“Bugs is better.”
By then the real point was dawning on me, and I went into the den and peered out at the porch. Sure enough, black crickets in small-plague proportions were hopping around in the once-clear space of my screened-in porch.
“When it stops raining, I’ll shoo ’em out into the backyard. It ain’t no big deal,” Jimmie said.
After I finished staring at the black bugs that now populated my porch, I stared at my backyard. The grass was somewhere between ankle and calf high in the spots where it actually grew. So far, I had to conclude that Jimmie as a live-in yardman was not working out especially well.
Jimmie spun around in a half circle, spread his arms wide, and said, “Browning says, ‘the best yet is fixing to be.’”
Despite Jimmie’s encouraging and goofy grin, I seriously doubted if that was the exact quote or was going to be the case. But before I protested, Jimmie winked and said, “Let’s get that wine, you tell me where you got it hid. Then I got me a date next door.”
In nothing flat, while I was still dripping water, Jimmie poured me some wine, then he ran out in the wet night, in search of love and fried meat.
Chapter 26
Two black crickets were sitting on top of my coffee table, and they appeared to be engaged in activities designed to produce more crickets.
Frigging great.
But watching the bugs reminded me about Sherilyn Moody and Gideon Theibuet.
First I’d seen him on an apparent date with the good widow at the antiphosphate rally, then I’d seen them together at Sherilyn’s, and catty old Rayford had practically told me they were lovers. My mind quickly concocted a scenario in which the world-weary wife, tired of being left at home while M. David seduced the younger female population of Sarasota, convinced one Theibuet to off her husband, thereby relieving her of the burden of divorce court and a fifty-fifty split of the assets. I mean, why share if you can get it all?
Certainly from what I could remember, Theibuet would be strong enough to hold M. David down in the slime soup. Plus, with him dead, M. David’s 55 percent of the Antheus shares would be divided between the remaining three shareholders, substantially increasing Theibuet’s own holdings in the mining company.
And I remembered what Miguel had told me—that most of that land had been M. David’s to begin with, which he’d put into the company in exchange for the controlling number of shares. Meaning the remaining three shareholders had acquired not only increased shares, but a huge chunk of valuable land at M. David’s death.
Theibuet began to glow an even brighter shade of red in my mind’s eye.
Shoot, maybe he even had a revenge angle, since Rayford said Theibuet had been involved in the Boogie Bog mess, and lost money.
If Rayford was right about that, Theibuet had revenge, economic gain, and the good widow all as inspiration for murdering M. David.
Hot damn. I’d done it again.
I hoped Josey wouldn’t be mad at me for solving her case, and I pulled out her card, got her number, and rang her up.
“Detective Henry Farmer here,” Josey said, answering on the second ring.
“Oh, good. You’re home.” Without further chitchat, I babbled forth my thoughtful theory about Theibuet and Mrs. Moody.
“You do know you are not an official law-enforcement agent?” Josey asked.
“Don’t you think—”
“I think you need evidence.”
“That’s your job,” I said.
“Raining cats and dogs, you stay high and dry.”
The word high made me think of Delvon, which made me think of Lenora, which made me think of Angus, and that led naturally enough to my thinking of Miguel. “Hey, any word on where Miguel is? I mean, I heard that the police want him for questioning in Angus John’s murder. He’s my client and—”
“I told you, Angus John isn’t my case.”
“Yeah, but don’t cops talk with each other? I mean, it’s got to be related.”
In the pause that followed, I listened to Josey breathe for longer than a polite moment. “Just be careful, okay? There’s already dead people in this pile of rocks you keep kicking over.” And she hung up.
Well, damn. Josey was hiding something from me.
Me, who had just basically solved the M. David murder case for her.
I picked up the phone and had dialed the first half of her number before it occurred to me that a more forthcoming source might be Philip’s snitch.
Philip’s snitch, who Philip was paying, without ever once hinting that I should contribute a dime. Philip, who was but a phone call away.
He answered on the third ring. “Hi, Philip, how are you?” I said, for lack of a better segue into finding out if he could find out something for me.
“Lilly? Are you all right? No further problems with Miguel? I can be there in ten minutes.”
“Not unless your Lexus can swim. And, no, no further contact from Miguel. And these rains will probably keep Miguel off the streets. And Jimmie’s with me. And I’m fine. How are you?”
“Lilly, I’m fine. Please tell me what you want.”
“I, er…I just had this conversation with Josey, you know, the sheriff ’s detective?”
“I remember Josey.”
“Oh, good. Anyway, I think there’s been some kind of new development in the Angus murder, but she wouldn’t tell me. Would you mind terribly calling your insider guy at the police department and seeing if he can find out anything? What’s new, I mean.”
“Actually, I have already spoken with my man. Under all the circumstances, it seemed the wisest course that I stay well informed.”
“So, what?”
“This is thirdhand. It’s actually from the sheriff ’s department’s investigation into M. David’s murder. My man got his information from—”
“What? What?” I didn’t mean to interrupt, but at this precise moment in time I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the chain of custody or hearsay, I just wanted to know what Philip knew.
“The sheriff ’s department has evidence possibly linking Angus with M. David’s murder.”
“What?” I asked, suddenly anxious.
“At M. David’s house, in his den, the crime-scene experts found three beer bottles, Dos Equis. One of them had M. David’s fingerprints, and a can of honey-roasted peanuts had Angus’s fingerprints on the lid. They can place the bottles in the den the night M. David was killed.”
“So they had a drink. So what? I drink beer with people I don’t kill.”
“You don’t think Angus and M. David make an odd couple?”
“Pretty much, yeah, but so what? They had a drink together at M. David’s house. They can hardly arrest Angus for murder for that.”
“They can hardly arrest Angus regardless,” Philip said.
“You know what I mean,” I said, trying to resist the urge to snap at him now that I thought I might love him. “What about Miguel? Any of his prints?”
“No, there were the two other bottles, but condensation had washed off the latents. The techies were luckier with M. David’s bottle. And the peanut lid. They ran the prints through AFIS and got a match. You knew Angus had been arrested before?”
“Sure, yes,” I said, though actually I had not.
“And there were a couple of Dos Equis bottles on top of the gyp stack when they found M. David, but, again, no latents. But same brand, so naturally the investigators are inclined to believe there is a connection. That is, in the absence of any other explanation.”
“You got to wonder why anybody is stupid enough to kill somebody and toss out their beer bottles on the scene.”
“There’s more. Josey just got the phone records today, finally. Someone phoned M. David at his house from the pay phone at the pier where Miguel’s sailboat was docked. A little after six p.m. the night he was killed. The maid left at five-thirty, and there were no beer bottles in the den then. When she came in the next morning, she spotted the bottles, but left them
where they were because she had other chores, and, after all, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Moody was home.”
“Where was Mrs. Moody?”
“At the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, on a consult. She has ironclad witnesses. She wasn’t anywhere around when M. David died.”
“But she could have set it up,” I said, wholly unwilling to let the woman who had nearly set me up off any retribution hook I might be able to bait.
“Angus could have set it up too,” Philip said, sounding fatigued, and, maybe, a bit sad. “He calls from the pier, offers to set up a meeting, and presents himself at M. David’s house for a drink. Perhaps he even implied he had some deal to propose about ceasing to protest the mine, or some similar plan or offer that would induce M. David to agree to meet him. Then he overpowers M. David, or pulls a gun. The third beer bottle suggests an accomplice.”
That, I thought, would be Miguel. Damn. “Do you have anything that ties Miguel to this?”
“No.”
But I imagined the sound of a hanging “yet” in Philip’s words.
“If Angus was involved in killing M. David, it’s a reasonable assumption Miguel was involved, or knew something about it. Those receipts you gave me suggest that Miguel was involved in making a bomb, even if he didn’t mean to kill Angus. Given all that, and Miguel’s recent aggressive behavior toward you, I think I should come and get you. You’ll be safer here with me.”
I was tempted. I looked out the window in case the rain had stopped in the last ten seconds. But it wasn’t just rain, it was tropical-storm rain with attitude, and with thunder that would kill the living and raise the dead. “No, thank you. You are very kind to worry, but like I said, Jimmie is with me, and when it stops raining, I will go get Bearess. A hundred-pound rottweiler ought to slow Miguel down. And the door is locked.”
Philip gave it another round of convincing me to spend the storm safely in his arms, but I resisted. It wasn’t just the weather; I needed some time alone to consider my recent revelations. That I might love Philip. That Miguel was, after all, just lust that dissipated quickly enough after he tried to kill me.
So I put my best spin on turning down Philip’s offer to come fetch me in a hurricane, I promised him I would be careful, and hung up.
And sat down to think.
What Philip told me suggested that Angus and a third man, who most surely was Miguel, had shared a beer with M. David the night he was killed. If I wasn’t willing to leap to the next step—that is, that they had then killed M. David after sharing a drink with the man in his own den—that meant the beer bottles and the peanut lid with prints had to be a badly timed coincidence.
Or, a setup.
And a setup meant Sherilyn. I mean, hadn’t she just proved she was damned clever at setting up setups?
My head swimming with unproven theories of conspiracies and setups, I checked the locks on all my doors, and poured another glass of the good organic wine.
And I wondered just how much protection an eighty-year-old man and a hundred-pound lapdog would actually be—especially since they were both next door.
Chapter 27
A cricket landed on my face and chirped. As I woke up and swatted at it, I heard Rasputin issue a shrill morning whistle.
I rolled out of bed, looked out my window, and saw it was still raining a torrential tropical-storm gusher.
Great, a flood and a plague of locusts. Idly, I hoped no other biblical curses were in the offing, then stumbled to the kitchen and made my coffee. After feeding Rasputin his morning Save the Forest trail mix bar, I watched him jumping around on the porch after the many crickets. Though Rasputin seemed to be getting the basic idea, for the moment the crickets still had the upper hand. Well, let hopping birds hop, I thought, and ambled back to my coffee and my kitchen table.
I missed Philip. I missed Bearess my dog. I missed my grandmother. I was getting so mopey I wondered if I had a hormonal imbalance, and then I figured it was just the rain.
Remembering that I’d read caffeine is an antidepressant, I refilled my coffee mug, and looked out the kitchen window at the continuing storm. I hadn’t missed a hurricane warning, had I? And weren’t we months past the hurricane season, anyway? But as hurricane rules no longer seemed to apply, this because of global warming, according to Olivia, I coasted to the den and turned on the television to check the weather.
Blah, blah, blah. Rain. Thunder. Cold front hits warm Gulf something, something. More rain on the way, the Weather Channel reported, with worsening thunderstorms on the horizon. The explanation of the storm didn’t interest me, but the predictions were beginning to catch my eye. Rapidly rising river levels in Sarasota and Manatee Counties, potential flooding.
Potential, my ass, had anybody seen Shade Avenue last night?
Then the TV offered me a big scene of a cute woman in a rain slicker standing in front of a big dam, talking into a microphone in one hand, clutching her hat to her head with the other hand, and smiling like Miss Bermuda Triangle in the semifinals. “Though the Manatee River is already nearing flood levels, officials explain that the dam on the river has a lock designed to open and divert the water when it hits flood stage, so east Manatee County is safe,” she said. The camera crew cut away to a scene of hunched-over men in slickers frantically trying to turn a big wheel-like thing while truly huge amounts of water swirled around them and a series of concrete structures got pelted by more rain.
Okay, I had to say Miss Bermuda Triangle was more reassuring than the men, who seemed not to be succeeding in their attempts to turn the big wheel thing.
Then, shattering her previous reassurances, Bermuda T-girl returned to the TV screen and said, “However, the Myakka and the Peace Rivers in Sarasota County are nearing flood levels, and people living in the flood zones of those rivers are advised to stay tuned to their televisions and radios in case evacuation is ordered.”
Well, that definitely ruled out driving to the office for another day of churning my in-coming mail and my deposition collection. I turned off the television, and started back to the kitchen, thinking maybe I’d make spice cookies for breakfast. I have a killer recipe for whole wheat spice cookies that uses canola oil instead of butter. But while I was pulling out my flour, something Sherilyn had said about Rayford, a bodyguard with nothing but “a dollar inside his shoe,” slapped me in the face. So how did a cowboy with presumably zippo knowledge about growing oranges—I mean, okay, how many orange groves are there in Montana?—get that grove in the first place? Yeah, that was weird. Definitely weird.
My visions of spice cookies dancing in my head butted against the puzzle of a poor bodyguard who now owned a Florida millionaire-developer’s dream of forty acres and a mule, or, that is, owned it until the sales contract was finalized. Then he owned 48 percent of a huge check. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune had run a story a couple months back on how farmland in the east part of the County was selling for up to $35,000 an acre, and the surveyor had told me there were a hundred acres in that grove. I had to get out a pencil to do the math, but I calculated Rayford’s 48 percent as around $1,680,000. Okay, spare change to M. David, but megabucks for the rest of us.
That certainly invited further query.
Naturally I couldn’t resist calling Rayford. Wondering if the rain would keep Rayford from the office, I looked in both the Sarasota and Manatee phone books for a private listing. Finding none for a Rayford Clothier, I dialed the number for Delilah Groves. Rayford answered on the fifth ring.
Picturing Lauren Bacall, I huskyed down my voice to low and sexy, and said, “Rayford, this is Lilly. Lilly Cleary. We met—”
“What do you want now?”
Okay, so we weren’t going to be best friends. I switched to business mode, and said, “I wanted to let you know I received the notice of dismissal of the lawsuits against my clients.”
“Goody. Thanks for letting me know. ’Bye now.”
“Wait, wait…I’m wondering if you could tell me about the arrangements you and M
. David had with the groves.”
“You’re the big, smart lawyer, you figure it out,” Rayford said, and hung up.
When I called back, nobody answered. Doubly rebuffed made me more curious than ever.
If this were a trial, I’d collect every scrap of paper, evidence, information, and supposition, and analyze the dickens out of it. So that was what I was going to do on the multilayered riddles before me.
And the deed might be the place to start. So thinking, I booted up my computer. Within minutes, I was searching through the Sarasota County Property Appraisers Web site.
Oh, big, frigging surprise! I thought when, sure enough, I found that one of M. David’s corporations had owned 100 percent of the orange grove, but had sold a 48 percent interest to Rayford just a few months ago. The property office’s records listed the sale price as one dollar and “other considerations.”
Weird. Definitely. In fact, fishy weird, not just weird weird.
I left the computer running while I leaned back in my chair and contemplated what I knew in the big-picture sense, and what it might mean. Taking the easy stuff first, I concluded that the note on M. David’s body about making an appointment with me meant an appointment for Sherilyn. I made a mental note to try to exchange that information with Josey for something of value she might know.
Still cogitating, I wandered to the porch, where Rasputin hopped up on my arm and twittered up at me, beak parted, big bird eyes staring right into mine. I wondered if I could pet him, but then he hopped off and ran after a couple of chirping bugs.
After more fully taking in the disaster area that was formerly my porch, and having that sensation of my brain being squeezed to mush by collected debris throughout the house, I forgot baking cookies, gobbled a couple of trail mix bars, and fetched my buckets, mops, and herbal disinfecting all-natural spray cleaners, Borax, Clorox, and brushes. Jimmie saw me coming out of the laundry room armed with my cleaning tools, muttered a quick “Uh-oh,” and disappeared back into his room.
I set to scrubbing the entire house with the ferocity of Catwoman on too much caffeine. I raged at the cracks and crevices where typhoid and TB and E. coli and bird flu viruses like to live, and Philip called four times before the sun went down to make sure I was all right and offered to come over, and I said no, and kept cleaning until my Borax, Clorox, and orange spray were all gone. I felt a smidgen saner.
Bone Valley Page 23
