Lavender Lies

by Susan Wittig Albert

  The Colemans’ house—a stylish white Southwestern adobe with a red-tile roof—was set back from the street behind a circular drive xeriscaped with drought-resistant natives—yucca and sotol, rabbitbrush and agarito and desert willow. Letty’s elegant silver Lincoln Continental sat in front of the garage, which still sported a strip of yellow crime-scene tape. I looked around. No wonder the neighbors hadn’t heard the shot that killed Edgar Coleman. The nearest house was a half-block away, on the other side of a deep ravine.

  I parked, went up the walk, and opened the gate into a walled courtyard that stretched across the front of the house. The courtyard was hot and bright and paved with smooth river rock, with a few large boulders scattered artistically here and there. In the center, a large artificial waterfall plunged into a rocky pool surrounded by showy clumps of grass, a fifteen-foot green cactus with many branches and symmetrical ribs, and a tornillo mesquite with twisted limbs, hung with odd-shaped corkscrew beans. It was an interesting landscape, and its designer had achieved a striking effect—the plants and rocks and even the water all carefully composed, with not a weed to be seen. But that’s all it was, somehow: an effect, like a still life, finished, complete, season-less. To appreciate it, all the viewer had to do was stand and gaze. Not my sort of garden. I prefer plants that invite me to get involved with them, love them or hate them, dig them up and move them around, deadhead and divide them, mulch them, and root out weeds. I wondered whether Letty liked this garden. Perhaps it had been her husband’s idea.

  But I wasn’t here to ponder the relationship between the style of a garden and the personality of its owner. I needed to find out what Letty knew about the “other woman” who might or might not have been one of Edgar Coleman’s lovers—and to discover what Letty was hiding. I had thought about my conversation with her off and on all morning, while Billie Jean was turning me into a blond hussy, and I was sure she was concealing something. Some sort of knowledge, or an emotion she didn’t want to reveal: a deep-seated, far-reaching anger, perhaps, or fear. Still thinking about this, I walked toward the front door. If I hadn’t been thinking, hadn’t had my eyes on the ground, I doubt that I would have noticed the discreet little plaque: GARDEN DESIGN BY WANDA RATHBOTTOM, WANDA’S WONDERFUL ACRES. Wanda Rathbottom, another City Council member. I paused, wondering whether Edgar might have offered Wanda a landscaping contract in return for her vote on the annexation proposal. It wouldn’t surprise me.

  I went to the front door—a heavily carved, oaken affair—and rang the doorbell. After a minute, I rang it again. After the third ring, I pushed the door open, put in my head, and called Letty’s name. She was expecting me—in fact, when we talked that morning, she’d made it very clear that she was anxious to see me.

  Well, I was here, but Letty obviously wasn’t waiting. Calling her name again, I went down the hall and into a large open room with a cathedral ceiling, a stone fireplace at one end and a glass wall that looked out onto a patio. The room was furnished with leather Mission-style sofa, chairs, and occasional tables, and decorated with handsome hand-woven rugs and wall hangings. Over the mantel, a massive stuffed longhorn stared out at the room with glass eyes—a man’s room, full of man-sized furniture. Off to the right was a doorway into a dining room filled with a heavy pine Mission-style table, chairs, and sideboard, more rugs on the wall and a chunky pottery sculpture on the sideboard. Surely this wasn’t Letty’s style. There wasn’t a trace of her in anything I had seen so far. Didn’t she claim any space of her own in this house?

  “Letty?” I called again. No answer. In front of me, a sliding door opened onto the patio and I pushed it open and went outside. The patio was paved with bleached white flagstones and decorated with heavy terra-cotta pots filled with a variety of cacti—more of the Southwestern motif, uncomfortably stark, it seemed to me. On a table shaded by a yellow umbrella sat a pitcher of iced tea, three glasses and plates, a small tray of cookies, and a pair of sunglasses—but no Letty. The late-morning sun was bright, and the stunning glare from the white adobe and the stone paving patio made me slit my eyes as I looked around.

  The house was built on the edge of a rocky ravine. The patio was edged by a knee-high rock wall, but there was an opening where stone steps descended, perhaps to a garden area below. I went to the top of the stairs to call again, and that’s when I saw her, spread-eagled and face-up at the foot of the stairs twenty feet below, arms outflung, eyes wide open, staring blindly at the blazing sun.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lavender has a long tradition of magical use as a herb of purification, of love and of protection.... In Tuscany lavender was used to protect children from the evil eye, while in North Africa the Karbyll women used lavender to protect themselves from mistreatment by their husbands.

  Lavender, Sweet Lavender

  Judyth A. McLeod

  “Of course she’s dead,” I said grimly. I was clutching the cell phone so hard that my fingers hurt. I changed hands.

  “You’ve already called EMS?” McQuaid asked.

  “Yeah, for all the good it will do. Looks like a broken neck.” My throat hurt. I shut my eyes, but I couldn’t shut out the sight of Letty, with her blank face and blind eyes, sprawled at the foot of the stairs.

  “Signs of foul play?”

  “Death is foul.”

  McQuaid sighed. “Yes, I know. But—”

  Tough. I should be tough. Dead bodies don’t bother Kinsey Milhone. “If she was pushed,” I said, “the pusher didn’t leave any obvious clues. But then I didn’t take time to do a detailed forensic analysis. I flew down the stairs to see if she was as dead as she looked, then flew back up to the car to use the phone. I didn’t want to use the one in the house.”

  “Good girl,” McQuaid said approvingly.

  I repressed the urge to tell him that I wasn’t a girl and said, “I did notice something, though. There’s a pitcher and three glasses on the patio table. It looks like I wasn’t the only guest she was expecting. And now that I think about it, she did start to tell me that she might arrange something. She didn’t say what it was, though.”

  “Ah,” McQuaid said. It was the pleased “ah” of a cop who is on to something. He paused, and his voice softened. “Are you okay, China?”

  I thought about this. “I don’t find a dead body every day of the week, if that’s what you’re asking, and I was expecting to have a conversation with Letty.” I tried out a chuckle. It sounded normal. “I guess I’m as okay as a person can be after discovering that her hostess has cashed it in.”

  “Hang around until I get there,” he said. “I’m on my way.”

  It took him about twenty minutes. Meanwhile, EMS showed up, followed by the nearest neighbor, Mrs. Burnett, who came over when she heard the siren. She was a round-faced woman in a tastefully tailored gray suit, a little snug across the hips, carrying a gray fake-leather briefcase stamped with the name Rena Burnett, Adams County Realty.

  “Her too?” Mrs. Burnett asked. Her moony face was flushed with distress. “Poor Letty. Poor, poor Letty. How did it happen? She didn’t ... well, slit her wrists or anything like that, did she?”

  That idea had not yet occurred to me, and the question gave me something to think about. “I found her at the foot of the patio stairs.”

  “Those stairs,” Mrs. Burnett said, in the same tone she might have used for that snake. Her nostrils flared. “I told Edgar he ought to put up a railing.” She set her briefcase on the ground beside her tasteful gray pumps. “He told me to butt out.”

  “Did Letty give you any reason to believe she might be thinking of suicide?”

  “Well,” she said. She stopped, eyeing my denim skirt and plaid blouse. “You’re not from the police?”

  “No,” I said, then added, “I’m a lawyer. But this wasn’t a business call. Letty wanted to talk to me about something that was bothering her.”

  “Oh, well, that’s all right, then,” Mrs. Burnett said. “I just don’t want to volunteer—Well, you know.” Sh
e gave a nervous laugh, remembered what we were talking about, and pulled down her mouth. “I don’t make a practice of sticking my nose into people’s private business, no matter what Edgar thought.”

  “She must have been under a lot of strain,” I said sympathetically.

  “Poor, poor Letty,” Mrs. Burnett said again. “It was terrible, just absolutely awful, her finding him the way she did. She was hysterical, you know.” She gave me a sideways glance. “Out of her head.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “I know I would be, if I found my husband dead.”

  “Oh, yes. It was early in the morning and I was just going to the office—I’m a real estate agent, you know, with Adams County Realty.” She opened her bag and handed me a business card. “She was down at the foot of the drive, waiting for the EMS, crying and screaming like a mad-woman. Some man was with her—he turned out to be the editor of the Enterpise, the one who wrote all that awful stuff about blood on the wall.” She shuddered. “Poor Letty. She just kept going on about—” Mrs. Burnett stopped.

  “About—” I prompted.

  She narrowed her eyes and drew in her mouth. Her face was flushed. “Well, about Edgar’s women friends,” she said, with a show of great reluctance that wouldn’t have fooled anybody. “Names and stuff. It’s a good thing that man didn’t put what she said in the paper.”

  Names and stuff. “Pauline and Iris, you mean?”

  “And Jean. I know it sounds crazy, but she had it in her head that they were the ones who shot him. She said they plotted to kill him because he was cheating on all three of them. Four, counting her.” She screwed up her face. “Sex gets people in all kinds of trouble, doesn’t it.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I said, in a tone of great earnestness. “But I guess she didn’t say that to the police.”

  “I don’t think so.” She pursed her lips. “By the time they arrived, she’d gotten hold of herself, more or less. I mean, it was obviously the sort of accusation only a crazy woman would make. Nobody would really think that three grown women would put their heads together and decide to shoot somebody.” She paused, considering. “Although I don’t suppose you could blame them if they did. Edgar was just asking for it, the way he carried on. I swear to God, that man was such a womanizer. You never knew where he would strike next.” She made a huffing noise, fished in her shoulder bag for a tissue, and blew her nose. “How anybody could be so sweet and handsome on the outside and such a shark on the inside, I’ll never understand.”

  “He had a terrible reputation,” I agreed, wondering if Rena Burnett had first-hand knowlege of Edgar Coleman’s sharky seductiveness.

  “Lower than a snake’s belly.” Mrs. Burnett finished with her tissue and disposed of it in her bag. “Letty and I go—went—to the same church, you know, which gave me all the more reason to try and help her. I have never believed in divorce, because I think two people ought to work out their problems. But her marriage was a hell on earth, and I told her, straight out, she ought to get rid of him. If ever a husband mistreated a wife, it was Edgar Coleman.”

  Get rid of him. It was a resonant phrase. “Do you think,” I asked, “that he abused her physically?”

  Mrs. Burnett’s face had grown redder and she was perspiring. “I don’t know about that. But in my book, you don’t have to actually hit a person to abuse them. Letty couldn’t see it, naturally, but it’s been my opinion all along that he only married her for the money her first husband left her, which Edgar forced her to invest in the Blessing Ranch. Of course, she’d deny it, but I know for a fact that she gave him the money because she was afraid to tell him no, for fear he’d leave.” Mrs. Burnett blew out an explosive breath. “Anything he wanted, he got, and I do mean anything. And lots of times he wasn’t even nice about it.”

  “Such a pity,” I said, wondering whether Letty had grown so tired of always giving and never getting that she had picked up that shiny little mouse gun and blown her abusive husband away. And then, suffused with guilt and shame for what she had done, had thrown herself down the stairs. But while that theory was attractive, it didn’t fit Letty’s demeanor when we’d talked yesterday and this morning, or the fact of that pitcher and three glasses.

  Mrs. Burnett reached down and picked up her briefcase and I cast an eye toward the street. McQuaid’s arrival would probably put a stop to our girl talk. I’d better move her on to specifics.

  “It’s a good thing Letty had you to talk to,” I remarked. “It must have made her feel better to get it off her chest.” I frowned. “Of course, she spoke about Iris and Pauline to me, but I don’t think I heard her mention anybody named Jean.”

  Mrs. Burnett sniffed. “That was a new one on me, too. I asked Letty, because Jean is such a common name. She said she got it off the answering machine and maybe didn’t get it right. Then she said she actually didn’t know for sure about their relationship, and maybe she was wrong.”

  A stab at a name, a guess at a relationship. Still, Letty hadn’t sounded doubtful when she’d talked to me this morning. I made a mental note to tell McQuaid to check the machine and look around the phone for any scribblings she might have left, then went back to our earlier subject. “Did Letty actually talk to you about suicide?”

  Mrs. Burnett glanced at her watch. She was obviously worried about being late to something, but she also wanted to talk. A woman in conflict. “Not in so many words,” she replied. “If she’d said anything really specific, I would’ve called our minister and asked him to come and counsel with her. She said she didn’t want to go on living without Edgar, she wished she was dead, that sort of thing.” She looked grim. “Although if you ask me, she was well rid of him. Without him, she had a chance at a new life. It’s too bad she didn’t get to take it.”

  “Did you notice a car in the drive this morning?” I asked, fearing I was about to lose her before I ran through all my questions. “Or see anyone around the house?”

  “No,” she said slowly. “The only car I saw all morning was the one that turned around in my drive. A blue car. I saw it from my kitchen window.”

  “What time?”

  Mrs. Burnett gave me a puckered frown. “About nine-thirty, I guess. I was rinsing the breakfast dishes. We were a little late this morning. My husband was going off on a business trip. You know how men are about traveling. He couldn’t find anything he needed, including his skivvies.”

  “A dark blue car? Light blue?”

  She blinked. “Sort of dark. Medium, I guess.” She shook her head, frowning. “You don’t think—You can’t mean—” On the third time, she got the whole sentence out. “Oh, good Lord. You’re not saying that somebody pushed poor Letty down those stairs?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But if I were going to kill myself, I don’t think I’d trust a flight of stairs to do the job—even those stairs. Would you?”

  She chewed on that for a moment, then shook her head, tch-tching. “But who would do such a thing? And why? The only bad thing Letty ever did in her life was to marry Edgar. I can’t imagine why anybody would want to kill her.” More headshaking, more tch-tching.

  If she couldn’t, I could.

  Because Letty had learned who Jean was. And then she had arranged for a three-way discussion of the pertinent questions between herself, Jean, and me.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Burnett,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Burnett said doubtfully. She paused. “This is a little premature, but maybe you could tell me about Letty’s will, being a lawyer and all?”

  “Her will? No, I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about it. Was there a specific question?”

  Mrs. Burnett clasped her briefcase in both hands. “Well, I was just wondering about the house. Places around here are in great demand, and we don’t get vacancies too often.”

  “You’d like to list it?”

  She looked relieved, as if she were glad that the words had come out of m
y mouth, not hers. “It really is rushing things and I hate to mention it, but, well, yes. I have a buyer who just adores Southwestern style. I’m sure she’d be crazy about this place. We don’t see a lot of adobe around here, and that courtyard makes the property unique. Edgar had it done by a garden designer. He was proud as a peacock about it.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” I said. McQuaid’s siren split the air, ending the conversation between us.

  “Your nose looks pretty good, considering.” Laurel eyed me narrowly. “Your hair looks great. What a difference a day makes.” She glanced at the clock, which read eleven-thirty. “But I thought you and Mike were supposed to be at the courthouse, getting your marriage license.”

  “Yeah.” I rang the register to see how we had done for the morning. It could have been better. Much better. “But there’s been a complication.”

  “Another one?” Laurel asked. She was wearing her brown hair loose today, and it hung forward over her green Thyme and Seasons T-shirt. We had them made to wear and sell in the shop last spring.

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. I told her what I had found at Letty Coleman’s house; she expressed dismay, and we mused for a moment together on the impermanence of life. Then I frowned. “What do you mean, another complication?”

  Laurel gave me a rueful glance. “For starters, Bertha and Betsy called. They’ve gone to Houston to visit Lucia’s Garden.” Lucia’s Garden is a wonderful herb shop run by my friends Lucia and Michael Bettler. Their Basil Festival, which is held in August, is not to be missed. “They’ll be here Friday morning.”