CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the language of flowers, iris means “I have a message for you.”
Flora’s Dictionary
Kathleen Gips
Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, the messenger of the gods, always kept an eye out for the latest happening, which she then reported to the appropriate Olympic desk. Maybe we should christen her the goddess of private eyes.
China Bayles
China’s Garden
For wheresoe’re thou art in this world’s globe, I’ll have an Iris that shall find thee out.
Henry VI, Part II
William Shakespeare
Sheila turned on the ignition. “I just talked to Blackie,” she said, putting the vehicle into reverse and backing it expertly out of the tight space at the curb. “He told me that Letty Coleman died this morning—and that you found her.”
“Right.” I flipped the visor down to keep the afternoon sun out of my eyes, took a deep breath, and shifted gears myself, mentally, refocusing my attention from Melissa and her mother to the Coleman case. “She was lying at the foot of a flight of stone stairs, behind her house. When I talked to McQuaid at lunchtime, he hadn’t found any forensic evidence that would indicate foul play. However—”
I summarized the information that contradicted that assumption: the pitcher and three glasses on the patio table, Rena Burnett’s sighting of a blue car in her driveway around nine-thirty, and Darla Jean McDaniels’s odd behavior when Ruby tried to find out where she had been this morning. Then, realizing that Sheila was still in the dark about Coleman’s various blackmail schemes, I told her what Ruby and I had dug up in our conversations with the City Council members. “I tried to get through to McQuaid to suggest that he interview Darla McDaniels again,” I added, “but he was pursuing the Garza angle.” I glanced at Sheila. “Did you hear that Phyllis’s husband seems to have taken himself off to parts unknown?”
“Blackie told me,” Sheila said, slowing to turn the corner onto River Road. “It’s a complicated situation. Garza’s flight certainly makes him look guilty. And he seems to have been the kind of guy who would go storming over to Coleman’s house and blow him away.”
“That’s true,” I said. “He certainly has a violent temper. But it’s also possible he’s running to escape the state’s investigation into those phony documents he obtained, which has nothing to do with Coleman’s murder.” It isn’t just mystery plots that are built on red herrings; life itself is full of just such odd, misleading synchronicities. Finding out what’s a clue and what’s a coincidence keeps cops and the courts busy. “The last I heard, McQuaid was looking for prints to compare to the one on the gun. Do you know whether he’s picked anything up?”
“Not so far,” Sheila said. “Blackie is giving him a couple of men to speed things up. But without a full set of Jorge’s prints, it’ll be tough.”
“So McQuaid’s investigation is still basically at square one,” I said. I leaned back in the seat and stretched out my legs. “Except that now he has one gun, two dead bodies, and a lot more questions.” I paused, thinking ahead to our conversation with Coleman’s office manager. “If Iris Powell has heard about Letty’s death, I don’t imagine it has enhanced her sense of security.”
Sheila signaled for a left, checked her mirror, and nosed into the lane. Behind us, a little man in a Honda leaned on his horn and gave us the finger, obviously offended at Sheila’s audacity. She braked at the light, waiting for the traffic to clear for the turn. “You’re right,” she agreed. “If Iris thinks Letty was murdered and is afraid she might be next, she might be a little more willing to tell us what she knows.”
I drummed my fingers on the armrest. There was another possibility I hadn’t yet considered. Letty had known that Iris was involved with Edgar. What if Letty had learned that the involvement went deeper than she had thought? What if she had invited her over for a chat and had confronted her? What if the confrontation had escalated into argument, then into violence? Had Iris pushed her down the stairs, then panicked and fled? This reconstruction was entirely speculative, but possible. Briefly, I wondered what color car Iris drove.
Sheila waited for a gravel truck to clear the intersection. “Blackie told me he ran into you in the courthouse this afternoon,” she said, turning left.
I put my speculations on hold and shifted my attention. “Did he tell you what we talked about?”
She moved into the right-hand lane. “Just that you didn’t want McQuaid to stay on as chief. You’d rather I got the job.”
“You can say that again,” I said fervently. “But that’s beside the point. What Blackie said to me was that you should stop worrying about politics and follow your bliss.” I jammed both feet on the floor. “Shit!” The guy in the Honda had zipped out of the left lane in front of us and put on his brakes.
Sheila braked fast to avoid a rear-end collision, shifted gears, and muttered under her breath, “Boy, I wish I were a cop. A real cop, I mean. I’d ticket his damn ass.” The driver of the Honda, obviously pleased with himself, shot us the bird again and speeded up.
“Road rage,” I said. “Testosterone fury.”
“Yeah,” Sheila said. “I know I pulled in front of him, but there was plenty of room.” She looked at me, her eyebrows skeptical. “Blackie really said I should follow my bliss?”
“Words to that effect. He said it wouldn’t be fair if he kept you from doing what you really wanted to do. Bottom line, go for it.”
“I see,” Sheila said reflectively. There was a long pause. “Follow my bliss, huh? If I only knew which way.”
I glanced at her in surprise. “What’s the matter? Don’t you know what you want?”
“Being police chief is a big job.”
“Well, sure. But—”
“What if I give up my university position and then find out I don’t like being chief? There’s a lot of stress in a job like that, you know. You can see what McQuaid is going through right now. And remember what happened to that woman chief they hired in Austin? There was so much animosity toward her in the ranks that she finally quit.”
I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, Smart Cookie. I thought you wanted this job. I thought it was a job a woman law enforcement officer would die for.”
“Well, maybe,” Sheila said in a defensive tone, “but I might not like working with the City Council. The way you describe them, they sound like a bunch of unethical jerks with their own private agendas. And I’d have to start from scratch with the department. The entire communications system has to be overhauled, they’re back in the paper-and-pencil age when it comes to computers, and the budget is below the poverty line.” She smacked the steering wheel with the flat of her hand. “I don’t need all that shit! I’d be working myself into an early grave.”
“If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it,” I said mildly. “You’ve got a good contract, cushy office, lots of job security, prestige. Nobody would blame you if you stayed where you are.”
She chewed for a moment on a corner of her lip. “I didn’t say I don’t want the job,” she said finally. “I do. It’s just that—” Her mouth twisted. “Oh, hell. I don’t know what I want.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said, astonished. “I thought it was Blackie who was keeping you from realizing your dream of having your very own small-town police department to play with. Now you’re telling me it’s you!”
“I’ve always been my own worst enemy,” she said bleakly. “You can’t believe how hard it was to make up my mind to take the CTSU job. They almost gave it to somebody else before I said yes.”
I shook my head. “Smart Cookie,” I said, “you have a problem.”
“I have a problem,” she agreed, and we drove the rest of the way in silence.
The office of Coleman Enterprises occupied the left half of a one-story building at the corner of River Road and Pedernales, about a mile from the entrance to the Blessing Ranch. The place was built in the shade of a huge live oak and
designed to look like an old-fashioned Texas ranch house, with a Western-style porch across the front and a tangle of honeysuckle vines growing up lattices at each end. The right half of the building was occupied by an insurance company. Neither Coleman Enterprises nor the insurance company appeared to be doing a land-office business.
Sheila parked the Explorer in front of Coleman’s half, next to a new Lincoln that was the twin of the one I’d seen Letty driving—except that this one wasn’t silver, it was blue. The vanity license plate read Iris I. My antennae went up. The plot, as Ruby would say, was thickening.
As I got out of the Explorer, I glanced up at the brilliant afternoon sky. The air was hot and dry and the landscape baked under an unrelenting sun. It was hard to imagine Josephine out there in the Gulf, swirling and twirling in her scarf of wild clouds and rain. It had been a few years since a hurricane breezed into Texas, and I tried to remember the possibilities. If she headed northeast, toward Beaumont or New Orleans, we’d be on the western side of the storm and bone-dry. If she came in far to the south, around Brownsville, we’d be on the outskirts and would get a few showers, at most. But if she grew into a sizable storm and made landfall between Corpus Christi and Houston, we could get drenched. Williamson County, to the north of us, once got an entire year’s worth of rainfall in two days, something like thirty-six inches, courtesy of a hurricane. As soon as I got a chance, I’d better check with the Weather Channel for an update.
I followed Sheila’s yellow blazer as she climbed the steps, crossed the porch, and opened the door. Inside, the office looked more like a Houston high-rise than a Texas ranch house. It was paneled in an elegant wood and carpeted in bone-colored velvet, with ficus plants at strategic locations. Opposite the door was an elegant receptionist’s desk, and on the wall behind it hung a large gold-framed landscape of an old barn in a field of bluebonnets. Off to the right was a waiting area with pale upholstered chairs and a sofa heaped with colorful cushions, all very tastefully done. The only sign of the hard sell was a jumbo topographic map of Pecan Springs and the adjoining area. The map was stuck all over with green flags, green presumably representing ecological sensitivity, the flags representing Coleman properties, of which there were a bundle. The Blessing Ranch, between the Interstate and Lookout Mountain to the south of Pecan Springs, was outlined with a green marker. I hadn’t realized just how large and sprawling it was.
“Where is everybody?” Sheila asked. “Looks like the office is closed.”
I turned back, noting that the top of the receptionist’s desk was clean as a whistle, empty of everything except a telephone console. The chair was pushed under the desk. Operations must be shut down for a while, now that the boss was out of the picture.
A door opened to our left, and we turned. “I’m Iris Powell,” a woman said. “Are you looking for me?”
She was in her late forties, dressed in belted brown slacks and a silky white blouse, open down to the second button, that showed a full, firm cleavage. Her brown hair was permed curly, and she wore tortoise-shell glasses and clip-on earrings like fat gold snails. She was holding a cigarette between the first two fingers of her left hand. Her nails and lips were an I-dare-you red and her brows were penciled into an artificial arch. She had the brash, defiant look of a woman who had come up the hard way and was proud of it.
“I’m Sheila Dawson,” Smart Cookie said. “This is China Bayles.” She hesitated. “Paula did call you, didn’t she? She said you were expecting us.”
Iris lifted a cigarette to her lips, pulled on it, tilted her head back and blew a cloud of smoke out of both nostrils. Almost lazily she said, “My sister oughta mind her own business.” She didn’t say, so should you, but the implication was obvious.
“Paula’s worried about you,” Sheila replied. “She says you’re concerned that—”
Iris dropped the laziness. “Paula’s a peach,” she said, “but she worries too much. She heard me wrong, she got scared, and she’s making a federal case out of it.” From her accent, I’d guess that Iris began life somewhere along the border between Oklahoma and Arkansas. “But hey, it was real nice of you to listen to her, you being her boss and all. It made her feel a lot better. I just hate it that you had to go to the trouble of driving out here.”
“Oh, it was no trouble,” Sheila said. “However, I think it might be a good idea if we discussed—”
“Yeah, well, as I say, thanks,” Iris said, with a dismissive toss of her head. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a lot of work to do. The auditor will be coming in next week and—”
“I gather,” I said, “that the police haven’t contacted you yet.”
Her eyes slid to me. A slight frown appeared between her penciled eyebrows. She lifted her cigarette to her lips and took another puff. “The police? Why should they—”
“About Letty Coleman.”
Her eyes flickered again, not with amusement. Her face hardened. But the words, when she spoke, came out in that slow Okie drawl. “So what about Letty Coleman? She’s got nothing to do with me. She wants to know what’s going on, she can talk to Eddie’s lawyer.”
“She’s dead.”
The words hit Iris like a fist in the stomach. Her face went ashen. She sucked in her breath and sagged against the door frame. Moving swiftly, Sheila took one arm and I took the other and we half-pulled, half-lifted her into the other room and deposited her on a leather sofa. Sheila went for water and a towel. I picked up Iris’s cigarette from the carpet and dropped it in a heavy marble ashtray as I glanced around. The office was furnished with the same kind of massive pieces I had seen in Coleman’s house—a heavy oak desk, upholstered executive chair, elegantly paneled walls, a plush beige carpet, leather sofa and chairs. Instead of a window, one wall sported a large lighted aquarium, with two skillet-sized goldfish and a black fish with eyes like ski goggles. Over the aquarium hung another fish, a large stuffed marlin in full fighting posture. It was a man’s office—Edgar’s, no doubt.
On the sofa, Iris was getting her breath. “H-h-how did it happen?” she gasped. “When?” She pulled off her glasses and pressed the backs of her hands against her eyes. “Oh, shit. Poor Letty.” She began to cry, softly.
I sat down in the soft leather chair to the right of the sofa and watched her. I was sure that the news about Letty had been a surprise. I have met quite a few accomplished liars and actors in my courtroom days, and I didn’t believe that this woman could have faked her physical response to the announcement of Letty’s death. I also thought that Rena Burnett would have mentioned it if the blue car in her driveway that morning had been another Lincoln. But until McQuaid had checked Iris’s alibi for this morning, he might consider her a suspect. It did not behoove me to feed her any detailed information about what might or might not be a crime.
Sheila returned with a damp paper towel, dabbed at Iris’s face, then handed her the glass of water. Iris kept her eyes shut as she drank. Finally, she opened her eyes and put on her glasses.
“How did it happen?” she repeated.
“You’ll hear the details of Letty’s death when the police are ready to release them,” I said, and added. “They’ll also want to know where you were this morning.”
“This morning?” she asked. Her eyes went from Sheila to me. Her mascara was smudged and her red lipstick was bleeding into the comers of her mouth. “Is that when she died?”
“Yes,” I said.
She took the towel from Sheila and wiped her face with it again. “If you’re not going to tell me how it happened, I’ve got to assume somebody killed her.” Her voice was hoarse.
I didn’t say anything.
She was getting control of herself again. She sat for a moment, chewing on her lip and thinking, but not liking her thoughts. “Christ,” she muttered. She shook her head, disbelieving. “What a goddamn mess.”
Sheila and I said nothing. For the next few moments, the only sound in the thickly carpeted office was the soft bubbling of the aquarium filter. �
��If you’re thinking it might’ve been me,” Iris said finally, “you’re wrong.” Her voice was stronger now, edgy and belligerent. “I spent the whole damn day—from eight until just a little while ago—with the accountant. Eddie left the books and bank accounts in a helluva mess. Not even the accountant can figure out what he was up to. The bank is calling in an auditor.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Sheila said dryly.
Iris’s eyes came to me. “Paula said you’re a criminal attorney. What do you think ...” She stopped, trying to formulate a question but not quite able to decide what it should be. “Forget it,” she said. She reached for the cigarette case and lighter on the table, attempting nonchalance. “Doesn’t matter.” She flicked the lighter. Her hand was trembling and it took a couple of clicks before her Bic did its job. “I’m clean. I got nothing to worry about.”
“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “You told your sister that you know too much and you’re scared. Now Letty is dead and you’re wondering if you could be next. So why don’t you let us help you.”
Iris stared at me. She drew smoke. “The police know I didn’t kill Eddie,” she said. “They’ve checked out my alibi. I flew to Phoenix for a weekend with friends, and I didn’t get back to town until nearly noon on Monday. That was when I found out he’d been shot.” She ran her little finger around her lips, as if smoothing her lipstick. “It was a shock, but I can’t say I was surprised.”
“Did you have a reason to expect it?” Sheila asked sharply.
“Let’s just say he was living dangerously. I mean, you walk out in front of a train every day or two, you’ve got to figure on getting run over.” Iris shook her head gloomily.
“I won’t exactly say it was a death wish, but it had to be something like that. He hated being in a rut. Nothing made him happier than lighting a fire under people.”
Lavender Lies Page 20
