Rosemary Remembered - China Bayles 04

by Susan Wittig Albert

  She looked at me. Her lower lip was trembling and she caught it between her teeth.

  "He drove to Brownsville and left his car at the airport," I said, wanting to be reassuring. "He flew to Mexico City, paid for a hotel and some clothes with his credit card, and then went on to Acapulco. A friend of mine, Mike McQuaid, has gone down there to find him and bring him back."

  Her hands came up to cover her face. "Oh, God! Poor Jeff!" Her voice was despairing. "I wish, oh, I wish . . ." She began to cry, long hard sobs that shook her shoulders. "Why did he have to get involved with her? Why couldn't he just be content for us to go on like we were? I didn't want anything from him, not like she did. She wanted everything. Him, a baby, the hotel — " She got up and found a paper towel to blow her nose into. "And now he's gone. He's gone, and I'll never see him again!"

  I stood, too, and came close to her. "I know you care for him, Carol. If you have any information that will untangle this mess or help us find him — "

  She wiped her eyes with a corner of the paper towel. "Can you guarantee I'll be okay?"

  "The safest thing for you to do," I said carefully, "is to tell what you know, either to me or—"

  "You can't guarantee."

  "If you know anything that will bring Jeff back — "

  "Nothing will bring him back!" She turned away, her shoulders heaving. "I — I'll think about it. I can't right now. It's too — " She swallowed, trying to get hold of herself. "I have to talk to Nancy first. I have to ... to think. Maybe I didn't really see what I thought I . . . Anyway, I don't know what it means. Maybe I'm all wrong."

  And that was all she would say. Whatever she knew, she wasn't going to talk about it this morning, at least not to me. And I was sure that Bubba Harris wouldn't have gotten as much out of her as I had.

  She turned and led me through the living room, avoiding Tommy, who was pushing a fire engine across the

  floor, making siren sounds. Marcie was lying on her back with her legs draped over the back of the sofa, singing the words to a Barbie commercial. Junie stepped out from behind a chair and followed us. When we reached the door, the little girl attached herself to her aunt's legs and peeked out at me.

  I turned to face Carol. "It's not going to get any easier, holding onto it like this," I said. "It will only make you more and more unhappy, and prolong Jeffs agony, wherever he is."

  Her eyes were bleak. "Nothing can do that."

  "Please, call me when you're ready to talk about it," I said. "Do you still have my card?"

  She didn't say yes or no. She just stood there, her shoulders slumped and a look of almost unbearable misery on her face, with Marcie pretending to be Barbie, Tommy pretending to be a fire truck, and Junie pretending to be invisible.

  Chapter Fifteen

  On rosemary:

  Grow for two ends, it matters not at all, Be't for my bridal or my burial.

  Robert Herrick, 1591-1674

  Katz's Deli (Katz's Never Kloses) is famous for its kosher tacos, blintzes, and knishes. Marc Katz, the owner, used to drive a yellow cab —a long yellow cab. When he quit cabbing to open a restaurant, he had the cab gutted, then sliced in half lengthwise like a loaf of Jewish rye, and mounted above the second-floor windows on the Sixth Street side of his deli and bar. There's a yellow cab inside, too, painted on a blue wall opposite the door. On the other walls are pictures. Hillary's is there, "Katz's is Kool," scrawled on it. So is Michael Jordan's: "Katz's is a slam dunk." Bette Midler's, over the dining room door, says, "You don't have to be Jewish."

  The dining room—with a high, pressed-tin ceiling painted black and white walls decorated with the work of local artists, a large plastic marlin, and neon — held a motley crew. There were authoritative businessmen looking like godfathers in black suits with lots of clean white cuff showing, chic businesswomen in big-shouldered jackets and short skirts with lots of thigh showing, and laid-back hippie types in frayed denim cutoffs, Birkenstocks, and Armadillo World Headquarters tee shirts. The waitpersons were formal in white shirts, black slacks or skirts, and ties. The tables held bottles of Heinz catsup and jars of Ba-Tempte Mustard. Katz's is a blend of uptown and funk.

  Smart Cookie was seated at a table beside the window. As I sat down, she put aside the menu she was studying. "What did you find out from the bookkeeper?" she demanded.

  "She knows something."

  Sheila made an impatient noise. "So what does she know?"

  "She won't say. She's scared." I didn't have to look at the menu Sheila handed me. "Bagle with lox, cream cheese, onion, and tomato," I said to the waiter who appeared at the table. His long brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. "And iced tea."

  "Iced tea for me, too, and a turkey reuben," Sheila said. "What did she say?" she asked me, as the waiter went away.

  I unfolded my napkin onto my lap (a large cloth napkin, which is my idea of the napkins restaurants ought to use). Outside the window, a red, white, and blue Capital Metro bus stopped to disgorge a young man with a guitar case. On the side of the bus,were the words "Clean Machine. Fueled by Natural Gas." Austin is that kind of city.

  "She said..." I stopped, considering. "Well, it wasn't actually what she said that makes me think she knows something. It was more like what she didn't say." I frowned. There was something, though. Carol had said something that I should have paid more attention to, but I couldn't quite remember what it was.

  "Oh, for crying out loud," Sheila said disgustedly. "You know who you sound like? Ruby. You sound just like

  Ruby. Do you know how irritating it is when people talk that way?"

  I gave Sheila a juridical look. "I have deposed enough criminal defendants during the course of my career to know when the subject under interrogation is concealing important facts or suspicions. It is my opinion that Carol Connally possesses knowledge of criminal misconduct which she believes relevant to this inquiry. She appears to be constrained from revealing this knowledge by a deep-seated fear that such a revelation may be self-incriminating and may place her in physical danger."

  Sheila started to say something, but I shook my head and she subsided.

  "This witness actually conveyed very little factual information to me during our conversation this morning, but I am confident that she will have something to say in the very near future, and that when she does, it will alter our fundamental understanding of this case." I paused. "Does that answer your question, Ms. Dawson?"

  "I'm sorry," Sheila said humbly.

  "You ought to be," I said. I took a long pull on my iced tea, which had arrived while I was orating. "You should grovel. You should wear sackcloth and ashes."

  "That's a seriously good line of bull." Her tone was chastened. "I mean, I'm impressed."

  "It was either learn how to talk that way, or forever eat the other guy's courtroom shit," I said. "But I'm sure glad I don't have to do it for a living any longer. It corrodes the soul."

  "So what do you think she knows?"

  "Could be any one of a number of things. She could know who took the money. Or she might have taken it herself, all or part of it. Her sister is unmarried and has four children, but the house is equipped with a floor-to-

  ceiling entertainment center, a huge double-door refrigerator, and a new sofa with a large orange juice stain. And there's a new Toyota van in the driveway and enough toys to stock a play school. But with all of that, I don't think she's a murderer."

  The waiter arrived with our food, trying hard to pretend that he hadn't heard the last sentence. "Is everything all right?" he asked uneasily.

  "Wonderful," Sheila said with enthusiasm, looking down at her reuben: turkey pastrami on grilled Jewish rye, smothered in hot sauerkraut and melted swiss.

  "Great." I said. I glanced up at the waiter's worried face. "We're writers," I added. "We're plotting a murder mystery."

  "No kidding," he said. "I always thought it'd be fun to write one of those things. If I did, I'd put Katz's into it. A lot of very weird people come in here."
His glance included us among the very weird. "You putting Katz's into it?"

  "That's why we're here," I said. I looked down at my bagel, slathered with cream cheese and heaped with bright orange salmon. "Among other things."

  "My name is Luther," he confided. "You gonna put me in it too?"

  "Absolutely," I said.

  "Like, wow, man," Luther said happily, and went away.

  "An orange juice stain?" Sheila asked.

  "Forget the orange juice," I said. "Carol and her sister are also planning to move to Westlake Hills, where I'll bet you can't touch a rental for under nine hundred a month."

  Sheila began on her reuben. "So she's been taking the money and giving it to her sister?"

  "Some of it, none of it, who knows? It might be that she knows who has been taking it, and she's getting paid to keep her mouth shut." I layered purple onion slices on top of the salmon. "Or maybe she just likes to spend her earnings on her sister's kids, and what she knows has nothing to do with the embezzlement. Maybe it's got to do with the murder." Something was nagging at me, something I'd noticed when I was talking to Carol, but hadn't followed up on. Something about Matt —

  "But if she knows who shot Rosemary, what's keeping her from going to the police?"

  "She's afraid—which translates into being afraid of somebody."

  "Jeffs in Mexico. She can't be afraid of him." "Exactly," I said. I picked up my bagel and bit into it. Heaven.

  "But you don't know that what she knows is connected with the murder."

  "Right," I admitted with my mouth full. "It's my guess that she'll eventually tell us what's bothering her, but not if she's pushed. Especially not if she's pushed. I left my name and phone number."

  "Well, maybe she'll call," Sheila said, in a tone that implied she wouldn't.

  I suddenly remembered what it was I'd forgotten. "Oh, yeah," I said. I put down my bagel. "Carol also said it wasn't Matt who hired Rosemary. It was Jeff."

  Sheila tilted her head. "Of course it was. I told you that the night we met Ondine at Maggie's."

  "You did? I guess I forgot. But if Jeff was taking money, why would he hire somebody to audit the books? It doesn't make sense."

  "No, I guess it doesn't," Sheila said.

  We applied ourselves to our sandwiches and the conversation lagged. When we had finished, I looked at my watch. "Too bad you've got that meeting. Smart Cookie. There's something I'd like to do back in Pecan Springs, and it would be better if we could do it together."

  She made a face. "As it happens, the meeting was canceled. Yesterday, in fact. Only nobody had the presence of mind to call and save me a trip. What is it you want to do?"

  "I'd like to get into Rosemary's house and have a look around. I still don't feel I know very much about who she really was. Everybody I've talked to seems to have it in for her in one way or another."

  "It happens all the time. People justify the crime by putting the victim in the wrong. Like, she deserved to get raped because she was wearing a short skirt. Or she was asking to get killed, walking down that dark street."

  "Yeah," I said. "Lawyers are famous for that trick. Defend the criminal by criminalizing the victim. The hell of it is, it works."

  "Right." Sheila pushed her chair back. "The system sucks."

  Luther appeared with the check. "Good luck with your murder," he said.

  "Yeah," I said. "Thanks."

  I'm not keen on breaking and entering. This is not to say that, driven to desperation, I have not done it in the past and would not do it in the future. But it's the sort of thing hard-boiled, brash Pi's do in murder mysteries, and it almost always leaves me cold. I'm probably being too squeamish, but if I got caught at it, I know what would happen. Among numerous other indignities (such as being strip-searched, fingerprinted, photographed, arraigned, tried, and eventually found guilty), I'd be disbarred, sure as God made little green apples. And while I don't expect to practice law again, I egotistically (and prudently) prefer to remain an officer of the court. Which means that I have to keep my nose clean, or at least as clean as other lawyers keep theirs, which probably isn't saying a whole hell of a lot.

  By the time Sheila and I had made our separate ways back to Pecan Springs and joined forces at her house, I had a plan. We talked it over for a few minutes, then I drove both of us downtown to Bubba's office.

  The Pecan Springs Police Department is on one corner of the square, in the basement of an old stone building that houses City Hall on the main floor, the mayor's office on the second floor, and bats in the belfry. (Honestly. They're Mexican freetails, a great boon to civilized life in Adams County. They come out at night and gobble up tons of mosquitos. Their nitrogen-rich guano makes terrific fertilizer, as any serious Central Texas gardener will testify.)

  I parked diagonally in front of the building, let Sheila out to do her errand, and sat with the windows rolled down, watching idly as MaeBelle Battersby, the latest in a venerable line of meter persons employed by the PSPD, went about her work. Idly, that is, until MaeBelle stuck a ticket under the windshield wiper of Pauline Perkins's husband's blue Oldsmobile, which was parked next to me.

  "Hi, MaeBelle," I said.

  She bent over to peer inside the car, and brightened. "Well, hidy, Ms. Bayles. How's the herb bidness these days? "

  "Flourishing," I said. "How's it with you?" "Busy as a hound in flea season," she said happily. "I've given out three tickets in this last block."

  "I've been noticing," I said. "Do you happen to know whose Oldsmobile that is?"

  She looked at it without curiosity. "Cain't say as I do," she said. "All I know is the meter's expired." She looked at the car's front end, frowning. "Got a real low right front tar, too."

  "Yes," I said. "Well, if I'm not mistaken, that car belongs to Darryl Perkins, who just happens to be married to Pauline Perkins, who just happens to be — "

  "Oopsie," MaeBelle said, and hastily retrieved the ticket. "Mebee I just better walk up to the second floor and tell the mayor that her right front tar's real low on air. As a curtsey."

  I grinned. "I'm sure she'd appreciate it," I said. "She'll probably even give you a couple of dimes for the meter." The mayor's husband runs a used car dealership. It's not easy to guess whether a car with an expired meter near City Hall comes from Darryl's lot, but it's a basic job skill that every meter person before MaeBelle has had to learn. A prerequisite to extended tenure and optimal career enhancement, you might say.

  A few minutes later, MaeBelle came back, fed coins into the meter, and bent over to look in my window.

  "Gracias, Miz Bayles," she said, and patted my shoulder. "You need a favor, you let me know, y'hear? I never fergit a friend."

  "Don't mention it," I said. MaeBelle went on to the next block, and Sheila came up the steps from the basement. She was carrying a key with a large yellow tag.

  "Voila," she said triumphantly, brandishing the key. She got into the car. "Or words to that effect."

  "Did Bubba give you any grief?"

  She laughed. "Are you kidding? I gave him the spiel, and he said he'd hate like hell for me to get into any kind of trouble with the IRS, and handed me the key. After all, I am a fellow police officer. He knows he can trust me."

  I grinned. Sheila's story, as we settled on it after we got back to Pecan Springs, was that Rosemary had been doing Sheila's taxes, late, and was almost ready to file when she was killed. Sheila needed to get her taxes straightened out, and the only way she could do it was to retrieve her material from Rosemary's office. And to do that, she needed the key and Bubba's permission to enter Rosemary's house, which (like The Blue Beast) hadn't yet been turned over to the next of kin.

  Of course, Sheila's taxes were already filed, and it wasn't her material we were after. I wanted to see if I could find something, anything, that the police might have missed—some clue to what had been going on at the hotel, some idea of the relationship between Rosemary and Jeff, some concrete fact that might make sense of the cobwebs
of belief and innuendo that still obscured the truth.

  But before we went to Rosemary's, I wanted to make a quick swing past the shop. Thyme and Seasons is a couple of blocks from the square, so it only took a few minutes to get there. It took even less time for Laurel to give me a rundown on the morning's business, and for me to ring a total on the register. It wasn't bad, considering that it was July.

  "Did McQuaid call?" I asked. He'd only been gone since Monday, but it felt like a month. I caught myself wishing he was back. I'd like to hear his take on Carol Connally.

  Laurel shook her head. "Haven't heard anything from him," she said. "But Mr. Monroe called, from the hotel. He said for you to tell McQuaid that the bank hasn't picked up any charges since Mexico City—whatever that means."

  "If McQuaid calls here," I said, "give him the message. He'll understand. And tell him I'll be home after I pick Brian up at the sheriff s office. Has Emily come up with anything on the air-conditioning?"

  Laurel sighed and fanned her face with her hand. All the doors and windows were open and there was a breeze, but the shop was still pretty hot. "The compresser is a dead duck," she said. "She'll call you tonight, at home." She looked down at her khaki shorts. "I hope you don't mind my shorts. I went home at lunchtime and changed. It's too hot for jeans."

  "No problem," I said. "I guess we'll have to get a new unit. Any other good news?"

  A smile quirked Laurel's mouth. "Your mother called. She'll call you tonight at home."

  I muttered something under my breath.

  "What was that?" Laurel asked in an innocent tone. "I didn't quite hear."

  "I said I think I'll take Brian to the movies tonight."

  Laurel pursed her lips. "Well, sheis your mother."

  "Just because she's my mother doesn't mean she's my mother," I replied obscurely. Now that Leatha's sobered up and married a man who actually pays attention to her (something my father never did), she thinks the only thing that will bring her total happiness is a warm and loving relationship with her only child. But I am as unskilled at being a daughter to my mother as I am at being a stand-in mother to McQuaid's son, and I continually disappoint her by not being as warmly responsive as she would like.