Spanish Dagger

by Susan Wittig Albert

  There was the swift, hard sound of a slap, and I heard Tyson suck in his breath.

  “How about it?” Sheila snapped, icy cold. “Want a little more of that?”

  Way to go, girl! I said silently, clenching my fist.

  Tyson’s voice was hard and rough. “As I was saying, you might’ve been notified. But my task force commander thought it wasn’t a good idea to involve you in the investigation, since you had a prior relationship with the subject. He—”

  And at that moment, my cell phone rang. Without thinking, I had slid the damn thing into the pocket of my vest, and now “The Eyes of Texas” was tinkling merrily into the silence of the sunlit afternoon. I fumbled hastily for the phone, flipped it open, and broke the connection. Frantically, I looked around for a place to hide, but it was too late.

  “China Bayles!” Sheila said sharply. She was standing in the doorway, her fists on her hips, wearing the fiercest scowl I had ever seen on her face. Over her shoulder, she said to the man, “Stay where you are. I’ll handle this.” To me, she said: “What the devil do you think you’re doing, skulking around out here?”

  “I…uh, I—” I could feel my face flaming. I’m sure I have been more embarrassed in my life, although I couldn’t think when. “I only was trying to—I mean, I—”

  Sheila came outside, closing the kitchen door firmly behind her. “I told you to leave,” she snapped angrily. “I told you to take that dog and go home. You disobeyed a police order, China!”

  “But I thought you might…” I straightened my shoulders, struggling to recover my cool. “I thought you might be in trouble. You didn’t bring any backup. For all I knew, this guy was a killer, maybe a two-time killer. I was worried about you.”

  Sheila regarded me, narrow-eyed, processing what I’d said. “But you’re not worried now?”

  “Are you kidding?” My cool was coming back. In fact, I was all fired up. “I know what a jump-out boy does for a living, Smart Cookie. I know how those guys deal with the local authorities. He could set you up. He could frame you. He could—”

  “Yeah.” Sheila’s look said she had already thought about this. “We need to talk, China. But not here. Not now. Tonight. You going to be home?” A breeze shivered the roses and a shower of white petals fell on her hair and shoulders.

  “Anytime after six,” I said. “Come for supper. But listen, Sheila,” I added urgently, in a lower voice, “I want you to watch your back. These jump-out jockeys can’t be trusted. They’re bad news. They—”

  And then the damn cell phone rang again. The jingling tune of “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” pealed into the quiet air.

  Sheila threw back her head and laughed, a genuine laugh. “China Bayles, as a detective, you are positively inept.”

  I had to laugh, too, as I grabbed for the phone, feeling about as dumb as dirt. “You’ve noticed, huh? But as a friend I’m tops. You have to admit that.”

  “As a friend, you are definitely super,” she agreed amiably, still chuckling. “Now get outta here, will you? I’ve got work to do, and you’re keeping me from doing it.” She went back inside and closed the door in my face. Then she opened it again and said, through the crack, in a tone of mock severity, “And if you don’t get out of here, I’m going to call the police.” She laughed and shut the door.

  The phone was still ringing. I flipped it open. “Whoozzit?” I growled.

  “Hey, China,” a man’s voice said. “Hope I haven’t interrupted something important. I don’t have your husband’s cell phone number, and I need to talk to him. It’s about the car. Your dad’s car. Our dad’s car. It’s important.”

  It was my brother. Excuse me. My half brother.

  Chapter Fourteen

  LEMONY SPRING GREEN NOODLES

  2 cups minced dandelion greens, packed (use only unsprayed, washed leaves, or substitute fresh spinach)

  2 eggs

  1 teaspoon lemon juice

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 tablespoon fresh or 1 teaspoon dried dill weed

  1 1/3 cups flour

  Beat together dandelion greens, eggs, lemon juice, salt, and dill until smooth. Beat in flour, one-quarter cup at a time, continuing until dough is very stiff. (You may not use the full amount, depending on the moisture in the greens.) Turn dough onto a floured surface and knead for 5–6 minutes, until smooth and elastic. Roll into a sheet 1/16-inch thick. Allow to dry for about an hour, then dust with flour, roll loosely (like a cigar) and slice into strips of whatever width you like. Drop into boiling water; cook for about 8 minutes. Toss with butter and grated cheese and serve as a flavorful, colorful side dish, or add to your favorite seafood.

  I took Rambo home and introduced him to Howard. The two circled each other, sniffing warily at front ends and back ends while they exchanged personal greetings in that silent code that all dogs, no matter what breed they are, understand. Howard (who is more aggressive than he looks) let Rambo know that he was the boss here and didn’t intend to relinquish that position any time soon. Rambo (although he is much the larger dog) politely let Howard know that he got the message and was fully prepared to cooperate.

  Introductions made, territorial negotiations completed, and the truce ratified, Howard sat on the back steps and watched with his usual aloof-basset expression as I put the Rotti into the backyard Puppy Palace, a securely fenced twenty-by-six-foot run, equipped with cozy doggie igloo, a doggie water fountain, and all the doggie toys any basset’s heart could desire. Howard disdains the run, of course, preferring to spend his waking hours chasing squirrels and his naptime dozing under the porch swing, but Rambo settled in as if he had lived there all his life.

  I left the two dogs observing each other across the neutral territory of the backyard and drove back to the shop. I was still smarting from my performance at the cabin, where I had come off looking and sounding like an idiot. Worse. A blathering idiot with a teenaged cell phone. I would have changed the ring-a-ding thingy if I could’ve, but that would have to wait until Brian got home. I hate to confess it, but I don’t know how.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to improve my attitude. Cass had already closed the tearoom by the time I got back, and business was slow enough to allow me to go outside and weed the beds along the path to the front door, where I could keep one eye out for customers while I made sure that each weed I pulled was a genuine weed.

  To some gardeners, of course, a weed is any plant that’s growing in the wrong place. But in my garden, what looks at first glance like a weed may be a volunteer herb, and while I might not enthusiastically endorse its unexpected appearance or invite it to stay for the season, it deserves a certain amount of respect. The common dandelion, for instance, is a potassium-rich diuretic, a nutritive tonic, and a treatment for high cholesterol, as well as a tasty food. Chickweed has been used to treat kidney ailments, coughs, and even obesity. Plantain, one of the Anglo-Saxons’ nine sacred plants, was called waybroad, for its ubiquitous growth. It was known as a powerful burn treatment and all-round wound-wort, especially potent in the case of mad-dog bite. I love this old recipe for a salve to treat “flying venom,” which Brother Cadfael probably manufactured by the bucketful:

  Take a handful of hammerwort [pellitory] and a handful of maythe [chamomile] and a handful of waybroad and roots of water dock, seek those which will float, and one eggshell full of clean honey, then take clean butter, let him who will help to work up the salve, melt it thrice: let one sing a mass over the worts, before they are put together and the salve is wrought up.

  I don’t sing a mass over the worts while I pull them, but I have found that this sort of work is a very good thing for the soul, particularly when you know that you’ve made a total idiot of yourself.

  But while I might feel somewhat better about my idiocy, the central questions still remained. Who exactly was the guy in Cabin 37? A jump-out boy, Sheila had said—but what was a narcotics task force agent doing in Pecan Springs? What was Tyson’s connection to Colin?
Why did he want the box of photos Colin had stashed at Ruby’s house? How was he connected with Lucita Sanchez? And did any of this have to do with that business about official corruption that Hark had mentioned?

  But as Sheila had made abundantly clear, those questions were none of my business, and I wasn’t going to get any answers—not right away, anyway. So I might as well stop thinking about them, and get on with my life and my business. I certainly had plenty to keep me occupied. Ruby had called to tell Missy that the psychiatrist was going to evaluate her mother on Monday morning, so she wouldn’t be back until that afternoon, at the earliest. Carole had checked in to say that she had things pretty well set up for the next day’s workshop and was headed to San Antonio for an evening with friends.

  I looked down at a curling tendril of Texas bindweed, the bane of a gardener’s existence and a notorious strangler that grabs every stem within its greedy reach. I was trying to remember where I had read that the plant was used by the Navajo to treat spider bites when I heard someone call.

  “Yoo-hoo, China! China Bayles!”

  It was Wanda Rathbottom, coming up the walk. Wanda is a large woman with broad shoulders, strong arms, and a perpetual frown. The former owner of what is now Sonora Nursery, she did not give up her business happily and I knew that she resented the Conrads for transforming her failure into a stunning success. She was writing a book, I’d heard, about how to succeed in the nursery business. It figured. Those who can, do. Those who can’t (with a few exceptions), write about it.

  “Hello, Wanda,” I said, straightening up. “Sorry I didn’t call you back.” I was going to say I’d forgotten, but that wasn’t very tactful. It wasn’t very true, either. I hadn’t called her back because she is so pushy. I avoid her as much as possible.

  “No matter.” She waved away my apology. Her spiky brown hair was unusually spiky today, and her nose was twitching. Wanda always reminds me of a rabbit, with that twitchy nose, and she has no natural eyebrows. Today, she had penciled upside-down brown Vs over her eyes, giving herself a clownish look. “I thought I’d catch you here,” she added, looking around. “Is there a place where we can sit and be a little private?”

  “How about that bench over there?” I asked, pointing to the wooden bench at the gate to the Peter Rabbit garden that we share with the children’s bookstore next door. “If we sit there, I can keep my eye on the shop.”

  “Oh, right,” she said, turning down her mouth with her usual sarcasm. “You wouldn’t want to miss any customers, would you?”

  I ignored that. “What’s up?” I asked, as we sat down.

  “It’s about what happened at Sonora this morning.” She looked around nervously, as if she expected somebody to pop up out of the rhubarb patch. Farmer McGregor, maybe. “Ronny—my son works in the greenhouse there—told me about it when he came home for lunch. He said you found the body and called the police.”

  I frowned. “Well, actually it was Betty who found the body. I just happened to—”

  “Lucita Sanchez,” she cut in darkly. “But I suppose you know who she was. If Betty had listened to me, this wouldn’t have happened. I told her it wasn’t a good idea to hire that woman. She’d been in trouble with the law down there in Brownsville, you know. She was in jail last year for dealing drugs.”

  Dealing drugs. “Really? You knew her, then?”

  “No, of course I didn’t know her,” she said indignantly. Her nose twitched. “My son told me about it.”

  Now, Ronny Rathbottom is not what I would call a credible witness, since he has frequently been in trouble with the law. But perhaps, in this case, he could be trusted. He certainly had an insider’s view.

  “Tell me about it,” I said encouragingly.

  Wanda hesitated. Now that she had identified her son as an informant, she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to involve him—or how much of the truth she wanted to tell. In a more tentative voice, she said, “You probably don’t know about this, but Ronny has occasionally taken drugs.” She coughed dismissively. “Lots of young people do these days, of course. Seems like every mother I talk to has a kid with a drug problem. But I always say that everyone deserves a second chance.”

  If Wanda thought I didn’t know her son was a user, she was fooling herself. Everybody knew that Ronny had done jail time and treatment time, not once but twice. Still, Pecan Springs is a forgiving town, and Ronny isn’t the only one to forgive. There’s a long lineup of kids with drug problems, all in need of forgiveness, all in need of a real second chance.

  “But how did Ronny know about Lucita?” I persisted.

  “I’m getting to that,” she said. “Ronny was down in Brownsville about the time she got out of jail. Turns out that she’s an aunt of his friend Woody, and Woody said maybe she could get them something. Ronny just said no, of course,” she added defensively. “He’s off the stuff altogether. He’s clean as a baby. He’s got a job at Sonora. That’s where he saw her, you see, working in the office. He told me, and I told Betty what I thought about that.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said softly. So much for second chances.

  “Well, I didn’t want her around where Ronny could be tempted, did I?” Wanda flared. “Of course, I know he wouldn’t. He’s sworn to me that he’ll never do that again. But maybe Woody would. Lucita was his aunt, after all.”

  “Did she offer to get anything for the boys?” Anything like marijuana or cocaine, two herbs with nasty reputations.

  “No, but the woman was trouble. That’s why I alerted Betty to the situation. I like Betty, you know, although I’m not too keen on some of the things she and Allan have done with the place. That fountain, for one thing. Makes the place look like a Hollywood set. Must have cost a fortune.”

  True enough, I thought. But Wanda’s words had the tart tang of sour grapes, which I could definitely understand. The Conrads had turned her failed business into a major success story.

  “But Betty has a good heart and she works hard,” Wanda went on. “And she’s crazy about Ricky and Jeannette. She’d do anything for those kids. I thought she ought to know that this woman—Lucita Sanchez—has been in trouble with the law over drugs, because I didn’t think she’d want her around her children. Teenagers are so vulnerable these days. Boys, especially. They get into the wrong crowd, you know. And Betty has always been very grateful when I’ve given her a little advice here and there.”

  Yeah, I bet. “How did she take it?”

  Wanda pursed her lips as if she were tasting something bitter. “She was shocked, of course, poor thing. Just devastated. But Allan had hired the Sanchez woman, and she’d been here since the middle of March. Betty said she hated the thought of having somebody on the premises who’d been dealing drugs, but she really didn’t think she could just up and fire her.”

  It must have been a challenge for gentle Betty to deal with Wanda on her high horse, full of self-righteous disdain. And I knew it wouldn’t be easy for her to tell what she knew to the police, especially if she hadn’t yet told her husband that Sanchez had a record. I wondered if that was what she had wanted to talk to me about earlier that afternoon.

  As if she had read my mind, Wanda went on. “That’s why I thought I should discuss this with you, China. I mean, you found Sanchez’s body. And you’re a lawyer—you know about things like this. Ronny said he didn’t think Betty had told the police about the woman’s record. You have to tell them.”

  “But they’ll run a check on her,” I objected. “They’ll pull up her record. They’ll find out whatever—”

  She leaned closer. Her rabbit nose twitched. “Ronny knows why she was killed. And it didn’t have anything to do with a robbery, either, you can bet your sweet patootie on that.” She folded her arms and regarded me with dark satisfaction.

  I frowned. “Why was she killed?”

  “Because she was mixed up in a dope deal with that friend of Ruby’s. That man Ruby was running around with.”

  I felt the skin prickle across my
shoulders. “Colin Fowler?” It was an unnecessary question. There was no doubt who she meant.

  “Yes, Fowler. The one who got killed.” A pitying smile curling at the corners of her mouth. “I know that this is a really bad time for Ruby, with her mother and all. And I certainly don’t want to put her to any unnecessary grief by associating her with a drug dealer. But somebody ought to tell the police that Sanchez and Fowler were—”

  “Where did Ronny get his information?”

  She stonewalled me with a shake of her head.

  “I have to know who his source is,” I said firmly. “Otherwise, I am not going to get involved.” Probably not even then.

  She hesitated, weighing her options. “His girlfriend told him,” she said grudgingly.

  “Who’s his girlfriend? And where did she get her information?”

  Wanda leaned forward, her clown eyebrows pulled down, her nose twitching as furiously as a rattlesnake’s rattle. “Ronny’s girlfriend worked in Fowler’s shop. She knew what he was up to, every dirty little bit of it.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Ronny’s girlfriend is Marcy Windsor?”

  “You know her?” Wanda asked, surprised.

  “We’ve met.” I could have said that I made Marcy’s acquaintance when I caught her with her hand in the till at Colin’s shop, but I didn’t. I might have added that when I talked with her, I had the feeling that she knew more than she was willing to tell me. But I didn’t say that, either.

  Instead, I said sternly, “Let me get this straight. You’re saying that Marcy Windsor told Ronny that Colin Fowler was dealing?” If that was true, it probably answered my question about what Tyson, the undercover drug task force guy, was doing in Pecan Springs. He was after Colin. And if Colin hadn’t ended up dead, he might have ended up in jail.

  “Well, I couldn’t say whether that was the exact same word Marcy used,” Wanda said, as carefully as if she were a sworn witness and I was a prosecutor. “I got it from Ronny, and I don’t know if what he said was exact. But yes, that’s the meat of it. That’s what she told him. Dealing.” Her face hardened. “Which is probably what got him killed. It’s a dangerous world out there, if you’re into drugs. That’s why I keep telling Ronny he has to stay away from the stuff. One way or another, it’ll kill you.”