Rosemary Remembered - China Bayles 04

by Susan Wittig Albert

  But from another point of view, I had learned quite a bit. I might not be any closer to Rosemary's killer, but I felt a good deal closer to Rosemary herself. I had seen her through the eyes of two people who remembered her quite clearly.

  But how accurate were their recollections? Curt Robbins's bitter memory of his wife was colored by the un-happiness of their marriage, a marriage marred by passion and violence. Rosemary may have done what a thinking woman should do: reject the violence, put it out of her life, and find someone else who could love her gently, tenderly, who could make her happy. Linda Rhodes's memory of Rosemary was filtered through her father's conviction for tax fraud. There was no concrete evidence that Rosemary had seduced him, attempted to blackmail him, or turned him in to the IRS. In fact, she may have simply been doing what a good accountant ought to do: question the numbers the client gives her and charge more for an account that posed difficulty. I sighed heavily as I drove up the long drive to The Springs Hotel. All I had really learned this morning was how Rosemary was remembered. I wasn't much closer to the woman herself.

  I had planned to talk next to Carol Connally, the bookkeeper at the Springs. I struck out on that, but the trip wasn't wasted. I ran into somebody who told me a great deal more than I might have gotten out of the bookkeeper.

  Her name tag said Hi! I'm Priscilla! She was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the file cabinet, a stack of manila folders in the lap of her floral print dress. She was probably thirty pounds overweight, a fact that her girlish dress only exaggerated. Her plain, square-jawed face would have been more attractive without the purple eye shadow and the frilly ruffle at her throat. Her expression conveyed an anxious eagerness to please and the simultaneous and almost hopeless conviction that whatever she did would not please.

  I gave her my name. "I'm looking for Carol," I said.

  Priscilla scrambled heavily to her feet and shook her head. "I'm afraid I'm the only one in the office today. Lily's in Lubbock. Her mother had surgery." She glanced at the phone on Lily's desk, where the red button was lit opposite Matt Monroe's name. "Mr. Monroe's on the phone. Maybe I can help you." There wasn't much conviction in her voice.

  "That's too bad about Lily's mother," I said, shaking my head. "It isn't as if she didn't have enough on her mind, what with — "I waved my hand toward Jeff Clark's office door. "You know."

  "I sure do," Priscilla said earnestly. She was wearing so much mascara that her eyelashes were little black twigs. "Everybody's in a state of turmoil, especially after the police were here on Monday. I just can't believe it was Mr. Clark's gun that — " She bit her lip and blinked hard. "It's just too awful for words."

  "What about Carol?" I asked with concern. "She's not sick, is she?"

  "Nuh-uh. Her sister Nancy had a baby." She bent over and picked up an armload of folders and put them on the desk. "She went to Austin to help with the kids for a few days."

  "Not many sisters would do that," I said. "Do you happen to know Nancy's address?"

  Priscilla's face brightened. "Oh, you're going to send a present! That's nice. / did, a kimono trimmed in pink and white checks. It's a girl, you know. Jennifer, if you want to put her name on the card. I think it's wonderful for mothers to get presents when their babies are born, even if. . ." She shifted her bulky shoulders. "I guess you know that Nancy isn't married. But Carol says it doesn't matter. She was just happy that the baby was healthy and Nancy was okay. And under the circumstances, I'm sure she was glad to have an excuse to get out of the office. But I do have Nancy's address. I had to get it yesterday to give to the police."

  "The police have talked to Carol?"

  "I don't know. I suppose so. They talked to me, and to Lily, before she flew to Lubbock. We couldn't tell them much, though. We don't know any of the facts, and it doesn't seem right to . . . well, you know." She wrinkled her nose. "Dish the office dirt."

  You'd be surprised how many people think it's their duty to conceal gossip from the police during an official investigation. They confuse talking to the cops with testifying in court, where they're permitted to say only what they can swear to. As a result, the police often miss out on some very useful information which an informant may be quite willing to share with a less intimidating person in a less formal interrogative situation — like our chat just now.

  "I suppose Carol has some real information," I said. "Especially because she and Mr. Clark used to be ..." I let the sentence float like a dry fly on a swift current. "But you must know about all that, too," I added, giving the lure an extra tweak.

  The glitter in Priscilla's eye and her voluminous sigh told me what I needed to know. This overweight, un-pretty girl felt herself to have been an important, if peripheral, participant in what amounted to an office triangle: the bookkeeper in love with the boss, a rival murdered, the boss himself suspected of the crime and on the lam. She might not have many "facts," but she was dying to share her impressions, romantic as they were. It would have been unkind of me not to encourage her.

  "Oh, yes, I do know," she said passionately. "We talked every day for the past three or four months. Carol said that the only thing that's kept her sane is being able to talk about it. And of course she felt so much worse after Miss Robbins was shot."

  She paused, and I wondered briefly why Carol Connally had chosen this inexperienced, unsophisticated young woman as a confidante. Perhaps it was Priscilla's romantic naivete" that had invited Carol to open up to her, her willingness to accept and trust another person at face value, as she had accepted and trusted me because she thought I was nice enough to send a present to a new mother. I felt awkward about violating that trust, but I was pulled, forward by the intuition that there was something important to be learned here.

  "By worse,' " I prompted gently, "you mean — " She twisted her mouth. "Well, like it was her fault, or something. Of course it wasn't." "Her fault?"

  "You know." Priscilla waved her hand vaguely. "Well, Carol was very jealous of Miss Robbins. And she was very mad at Mr. Clark for being such a snake. For breaking their engagement."

  "I didn't know they were engaged."

  "It wasn't formal or anything, and they hadn't set a date, but she considered herself all but engaged. She really loved him, I mean really." Priscilla's eyes, brown spaniel eyes, were teary with the romance of it. "I've never seen anybody love a person the way Carol loved Mr. Clark."

  All but. I wondered how many women broke their hearts over all but.

  "Well," Priscilla hurried forward with her story, "like I say, she was already very hurt about Air. Clark jilting her, and when she found out Miss Robbins was preggie, she just about — "

  "Carol knew that?" I asked. I spoke more sharply than I meant, but Priscilla was so involved with her story that she didn't appear to notice.

  "We both knew it, Carol and me. We overheard Miss Robbins telling him after she found out from the doctor. It really made Carol crazy, believe you me." The sympathy was drawn on Priscilla's face, together with an appreciation of the drama of the situation. "Wouldn't it you, if you came back from a nice cheeseburger and fries at Wendy's, all unsuspecting, and overheard some woman telling the man you loved that she was going to have his

  baby? Just like AllMy Children."

  "I'm sure it would," I said. It wouldn't make me crazy enough to kill, though—at least I didn't think so. How crazy had it made Carol? Crazy enough to steal her ex-lover's gun and shoot her rival in the face with it? Crazy enough to wear gloves, to preserve his prints on the gun? Passionate love turns to passionate hate—the basic plot of many a murder mystery.

  Priscilla was talking faster, with greater urgency, as if her story was pushing its way up out of her soul. "That's why when Miss Robbins got murdered, Carol felt like it was her fault. Not because she did it or anything like that. Carol is a very nice, very sweet person who wouldn't hurt a fly. I mean, because she wanted her dead. Do you get what I'm trying to say?"

  Carol Connally wouldn't be the first very nice, very s
weet person to kill the other woman. But I only nodded.

  "Well, that's how I saw it, anyway," Priscilla said. "Like, I mean, I know I would've felt guilty if I said, T hope a certain person burns in hell,' and then that person goes and gets herself murdered."

  "Carol must have been terribly shocked when she heard about it," I said sympathetically. "I can't imagine."

  Priscilla bobbed her head. "Oh God, yes. Dazed, sort of. Like she couldn't really believe it. She goes, 'I'll never believe it, not in a hundred years,' and I go, 'I'll never believe it, either.' " Her chin wobbled a little and she sniffled. "It id hard to believe, don't you think? I mean, I never knew anybody who died, except for my grandmother and she was really old, seventy-two, and too sick to get around. I just sorta keep remembering Miss Robbins like she was, kind of pretty—" She paused, wanting to be truthful. "Well, not pretty, exactly, but nice-looking. Elegant, you might say. I would of gone to the funeral if they'd had it here." She wiped her nose on the back of her large, square hand. "Miss Robbins was always nice to me," she added a little defensively, "even though I was Carol's friend. And everybody knew how smart she was. She had to've been, to find out about the money."

  "Oh, really?" I looked at her. "What about the money?"

  "Well — " Priscilla glanced at the telephone set on Lily's desk. The button opposite "Monroe" was still lit. She lowered her voice and leaned forward conspiratorially. "There's a lot of money missing from the hotel accounts. Like a whole lot."

  I stared at her. Priscilla couldn't know it, but she had just given me a whole new view of the crime. Matt had hired Rosemary to do an audit of the hotel books. If she had turned up any discrepancies, she presumably had also discovered who was responsible and had taken the information back to the person who had hired her. To Matt.

  But suppose she hadn't gone to Matt. Suppose she had gone instead to the embezzler and offered her silence in return for a cut. That's what Howard Rhodes's daughter accused her of doing. And suppose the embezzler was the other owner, Jeff Clark, who'd gotten tired of splitting the hotel's revenues with his ex-brother-in-law and decided to skim a bit off the top. Had Rosemary offered her silence in return for marriage? Had she been asking, not for just a cut of the deal, but a lifetime partnership? Had she gotten pregnant —or claimed she was pregnant —to put more pressure on Jeff?

  An interesting scenario. The prosecution would find it irresistible. But it wasn't the only possible scenario.

  "Poor Carol," I said. "She must have been really upset when she heard about the money. If I'd been in her place, I'd be really scared that they'd suspect me of taking it."

  Priscilla rolled her eyes heavenward. "You better believe she was scared. We both heard Miss Robbins telling Mr. Clark that there was a couple hundred thousand missing. At the very least, Carol figured she'd get fired, even though she and Mr. Clark had been been —" She held up two fingers, intertwined. "Well, you know. She thought about looking for another job, but once they checked her references, they'd find out that there'd been trouble here. And she isn't really an accountant, you know. Like she doesn't have a degree or anything. All she does is put the numbers in the books the way Mrs. Monroe taught her when she first came to work here, way back."

  "And that was — "

  "Ten years ago." Priscilla pulled in her breath and let it out in a puff. "That's how come this whole thing has been so hard on her. After ten years of her doing exactly like she was told, first by Mrs. Monroe and then by Mr. Monroe, and getting bonuses and everything. And then Mr. Clark leading her on to believe that he really loved her and wanted to marry her. Well, of course she had to think she was home free. I would of. Wouldn't you?"

  She scarcely heard my murmured "Of course." There was a look of empathetic pain on her face as she felt in her soul the tragedy of Carol Connally's fall from grace and she spoke very fast, in the breathless voice of a witness to catastrophe. "Well, anyway, she really went to pieces. If she hadn't had to leave to take care of Nancy's kids, Mr. Monroe would've sent her home, she was in such a terrible tizzy."

  I waited until she had taken a couple of deep breaths. "Having her and Lily out at the same time must be awfully hard on you," I said finally. "The work is probably stacking up."

  "There's mountains of it," Priscilla said, her voice rich with self-pity. "Not to mention that Mr. Monroe can't seem to do much except—"

  The sound of a door opening made her stop, and a sudden flush flared on her cheeks. She turned, and we saw Matt Monroe, standing in the doorway of his office, collar open, sleeves rolled up. He was scowling.

  "Oh, Mr. Monroe, you're off the phone," she said, flustered.

  Matt was curt. "If you've got so much work to do, you'd better get back to it, Prissy." He nodded to me. "Hello, Miz Bayles," he said, and motioned me into the office. He shut the door behind us with a resigned look.

  "That girl," he sighed, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. "You'd think she was practicing for Hard Copy." He stuffed his handkerchief in his pocket and strode to his desk. "I'm glad you stopped by, Miz Bayles. I was goin' to call you so you can get word to McQuaid. I just got off the phone with the bank. Jeffs been usin' that credit card down there in Mexico City—pretty freely, too." He gave a short, sharp laugh. "Running up quite a bill."

  "That's surprising," I said, taking a chair opposite the desk. "If I were Jeff, I wouldn't use my cards. Not unless I wanted to be found."

  Matt lowered himself into his upholstered leather chair. "He's made it to Mexico — he probably feels safe. And he would be, if it was just the Pecan Springs cops after him. He doesn't know McQuaid's on his trail."

  "Where did the card show up?"

  "Mexico City. He used it to charge the hotel and some clothes, a camera, luggage, stuff like that. And a plane ticket."

  "I don't suppose he's flying back to Brownsville," I said wryly.

  He gave an ascerbic chuckle. "You know better. I checked with the airline by phone to save McQuaid the legwork. He's gone to Acapulco. Tell McQuaid to get the next plane after him. And there's something else you should tell him, too, Miz Bayles. Seems like there's been some big-time funny business with the hotel books. From what I hear from the office help, Rosemary Robbins stumbled onto it. She went to Jeff with the news, instead of to me, like she should of." He shook his head sadly. "If Jeff was dippin' into the till and that lady found out, he was in a shit pot of trouble. She must've offered to keep her mouth shut if he married her, maybe even got herself storked to up the ante. He probably figured it was cheaper in the long run to kill her than marry her." He shook his head. "She was tough as saddle leather. I sure as hell wouldn't of wanted to be married to her."

  "How much of this have you told the police?"

  "Just that Jeff was maybe cooking the books. I don't have anything firm to tell them until I bring in an auditor, which I will, quick as I can." He gave me an apologetic glance. "I know this isn't going to make McQuaid happy, because Jeff s a friend of his. You tell him to watch himself, Miz Bayles. I sure wouldn't have said Jeff was dangerous, but now —" He shook his head, his mouth set. "This business is ugly as homemade sin."

  I glanced at my watch. "He'll be calling at three," I said. Suddenly I caught myself wanting to connect with McQuaid, hear his voice, talk to him about what I had learned. Living with him, I'd gotten into the habit of telling him what was going on in my life, hearing his side, testing my responses against his. I missed it. Dangerous dependency, the other China whispered. Its a good thing he'd gone. You can be your own woman again. The other China be damned. I could be my own woman and still miss McQuaid.

  Matt stood up. "Well, when he calls, you tell him to hightail it down to Acapulco. Tell him to stay on the trail, even if he doesn't turn up anything for a while." He shook his head, frowning, deeply troubled. "Jeff has really ripped his britches on this one. He can run from here to Rio, and it's not goin' to solve a damn thing. McQuaid's got to find him. You hear?"

  I nodded and left. On the way out, Priscilla su
rreptitiously handed me a slip of paper. I probably should have felt like a rat for having obtained Carol Connally's sister's address and phone number under false pretenses, but I didn't.

  As I drove along the winding road to the campus to pick up Brian, I considered what I had learned. Connally's sister lived in South Austin. The way things stood, I probably couldn't get there before the next day. But I had to talk to Connally. The facts seemed to support the theory that Jeff had been stealing from the hotel's accounts, that Rosemary had found him out, and that he killed her to keep her quiet. If I were Chick Barton, it was the theory I'd use to construct the People's case.

  But I could use the same facts to argue at least two different theories. Maybe it was Matt, not Jeff, who had been stealing from the hotel's accounts. But Matt would hardly have hired an accountant to examine the very books he'd been diddling. No, it was far more likely that Carol had been embezzling money from the hotel and that she had stolen Jeff s gun to kill Rosemary, silencing her and framing him, revenging herself and protecting herself in one brutal act. I remembered that it was a woman who had phoned the police with the tip about Jeff — Carol, no

  doubt. There were a few holes in my theory, but at least it was a beginning. If I were arguing Jeff s defense, I'd find a way to plug them.

  I sighed as I negotiated the turn into the campus and drove up to the entry kiosk to wrangle a parking permit from the surly guard who doles them out as if they were Dallas Cowboy Super Bowl rings. It was too bad I couldn't drop everything and drive up to Austin tonight to question Carol Connally. But I had to pick up Brian and head for the shop to catch McQuaid's phone call. And after that, I needed to spend the evening being a mom. Not an ordinary mom, either, but a mom who is responsible for the safety and well-being of a small boy who is the declared target of a killer ex-con out for revenge.