“Yep.”
While I struggled for a segue into asking if her recently-made-late husband had anything to do with two other dead bodies and possibly a patent, Bonita began to gingerly pick out some of the cactus.
“You want, ma’am, I got me a boy who’ll trim those prickles right off for you. But once they’re peeled, you need to fix ’em real soon.”
“Yes, that would be nice,” Bonita said, and handed her sack to the big-haired, big-hipped Mrs. Daniels. “Having the spines cut off would be easier.”
“Yoo-hoo, Jose,” the big-hipped widow called out, and a squat young man, looking more Indian than Spanish, came out of the back and took the sack. He didn’t make eye contact with any of us.
I thought Jose looked a bit like Armando and started to say so, but then remembered reading in one of the books Bonita had given me about Mexico that the so-called highborn Mexicans, the Criollos, those of Spanish descent, often do not like being confused with the native Mexicans, that is the meso-American Indians. Though Bonita had never displayed any signs of ethnic or other snobbery, I bit back my comment anyway. Then I stared at Bonita. Nothing Indian about her. Tall, willowy, chocolate-colored eyes, chocolate-colored hair, cream-colored complexion, the very picture of a Spanish woman of class. College educated in California, she had only the trace of an accent. Her children, though looking more Mexican than she, sounded like the average children of the U.S.A.
As I pondered how well they had all acclimated, Bonita spoke to the young man. “Que le vaya bien.”
Jose nodded and ducked away. Bonita then introduced us to Mrs. Daniels.
“Attorneys, huh? Don’t know as I need an attorney,” she said.
Jose brought the sack of de-thorned cactus back and handed it to me. “I’ll get these,” I said, and moved toward the check-out line where a man with bug eyes and a weak chin was working his jaw in a way that put me in mind of a pop-eyed goldfish.
“I can afford my own cacto, thank you,” Bonita said, and reached for the sack.
“Let me treat, okay?”
While I held on tightly to the sack as Bonita tugged at it, Goldfish Face guy rang up something for a man in front of us and then turned to me. “While you gals make up your mind who’s gonna get that, I gotta get this guy some worms, you hear?”
“I’ll ring those up for you,” Mrs. Daniels said, and stepped in behind the cash register.
“Could we talk to you a moment? About your late husband?” I asked, molding my face into the shape of a nice person who felt a good deal of sympathy. “We are very sorry about your loss.”
“You knew Mad?”
“No, we didn’t have that pleasure. But we, that is, I, knew one of his employers,” I said. “Earl Stallings.”
“Now wasn’t that a shame, him getting kilt like that, and on his own tractor.”
“Yes, ma’am, a real shame,” I said, not bothering to point out that technically it was his grape picker that ate him, not his tractor. “And that’s part of what we’d like to discuss with you, Mrs. Daniels.”
“Call me Mary Angel,” she said.
“Oh, what a pretty name,” Bonita said.
“Yes’um, I like it.”
Goldfish man came back and I asked Mary Angel, “Could we go somewhere private and just chat a minute?”
“I done already talked with the sheriff’s office man. One with that cute little baby, but he ought not to be toting that child around like that.”
No, he shouldn’t. But I passed on discussing Tired’s problems as a single dad and said, “If we could just go over things again, just the three of us.”
“What’s y’all’s interest in this?”
“Earl was our client,” I said, and silently dared Bonita to tsk-tsk me.
“Well, what’s Earl got to do with me?”
“That’s what we’d like to find out.”
“Well, I could use me an iced-tea break. You two want some?”
“Yes, please,” Bonita said.
Me, I wasn’t sure, glancing around the produce stand for signs of high hygiene standards and finding none.
We followed Mary Angel back to a hot, tiny office that brought out several of my phobias at once when I saw the clutter, the dust, and the bottles of bug spray.
From a tiny refrigerator, Mary Angel brought out a pitcher of tea that looked like syrup and poured three glasses. I knew I’d never be able to actually drink it, but the glass felt cool in my hands.
“Awright,” Mary Angel said. “Ask me what you want to.”
I did.
Apparently tea and sugar were this woman’s version of alcohol, and her words soon poured out like someone on her third vodka and with a story to tell.
Michael Andrews Daniels, aka Mad, had indeed worked for Earl. They were working up models of a new kind of grape picker because the standard models still had a lot of problems. “That picker thing Earl had wouldn’t even back up, or was it turn around?” she queried, as if Bonita and I would have a clue. “And tore up them grape plants something terrible.”
“Did Mad and Earl invent a new kind of harvester?” I asked, beginning to figure out that if a patent were at the heart of this mess, it probably wasn’t for sulfite-free wine.
“Oh, no. Mad jes’ did what he was told to do. Earl was the inventor, but Mad did plenty welding and such,” Mary Angel explained. “I got no patience with men playing with models, so I didn’t pay much attention to Mad when he’d explain what they were doing.”
“And you explained this to Officer Johnson? You know, the officer with the infant?”
“That’s right, and to some other guy named Stan. I liked that deputy with the baby, he was nice to me.”
“Did Mad ever go to a lawyer?”
“What’d he need a lawyer for?” Mary Angel asked. “He was nothing but a welder and a machinist and a man went out to the swamp and had the bad luck to step on a rattler. Why y’all trying to make such a fuss over bad luck’s beyond me.”
Maybe she didn’t know that someone had chased Mad’s car into a ditch before Mad abandoned the car and ran into the swamp?
“Did he ever mention a Kenneth Mallory?” Bonita asked.
“That does seem to ring a bell somehow,” Mary Angel agreed.
But despite further questioning, Mary Angel couldn’t place why Kenneth’s name sounded familiar.
“Didn’t like that tea much, did you?” Mary Angel asked, looking at me with the sound of finishing up in her voice.
“Diabetic,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Well, you should’ve said, I had me some bottled water in there.”
Suddenly thirsty, I waited for the offer. But when it didn’t arrive, I figured I could buy a bottle on the way out and we made our thank-yous and left Mary Angel’s office.
On the drive back, we ran the new information around a bit but arrived at no firm conclusions beyond the obvious need to pursue the potential Mad-Kenneth link further.
Once at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley, I left Bonita and tracked Cristal back to her desk outside Kenneth’s office. “Finished at the front for the day?” I asked, showing modest personal concern for her before I pestered her to give me all of Kenneth’s appointment books for the last year. Then I boldly strode into the law library like someone with billable materials and dumped the appointment books on the first hapless law clerk who looked up.
“What’s your name?” I asked, but didn’t bother to listen.
“Look, this is important and I promise you a promotion to associate if you find the name M. A. Daniels, or Mike, or Michael Daniels anywhere in these appointment books.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Can do.” The boy beamed with the belief that he’d be an associate within a week, not knowing I didn’t have that authority. Young man wants to be a lawyer, he needs to learn early on not to be so gullible, I thought, feeling no guilt at all as I left the library.
As I walked back to my office,
Edith’s voice came over our intercom. Sounding more wrath-of-God than office manager, she said, “Paging Jackson. We need you up front. There’s a sheriff’s deputy with a warrant to search the whole building.”
I understood instantly that this was Edith’s warning, giving each of us a modest head start, and I imagined that the sound of shredders and flushing toilets would rise up around me in seconds. Rather sanctimoniously, I concluded that there was nothing I needed to shred or flush and sauntered back to my office amid the scurry of attorneys toward their own hidden stashes of whatever.
Then I happened to remember I had stuffed Kenneth’s laptop in my back credenza. After stealing it out of his house, I had opened it at home to find his hard drive completely blank. Given the glossy initials “KUM”—like I’d put that on my laptop—Kenneth had had embossed on the case, I had concluded that the laptop was all for show. Not wanting it to collect dust in my house, I had brought it back to the law firm to slide into Kenneth’s office at the first chance. But every time I tried to do just that, Cristal was guarding the golden gates and I didn’t want her knowing I had Kenneth’s laptop because that invited speculation as to exactly how I had gotten it, and as a general principle I thought it best not to let my new hobby—breaking and entering—become the fodder of office gossip. So Kenneth’s laptop had been sitting in my credenza until Edith’s warning made me remember I had stolen merchandise in my office. Highly motivated, I practically knocked down the rat-faced law clerk with the earring as I sprinted for that credenza.
Dashing past Bonita, I rushed into my office. Flustered as I was, I heard the sound of Bonita’s chair sliding back as she rose to follow me in. Panic drew her like honey.
I ripped open my credenza door. The laptop was gone.
And a cardboard box of 158-grain roundnose bullets with the letters “JEB” scribbled on the side sat neatly in the space that Kenneth’s purloined computer had recently occupied.
“Shit,” I screamed, not even bothering with the more poetic sounding mierda that Benny had taught me so I wouldn’t sound crude.
Crude was the least of my worries.
“The laptop. Kenneth’s laptop, where is it? Who’s been in my office?”
Bonita shook her head. “I haven’t touched it since you put it there. And to my knowledge, no one but you and I have been in your office.”
No time for further cross-examination. I snatched up the bullets, but not before Bonita had a good look too. Throwing my gray jacket over the box, I bolted out the back door and aimed straight for my ancient Honda. Once inside my car, I sped away, darting briefly the wrong way down the one-way Morrill Street behind our office building and out into the relative safety of the traffic and confusion on the Tamiami Trail.
I made it home in record time and sprinted for the cool, clean sanctuary of my own house.
But once inside, I realized keeping those bullets in my house was not a good idea. Being freaky about paper in my personal space, a definite problem for a lawyer, I didn’t have any gift-wrapping paper inside. So I ran outside to my newspaper recycling bin, pulled out the Sunday funnies, and trotted back inside where I wrapped up the box of bullets in the funnies, drew a bow on it with a red Magic Marker, jogged next door, and rang Grandmom’s bell. She answered in a flounce and a hurry, Redfish gurgling happily in her arms.
“Can I hide this present at your house? Just until the birthday party?” I smiled so forcibly my jaw made cracking noises.
“Well, hello there,” Grandmom said.
“Hello there,” I backed up and said.
“Of course you may,” Grandmom said. “Please come in.” Then she eyed the present. “Don’t you even know how to wrap a gift?”
Her consistent disappointment in me made me think it was kind of like having a real mother. My own mother didn’t pay enough attention to me to be disappointed.
“It’s for an environmentalist. You know how they hate to waste paper. Trees and stuff, you know.”
“Well, if you change your mind, I have a good collection of wrapping paper. I’ll show you how to do it up really nice.”
Grandmom’s constructive criticism aside, the cool rooms of her house opened to me like a safe inner sanctum, and I listened for a half hour to her theories of child rearing while playing with Redfish and declining offers of food.
But my mind raced with the questions of who had put the bullets in my credenza and why Tired Rufus Johnson was armed with a search warrant for the Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley law firm.
Okay, I was officially paranoid now.
That night, Philip rang my doorbell as I was trying to cajole Bearess into eating some stir-fried okra.
“You left several messages,” he said. “I hope you do not object to this impromptu visit.”
“Come on in.” I led him to the kitchen, where he and Bearess took remarkably the same attitude toward the okra, so I poured Philip some of Earl’s wine, split my salad with him, poured Bearess some dog food, and sat down to eat my okra.
While Philip was giving me a rundown of his day, I waited for the most dramatic moment to tell him about my day’s events. If there was a competition going here, I knew I’d win with the box of 158-grain roundnoses. But then the doorbell rang again.
Philip hovered protectively as I opened the door to the junior law clerk. “How’d you get my address?” I demanded.
“Er, the, eh, Edith gave it to me. I told her you said this was important.”
Not as important as having a chat tomorrow with Ms. Too-Free-with-Her-Information about never giving out my phone number or address to anyone, ever, no matter what. Okay, maybe she could give it out to Lenny Kravitz. But office-manager jackal or not, Edith needed to be reminded of my privacy rights.
But back on track, I asked, “Did you find Mike Daniels in Kenneth’s appointment book?”
“Eh, um, no.”
“Stop stuttering. Then why are you here?”
“I, er . . . um, found that . . .”
I noticed that the young man was sweating profusely. Okay, he couldn’t talk without an um every breath, he didn’t respect privacy, and he sweated too much. Unless his father was a Supreme Court justice, this boy’s future was not bright.
“What?” I snapped.
He flushed and sweated and ummed. Finally Philip introduced himself and asked the clerk if he would like to come in and share a glass of wine.
The boy stepped inside. “I, um, didn’t find Daniels’s name.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“But, um, I did find, um, that two pages were torn out of his, um, appointment book.”
“What dates?”
He told me with a maximum of five more ums, and left, never having partaken of the proffered wine.
“You scared that young man,” Philip said. “Did you know that?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“You should be nicer to people.”
“Yeah, and not say crap, got it, short man.”
“You should be nicer to me,” he said. “And I’m not short, you are just exceptionally tall.”
I looked at Philip until I saw that I was making him nervous. As I studied him, I tried to separate my need for his professional services from any personal desires I might have for him. When I’d first met him, I had been so smitten I couldn’t form sentences. But now, well, now I wasn’t so sure.
Leaning into Philip, I kissed him, thinking physical contact might answer that question in a way staring at him had not.
It was a good kiss, Philip was right there, and right into it. His hands stayed the hands of a gentleman, but his body pressed against me in a decidedly roguish manner.
“I am hoping we might make love now,” he said, taking a break from the kiss.
“I was hoping we might go back to Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley and see if we can find any time sheets in Cristal’s stuff that would explain where Kenneth was on those two days he tore out of his appointment book. Plus, there’s some stuff I need to tell you a
bout.”
Philip sighed. “I’ll drive,” he said.
On the ride over, I brought Philip up to date with my day’s discoveries. We played endlessly with the question of who could have the bullets and access to my office. The only people who could have the bullets were Benny if he’d kept the gun and bullets, Bonita if she’d taken them from Benny, Waylon if he’d ended up with the backpack with the gun and bullets, Dave if he’d recovered them from Benny or Waylon. Of that list, only Bonita had access to my office.
But Bonita had looked as surprised as I was when we’d discovered the bullets in place of the laptop.
Besides, Bonita would never, not in a million years, plant those bullets in my credenza.
I said this to Philip over and over, applying the trial-attorney rule that a statement repeated frequently enough takes on the tone of truth.
“Are you sure?” Philip the doubter asked. “Wouldn’t she do it to protect Benny?”
“No,” I said. But I wasn’t sure. In a tight corner, if Bonita had to choose between me and Benny, then obviously Benny would win. And I wouldn’t blame Bonita in the least for that. But Bonita was too smart to get herself into that kind of trap.
Wasn’t she?
After we talked Bonita-and-bullets scenarios to death, we arrived at no particular conclusions about who was killing whom, or why. But at the office, after grumping around in Cristal’s files, we discovered modest pay dirt. In Kenneth’s travel-reimbursement folder, we found copies of forms showing that Kenneth had filed mileage-reimbursement requests for a round-trip to Oneco for client conferences on both of the dates he had torn from his appointment book. The form was blank where a client’s name should have been.
But, hey, since Mad lived in Oneco, it was too much to be a coincidence.
Before we left Cristal’s files, I did a free-association snoop and cruised through her personal files—Visa bills and such. For a legal secretary, she had pretty expensive tastes, especially in clothes. She had her receipts in perfect chronological order—Saks at Southgate, St. Armand’s Key, Winter Park, another Winter Park, Saks, St. Armand’s, et cetera, et cetera, all true shopping Meccas for the rich. This made me think she had a rich man out there somewhere. The gossip from the Sisterhood of the Secretaries had never caught Cristal dating anyone. Hmm, a rich man, especially a rich, married man, would explain her secretiveness. When I started pursuing copies of her health-insurance claims, Philip suggested I was being a bit rude. So I quit.
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