“Who’s he?”
“Nick Cooper. He’s head reference librarian.”
He raised his dark eyebrows. “Nick and Nora?”
“Yeah, pretty hokey. Their mother loved old mysteries apparently.”
“Do you know her parents’ address?”
“They’re dead. It’s only her and Nick. He lives over by your old house on Houston Street. I don’t know the exact number. He’s in the phone book, though.” I felt a stab in my heart. “Who’s going to tell him?”
“Probably Jim, once he gets here and I can give him the particulars.” Captain Jim Cleary was Gabe’s right-hand man. He was an even-tempered black man in his late fifties whose easygoing personality was the perfect counterbalance to Gabe’s sometimes fiery temper and stubborn perfectionism. A couple of months ago Jim organized a weekly basketball match between the young patrol officers and older, higher-ranked officers with the loser having to spring for pizza and beer at Angelo’s Big Top Pizza downtown. Invariably the senior officers lost, which boosted the morale of the patrol officers immensely. That small activity had gone a long way toward establishing a stress-relieving camaraderie within the ranks. Jim was subtly teaching Gabe that strong leadership and a sense of humor were not mutually exclusive.
“What’s her ex-husband’s name?” Gabe asked. “Does he live around here?”
I looked down at the ground. This was already getting complicated. “Roy Hudson. He’s a member of the co-op and the Storytellers Guild. He lives with my friend Grace.”
“Grace?”
“Grace Winters. She owns the stables where I ride.”
Gabe’s face looked thoughtful.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head as if it were nothing. “Why don’t you go on home? I’ll pass your story on to the detectives. You can come down to the station tomorrow and give an official statement.”
“Okay,” I said, glad to get away. “What time will you be done?”
“I have no idea. I’ll try to keep you posted.”
“Want me to bring you some other clothes?”
He looked down at his outfit and gave me a rueful smile. “Why don’t you drop them down at the station? That’s where I’ll be heading after this.”
“I’ll bring you some lunch, too.”
“Great. Don’t talk to the reporters and be careful driving home.”
“Yes, sir, Chief Ortiz,” I said, backing away from him. “Is it me or the Corvette you’re worried about?”
His mustache twitched in a half smile.
“Jerk,” I mouthed.
I ducked under the yellow tape and was instantly pounced upon by a reporter from the San Celina Tribune. The yuppie reporter who accosted me was intent on one thing—furthering his career by scooping the Central Coast Freedom Press. He wore a brownish tweed jacket and black Levi’s. His blond hair stood up in wet-looking spikes revealing a clean pink scalp.
“Mrs. Ortiz, it’s rumored you found the body. Can you tell us what happened? Do you know who the victim is? How were they killed?” His photographer, a tall, big-shouldered woman wearing ragged overalls and a red tank top, aimed her lens at my face.
“Ms. Harper, and no comment,” I said automatically. Then I added in the interest of good public relations, “Sorry.”
“Is the victim male or female? Was there any mutilation? Do you think it’s the work of a serial killer?”
“Excuse me.” I pushed past him. When he realized he wasn’t going to get anything from me, he scurried back to the edge of the crime scene, where he was kept at bay by a couple of burly San Celina police officers.
During the drive home I thought about Nora, wondering who would kill her. Could it possibly be a random crime? The thought sent ice crystals through my veins. Serial killers hadn’t touched the Central Coast yet, and I hoped they never would. It seemed unlikely, though the alternative was just as frightening—being murdered by someone she knew. That instantly brought to my mind her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Roy Hudson. He would likely be first on Gabe’s list of suspects, and that troubled me. Roy, though a bit of a redneck at times, was basically a nice guy. He was also one of the best farriers in the county. More importantly, I’d grown fond of Grace while riding at her stable these last few months. Though her and Roy living together and united against Nora, whom I also liked, was certainly not a situation I approved of, when I was with each of them, I kept my opinions to myself. Since all three were involved with the storytelling festival, I’d attempted to keep their paths from crossing too often.
I wondered how soon Nick would be notified. Should I call him or drop by? What was the proper thing to do when a friend’s family member is murdered and you’re the person who found the body?
At home, Mr. Treton, my iron-spined, elderly neighbor, was clipping the hedge separating his two-story gray and blue Victorian house from my Spanish-style bungalow. I’d rented the neat, two-bedroom house when I moved off the Harper Ranch into town. It was perfect for one person, with square little rooms and a newly remodeled terra-cotta-and-white Southwestern tile kitchen. After Gabe and I married, he just sort of moved in his clothes and books, gradually mingling our possessions. Unfortunately he’d not planned on getting married when he came to San Celina and had paid for a year’s lease on a woodframe house over by Cal Poly. It had a huge garage and a yard full of mature shade trees; we’d discussed living there, but my house was closer to our jobs and homier, with all my quilts and mismatched antiques, so we nonverbally seemed to have decided on it. The lease on his house was up at the end of September, and he still had some things he hadn’t moved yet, though I’d subtly nagged him about getting to it. One thing that was still there was his stereo and a good part of his extensive collection of Southern jazz and blues CDs. I suspected there was a deeper motivation than laziness that kept him from moving everything he owned into my . . . our house.
I carefully steered the Corvette into the narrow driveway. My own vehicle, a red 1977 one-ton Chevy pickup with HARPER’S HEREFORDS in chipped lettering on the doors, sat out on the street, having lost the honored driveway spot to the Corvette. Inside our minuscule one-car garage reigned the real star of our vehicular family, the newly restored blue 1950 Chevy pickup that Gabe’s father had owned and we’d had shipped back from Kansas two months ago.
“Hey, Mr. Treton,” I said, climbing out of the car. “Hedges are looking good.”
He grunted and continued trimming with his beat-up hand clippers. No newfangled, fancy electric ones for Mr. Treton. “Just another way the electric company’s trying to rip off honest Americans,” he’d grouse. He was a thirty-year army man who believed insubordination from anyone, including plant life, needed to be promptly nipped in the bud.
“Talked to your grandmother lately?” he asked, his clippers never stopping their clop, clop, clop.
“Not since yesterday,” I said, smiling good-naturedly. He knew Dove checked up on me almost every day. She used to say it was because I needed watching over since I was living alone in the city and didn’t have the sense God gave a duck. Now that I had the personal protection of the chief of police, she said she had to make sure, in the interest of public safety, that I wasn’t driving Gabe too crazy. “Do you need something?”
“All out of honey,” he grumbled. He’d grown addicted to Dove’s fresh clover honey when she used it to bribe him into giving her reports on my daily activities. She didn’t require his detecting services any longer, but Mr. Treton still craved the honey.
“I’ll swipe you a couple of jars next time I go out to the ranch,” I promised. He nodded his thanks and attacked a rebellious mock orange tree.
Inside the house I kicked off my ruined shoes and peeled off my wet socks, gave them a satisfied smirk and padded across the room where the answering machine winked its red insect eye. A well-known and mostly well-loved voice brayed out, practically melting the wax in my left ear.
“Where are y’all?” Dove asked. “Benni Harper, it’s seven o
’clock in the morning, and you haven’t gotten up this early since you left the ranch. If you’re there and occupied, call me when you’re through. And you take it easy now. Gabe’s ticker isn’t as young as yours.”
I snickered and didn’t rewind the tape so Gabe could hear Dove’s comment on his sexual endurance. Only my grandmother would have nerve enough to tease him that way. Glancing into the bedroom where the sheets and thin blanket were shoved in a tangled heap at the foot of the king-sized bed, I had to say she knew us better than we’d probably like to admit.
I went into the kitchen and grabbed a Coke before returning her call. With everything that had just happened, I suspected it would be a long and detailed conversation. Back in the living room, I picked up the cordless phone and settled down on the brown tweedy sofa, but before I could dial, it rang.
“Benni, help,” a panicked voice wailed. “She’s back.”
“No one here by that name,” I said, and hung up.
3
SECONDS LATER, THE phone shrilled again. I waited three rings before reluctantly picking it up, knowing without a doubt that trouble lurked at the end of this line.
“Very amusing, young lady,” Dove said. “If you were still living within spittin’ distance of me, I’d be taking you out behind the barn with a hickory switch.”
“Have to catch me first,” I said smugly.
“Don’t think I can’t.”
An arrow of panic shot through me. “She’s not here already?”
“No, thank the Lord. We pick her up at the airport tomorrow. She says she’s done left W.W. for good.” She paused for emphasis. “Again.”
“She” was Dove’s only sister and only sibling, Garnet Louann Wilcox. She and Dove, though they loved each other to pieces, got along about as well as two porcupines in a gunnysack. W.W. (pronounced in the way that only Southerners can—Dubya, Dubya) was, or rather is, Garnet’s husband, William Wiley Wilcox. They’d been married fifty-three years, all of which time, Uncle W.W. was the plumbing contractor of choice in the Sugartree, Arkansas, area, about fifty miles north of Little Rock. After fifty-five years, he’d finally retired to live out his dream, designing and building custom-made yard fountains. According to Dove, who, much to her dismay, was getting semiweekly updates, Aunt Garnet and Uncle W.W. were having difficulty getting used to being around each other all day. It sounded like the pressure had finally gotten to both of them and Aunt Garnet decided to take a powder. Except for her only child, Jake, in Pine Bluff, whose wife, Neba Jean, had absolutely forbid Garnet to ever cross the threshold of their mahogany-paneled three-story split-level house again, poor Aunt Garnet had nowhere else to flee. Her only other close relative was her granddaughter and Jake and Neba Jean’s only child, my cousin Rita. Last we all heard, Rita was traveling the rodeo circuit in an old Winnebago with her bull-riding husband, Myron “Skeeter” Gluck.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“You know, we’re so busy with this remodeling and what with the house all torn up, I was thinking—”
“Not a chance, Dove,” I interrupted. “Gabe and I are still newlyweds. And I’ve got the storytelling festival this weekend and now there’s this murder that Gabe has to worry about . . . and since when are you all remodeling?”
“I’ve been considering it,” she said defensively. “Now’s as good a time as any to start. What murder?”
We temporarily shelved the subject of Aunt Garnet while I told Dove about Nora Cooper and my morning’s gruesome discovery.
“Her mama made the best apple pan dowdy,” Dove said, tsking under her breath. “This would’ve tore her heart to pieces.”
“I guess I should go visit Nick. We only see each other occasionally now, but we were good friends in college.”
“Take some banana bread,” Dove advised. “Or a fruit pie.”
“Okay, I’ll drop by the bakery.”
Her pointed silence admonished me. Dove didn’t approve of anything bought in a bakery, especially if you were taking it as a token of sympathy. “Your generation,” she was always harping at me. “Y’all are too lazy to pick your own teeth.”
I ignored the disapproving vibes floating over the phone lines and asked what Daddy and Uncle Arnie thought about Garnet’s visit.
“When they heard about it they lit out of here like two fresh-branded calves. Haven’t seen ’em since. And now that we’re back on that subject—”
“Gotta go,” I said. “I need to buy that pie. Call you later.” I hung up while she was still sputtering, knowing I’d pay big time for that little bit of bravado. In our family there were two sets of rules—the Ten Commandments and Dove’s Rules of Order. I had just broken one of the biggies—cutting her off when she was in the middle of cajoling you to do something. When she didn’t call me right back, I knew I was really going to get it, that she was plotting big time. That meant I’d never see it coming.
After a quick shower and change into clean Wranglers, a plain white T-shirt, and my old brown Ropers, I grabbed up Levi’s and a pale yellow polo shirt for Gabe. I pointed the pickup toward Blind Harry’s Bookstore and Coffeehouse in downtown San Celina. My best friend, Elvia Aragon, manager and head honcha of the bookstore, would most likely be there, even though Sunday was technically her day off. She’d kill me if I didn’t tell her about my morning’s activities before she heard it on the news. Grimacing at my poor choice of mental words, I maneuvered for a precious parking space in our already congested downtown shopping area. The influx of people moving into San Celina County and shopping downtown had been great for the merchants, but heck on the local residents, who were accustomed to finding a parking space on the first try. I pumped my last quarter into the meter, attempting to be a model, law-abiding citizen now that I was the police chief’s wife.
Blind Harry’s Bookstore resided a block away in part of a two-story brick row building that once held the offices of San Celina Trust and Savings, an institution that bit the dust during the 1929 stock crash. Until six years ago, it had been a bookstore called simply San Celina Books and Stationery. Then Cameron McGarry, a mysterious Scottish man who owned casinos in Reno, a cattle ranch in Wyoming, and oil wells in Oklahoma, acquired it during a drive through town. He bought it as a whimsical tax write-off and hired my friend Elvia as the manager for peanuts, probably feeling very smug and politically correct for accommodating two minorities in one fell swoop. It warmed my heart to watch her blow his socks off. Under her fair but somewhat military-style management, she built Blind Harry’s into the most popular and profitable bookstore/coffeehouse between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her success story had been written up twice in the L.A. Times, once in the San Francisco Chronicle, and in numerous Latino newspapers.
The basement coffeehouse, lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves packed with used books free for the borrowing, was crowded for a Sunday. The antique mantel clock on the Hemingway shelf had both hands lifted in surrender, reminding me of my promise to bring Gabe lunch. I ordered an avocado, Jack cheese, and alfalfa sprout on cracked wheat bread and scanned the chattering crowd for Elvia. She sat in a back corner at one of the round oak tables, her dark head bent over three-inch thick sheaves of computer printouts. Though she had a beautiful office upstairs complete with French Country antique furniture, all the latest computer equipment, and soundproofing, she still preferred to do much of her paperwork downstairs in the coffeehouse. She claimed the noisy conversations relaxed her, that complete silence was too distracting after all those years living with six brothers.
“No rest for the wicked, huh?” I flopped down on one of the oak ladder-back chairs she’d purchased for a song when they refurnished the new library. The only way you could tell it was her day off was she wasn’t wearing one of her many Chanel-Armani-Donna Karan power suits. Instead she wore black leggings, Italian leather flats, and a flowing café au lait silk blouse that probably cost more than my truck’s new clutch.
“Hermana gringa, you have no idea. What’s u
p? I thought you and tu esposo el chota were out building lung capacity this morning.”
“I’ll have you know I jogged a whole mile and a half.”
“And?” Her liquid voice held a hint of laughter.
“Is it too late for an annulment?” I asked with a dramatic groan.
She pointed a French-manicured nail at me. “I warned you about getting hitched up with a Latino man. They want to run your life like they’re five-star generals and you’re a buck private with no chance of advancement. Not to mention he’s a cop. And a cop in management.”
“Ah, he’s not that bad,” I said, grinning. “Besides, I never could resist being sweet-talked in Spanish.”
“Tramp,” she said, taking a sip of her iced cappuccino. “You just married him for the great sex.”
“Shh,” I said, putting my finger over my lips. “He thinks I married him for his fascinating personality and government pension.”
She rolled her luminous black eyes, and we were both giggling when José, Blind Harry’s cook, brought over my order and told Elvia briefly that they were running low again on almond-flavored Tortani syrup.
“Double the order next time,” she told him, then raised her eyebrows at me. “What’s with the food to go?”
I stopped laughing, suddenly feeling guilty for making jokes after having discovered only hours earlier the body of someone I’d known and liked. But as Gabe once said, people joked automatically to protect themselves. Especially those who saw man’s inhumanity to man on a regular basis.
“If cops didn’t,” he’d told me, “they wouldn’t last a year. That’s why you hear so much grotesque humor at crime scenes. If any of us contemplated emotionally at the moment what really happened and how it could happen to us or to someone we love, we’d end up eating our guts or our guns.” His blue-gray eyes turned dark with sadness. “Some cops lose that ability to disengage, and that’s what they do. Too many.”
Elvia’s face instantly sobered. “Benni, what’s wrong?”
Goose in the Pond Page 3