Hangman's root : a China Bayles mystery

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  Amy tossed out a nonchalant "I'll let you know." She glanced at me. "See you."

  "I'm leaving, too," I said stiffly. "Thank you for the dinner. Ruby. Please tell your mother and sister how much I enjoyed their utterly fabulous company. It was an evening I won't forget for a long time."

  Ruby gave me a hard look. "Don't mention it," she said. "I'm sure Mother and Ramona were enormously thrilled to see you again. They admire you so tremendously, of course."

  It really was time to go. The conversation had deteriorated into the satiric hyperbole offending fourteen-year-olds.

  Outside, I took a deep breath of the clean March air, spiced with the scent of the junipers along Ruby's driveway. I was glad I had walked over, because walking back would give me a chance to burn off some of the negative energy I generate when I fight with Ruby. Actually, our arguments are always the same argument—not the same subject, of course, but the same two positions, over and over again. Her passion against my rationality. Her right brain against my left. Her impulsiveness against my

  caution. The hostilities are high vohage because the conflict is so deep seated, so fundamental. On the surface, our arguments are trivial; underneath, they go straight to the heart of who we are.

  Amy walked down the gravel drive beside me, silent. She seemed to be turning something over uneasily in her mind. Finally, she stopped at the sidewalk under the streetlight. When she spoke, her voice was thin and taut.

  "Is it true what I heard about Harwick? Did somebody really string him up?"

  A campus is like any other small town. News gets around fast, even during spring break. Still, the question surprised me. From suicide to murder in six hours or less. "Where did you hear that?"

  "This girl who works with me on PETA projects." The narrow triangle of her face was grayish blue in the mercury light and her freckles stood out like flecks of metallic snow. "She heard it from her uncle. He's a custodian at the campus police station."

  "You know as much about it as I do," I said. A van rumbled past, then a motorbike, the small engine revving shrilly in the quiet night. The smell of oily exhaust tarnished the sweet cedar. "Probably more, in fact."

  Amy thrust her hands into the pockets of her baggies. She looked like a tall, sad clown with her punk clothes and hair, her face washed with blue light. "I heard your boyfriend was a cop. I figured that he'd have an inside track."

  "He isn't a cop anymore." Where was she getting all this information? "What did you hear about Harwick?"

  She turned halfway away from me. "That he was doped up when he died." Her voice was so low I could hardly hear. "That he was keeping a roomful of abused animals in the basement under his office." She laughed harshly. "Funny, huh? He planned to hang all those guinea pigs, and hes the one who gets hung."

  "Doped? With what? How?"

  "In his coffee." She shrugged. "That's just what I heard. You don't know anything more?"

  "I didn't know that much." I sifted through the rest of her information. "Who told you about—"

  "Here's my ride," Amy said, as a yellow Camaro, one fender bashed in and rusting, pulled up in front of us. "I have to go." She opened the door and climbed in.

  "Wait," I said, catching the door before she closed it. "Who told you about the animals?"

  "I just heard it," she said. "You know how people talk." She turned to the driver. "Let's go."

  "Ok-k-kay," the driver said, and let out the clutch fast, squealing the tires.

  I stared after the Camaro as its taillights disappeared around the next corner. I could figure out who had told Amy about the room in the basement, but the answer left me even more puzzled. Amy the animal activist and Kevin the animal keeper—an odd combination. How long had they known one another.^ What had brought them together?

  My right-brain emotions had simmered down enough to allow my left brain to get logical, and the argument with Ruby wasn't the only thing I mulled over as I walked home through the dark. Ruby, me. Ruby, Amy. Amy, Kevin. Harwick, Kevin, Amy. I wasn't sure I liked all of the possible connections.

  When I got home, I called McQuaid. I was greeted, as I expected, by Brian's taped announcement: The captain and first officer of the Starship McQuaid were in hot pursuit of the Klin-gons through another galaxy and would the caller please leave a message after the beep. I knew McQuaid had driven down to Sally's to pick Brian up and take him for a weekend visit to the elder McQuaids' farm outside Seguin, a little town about thirty miles east. He wouldn't be home until the next day.

  "Greetings, Captain McQuaid," I said to the machine, and got down to it without preamble, phrasing my question so it would be suitable for eleven-year-old ears if Brian got to the answering machine first. "Star Fleet wishes you to ask Smart

  Cookie whether there's any truth to the rumor that Harwick's coffee had something in it. Brian, if you get this message, please write it down. Live long and prosper, you guys."

  What's the good of being intimate with an ex-cop if you can't exploit his connections once in a while?

  I

  Saturday was one of those days that happens every now and then in a one-person shop. It wasn't the herbs, of course. Plants are pacific and naturally good-natured. They are never rushed or impatient or snappish. But people are all of the above, and that day / was, too, partly because I had Ruby on my mind (we were still doing our volcano act and weren't speaking), partly because of what Amy had told me, and partly because I was coping single-handedly on what was shaping up to be the busiest weekend of the year

  I was working by myself because Laurel had gone off to a meeting of the Society of Ethnobiology at the Smithsonian in Washington, where she was giving a paper on capsicums— cayenne and chili peppers. To a botanist, a pepper is a fruit; in the produce market, it's a vegetable; dried, on the shelf, it's a spice, like cayenne. What gives capsicums their personality is a unique alkaloid called capsaicin (cap-SAY-a-cin), which is so potent that a human taste bud can respond to as little as one part per million. Muy picante. When somebody is so foolish as to actually eat, say, a habanero, which is the red hot mama of all hot peppers, the capsaicin irritates pain cells in the mouth. The brain responds with endorphins, the body's natural painkiller. The more ha-baneros, the more endorphins, until you end up with a habanero

  high. But you don't need to be a chili junkie to reap the benefits of this savage process. If you suffer from chronic pain, you might try rubbing on some capsaicin cream. If you're a hiker in grizzly country, you can repel the beast with a capsaicin spray called Counter Attack. And if you're a woman who walks dark streets, you can arm yourself with pepper gas instead of Mace. Capsicums aren't just for chiles rellenos.

  Hot also described the traffic. The store was crowded, almost without respite, from the minute I opened until the minute I closed. By midafternoon I had completely sold out of the most popular potted culinary herbs—parsley, basil, sage, thyme—and the herb gift baskets my friend Cara had made. It had rained early that morning, and I worried about how the paths were holding up in the gardens. But I didn't have much time to worry. I didn't even have time for lunch. Maggie Garrett stopped in about one, saw my predicament, and sent over a Magnolia Kitchen takeout box containing a generous slice of quiche and a serving of lemon verbena flan. I ate on the run. It kept me going the rest of the day.

  At five minutes to closing time, there were still two women, elderly sisters, left in the shop. One of them—the one with Lady Clairol blue hair rolled in little blue sausages all over her head— wanted an herbal remedy for the ailment suffered by their cocker spaniel. Pretty Baby. When I asked her to describe the problem. Lady Clairol was delicately evasive.

  "It's . . . you know," she said, gesturing vaguely. "In Pretty Baby's intestines."

  "The vet gave her something," the other sister offered, "but it made her. ..." Her prim little mouth drew tighter. "Well, you know, all over the carpet. She was so humiliated, and we feel we can't subject her to such torture ever again. But we do have to get rid of the ..." Th
e mouth got tighter and more prim.

  Some people are squeamish. "Have you tried garlic?" I asked. I was describing its traditional uses as a treatment for internal

  parasites when the door opened and Dottie Riddle came in. Her brown hair was loose and untidy, and there were lines around her mouth and navy smudges under her eyes.

  "I don't think Pretty Baby would like the taste of garlic," Lady Clairol objected, shaking her head. "She's really quite finicky about what she eats."

  "Then you might try making up some pellets." I opened the top drawer of the file cabinet behind the counter and found a copy of my recipe for garlic and rosemary worming pills. "This is something people have used for a long time." The law forbids me to prescribe herbal preparations, but it doesn't keep me from offering information about traditional herbal practices.

  A few minutes later, the sisters had what they needed and were on their way to aleviate Pretty Baby's suffering. With a sigh of relief, I hung up the "Closed" sign, locked the door, and turned to Dottie.

  "What's up?" I asked.

  "I need to talk to you," she said. She took a cigarette out of her purse. "I need some advice. Legal advice."

  "If you want to smoke," I said quickly, "let's go outside." A lot of the people who come into my shop are concerned about health. They don't want to smell cigarettes.

  "If you don't mind," she said. She followed me out to the fountain, where we sat down on the stone bench. She lit her cigarette and I surveyed the area around the fountain, making a mental note to loosen up the soil around the bronze fennel and dig in a little compost. I glanced around, thinking that there was more work here than I could handle myself. Maybe it was time to break down and admit that I needed a gardener. Not full time, I couldn't afford that. But ten hours a week would help a lot.

  Dottie pulled in a lungful of smoke and pushed it out again. Her forehead was shirred, her voice gritty. "Chief Harris came to my house this morning and questioned me. He brought the new

  head of Campus Security with him. A woman named Dawson. But Harris asked all the questions. The woman just listened."

  I abandoned my mental list of possible gardeners. "They were there to talk about Miles Harwick?"

  "Yes. How long I had known him, how well I knew him, what kind of person he was, who his enemies were. That sort of thing."

  I frowned. "They seem like pretty ordinary questions to me. You worked with Harwick. You were his next-door neighbor. You're the logical person to ask." But Bubba is a busy man. If he was convinced that Harwick's death was a suicide, he wouldn't bother to interrogate the neighbors. I thought about the pipe that was out of Harwick's reach and the coffee that might have been doped. "What else did he ask?"

  "Where I was on Wednesday night from seven until eleven."

  "And you said—"

  "That I was trucking around the campus, feeding stray cats, from seven to nine. I do it every night. After that, I was home. By myself. I went to bed about eleven."

  Seven to eleven. A pretty big slot. That must have been when Harwick died. "What else?"

  Dottie pulled one ankle over the other knee and nervously fiddled with the tassel on a black loafer. Her navy slacks were shaggy with cat hair. "He asked about Harwick and me. How we got along. He wanted specifics. He said he already had the general picture."

  I raised my eyebrows. "Who gave him that?"

  "Castle, probably." She pulled hard on her cigarette, peevish. "And Cynthia Leeds."

  "Did he ask about—" I paused and let her finish it for me.

  Her eyes flickered. "The letter? Yes." Wary, she ran her teeth over her lower lip. "He seemed to know what it said. I guess Cynthia told him." She flashed me a look. "Unless you did."

  I shook my head. We were getting closer to the truth. But first

  there was something else. "Dottie," I said, "let's make a deal. Before you say anything else, I want you to give me some money. A couple of bucks'll do it."

  She frowned. "Why?"

  "So I can't be compelled to discuss our conversation." Things looked serious. If I was going to help Dottie, I had to know whether she had done anything that could result in criminal charges. In return for letting me in on the extent of her culpability, she would get the assurance of my silence. She would also get my advice about when, and under what conditions, she should tell the truth.

  Dottie looked at me, half understanding. "Oh," she said. "You'll be my lawyer?"

  For the last four years, I've said "no" to that question every time it came up. For Dottie, I was willing to say "yes, but." "In a limited way," I said. "I won't represent you in court. But if you're in trouble, I'll give you the best advice I can."

  "Oh," she said again, and fumbled for her wallet. She found it and fumbled with bills before she sorted out a five. "This is the smallest I've got."

  I took the five. "Tell me more about Chief Harris's questions. Did he ask you for the letter that turned up on Thursday, or for the other threatening letters you received?"

  She looked down. Her "yes" was rough, reluctant.

  "What did you tell him?" It's not easy to dig information out of somebody who is either ashamed or afraid to tell the truth. I was guessing that Dottie was both, which made it harder.

  She began talking, too fast. "I told him I threw all three letters away after Miles' body was found. I said that making a fuss about the threats at that point would have been ... " She raised her eyes to mine, didn't quite make it, and dropped them again. "There wasn't any point. He couldn't harm me or the cats. I'd only be blackening his reputation, for no purpose."

  "I see. What did the chief say to that?"

  "Nothing." She got up and began to pace back and forth in front of the fountain, gesturing with her cigarette. "He just sat there, making notes in a Httle blue book, giving me this look like he didn't believe me." I'd bet. I was sure that Bubba wanted Dot-tie to notice his skepticism, aiming to make her more nervous. "He knew about Miles trapping Ariella," she added, "and the hammer. I guess the sheriff told him."

  That would be my guess, too. Blackie and Bubba regularly cooperate on cases. The interesting—and thought-provoking— question was how they had gotten together so quickly on this one. Had Bubba gone fishing for information? Or had Blackie heard about Harwick's death, recalled his Monday morning trip out to Falls Creek, and decided that Bubba needed to know about the catnapping, hammer-slinging episode? The latter was more likely. In law enforcement circles, a hammer attack on somebody who turns up dead soon after is considered interesting, especially when the death is not a natural one.

  "I see," I said again. I waited, watching her, not letting her off the hook.

  Dottie dropped her cigarette in the fountain, then caught my eye. Sheepish, she fished it out, holding it as if she didn't know what to do with it. "The truth is," she said nervously, "I kind of . . . well, came unglued." She sat back down, wrapped the wet cigarette in a tissue, and dropped it into her purse. "The chief was being pushy. He wanted to know why I threw the hammer. He kept asking me what I'd done with the letters. I didn't want to say anything, but he just sat there, like a stupid fat toad w^aiting for a fly. Finally I told him."

  "I see," I said for the third time. As a technique of interrogation, waiting somebody out works more often than you might think. People get nervous. They think you know more than you actually know, and they tell you so they won't look like they're hiding anything. Bubba does a pretty good fat toad.

  She began to worry her lower Hp again, with more energy. "I threw the letters in my office wastebasket. On Friday." She shook her head. "Stupid," she muttered. "Why didn't I burn them?"

  I agreed with her, because I knew Dottie well enough to believe that those letters—more specifically, the third letter—were irrelevant to Harwick's death. But Bubba didn't know Dottie from Eve. It was my guess that he'd already formulated a theory of the case, and he needed the letters in order to test it. I calculated. If the custodian had picked up Dottie's wastebasket last night, the letters
were probably still in plastic bags in the dumpster behind Noah's Ark, waiting for pickup. Or, more likely, Bubba either already had them or was on his way to get them. In which case, he might consider his theory supported, which might lead him to frame his facts into an allegation.

  "Do you think ..." She cleared her throat and tried again. "Do you think I should go look for them? I mean, they might still be there, in the dumpster."

  "I doubt it," I said. "Chief Harris probably has them already—or soon will. Anyway, it wouldn't be a good idea for you to be seen rooting around in the dumpster. It would look like you had something to hide."

  Dottie shifted uncomfortably. "I didn't mean ..." Her voice trailed off and she dropped her eyes.

  I phrased my next question carefully, not wanting to lead her. I wanted her to tell me, as accurately as she could remember, the tack Bubba had taken in his questioning. "Did Chief Harris mention anything related to the conditions surrounding Harwick's death?"

  "The conditions surrounding—" She fiddled with her purse, trying to decide whether she'd look like a nicotine fiend if she smoked another cigarette. "Well, yes. He asked if I knew of any good reason why Miles would hang himself. Is that what you

  Close enough. "What did you say?"

  "That I thought Miles did it out of spite." She stopped worrying about appearances and dug out another cigarette. "He was that kind of man, you know. Petty, mean, vindictive, like a little kid. He was always trying to make himself look good by getting other people in trouble." It took two matches to get her cigarette going. "I can certainly imagine somebody killing him—plenty of people had it in for him. But if he wanted to kill himself, it would be just like him to rig it so somebody else got blamed."

  That wasn't as bizarre as it sounded. A friend of mine once conducted the defense in a similar case. A man set up his own successful suicide—a barbiturate poisoning—so it looked as if his ex-wife had done it. He gave her everything the cops needed for a murder charge: motive, means, and opportunity. He even left a few helpful clues, all pointing to her, of course. The case was so persuasive that the dead man almost got away with it. It took an appeal to overturn the first guilty verdict.