Death Come Quickly

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Bottom line, the jury didn’t like the victim and was more than happy to exonerate the man charged with her murder,” Sheila said flatly.

  “Hey, wait,” I protested ironically. “I thought it was that slick Houston defense attorney who got Bowen off the hook.”

  “Well, that, too,” Sheila conceded. “And I suppose the DA might have done a better job with jury selection. The defense challenged a couple of people, but the state’s voir dire was exceedingly skimpy. Unusual for a murder case.”

  “Who was the prosecutor?” I asked.

  “Henry Bell,” Sheila replied.

  I rolled my eyes. “Why am I not surprised that the state lost?”

  Henry “Ring-a-Ding” Bell was a twenty-year veteran of the Adams County prosecutor’s office, a good old boy who had a reputation for cozying up to as many of the other good old boys as necessary to ensure his reelection. Ring-a-Ding was still in office when I first arrived in Pecan Springs, and I had observed him in action a time or two. He may have been a good prosecutor in his salad days, but those were long since behind him and he was well into dessert. Fortunately, Pecan Springs, back then, didn’t require the services of a real legal eagle, and Ring-a-Ding kept on keeping on for much longer than he would have, say, in Austin or San Antonio, where there’s much more competition. Fortunately, he has been admitted to practice before the bar in that great courtroom in the sky. He’s probably losing his cases there, too.

  “Let’s get back to the victim,” Sheila said. “What can you tell me about her, Ruby? She wasn’t originally from Pecan Springs, I understand.”

  “Oh, no way,” Ruby said emphatically. “Christine started her career as an anchorwoman for a Houston television station. Then she married an ob-gyn with a ton of money, gave up her television career, and became a River Oaks socialite. Then she got into art collecting. She especially admired twentieth-century Mexican art, and she bought quite a lot of it. She was widowed when her husband died of an early heart attack a few years later. But she never lost her taste for the limelight. She was attractive, slim, and always very well dressed. She liked to be the center of attention.”

  Sheila was making rapid notes. “How did she get from Houston to Pecan Springs?”

  “Her cousin Sharyn—her only living family member—grew up here. Sharyn Tillotson. We went to high school together. She and Christine were on good terms at the time. Christine was looking for a place where she could be active in local organizations and . . . well, belong. But she wanted a starring role, too, which is hard to manage in Pecan Springs—unless you’re born here. If you’re not, you’ll be an outsider all your life. No matter how hard she tried, Christine would always be an outsider.”

  “I know something about that,” I said ruefully. It was true. I’ve been here long enough to think of myself as a native, but the real natives still view me as a foreigner—and they always will. This isn’t necessarily bad, of course. Being an inside outsider has a certain advantage. You can understand more about the town and its people because you have a double viewpoint. You’re likely to see things the natives never notice.

  Ruby nodded. “But Christine made things worse for herself by making a special point of criticizing everybody. People didn’t like that. And they didn’t like her—even after she married Doug Clark.”

  “She was married to Douglas Clark?” I asked in surprise.

  Doug Clark is Pecan Springs’ most prominent developer and builder. He got his start some twenty-five years ago, when CTSU lifted its campus residency requirements and the student rental market began to blossom. He took advantage of the situation in a big way, building dozens of cheaply constructed duplexes and shoddy apartment complexes around the campus perimeter, then branching out into strip malls and retail buildings. Then, as Austin spilled south along the I-35 corridor and San Antonio crept north, he became a major player in Pecan Springs’ development and construction market and the Clark operation went upscale, graduating from cheap construction to something much more impressive. A couple of years ago, he put together the package for the Hill Country Villa, an exclusive singles complex on Sam Houston Drive. Rumor has it that he’s working on a project that’s even bigger and more elegant.

  “Ruby’s right,” Sheila put in dryly. “It was a short marriage. According to the trial transcript, Christine Morris filed for divorce three years after they were married. On grounds of adultery.”

  Adultery. In one way, I wasn’t surprised. Doug Clark has a long-standing reputation as a womanizer—the more the merrier is his mantra. In another way, I was surprised. Texas is a no-fault state: to get a divorce, you simply claim incompatibility, and both spouses are off the hook. But there are strategic reasons to claim adultery—and where divorce is concerned, it’s always all about strategy. One of the reasons is revenge: “I’ll get that miserable jerk for cheating on me. I’ll rake his name through the mud—and hers, too.” The other reason has to do with . . . yes, you guessed it: money. The wronged spouse can sometimes get a bigger piece of the community property pie, the wronger, the bigger. As I said, it’s always all about strategy.

  “It was a messy divorce,” Ruby remarked, “and Pecan Springs loved every tasteless, tawdry moment of it.”

  “Adultery usually boils down to money,” I said thoughtfully. “And Douglas Clark is a great big fish. Christine must have reeled in a very nice property settlement.”

  “Charlie Lipman would know the details,” Ruby said. “He was Christine’s lawyer. All I know is that she got the house, which was huge. And the paintings they bought while they were married—or, rather, that she bought while they were married. By that time, she had developed an arrangement with a couple of New York galleries, where paintings from her collection of Mexican artists were displayed and sold.”

  “Ah,” I said. “She was setting herself up as an art dealer. That can be a lucrative business.”

  “The house,” Sheila said. “That would be the house where she was killed?”

  “Yes. It’s now the Morris Museum of Mexican Art, at the end of San Jacinto.”

  “I know the place,” I said. “It’s striking. Very modern. Architectural.” I’d never been inside, but from a distance, it looked like stark white windowless cubes arranged in geometric stacks, with a second floor cantilevered out over a paved plaza and a sculptural roof that curved upward, like the rim of a saucer. A flying saucer.

  “If you think it’s modern now,” Ruby said with a wry chuckle, “you should have heard what the neighbors said about it back then. They hated the place, partly because Doug tore down a perfectly lovely Victorian in order to build on the property. He hired a famous architect from Dallas and gave the house to Christine as a wedding present. She loved it, I heard. It had acres of wall space where she could hang her paintings. She told everybody that she was going to use the first floor as an art gallery.”

  I was surprised again, but the pieces were beginning to fall into place. “The museum that exists now is an expanded version of her gallery, then?”

  “Something like that,” Ruby said. “Christine had already set up a foundation for her art. In her will, the foundation got the house and a substantial sum of money to maintain her collection—basically, a private art museum.”

  “A private art museum?” Sheila asked. “What’s that?”

  Ruby frowned. “I’m not sure, exactly, except that it’s privately funded and open only by appointment, mostly to groups—schoolkids, ladies’ clubs, things like that. Anyway, once the foundation took over the house, it pushed through the zoning change. Christine would’ve been proud. Before she died, she was making a career out of her interest in art.” She chuckled. “That, and seriously annoying the neighbors along San Jacinto.”

  San Jacinto Avenue was a neighborhood of gracious older homes built in the early part of the twentieth century. I could see why, when the Clark-Morris house was first built, it would have s
eemed terribly incongruous, an intrusion of modern architecture, like a rude thumb in the eye of the neighbors. And I could see why Gretchen and Kitt had decided that this particular story might make an interesting documentary.

  “San Jacinto Avenue,” Sheila mused. “I was looking at the crime scene photos, and I saw that when the murder occurred there was a six-foot-high chain-link fence around the property. It was ugly and very much out of place in that neighborhood. The fence isn’t there now. Was it Morris’ idea? Why?”

  “The fence?” Ruby laughed. “Oh, you bet it was her idea.” She sat back as Becky came to refill our iced tea glasses and collect our empty plates. “Are we ready for dessert?” she asked.

  “Not for me, thank you,” Sheila replied. “I’m full.”

  “No is not an option,” Ruby said cheerfully. “We’re having the pudding, Becky.” To Sheila, she added, “It’s cool and very light. The perfect dessert for a hot July day.”

  “If you say so.” Sheila went back to her question. “So why did Morris put up the fence?”

  “It was the dogs, mostly,” Ruby said. “If I remember right, most of the time she lived in that house, she had three: a couple of German shepherds and a Doberman. Her husband hated them—they were one of the reasons for the divorce, Sharyn told me. They were always barking, day and night. You could hear them for blocks. The neighbors were constantly complaining.”

  “Sharyn?” I asked. And then, “Oh, yes. The cousin.”

  “Right. Sharyn Tillotson. She was the one who introduced Christine and Doug and always took credit for their marriage. I don’t know the details, but apparently she and Christine had a major falling-out over the terms of some family member’s estate. Christine was the executrix, and Sharyn felt that she didn’t distribute the proceeds according to the will, or something like that. Supposedly, they weren’t on speaking terms when Christine was killed. Sharyn said she didn’t get a nickel out of Christine’s estate.” She frowned. “I guess she had a change of heart, though. She manages the Morris Foundation.”

  Sheila cleared her throat. “The fence,” she said firmly.

  “Before the fence went up,” Ruby replied, “Christine’s dogs kept getting loose. They scared the neighborhood kids and dug up people’s landscaping. Dick Bowen—he lived on one side of her—called Animal Control and they came out and picked them up. Christine gave up the two German shepherds, but she paid to get the Doberman back and she built that ugly fence—mostly to spite Dick, we thought, since he was the one who called the animal cops. Of course,” she added, “she would have had to take down the fence if she got the zoning variance she wanted. People don’t want to visit an art gallery that’s surrounded by a six-foot chain-link fence.”

  “So Morris never got the variance for her gallery?” Sheila asked.

  Ruby shook her head. “She blamed Dick Bowen for that, too, since he worked in the planning office. But the fence wasn’t just a spite thing. Sharyn told me that Christine was absolutely paranoid about theft. She was convinced that somebody was trying to break into her house and steal her paintings. She installed an expensive alarm system, too.”

  “Was her collection all that valuable?” I asked curiously.

  “Apparently it was,” Ruby said. “I don’t remember the exact figure, but when her estate was probated, it was valued in the millions, including the house and its contents. Anyway, she was always complaining to the city council that the police didn’t do enough to patrol the San Jacinto neighborhood. And I think there might have been at least one attempted break-in that was foiled by the alarm system.”

  “I wonder if the defense looked into that,” I said, mostly to myself. But Sheila heard me and gave me a curious look.

  “You’re thinking . . . what?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Just thinking. Go on, Ruby. You were saying—”

  “That Christine was paranoid,” Ruby said. “That was why she had those dogs. And why she installed those two giant yard lights, front and back. They burned dusk to dawn, every night. The darn things lit up the neighborhood like a football field. We didn’t think of it as light pollution back then, but that’s what it was. Pecan Springs has rules against that now.”

  Becky arrived with the pudding, in three elegant glass dishes, garnished with sprigs of mint. Sheila put in a spoon and tasted it.

  “Oh, my,” she whispered. “What is it?”

  “Muhallabiyeh,” Ruby said comfortably. She said it again, slowly, giving more stress to the second syllable. “Moo-HEL-lu-bee-ya. It’s a Middle Eastern pudding made with rose water.”

  “I take back everything I said about roses,” Sheila said. “This is delightful.”

  “Those yard lights.” I picked up my spoon. “I’ll bet they went over well with the neighbors.”

  “Everybody hated them,” Ruby replied. “Some people even speculated that she was killed over those lights. Dick Bowen objected to them more than anyone, since the front light shone right into his living room and bedroom. A few weeks before she died, Bowen tried to get the city council to pass an ordinance against those lights. But by that time, some of the council members were scared of Christine, and he struck out.” She shook her head. “Everybody was relieved when the house was taken over by the foundation and the fence and the lights came down. By that time, the neighbors were reconciled to the idea of a museum, I guess—especially since it’s private and doesn’t attract a gazillion visitors. When the foundation asked for a zoning change a couple of years later, it went through without any fuss. So I guess Christine won on that score, in the end. Even if she wasn’t around to enjoy her triumph.”

  “The council was afraid of her?” Sheila asked curiously. “Why? I didn’t find anything like that in the case notes or the transcript.”

  Ruby was about to answer, but Cass came up to the table just then, wearing her yellow and green Thymely Gourmet apron over a white T-shirt and white pants. Cass—pretty and blond, with blue eyes and a lovely complexion—has always been oversize, partly because she is (as she says) “just built big” and partly because she’s a top-flight cook and enjoys her own cooking. But for the past five or six months, she has been on a personal weight-loss campaign, counting calories, walking in the evening, and going to the gym every morning. She’s lost about twenty-five pounds, with another twenty to go. But it’s for the sake of her health, she says, not because skinny is beautiful. “I believe in curves,” she says flatly. “Thin just doesn’t do it for me.”

  And there’s another reason for this weight loss. Many of the clients in Cass’ Thymely Gourmet meal-delivery service are upscale singles who commute to Austin or San Antonio, aren’t crazy about cooking, but want to eat right and keep their weight down. So she has developed a line of low-calorie, heart-healthy, home-delivered gourmet vegetarian meals. “I figured I’d better lose a few pounds to market the new line,” Cass says with a frank grin. She’s a good advertisement. Customers who knew her “before” can see the “after” difference and imagine themselves minus a few extra pounds.

  Cass walked around the table. “What did you think about the shrimp pasta?” she asked. “Did you like it?”

  Ruby and I looked expectantly at Sheila, who was frowning thoughtfully. “Well, actually, I’m not sure,” she said at last. “I’d like to think about it some more. Are there any leftovers? I could take some home and give it another test.”

  Ruby and I laughed. “I don’t think restaurant critics do doggie bags,” Cass said.

  “I’m not a restaurant critic,” Sheila replied with dignity. “I am the chief of police. And doggies have nothing to do with it.”

  “I didn’t think so,” Cass said with a grin, “although I’ll bet Rambo would gobble it down and woof for more.” She turned to Ruby and me. “How was the muhallabiyeh?”

  “Delicious!” we exclaimed in chorus.

  “Was it difficult to make?” Ruby asked.r />
  “Nah,” Cass said. “I recommend a double boiler, though.” She paused. “That could be one of the recipes we put on the table for take-home.”

  “Great idea,” Ruby said enthusiastically. “Audience participation,” she said to Sheila. “We try to put a recipe for one of our dishes on every table. When people make the dish themselves, they’ll think of us.”

  “And in this case, buy their rose water and orange blossom water from us,” I said. “Specialty items.”

  “Oh, so that’s it,” Sheila said with a laugh. “The take-home recipes are made with ingredients that you have for sale.”

  “Our mamas didn’t raise no dummies,” Ruby said smugly.

  There was a low vibrating buzz, and Sheila took her cell phone out of her uniform pocket and looked at it. “Excuse me,” she said and got up from the table. Phone to her ear, she walked down the steps from the deck and into the garden.

  “You liked the shrimp pasta?” Cass asked again.

  “More Parmesan,” Ruby said.

  “On the table,” I put in. “We could put it in a shaker.”

  “And maybe some snipped chives,” Ruby added. “Oh, and don’t let Sheila fool you. She loved it. We all did.”

  “Parmesan—I don’t think so,” Cass said. “And if you put it on the table, people will be tempted to use too much. But I’ll take the chives under consideration.” She turned to Ruby. “Oh, drat. I forgot. I was supposed to tell you that somebody named Kitt called. She wants you to call her. As soon as you can.”