Death Come Quickly

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “María Izquierdo,” I replied. I found it curious that she didn’t know the painting, especially since she had written her thesis on Mexican women artists. “I didn’t get a chance to ask Sharyn about it,” I added. “I’d like to find out more about the painter. She was apparently quite well-known.”

  Another uneasy hesitation, then she stepped back and put her hand on the doorknob. “I’ve read about Izquierdo, but I don’t know anything about her work.” She cocked her head, listening. “Oh, dear, Paul is calling. I’d better go and see what he’s up to.” She gave a resigned sigh. “It’s not a good idea to leave him alone too long, when he’s in this mood.”

  I nodded. “I’ll phone you in a day or two. Maybe he’ll be feeling better.”

  “Maybe he will,” she said with a sad little smile. “I hope so, anyway. Do call—I’m sure he’d like to see you if he could. And that will give me time to think about those pieces for your shop.”

  “The lilies of the valley would be especially nice,” I reminded her.

  She nodded and closed the door. I heard the latch click firmly.

  I got in the car, flicked on the air conditioner, and sat for a moment, thinking about how easily a health problem—mental health as well as physical—can derail even a happy marriage. Irene had every right to look forward to a long life with her husband. And now she was having to deal with the financial fallout of his erratic financial behavior and figure out how she could pay for whatever care he was going to require, which wouldn’t come cheaply, I was sure. It was good that she was painting again, of course, but very sad that she had to do it in order to pay the bills.

  I turned on the ignition and drove off. Thinking about Paul and Irene—and Felicity and her grandmother—made me sad. Illness and death changed everyone’s lives. I suddenly felt very grateful that I could go home to my contented marriage and our more or less financially secure house, where McQuaid and I and the kids, along with Gretchen and Jake, would be sitting down to supper in a couple of hours. We would laugh, tell jokes, mind our manners, tease each other a little, and love each other a lot. We would be a family.

  At home, in the kitchen, I scrubbed a batch of Yukon Gold potatoes from the spring crop in our garden—we never get many, but they are very good, especially for potato salad. When they were on the stove and the water was coming to a boil, I picked up my phone and dialed Justine Wyzinski. She wasn’t there, so I left a message on her answering machine.

  I had some questions for her. About Roberto Soto.

  • • •

  I had work to do after supper, so while the kitchen cleanup crew got busy, I went upstairs to our bedroom, stripped and showered, and pulled on the oversize T-shirt I sleep in. Then I flopped on the bed under the ceiling fan with the transcript of Richard Bowen’s trial. I read the best parts (Johnnie’s cross-examinations and the defense section of the trial) with some attention and skimmed the rest quickly. I also looked for the court record of the closed hearing at which Johnnie had offered up his alternative suspect, which should have been with the transcript but wasn’t. Maybe it would be in the case file in Aaron’s office.

  The transcript made it clear that the case had presented so many challenges for the prosecution that poor old Henry Bell simply didn’t stand a chance, even though he was ably aided and abetted from the bench by the Honorable Roy Lee Sparks. His Honor did his friend Ring-a-Ding the favor of allowing in the evidence seized during Barry Rogers’ warrantless search, probably because if he hadn’t, Bell would have had to drop the charges. The tainted evidence against Bowen was the only evidence there was. There wasn’t a word about the Morris Foundation, of course, and not much about Christine Morris’ art collection, except that there was one and that it was valuable enough to prompt her to install an alarm and a fence. There wasn’t much about her, either, and her ex-husband’s name barely entered into it. The trial was all about Dick Bowen.

  From the transcript, I could see that the prosecutor was building his case almost entirely on motive and opportunity. He called three witnesses to testify to Bowen’s hatred of the victim, who had accused him at several city council meetings of abusing his power on the zoning committee. Other witnesses testified that he hated her dogs, her chain-link fence, and her annoying security lights. Ring-a-Ding used these to build his simple theory of the crime. According to him, Bowen had come to the end of his rope one dark night, pulled on his gardening shoes, grabbed a club out of his golf bag, then dashed next door to beat the lady to death. Unfortunately, however, the Pecan Springs police had committed so many errors that the case against Bowen—which was based only on the golf club, the gardening shoes, and next-door proximity—was compromised from the get-go.

  Johnnie’s cross of the lead investigator, Barry Rogers, was a masterpiece of contained and biting sarcasm. He began by eliciting the information that Rogers had entered this case with a recent history of poorly managed investigations, one of them so full of errors that the judge had thrown it out. Johnnie got Rogers to admit that if he didn’t bring in a solid case on this one, he was in serious trouble. And then, over the course of one painful morning’s testimony, it emerged that Rogers had not properly secured the crime scene; that he had conducted a warrantless search of Bowen’s premises, based on the patently bogus assertion of “hot pursuit”; that he had not ordered the victim’s hands bagged to preserve any possible evidence; that the crime scene photographs taken by a junior police officer were so flawed as to be essentially worthless for forensic purposes; and that there was (or appeared to be, in the best of the photographs) a print of a different shoe in the pool of blood around the victim’s body. The second shoeprint was never investigated.

  Regarding the defendant, Rogers conceded that Bowen’s garage was widely known to be unlocked and that the main garage door was regularly left open so that the contents were visible from the street. Further, he admitted that he had not ordered a police canvass of the neighborhood in order to determine whether anyone had seen a person entering the unlocked garage (presumably to borrow Bowen’s gardening shoes and his golf club) or had noticed any suspicious activity at the Morris house on the night of the murder.

  Finally, it emerged that the medical examination of the corpse (performed in Bexar County, since Adams County had no ME at the time) had not determined whether Christine Morris had had recent sexual intercourse. Somehow or other, that essential part of the autopsy had either been overlooked or its results had not been recorded, nobody seemed to know which. I could just imagine Johnnie’s incredulous tone as he asked the artfully phrased question, “You mean to tell this court that no one determined whether the murdered woman had had sexual intercourse before she died?”

  And the subdued reply: “No, sir.”

  At which Johnnie must have rolled his eyes, for he requested that the question be read back to the witness, who (by now thoroughly confused) had answered, “Yes, I guess,” and then dejectedly, “Oh, hell, I don’t know.”

  I could hear Johnnie’s ringing disgust as he said, “This witness is excused,” and strode back to his seat.

  It was a Bad Day at Black Rock for Ring-a-Ding, who might have remembered a classic line from that film: “You want to register a complaint? To register a complaint, boy, you’ve got to have evidence. You got evidence?”

  Johnnie’s strategy was to challenge the credibility of the investigation, the evidence, and the witnesses, and he was off to a good beginning on cross during the prosecution’s case. When it came time to open for the defense, he put on a series of witnesses, each of whom reminded the jurors of what they already knew, that Bowen was a Good Samaritan who spent all his spare time contributing to the welfare of the community. Then he put on several witnesses, including Florabelle Gibson and Bowen’s boss, Jimmie Lee Hanson, both of whom testified that Bowen had come to work the morning after the murder as cheery as he always was—“not at all like a man who had bludgeoned his neighbor in a fit
of rage just a few hours before,” as Hanson put it.

  Johnnie also called the neighbor across the street, Mr. Davidson, who testified that Mr. Bowen was a “trusting sort” who often left his garage door open and had invited the neighbors to borrow his garden tools, as long as they were returned in good condition. “Kind and considerate,” was the way Mr. Davidson put it. “He’d go a mile to help you out.”

  As his final witness, Johnnie called Detective Barry Rogers. Judge Sparks wouldn’t let the defense offer up an alternative suspect, but he gave Johnnie some latitude in using the evidence to suggest that there was one. Under Johnnie’s questioning, Rogers testified, reluctantly, that the padlock on the inside of the back gate had been unlocked and the gate left open, presumably by Ms. Morris. That although the house contained a great many valuable paintings and Ms. Morris was concerned about theft, the alarm system in the house had been turned off at the console, presumably by her. And that there was an unopened bottle of champagne in the refrigerator and two crystal flutes on the kitchen counter. Johnnie could have brought out these facts on cross in the prosecution’s case, of course, but saving them for the defense made a much greater impact.

  All these facts added up, Johnnie said in his closing argument, to the likely presence of someone whom Ms. Morris expected, who had come in through the back gate, carrying the defendant’s golf club and wearing his shoes.

  “But the police don’t have a clue about this person,” Johnnie said, with his trademark sarcasm, “because they didn’t bother to ask the neighbors what they might have seen or heard. They had already made up their minds that my client was guilty, and that assumption led them to conduct a sloppy, careless, incompetent investigation. Ladies and gentlemen, the unlocked gate, the silenced alarm, the champagne glasses, the possible bloody print of another shoe—they all add up to a reasonable doubt. And when there’s doubt, you must acquit.”

  To which the jury, after deliberating for a very brief two hours and twenty-two minutes, agreed. They found Richard Bowen not guilty of the murder of Christine Morris. And that was that. Time to break out the bubbly.

  But who had killed her? In the process of reading, I learned that Douglas Clark had a very firm alibi for the night of the murder. Like the dog that didn’t bark in the night, he was in the hospital, recovering from an unscheduled emergency appendectomy. As far as the police were concerned, that removed him from the suspect list. They didn’t appear to have considered whether he might have hired a hit man to do the dirty work for him.

  And they didn’t reopen the case, either, after Bowen was acquitted. I’ll bet if I knocked on Bubba Harris’ door right now and asked him if he thinks they got the right man, he’d say, “You damn betcha we got him! His weapon, his shoes. It was him, all right.”

  As for Dick Bowen, he had insisted on testifying in his own defense and had done quite a credible job of it. “I have nothing whatsoever to hide,” he insisted—although of course he did, if Florabelle Gibson was to be believed, or if I was to credit Johnnie’s remark that his client wasn’t exactly pure. Bowen was hiding a big pocketful of bribes, paid to him by Douglas Clark. But of course, none of that was brought up. The transcript shed no light at all on that little caper, which now appeared to me to be completely irrelevant.

  Or rather, if there was any relevance, I wasn’t seeing it. And when McQuaid came into the room and began to strip for bed, I was happy to lay the transcript aside and get on with . . . um, more immediately relevant and interesting matters.

  • • •

  I was up early the next morning, and dressed in a slim khaki skirt, brown tank top, colored scarf, and low heels for my one-day excursion to Houston. I was putting on my makeup (I was a little out of practice because I don’t wear it very often) when McQuaid asked me where I was going. I told him I was planning to drive down to Houston for the day to see Lucia Bettler, who teaches cooking classes and owns and manages an herb shop called Lucia’s Garden.

  It was true. Lucia is a good friend, and I try to see her whenever I’m in Houston. She’s a great fan of the work of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and I thought she might be able to tell me something about María Izquierdo. I had phoned her the evening before, to make sure she’d be in the shop today.

  Of course, I was seeing someone else, too. But McQuaid knows Aaron Brooks and doesn’t trust him—not because he’s jealous, necessarily, although that might be part of it. But they had butted heads in a murder trial when McQuaid was with Houston Homicide, and McQuaid still remembers. I would tell him tonight, after the fact, when he could see that I was home safe and sound—and entirely unmolested.

  The sky was a gloomy gray, overcast with low clouds heavy with moisture scudding up from the Gulf. Unfortunately, in Texas, clouds don’t necessarily signal rain. They just mean that the day will most likely be a bad hair day, if your hair is inclined to get lank when the weather turns muggy, the way mine does. I wasn’t in a very good mood, anyway. I hate the drive to Houston—or rather, I hate the last sixty miles of it, when the traffic picks up and everybody drives as if they are doing laps on the Indianapolis Speedway on Memorial Day.

  It’s odd, but I don’t remember feeling this way when I lived and worked in Houston, when my whole life—every personal and professional moment of it—was spent in the fast lane, actual and metaphorical, pedal to the metal as hard as I could to stay ahead of the competition. I guess I was so habituated to the insane speed at which everybody operated that I simply didn’t notice. Maybe all of us were like that, frogs swimming in water that is rapidly coming to a boil, and we didn’t notice a thing.

  I notice now. Life in Pecan Springs isn’t nearly as simple as I had expected it to be. But it is definitely slower and sweeter, and the commute between our house in the country and my herb shop and gardens in town is a cakewalk. If I had to drive on the Houston streets and freeways five days a week, every hair on my head would be gray and my nails would be bitten down to the bloody quick.

  Last year, McQuaid (whose watchword is safety first when it comes to cars and guns) bought me one of those hands-free cell phone devices to use when I’m driving. It came in handy today, because there were several calls. The first one was from Brian, who couldn’t find his favorite shirt (it was in the dryer, which is totally off his radar). What that boy will do about his laundry when he goes off to college next month is beyond me. Do they teach Washing and Drying 101?

  The second call was from Caitlin, who told me with great excitement that Mrs. Banner (the neighbor who is having a baby) has a friend who has a rooster who would love to have some hens for his very own (he lives with another rooster, who is selfishly hogging all the hens for himself). Mrs. Banner’s friend hates the thought of having her rooster for Sunday dinner, so she would like to find him a new home. If we adopted him, he and the girls could have s-e-x, couldn’t they? And then the girls wouldn’t just have eggs, they would have baby chicks, wouldn’t they? And she would call him Lucky Boy, because he was lucky to escape being Sunday dinner.

  I deferred a ruling on the request until we had a chance to sit down and discuss the pros and cons of giving Lucky Boy his very own harem of hens. But I did remark that if the girls were allowed to have baby chicks, there wouldn’t be just one rooster. There would be more roosters (the gender distribution of chickens is probably like that of humans, I would guess, approximately fifty-fifty, boys and girls). And more roosters would lead to the same uncomfortable situation in which Mrs. Banner’s friend found herself. Are we willing to have roast roosters for Sunday dinner, and if so, who will do the terrible deed? This question was met with a long silence, and then Caitlin made kissy noises and went off to think about it.

  The third call was from Ruby, who had returned from her Web-surfing expedition with some interesting information about María Izquierdo.

  “She was born in 1902 in a small Mexican village,” Ruby read from her notes. “When she was fourteen, she was marr
ied off to an army colonel and had three children, one, two, three, just like that. It’s probably fair to say that this wasn’t her idea. In 1923, her husband moved the family to Mexico City, where she took art classes whenever she could manage to get away. Four years later, she left her husband and children and went to study art full-time.”

  “Really?” I broke in. “That was brave.”

  “Oh, you bet,” Ruby said. “And there’s more. At the Academy of San Carlos, María met Rufino Tamayo. He was an artist, and it wasn’t long before they were lovers. She also met Diego Rivera, who took her under his wing. She had her first exhibition in 1929, in Mexico City—and that same year, her work was shown in New York. In fact, she was the very first Mexican woman to have a New York exhibition. Then, in 1936, she had an exhibit in Paris.”

  “My goodness,” I said, checking my rearview mirror. There was a large truck on my bumper and I sped up. “She sounds important.”

  “She was, apparently. Her work was praised everywhere. She and Tamayo lived together for four years, but he left her in 1933 for a younger woman. She was distraught, and the breakup led to a depression that affected her painting for several years. A French poet named Artaud wrote that her paintings have the ‘color of cold lava, as if in the semidarkness of a volcano.’”

  “Ah,” I said, remembering the painting on the wall. Betrayal, desolation, loss, unbearable pain, symbolized by the flower. Muerte llega pronto.

  “In 1945,” Ruby went on, “María was invited to paint a mural in Mexico City. But she had made some powerful enemies by speaking out against some of the prevailing trends in Mexican art, and they were able to block the commission.” She took a deep breath. “After that, her career suffered. She began having nightmares. She painted one of them—she called it Sueño y Pensamiento, Dreaming and Thinking. I’ve seen a photograph of it, China. She’s painted herself holding her own severed head out of a window, while her headless body disappears—literally—into the distance. The year after that, she suffered a debilitating stroke. It more or less ended her artistic life. She died a few years later.”