Death Come Quickly

by Susan Wittig Albert

“When I saw the video, I was struck by something you said at the end of your segment, Florabelle. You said you thought somebody wanted to make Dick Bowen look guilty—the same person who killed Christine Morris. You said you had a pretty good idea who it was.”

  Florabelle was chewing nervously on her lip. “I guess I’d better learn to watch my big mouth. Not since the trial has anybody asked me what I thought about that killing or how I felt about Mr. Bowen. So when the girl turned on her camera, it was a chance to say what I was thinking, which maybe I shouldn’t have.”

  “The police didn’t question you at the time?” No, probably not. They wouldn’t have any special reason to talk to Bowen’s coworkers, other than to determine his demeanor the morning after the murder. Thanks to the enterprising efforts of Barry Rogers, the cops had already uncovered all the evidence they needed. They wouldn’t want to hear anything that might contradict or complicate their theory of the crime.

  Florabelle shook her head. “Only to ask me if I’d noticed anything out of the ordinary about Mr. Bowen that morning.” She turned to the dog and clucked with her tongue. Mimi got up, stretched, and jumped delicately from her chair to the sofa, settling close to her mistress, who stroked her silky fur. She went on, “After the girl packed up her camera gear and left, I started thinking about how much I said. I was sincerely hoping she’d take that part out. About the killer making Mr. Bowen look guilty.” She looked up at me. “Do you think maybe she would, if I asked her?”

  “You could try, I suppose,” I said cautiously. I wasn’t going to tell her that Gretchen and Kitt had decided to scrap their project. I wanted to keep the pressure on.

  Florabelle pushed out a gusty sigh. “Well, I sure hope she will. Like I said, me and my big mouth.” She picked up her glass again and drank down another gulp of lemonade. “I wouldn’t want somebody to get the wrong idea. I mean, I wouldn’t want anybody to think I know something when all I do is suspect it.” She looked down at Mimi and brushed a piece of fuzz off her ear. “How come you’re asking about all this, China?” She picked up a small comb from the table and fluffed the dog’s silky tail. “You’re not fixing to go back to lawyering, are you?”

  “No more lawyering for me.” I chuckled. “My shop keeps me pretty busy these days, and I like what I do there. Let’s just say that I have a . . . personal concern in this matter.”

  “A personal concern.” She looked up at me, pushing her lips in and out, much more businesslike now. In her voice, I heard something of the professional woman she had once been, perhaps not all that long ago. “I wonder just what kind of personal concern you’d have. Ms. Morris was killed a long time before you came to Pecan Springs.”

  I decided it was time to tell her the real story. Part of it, anyway. “Karen Prior, the faculty member who was supervising the girls’ documentary film, was killed this week—mugged in the mall parking lot. She was a friend of mine.”

  Florabelle put down the comb. “I saw that on the news. But I didn’t know it had anything to do with that video.”

  “Nobody knows for sure,” I said. I added vaguely, “The police seem to think there might be some sort of connection. I thought I might learn something from the film, so I watched it—part of it, anyway. That’s how I came to see you and Mimi.” I leaned forward and repeated myself. “You said you thought the killer of Christine Morris framed Dick Bowen, and that you knew who that was.” I watched her intently. “Do you?”

  “I don’t see how that could have anything to do with a parking lot mugging.”

  “Neither do I,” I confessed.

  She was silent for a moment, chewing on my question. “If I tell you,” she said finally, “what will you do with the information?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “As you say, it was a long time ago.” I didn’t say that there is no statute of limitations on murder, although I could have.

  She thought about it some more, then made up her mind. “Well, I’ll tell you, China, although I still don’t see what the connection could possibly be. That woman who was killed—Christine Morris—liked nothing better in this world than making folks mad at her. She went around with a string of enemies rattling along behind her, like a dog with a bunch of tin cans tied to his tail. But so far as I know, there was only one person with a serious reason to want her dead. That was her husband, Douglas Clark.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What reason did he have?”

  “Christine was digging around, looking for some money he didn’t mention when they were getting divorced—money that should have been declared in the financial settlement and wasn’t. She wanted her share, and she was bound, bent, and determined to get it.”

  I thought of McQuaid’s investigation into this same matter. “How did you find out about that?”

  Her answer was so simple that I had to try not to smile. “My niece, Jerri Rae, worked in Charlie Lipman’s office.” She gave me a quizzical look. “I guess you know Mr. Lipman. He was Christine’s lawyer during the divorce.”

  Well, of course. Attorney-client privilege is expected to extend to the paralegals and other office staff, but it often doesn’t. Lawyers have a big stake in keeping their mouths shut, and they do, as a general rule. The paid help—especially if they think they’re seriously underpaid—have no stake at all. There’s no way to keep their tongues from wagging, short of pasting duct tape over their mouths or locking them in the closet at the end of the day. The authorities would frown on that.

  “Are we talking about a lot of money?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I never heard any of the details. But it had to do with some kind of big real estate development—multiple millions of dollars, Jerri Rae said. I have no idea how much of that money Clark would’ve had to hand over. Mr. Lipman told Christine that if they could prove he’d hidden it intentionally, Clark would have to pay a big fine, maybe even go to jail. But then all of a sudden Christine Morris was dead, and her ex was home free.” She gave me a sideways glance. “You see the point I’m making?”

  “I see,” I said. “It sounds like Douglas Clark might have had a million-dollar motive for killing his ex-wife. But I don’t get the second part. Why would Clark want to frame Dick Bowen for the murder?” If Bowen himself hadn’t killed her, somebody had framed him, using his golf club and wearing his shoes—both apparently easy pickings from his unlocked garage.

  “Well, because.” Florabelle’s mouth tightened and she sat up straighter on the sofa. “Because Clark was scared that Mr. Bowen was going to blow the whistle on his building code violations.”

  I blinked. “Code violations?”

  “Yes. That was after the balcony collapse. Which of course wouldn’t have happened if Mr. Bowen hadn’t taken the money in the first place.” She pulled down the corners of her mouth. “Now, I am not for one minute excusing him for what he did. It was wrong, pos-o-lutely wrong. But that doesn’t alter the fact that he was a wonderful person. He just made a mistake, that’s all.” A long, heavy sigh. “Unfortunately, after the first one, he made a few others.”

  “Wait a minute, Florabelle. ‘If Mr. Bowen hadn’t taken the money’? What money?”

  She looked at me as if I ought to be smart enough to understand this without having it spelled out for me in so many words. “Mr. Bowen was the city building inspector.” She spoke with an exaggerated simplicity, as if she were explaining this to a third-grader. “Douglas Clark was in the building business. He had to get Mr. Bowen’s approval on his plans and engineering documents, and on the new construction, once it was built. Everything had to be according to code, start to finish. Pecan Springs was a lot smaller then than it is now, and Mr. Bowen was the only building inspector. He had the final say-so on every project, start to finish. Once he signed off, it was all A-OK.”

  And then a lightbulb went off in my brain. Duh. Of course. What we had here was your basic shakedown racket. Bribery, subornation, corruption.<
br />
  “So Dick Bowen was shaking him down—Douglas Clark, I mean.” At her frown, I turned it around. “Douglas Clark was paying Dick Bowen to keep him quiet on some infraction of the building code?”

  “Yep.” Her mouth quirked at the corners. “That’s how it was. But make that multiple infractions. Multiple payments. While it was going on—two years, maybe three—it amounted to a lot of money. I don’t know how much, but I’d say in the tens of thousands, maybe more. All of it in cash.”

  I was beginning to put it all together. The house that Dick Bowen lived in, in the best part of town—well above his pay grade as a city employee. The money he donated to charity. The contributions he made to the Friends of the Library, the financial help he offered to people in trouble. Why, the man was a modern-day Robin Hood! He took bribes from Douglas Clark in return for closing his eyes to the code violations in Clark’s construction projects—those cheaply built duplexes, substandard apartment complexes, shoddy strip malls—then turned around and gave the money away. Not all of it, of course. He lived in that nice house, in a neighborhood he couldn’t afford without the money he took from Clark.

  “Were other developers involved in Bowen’s bribery scheme?” I asked. “Or was it just Clark?”

  Florabelle’s response was prompt. “So far as I personally know, the only deals he made were with Clark. If there was anyone else, I never heard about it. And I think I would have.”

  Yes, she probably would have. Florabelle seemed to know everything about everything else. I pictured her with her ear to a keyhole, or her hand over the receiver while she eavesdropped on a phone call, or sorting through notes on Bowen’s desk. With Florabelle in the office and in her prime, there would have been no secrets.

  “Did you actually see the cash changing hands?”

  “Once or twice. I saw the permits, too.” And then, fending off the question she knew was coming, she said, defensively, “And if you’re thinking I was in on the payoff, you can forget that. Nobody paid me a cent, not Douglas Clark and not Mr. Bowen, either. I’m just a nosy person, and maybe a little suspicious. I like to know what’s going on around me. When I was working in that office, I listened hard. I did a little digging. I learned things I wasn’t supposed to know. But I didn’t take any money, and that’s a fact.”

  “But you could have blown the whistle,” I reminded her, “either when you first saw the payoffs or later. It doesn’t bother you that you didn’t step up with what you knew?”

  She shifted uncomfortably. “Well, yes, it did. Especially after that balcony collapse. That was when Mr. Bowen decided he’d had enough. I overheard him telling that Clark he wasn’t taking another dime.” Her housecoat had crept up and she twitched it, covering up one white, dimply knee. “But of course I wouldn’t have wanted to do anything that might hurt Mr. Bowen. He was doing such good, for so many people. A real role model, as they say.”

  I frowned. “Balcony collapse?” It was the second time she’d mentioned it.

  She looked down at her arthritic fingers, flexing them as though they hurt. “I guess that was before your time. It was one of the student apartments that Doug Clark had built on Pedernales Drive, over near the campus. Some girls were having a party and several of them went out on their third-floor balcony. It pulled away from the building and dumped everybody three stories down onto the concrete parking lot. Luckily, nobody died, but a couple of girls were hurt pretty badly. Their bad luck.”

  “How awful,” I breathed. But of course, it wasn’t exactly bad luck. Building codes are designed to prevent events like that. Breach the code, the building suffers. People suffer, too.

  “It was. Awful, I mean.” She pressed her lips together. “There was an investigation, of course. And lawsuits.”

  I’ll bet. If it could be proved that a building inspector had overlooked (or had been paid to overlook) violations, there would be both criminal and civil penalties. Pecan Springs would have been sued, too, in addition to the owner and the builder. I’d never gotten into premises liability, but I had dated a guy who worked for a firm that specialized in slip-and-fall litigation. He’d once told me that he’d gotten a million-five for a stair collapse.

  Florabelle went on. “Clark’s lawyers pointed out that there shouldn’t have been that many people on the balcony—there were seven or eight, apparently, and they were dancing. The apartment manager had even posted a sign beside the balcony door saying that no more than two people should be on the balcony at any one time. It was also in the lease and the tenants were told to read it before they signed. But you know kids—they don’t pay attention.”

  “What happened to the lawsuits?”

  “Clark’s insurance company settled out of court. Luckily, Mr. Bowen’s role in it didn’t come out.”

  I nodded. “So when the balcony collapsed, Bowen decided he was going to quit doing business with Clark?”

  “Right. I heard Mr. Bowen talking to Clark on the telephone the week after it happened. It was weighing on his conscience, really making him miserable. What’s more, he was thinking of turning himself in. He didn’t come right out and tell Clark that’s what he was going to do, but I knew Mr. Bowen pretty well and I had a suspicion that was it. Maybe Douglas Clark had the same suspicion. Maybe that’s why—” She gave a little shrug.

  I finished the sentence for her. “That’s why he decided to frame Bowen for Christine’s murder?”

  “That was my guess. Ms. Morris was killed a couple of weeks later.”

  “And what about you?” I challenged. “Didn’t you think that you might have prevented the whole thing by telling the authorities about the bribery scheme—before that balcony collapsed? Or maybe just telling Bowen’s supervisor, and letting him decide what to do?”

  She ducked her head with a half-guilty gesture. “I guess I could have. But I didn’t, before, because . . . well, because it didn’t seem that important. And afterward, there were serious injuries.” She lifted her hand, rubbing her pudgy cheek with a nervous gesture. “By that time, I was getting scared. I didn’t want to see Mr. Bowen hurt, because he was . . . well, he was such a darned good guy. Maybe it doesn’t sound that way to you, with me telling you that he took bribes.” She gave me an earnest look. “But like I said, he didn’t keep that money. Oh, maybe a little for himself, but mostly he used it to help people. Also, for all I knew, maybe Mr. Bowen’s boss, Mr. Hanson, was in on it, too. If I went to him and told him the whole story, it would be just my luck to get fired.”

  That sounded credible to me. I went on. “What about later, after Christine Morris was killed and you suspected that her ex was framing Bowen? Why didn’t you go to the police? Or better yet, to Bowen’s defense attorney? He might have been able to build your testimony into his defense.”

  “Well, I did testify for Mr. Bowen,” she said. “I testified to the fact that he acted entirely normal in the office the morning after the murder. But by then, I was even more scared.” She sighed heavily. “Call me chicken if you want to. But I figured I’d better keep my mouth shut.”

  I could understand that. I’ve known witnesses who refused to testify for reasons not nearly as good as hers. After the fact, it’s always easy to be all noble and pure of heart and say that somebody should have said or done this thing or that thing—especially when it’s somebody else whose future is on the line. People do what they do, or what they feel they have to do. They get caught in one trap or another and they can’t see any way out. Who was I to judge?

  She sighed. “I suppose, if I’d thought the jury would find Mr. Bowen guilty, I would have gone to the police. But I couldn’t believe they’d convict him. And I was really just guessing, you know. About Doug Clark being the murderer, that is. I didn’t have any evidence. And I was afraid that if I told the police about the bribes, Mr. Bowen might have looked even more guilty when it came to the murder. I mean, he had taken money to let a balcony fall off a
building and injure a couple of girls—what would keep him from whacking his pain-in-the-patootie neighbor over the head with his golf club?” She lifted her shoulders and dropped them in a heavy shrug. “So I just kept my mouth shut. When he was acquitted, I felt like a thousand-pound weight was off my shoulders. I was free and clear, too, right along with Mr. Bowen.”

  There wasn’t any reply I could make to that. And anyway, she wasn’t finished.

  Her mouth tightened down to a hard line. “Now that I’ve told you all that bad stuff, China, I want to be sure you get this straight. What I know about the money Mr. Bowen took for overlooking a few code violations has nothing at all to do with the way I feel about Mr. Bowen the man. He was a good-hearted, solid-gold citizen who cared about this community and the people in it. He volunteered, he worked hard, he gave his time, he contributed money. What he did on the sidelines or under the table was no business of mine.”

  Except that she had made it her business when she put her ear to the keyhole or listened in on the phone to find out what was going on. Her failure to act on what she knew helped the criminals evade detection, which could make her party to the crime. But chapter 7 of the Texas Penal Code—Criminal Responsibility for the Conduct of Another—is complex. There might be a moral issue here, but there was no point in making a legal issue out of it. And as I said, who am I to judge? I nodded and kept my lawyerly mouth shut.

  A smile quirked her lips. “To tell God’s honest truth, it tickled me right down to the soles of my feet that the money came out of Douglas Clark’s big fat pot of ill-gotten gains and went straight to the Humane Society and the homeless shelter and the food pantry and all the other causes that Mr. Bowen supported. Douglas Clark would never have given them one thin dime.”

  I nodded. “Just a few more questions, if you don’t mind. You said you didn’t have any evidence that Douglas Clark killed his wife—other than your suspicions about his motive. Do you have any evidence that he framed Dick Bowen for the murder?”