Death Come Quickly

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Between nine p.m. and two a.m., according to the autopsy. The police thought she was attacked when she went outside to get her cat.”

  “And when was the body discovered?” I asked.

  “Not until shortly after noon the next day,” Kitt said. “The lawn mowing service came to mow the grass. One of the employees saw her and called the police.”

  McQuaid and I exchanged glances. He spoke first. “So Rogers claimed he heard that garbage can lid banging sometime after noon, huh?” His voice was edged with sarcasm. “I guess he figured that the perp was just hanging around until the police showed up before he bothered to dispose of those bloody shoes.”

  “In his own personal garbage can,” I said with amusement. “In the alley.”

  McQuaid snorted. “And then Rogers dashes off in hot pursuit—twelve hours after the murder—to search Bowen’s property. Without a warrant.”

  “I’d like to have heard what the defense did with that,” I said. “No wonder the jury acquitted.” I added, to Gretchen, “Those were really Bowen’s shoes?”

  Gretchen paused on the next image, a pair of shoes, one turned over to reveal the bloody grid on the sole. “Bowen said they were his gardening shoes. He always took them off and left them in the garage, beside the door into the house.”

  “And he usually left the garage unlocked, I suppose,” McQuaid said thoughtfully, and Gretchen nodded.

  “Huh,” I grunted. “I’ll bet Johnnie Carlson argued that his client was either not guilty by reason of insanity—or he was framed. No killer in his right mind would choose one of a set of his own golf clubs as the murder weapon, then drop the broken club in his own backyard and put his bloody shoes in his own garbage can.” I rolled my eyes. “I’ve seen some pretty clueless criminals, but nobody could be that dumb.”

  “The defense attorney argued that there was some sort of frame-up,” Gretchen said. “I read it in the transcript.”

  This was getting interesting. “You wouldn’t happen to have a copy of that transcript, would you?” I asked.

  And there was something else—an idea forming in the back of my mind. Johnnie had mentioned notes on his arguments for an alternative suspect, and I thought I knew where they were. He and Aaron Brooks had been in practice together, after they both left the firm where we’d worked. Gorgeous, hunky Aaron, with whom I had had a wild and rather wonderful fling back in the days when I was young and foolish. Together, Johnnie and Aaron had been Brooks and Carlson, with an office on University Boulevard, a few blocks from the Rice University campus in Houston. Johnnie was dead and buried, but that didn’t mean that his notes were, too. I was suddenly curious. And after all, he had offered to let me read them. The last time I had seen Aaron had been a couple of years ago, at the wedding of a mutual friend, an attorney we had both worked with. Afterward, we had slipped out for a drink, to catch up on our lives. Maybe I could persuade him to let me—

  “The transcript?” Gretchen slid me a sideways glance. “I borrowed a copy. I’ll be glad to loan it to you, if you want. It’s kind of . . . well, long.” Her tone suggested that she couldn’t imagine why I would be interested in reading such a boring document. She pressed the play button and the film resumed. “Mr. Bowen—the defendant—lived here. This is how it looks now.”

  The house Dick Bowen had lived in wasn’t as strikingly conspicuous as its ultramodern neighbor, but it was very attractive—a 1960s one-story brick and frame ranch with an attached garage, neatly trimmed landscape shrubs, and a carefully manicured front lawn. The curbside mailbox featured a large rosemary bush and a bright planting of marigolds and zinnias.

  The color video of the contemporary house was replaced by a black-and-white still photo. “We got this photograph from the newspaper,” Kitt said. “It was taken around the time Mr. Bowen was arraigned.” The house hadn’t changed, except that when Bowen lived there, a large live oak tree dominated the front yard. Pecan Springs has never paid its city employees very well, and a fleeting thought crossed my mind. How had Bowen been able to afford such a nice house in the San Jacinto neighborhood?

  McQuaid might have been thinking the same thing. “Bowen was married?” he asked.

  Gretchen wrinkled her nose. “Nope. He was a longtime bachelor. He lived alone—and very quietly, according to the people we talked to.”

  “That was one of his problems,” Kitt put in. “The murder took place on a Tuesday night. He swore he was in bed asleep, but there was nobody to corroborate his claim. The people in his office testified that he came to work Wednesday morning at the usual time and behaved the way he always did. They didn’t notice anything strange about him. Of course,” she added regretfully, “we couldn’t get any video of that testimony. Trials weren’t being televised back then.”

  I could have told her that it was a little more complicated than that, and that the decision was made before she was born. In the famous 1965 case of Estes v. Texas—involving Lyndon Johnson’s crony Billie Sol Estes, convicted on multiple counts of fertilizer and mortgage fraud—the U.S. Supreme Court held that the way in which television cameras were used in the courtroom deprived Estes of his Fourteenth Amendment rights. Television cameras weren’t allowed back into Texas courtrooms until 1991, and then only in civil trials. Now, cameras are permitted in some criminal proceedings in some counties, at the discretion of the trial judge.

  But instead of going into this camera-in-the-courtroom explanation, I changed the subject. “The Doberman,” I said. “What was the watchdog doing while his mistress was being beaten to death with a golf club?”

  “The prosecution brought that up,” Kitt said. “It turned out that the dog had been at the vet’s. He’d had problems with dysplasia and was getting a new hip. He wasn’t due to be released until Thursday. The woman who came in twice a week to do Ms. Morris’ cleaning testified that she told Bowen that the dog was gone and when he’d be back. So he knew that the coast was clear.”

  “Who else knew that the dog wasn’t there?” I asked, more sharply than I intended. “Sorry,” I muttered, before McQuaid could remind me that we weren’t in a courtroom and that Kitt wasn’t a witness.

  But Kitt didn’t seem offended. “Actually, it seems like everybody in the neighborhood knew that the Dobie was gone. The people we interviewed said he wasn’t a very good watchdog because he barked at everything, constantly, day and night. They all figured he must be out of commission because they hadn’t heard him for a day or two. The woman who did Ms. Morris’ cleaning also worked for some of the other neighbors, so word got around that the dog was getting his hip fixed.” She grinned. “Several of the neighbors remembered wishing that he was getting his bark fixed.”

  Ah, yes. The dog that didn’t bark in the night, not because the dog knew the killer but because the dog wasn’t there and the killer knew it. I wondered whether Johnnie Carlson had remarked on that neat little Holmesian barking-dog trick. But I refrained from asking. I could check it out in the trial transcript.

  And that thought prodded me into the startled realization that, yes, I really had decided to read the transcript, however boring it might be. Not only that, but I was planning, posthumously, to take Johnnie up on his offer to read his trial notes on the alternative suspect—that is, if I could coax Aaron to let me have a look.

  Why? Because I wanted to decide for myself whether the jury had done an admirable service to the causes of justice and jurisprudence by acquitting Dick Bowen?

  No. I already understood and appreciated the jury’s willingness to poke a hole in the blue wall big enough to let some version of the truth escape. But somebody had murdered Christine Morris. Somebody had attacked and killed Karen Prior; somebody had attacked Gretchen Keene and stolen her camera. Were these somebodies the same person or different people? What were the motives? The transcript and Johnnie’s notes might give me a place to start.

  “And this,” Gretchen said, “is
Mr. Bowen.”

  And there he was, a short, seriously overweight man of forty-five or fifty, wearing a white shirt and tie and rimless glasses, seated behind a desk littered with papers. His brown hair was thinning; his face was soft and round; his smile was friendly, almost ingratiating. He might have been a schoolteacher—chemistry, maybe, or history—but the plaque on his desk announced that he was Richard Bowen, Building Inspections, Zoning. That photo was followed by several newspaper stills. One of them showed Bowen in front of the city council. The caption read: Zoning Committee Denies Morris Request.

  “I noticed the headlines in the earlier shot,” McQuaid said. “Morris Accuses Zoning Committee of Malfeasance. Morris Slams City Officials. What was all that about?”

  “Ms. Morris was having a feud with the planning and zoning people,” Kitt replied. “It had to do with getting a variance or something.”

  “The section of San Jacinto where she lived was zoned single-family residential,” I said to McQuaid. “She wanted to open an art gallery on the first floor of her house. But the neighbors opposed any zoning change, and she got turned down. After that, Ruby said she launched a campaign against the zoning office. She would go to city council meetings and complain. It sounds like she was pretty universally hated, except in the art community.”

  “Well, even there . . .” Gretchen let her voice trail off.

  “What?” I asked curiously.

  Kitt cleared her throat. “We talked to another man who was on the museum board until very recently. Dr. Cameron.”

  “That would be Paul Cameron,” McQuaid said to me. “He retired at the end of the fall semester.” He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “He’s getting old and a little . . . slow.”

  That, I thought, was an understatement. I was acquainted with the man, who had taught art history at CTSU for decades and—while he was just sixty-five—was obviously suffering from some form of dementia. CTSU did away with age-based mandatory retirement a few years ago, so a faculty member can go on teaching until he decides to quit. For the past couple of years, Cameron’s lectures had become increasingly garbled and his colleagues had been pleading with the dean to “encourage” his retirement. They must be glad it had finally happened and they could hire a younger, more productive art historian to take his place.

  I wasn’t sure that his wife, Irene, would be glad, however. The Camerons had had problems, I’d heard—serious financial problems caused by Paul’s erratic and unwise investments in the stock market over the years. He had always earned a solid faculty salary with good retirement benefits, but rumor had it that they had been on the verge of losing their house to the bank more than once. I could only hope that his faculty benefits would cover his care, when he needed it.

  It made sense, though, that Paul would have been asked to serve on the museum board. He’d been a strong supporter of the arts in Pecan Springs for decades and knew everyone who was involved in art activity.

  “It was a little . . . um, difficult to talk to Dr. Cameron,” Kitt said tactfully. “He has a tendency to wander off the subject. We went ahead and filmed him because we were there. There might be a few sound bites we could use, but his footage would take a huge amount of editing. He was more than willing to talk to us, though.”

  “I’ll bet he was,” McQuaid muttered. “The problem is getting Paul to stop talking.”

  Kitt giggled, agreeing. “Anyway, we gathered that he had some strong opinions about Ms. Morris’ expertise as a collector of Mexican art. He doesn’t like Ms. Tillotson very much, either.” She ducked her head. “In fact, he said that both of them were ‘as ignorant as dirt’ when it came to real art.”

  “He said that was Shakespeare,” Gretchen put in, “so I looked it up. It’s in Othello.”

  “And he especially didn’t like the man Ms. Morris bought some of her paintings from,” Kitt added. “An art dealer from San Antonio. ‘Wily as a fox,’ he said.”

  Ah, yes. “Soto?” I asked, and Kitt nodded. “What didn’t Dr. Cameron like about Soto?”

  Gretchen frowned uncertainly. “He didn’t say, exactly. Or rather, he said, but it was hard to figure out just what he was saying. It had something to do with one of Ms. Morris’ paintings.”

  “Did you tape that part of the interview?” I asked.

  Kitt sighed. “We pretended to tape it, but I shut the camera off. By that time, he was getting really garbled. There wasn’t going to be anything worth the time it would take to edit.”

  I added “See Paul Cameron” to my mental list of things to do and wondered when I was going to do them all. Johnnie’s trial notes might be in Aaron’s office—I had his home phone number, which he had given me with the invitation to call him if I was ever in town. The shop was closed on Monday, so if I decided to go, I could drive there and back that day. Tomorrow was Sunday. Maybe I ought to see Paul and—

  “Besides Dr. Cameron,” McQuaid asked, “who else have you talked to?”

  “Well, there was Mr. Lipman, Ms. Morris’ attorney,” Kitt said. “And Mr. Davidson, another neighbor on San Jacinto. He told us that all the neighbors were mad at her about those yard lights and that barking dog, and that he thought he might have seen somebody looking into Mr. Bowen’s garage.”

  “We talked to the jury foreman, Mr. Peters,” Gretchen chimed in. “He said that the jury didn’t convict Mr. Bowen because they agreed with the defense attorney. They thought the police did some things they shouldn’t have done and that there was a reasonable doubt that Mr. Bowen was guilty. He gave us some other names of jurors to talk to, but we haven’t done that yet.” She sighed. “I guess we won’t, now.”

  “We also talked to several people who worked with Mr. Bowen,” Kitt said. “In fact, I think one of them is next on the tape.” She grinned. “Actually, it’s kind of a comic segment. Want to see it?”

  “Sure,” McQuaid said. “I’m ready for a laugh.”

  An image filled the screen—a large woman in her sixties, with tightly curled blue-white hair and saggy jowls, her cheeks rouged, her lips fire-engine red, the lipstick bleeding into the age wrinkles around her mouth. She wore a bright green dress and gold hoop earrings as big as bangle bracelets that dragged down her fleshy earlobes a good inch. She sat, posing self-consciously, on a living room sofa, surrounded by a heap of crocheted pillows. In her lap, she held a small Pekinese, who wore a matching green bow in her topknot.

  “Why, it’s Florabelle Gibson,” I said in surprise. “And Mimi.” I hadn’t seen Florabelle in a while, but for a time, she was a regular customer in my shop, usually with her dog. That Pekinese was the most foul-tempered animal I had ever seen. “Why is she in your film?”

  Gretchen pushed the pause button, and Florabelle Gibson was caught with her eyes half-shut and her mouth wide open. “She testified on behalf of Mr. Bowen. She was a secretary in his office, but she’s retired now.”

  “Which office was that, exactly?” McQuaid asked.

  “The Pecan Springs planning department,” Gretchen replied. “Mr. Bowen was a building inspector, and also zoning. Ms. Gibson managed the paperwork, so she knew him pretty well.”

  She hit the play button and Florabelle trilled, in an exaggerated East Texas twang. “Well, naturally, I never thought for one single minute that Mr. Bowen could’ve done what the prosecutor said he did.” She fluffed up Mimi’s ears, and the dog bared its teeth. “He was the nicest, kindliest man anybody ever wanted to know, always happy when he came to work in the morning, always glad to see folks, even those hard-boiled, crusty old contractors he had to work with as an inspector. And generous? Why, that man gave money to every good cause in this community. He was an angel, is what he was.”

  The screen went black for a moment, then Florabelle’s image reappeared. “What exactly did he do in the department?” she asked, as if she was repeating a question. “He was in charge of all the building inspections in Pecan
Springs, that’s what he did. He was really good at it, too, believe you me. Oh, and he was on the zoning committee, too. As I said, he was a good man to work with, always so helpful to everybody.”

  She pulled down her mouth. “Ms. Morris, on the other hand, was a genuine pain in the patootie.” She pursed her lips and said it again, emphatically. “A genuine pain in the pa-too-tie.”

  On the film, from behind the camera, I heard Kitt ask, “Ms. Morris was a pain? What makes you say that?”

  “Why, because.” Florabelle seemed to be surprised that her questioner didn’t already know the answer. “She was always bad-mouthin’ folks, always diggin’ up dirt on this one or that one. Nobody likes somebody like that.”

  “What kind of dirt?” Kitt prompted.

  Florabelle tossed her head. Her earlobes flapped and her hoop earrings danced. “Well, just take for instance that zoning variance she was trying to get so she could sell those gawd-awful paintings she set so much store by. Mrs. Rohde was the one in the office who turned down her paperwork, on account of she didn’t fill it out right. Then lo and be-hold, two, three days later, Mr. Hanson—he was the big boss at the time, Jimmie Lee Hanson, you know him?—he called Mrs. Rohde into his office and gave her you-know-what for being rude to Ms. Morris, who had complained about it in a letter to him.” She harrumphed. “Which was a lie, pure and simple, ’cause my desk was right next to Mrs. Rohde’s and I couldn’t help but hear every little thing that was said, and there was not one single word that came out of Mrs. Rohde’s mouth that was anything but polite. All the rude was on Ms. Morris’ end, and there was plenty of it.”