months. Every now and then I experience moments of sheer terror as I try to calculate how we’ll fit ourselves, our hobbies, and our expectations into an ordinary house. Normally, I’m as courageous as the next person, but I’d rather face lions than look for a new house.

  McQuaid was an hour late getting home from work. We avoided any mention of Edgar Coleman at supper, on the theory that Brian, who is now thirteen, has already seen his share of violence on television and doesn’t need the gory details of a murder dished up with his spaghetti. So we saved that until later and talked instead about the science project that Brian is working on with Melissa, his twelve-year-old girlfriend. This requires extended closed-door observation of Brian’s terrarium by both young scientists and detailed computer records of reptilian diets, down to the last mealworm. (If you ask me, this is a ploy to get his own computer, which will no doubt come loaded with games and equipped with the latest electronic joystick. Bribes have gone way up since I was a kid.) We discussed the dietary preferences of reptiles and segued into the topic of clothing for the Big Event.

  “I don’t have to get dressed up for your wedding, do I?” Brian asked defensively.

  McQuaid leaned over to gaze at his son’s unlaced Reeboks, ragged cutoffs, and knee-length T-shirt. “In a word,” he said, “yes. You will be wearing shirt, tie, slacks, blazer, and shoes. Real shoes. You’re going to look respectable if it kills you. Or us.”

  Brian flopped his head onto the table as if he had died of a sudden heart attack, narrowly miss
ing his plate of spaghetti. After a moment he straightened up and brightened. “I don’t have no real shoes.”

  “Any,” I said automatically. I put a heaping spoonful of pesto on my spaghetti and added some grated Parmesan, taking an appreciative sniff of the pesto. “You don’t have any real shoes.”

  “Right. I don’t have none.” He stuck out an unspeakably filthy Reebok and gazed at it fondly. “Guess I can’t go, huh?”

  “No such luck,” I replied, thinking that I’d better snip all the basil tonight, before it got dark, and put it into the freezer. If October was hot, as it often is, there’d be time for one more crop. I’m one of those who believe a bag of basil in the freezer is a marvelous thing to happen upon in the chilly depths of midwinter. “Your grandmother is coming up from Kerrville to take you shopping,” I added. “She’s in charge of your wedding costume.”

  Leatha, my mother, is good at clothes. When I was a kid, that was one of the few things I could count on: having the right outfits in my closet for school programs, dance recitals, tennis matches, and so on. I could also count on Leatha to show up at these events with whiskey on her breath—and my father to be too busy with his legal practice to show up at all. Back then, I thought it was her drinking that drove him away. Now, I suspect that his abandonment was responsible for her drinking. It’s a little late to point fingers, though. He’s dead and she, at long last, is sober, remarried, and reasonably happy.

  “Costume?” Frowning, Brian spooned my homemade tomato sauce onto his spaghetti, then buried it in tomato catsup, which he liberally applies to everything except cake and ice cream. “What’s this about a costume?”

  “Think of the wedding as Halloween,” I said, “without a mask.”

  McQuaid looked up from his plate. “What am I wearing? Not a tux, I hope.” He narrowed his eyes. “Tell me I’m not wearing a tux.”

  “If you were wearing a tux,” I said, passing the Parmesan, “you’d have heard about it long before this. You’re wearing a Mexican wedding shirt.”

  “What’s that?” Brian asked, swinging his foot against the leg of the table.

  “Please don’t kick the table,” I said. “A Mexican wedding shirt is a loose short-sleeved white cotton shirt decorated with floral embroidery and lace. It’s traditional.”

  “Lace!” McQuaid yelped. “Flowers!”

  “Think of it as Halloween, Dad,” Brian advised.

  “Plus your black dress-up jeans and cowboy boots,” I added. I’d had to compromise on a lot of things, but I’d gotten my way on our no-fuss wedding outfits. McQuaid’s shirt was borrowed from Leatha’s husband, Sam, who owns a ranch near Kerrville. I was wearing an ivory cotton dress with broomstick pleats and a handmade lace yoke that I found several years ago at a border market in Matamoros, and white sandals. Ruby, my matron of honor, was wearing—well, I didn’t actually know. She had promised to tell me as soon as she figured it out. She had also promised that it wouldn’t be so outrageous that it would upstage the rest of the party.

  Brian jerked his head in McQuaid’s direction. “If he gets to wear jeans, how come I gotta wear shoes and a tie?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and put a hand on his knee to remind him about the table leg. “Ask your father.”

  McQuaid pulled off another hunk of garlic bread. “We’ll discuss it later,” he said.

  Brian dropped a piece of garlic bread in front of Howard Cosell’s nose. “Whenever she says to ask him,” he remarked to the dog, “he says we’ll discuss it later. I wonder how come.”

  I snatched up the garlic bread.

  “Because we can’t think of anything else to say,” McQuaid told him. He looked across the table at me. “You’re not kidding about the jeans and boots?”

  “Nope,” I said. “But you can’t wear your cowboy hat. We have to draw the line somewhere.” I shifted my mouthful of spaghetti to the other side. I’d already called the dentist and managed to get an appointment for early the next morning. Until then, I’d just have to be careful not to break off what was left of my tooth.

  “Jeans and boots,” McQuaid said happily. “What a woman.” He grinned at Brian. “Hey, do I know how to pick ’em, or what?”

  Brian shrugged. “She’s okay. But I’m not gonna get married till I find somebody who’ll let me wear Reeboks.”

  After dinner, Brian went upstairs to do his homework and consult with Melissa on the phone about their project. When he had gone, McQuaid helped me with the dishes and cleared up some of the mystery about Edgar Coleman’s murder—not much, but some.

  “The autopsy report won’t be back until tomorrow,” he said, rinsing a plate and loading it into the dishwasher, “so we don’t have an official time of death yet, but it’s a pretty good guess that it happened between six and midnight. Coleman’s wife thought he was supposed to spend the night in Houston. Anyway, he wasn’t home when she went out, and if he’d been shot after she got home at midnight, she would’ve heard it. The bedroom is behind the garage, and the windows were open. She found the body early this morning.” He bent over and set the spaghetti dish on the floor, and Howard Cosell undertook his part of the cleanup chores with much enthusiastic tail-wagging. When you move in with a man, his son, and his dog, there are some things you have to accept whether you approve of them or not. At least there wasn’t enough spaghetti sauce to do any further damage to Howard’s liver.

  “Poor Letty,” I said. “This is going to be hard on her.”

  “Oh, you know her?” McQuaid took the dish away from Howard, rinsed it off, and put it into the dishwasher. Personally, I find McQuaid very handsome, in a rough-cut way. Very rough. His nose was broken by an Aggie right tackle about twenty years ago, his forehead was slashed by a knife-wielding crack dealer in a Houston parking lot, and the bullet that did a job on his spine also left a sizable white scar on his neck. He looks a little the worse for wear.

  “Not very well.” I shook out the place mats. “She drops in at the shop a couple of times a month. She and her husband have always struck me as an odd match,” I added, thinking of the timid, uncommunicative woman who buys several bottles of kava and St. John’s wort every few weeks. Kava helps to relieve anxiety and St. John’s wort is the herb of choice for the treatment of depression. People who purchase that much, that often, are probably using the herbs instead of Prozac.

  McQuaid stuck a handful of forks into the silverware basket. “She’s what—a dozen years older than Coleman? Not that I have anything against younger men marrying older women, of course,” he added with a grin. McQuaid is eight years younger than I am. “I heard, though, that he married her for her money. He bought the Blessing property right after they got married seven or eight years ago.”

  “Her first husband died and left her a nice stash,” I said. “He made his money in gas and oil.” I paused. “I wonder what Letty was doing out so late on a Sunday night in Pecan Springs.” At that hour, the only thing open are the all-night convenience stores.

  McQuaid dried his hands on a towel. “She was visiting her sister in New Braunfels. She left at ten-thirty and had a flat tire on the way home. Most of her story checks out,” he added. “She changed the tire herself, but the emergency spare was still on the car, and the flat tire was in the trunk. The sister corroborates her claim about the time.”

  “But if Edgar was lying dead in the garage, why didn’t Letty find him when she came home?”

  “Because the batteries in her garage-door opener were out of juice. She parked in the drive and went straight to bed, thinking he was in Houston on business.” He filled the dishwasher with soap, shut the door, and turned it on.

  “More shady dealings, no doubt,” I said wryly. “That guy seems to have played every angle in the book. The neighbors didn’t hear anything, I take it.” I put the milk back in the refrigerator, carefully ignoring a saucer containing three dead frogs, a gift from Melissa to Brian. When I was Melissa’s age, girls baked peanut butter cookies for their boyfriends. Dead frogs may
signal a new and welcome phase in female-male relationships. “What kind of gun was it?”

  “There was a cartridge on the floor near the body,” McQuaid said. “Thirty-two automatic. And the nearest neighbor is about a hundred yards away.”

  A mouse gun, only slightly louder than a Roy Rogers cap gun. “Any suspects?”

  “Suspects?” With a short laugh, McQuaid grabbed his canes and made his way to a chair. “How many would you like? Coleman was having an affair with his secretary, a feud with his neighbor, and a fight with the City Council. And of course, there’s always the wife. Her alibi isn’t unimpeachable.” He sat down heavily and stretched his braced leg out in front of him.

  An affair? Knowing Edgar’s reputation as a con man, I wasn’t surprised. I was troubled on Letty’s account, though. It’s bad enough to have your husband blown away in the garage without having to face the distressing fact that he was unfaithful-and that you’re a suspect in his murder. But there was another potentially troublesome aspect to this business, quite a bit closer to home.

  I poured a cup of decaf and set it in front of McQuaid. “I hope you’re remembering what day this is.”

  He picked up his cup. “Monday, the last time I looked.”

  “Which means that there are only five days left until Sunday.” I sat down opposite him. “You are planning to wind up this murder investigation before our wedding, I trust—no matter how many dozens of suspects you have lined up.”

  “Hey, wait.” He put the cup down. “You’re telling me it’s this weekend?”

  “Uh-huh.” I ticked the days off. “Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Then comes Sunday and the wedding, immediately following which we are scheduled to hop a plane for a one-week Hawaiian honeymoon.” I gave him a meaningful look. “With nonrefundable tickets, dear heart, meaning that we pay even if we don’t go.”