A Bodkin for the Bride

by Patrice Greenwood

  The tearoom was cozy: soft music, a few voices of patrons in quiet conversation, a hint of aromatic piñon in the air from the fireplaces. Willow was waiting in one of the chairs by the entrance, her black jacket over a teal sweater setting off her pale hair, a silver heishi necklace spilling like a waterfall down her chest. As I went to greet her, the bells on the front door jingled.

  A man—stocky, bearded, with wary eyes—stepped in and closed the door gently behind him. In khaki trousers and a black-and-red plaid wool coat, he did not look like he was here for tea, so I assumed he was the reenactor.

  “Mr. Quentin?”

  “That’s right,” he said, nodding. “You Ms. Rosings?”

  “Yes, and this is Willow Lane,” I said as Willow rose from her chair. “She’s the owner of Spirit Tours of Santa Fe. Shall we—hic—go back?”

  As I led them down the hall to the dining parlor, I couldn’t help thinking that Mr. Quentin was rather older, and rather heavier, than I imagined the typical Civil War Soldier to have been. That was neither here nor there, though. If he knew his subject, then he was the right man for the job.

  “Here’s the dining parlor,” I said, showing them in. The table was set for a party of five; there must be a reservation later in the day.

  “This was Dusenberry’s office, correct?” he said.

  “His study, yes. You’re familiar with Captain Dusenberry?”

  He nodded, surveying the room with a keen eye. “In a manner of speaking. I’ve done an impression of him several times. Quartermasters aren’t called for very much, but I like to mix things up a little.”

  Not quite sure I understood that, I went on. “Willow will be bringing tour groups here in October, to finish their tours with a light tea. We’d like you to be he—hic—here to talk about the Captain.”

  “Do you want a first person impression, or just a talk?”

  “I’m not quite sure what you mean.”

  “First person is when I portray the individual. I dress like him, speak like him, converse as if I were him. I become him, in a sense.”

  “Oh! Well, I was thinking of having you in uniform...” I looked to Willow.

  “A talk would be best, I think,” she said. “We’ll be discussing his death, and that might be a little awkward if you’re doing an impression.”

  He nodded, unoffended. “Third person, then, but in uniform.”

  “Yes, please,” I said. “Would you be—hic—bringing a gun?”

  Dusenberry would have worn a sidearm. I usually carry a Navy revolver.”

  A whisper slid down my spine. I shook it off. The Navy revolver was a common choice, I reminded myself.

  “That’s fine, but please bring it unloaded.”

  Another nod. I began to think he was making a mental list. I revised my initial impression of him; he might look like a diminutive lumberjack, but I was getting the impression that he was a very intelligent individual.

  “How long should I speak?” he asked.

  “Fifteen or twenty minutes?” I said, looking to Willow for confirmation. “No more than half an hour.”

  “This will be at the end of the tour,” Willow said, “so they’ll be a little tired. Many of them will be along specifically to hear about Captain Dusenberry, though.”

  “Shouldn’t be any problem,” said Mr. Quentin. “I’ll do a short talk and then answer questions. If you’ll let me know what you’ll be saying about the captain, Ms. Lane, I’ll make sure to cover different points.”

  “That makes sense,” Willow said.

  “What would you charge for a half-hour talk?” I asked.

  “Oh, there won’t be any charge,” he said. “I do this as educational outreach. I’ll hand out a little flyer, if you don’t mind.” He reached into his coat pocket and produced a half-page flyer, neatly printed, promoting a local Civil War reenactor group.

  “I don’t mind at all, but do let me compensate you. We’re talking about quite a few dates.”

  Willow took a folded page out of her purse and gave it to Mr. Quentin. “Here’s the schedule. It’s all the Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays in October, plus two tours on Halloween. ”

  “I see,” he said, studying the page. “I’ll have to double-check that I’m available for all of these. May I keep this?”

  “Yes, that’s your copy,” Willow said.

  “Thank you.” He bowed slightly in her direction, a gesture I found charmingly old-fashioned.

  “If you’d prefer it, I can give you gift cards for afternoon tea as payment,” I said, doing a quick mental calculation. “Say, one card for every two talks?”

  His eyes lit with interest, and he turned to me with the first smile I’d seen from him and another bow. “I know several ladies who’d enjoy that. Thank you.”

  “Then it’s a deal,” I said, offering my hand.

  He shook it, with a grip that was firm but not crushing. “It is a deal.”

  We chatted a little more, and Willow and Mr. Quentin exchanged cards. As I walked with them to the front door, Willow fell back beside me.

  “We need to talk.”

  “I haven’t heard back,” I said.

  At the door, I offered Mr. Quentin my hand, which he shook politely. “Thank you for coming in,” I said. “I’m sure our customers will enjoy your talk very much.”

  He smiled, executed one of his small bows to me and another to Willow, and took his leave. Willow watched him go, looking thoughtful.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” I offered.

  “I can’t stay now,” she said. “I have a tour in half an hour, but I could come back afterward, if that’s all right. I do want to talk.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Four o’clock?”

  “Four is perfect, thanks.”

  I saw her out, then went upstairs to my desk. Still no word from Tony. I sifted through the message slips and decided to call Bennett Cole at the Museum. He invited me to come by that afternoon and look at some Colt Navy revolvers, and since I was going to be out anyway, I agreed.

  As I hung up, Kris came in, swinging a rather thin looking bank bag from her fingertips.

  “Is there anything in it?” I asked.

  “Yes. It’s a slow week, though.”

  I stood and accepted the bag. “I’ll be back in an hour or so. I’m st—hic—stopping by the museum. I’ll have my cell if you need me.”

  “You driving?”

  “No, I’ll walk. It’s not that heavy, and I like the rain.”

  “Have a nice walk. Don’t catch cold.”

  In a few minutes I was stepping out the front door and taking a deep breath of rain-scented air. A whisper of smoke overlaid it from the fireplaces. My office and my suite would benefit from the heat going up the chimneys. I made a mental note to buy a cord of firewood for the winter, opened my umbrella, and headed out.

  Pausing to look at my garden, I noted that it was time to go out with my shears and deadhead the roses. Chrysanthemums were blooming in the beds close by the house, and I smiled, remembering planting them a year ago. The garden was filling in nicely; still new, but no longer pitifully thin.

  I thought about Nat and Manny’s wedding, picturing where the ceremony would take place. We’d been going back and forth about a tent. There would be some shade from the trees to the south, and I wasn’t sure that a tent big enough for the whole wedding would fit in my garden. Plus, I didn’t know how one could be erected, unless it was put up in the neighboring parking lot and carried across the rosebushes. Standing umbrellas were a possible alternative. More discussion was in order.

  I walked on, enjoying the novelty of a wet day in Santa Fe. Very few pedestrians. The cars were, of course, in a hurry, but on the whole it was a peaceful scene. There was no waiting in the bank, so I was just inside long enough to warm up, and then off again, swinging toward the Plaza and the Palace of the Governors on my way back.

  Bennett Cole, a few years older than me and a few inches taller, with premature
ly-thinning brown hair and a caterpillar mustache, was dressed for the chilly weather in a sweater vest over a work shirt and jeans. He welcomed me with a smile and led me downstairs into the Palace’s basement, where I’d never been before. It was big—probably it ran under the entire Palace complex—and about as un-spooky as a basement could get. With fluorescent lighting and many steel cabinets of varying shapes and sizes, its atmosphere was closer to industrial than ancient.

  Nevertheless, this was a treasure-hoard of New Mexico history. I knew that only a small percentage of the museum’s collection of artifacts was on display at any given time. Knowing and seeing are two different things, though.

  “Wow,” I said. “I hadn’t realized the collection was this big.”

  “This is only part of it,” Bennett said, leading me to a tall standing cabinet. He pulled out a flat, shallow drawer in which lay half a dozen antique guns, all of the same size and shape. Some were in poor condition—pockmarked and showing signs of rust, the wooden handles partly decayed on a couple, one missing its trigger—though they were all clean.

  “These are Colt Navy revolvers,” Bennett said. “There were quite a lot of them in the territory around the time of the war.”

  They looked like classic cowboy guns, with big revolving cylinders and long barrels. Bennett picked one up and displayed it to me.

  “See that design on it? That’s why it’s called a Navy revolver.”

  I peered at the cylinder where he indicated and saw a finely-engraved scene of a ship, with either clouds or explosions, I wasn’t sure.

  “Not because it was—hic—used by the Navy?” I asked.

  “Right. Mostly it was used by civilians and soldiers. It was popular because it was lightweight, and could be carried easily in a holster.”

  “Lightweight?” I said, disbelieving.

  “Compared to earlier revolvers, it was.”

  I gazed at it, thinking it looked deadly enough. Heavy enough, still, to kill if used as a club, never mind the bullets.

  A weapon like this had killed Captain Dusenberry. Sudden sadness filled me.

  I looked at the carefully-typed cards that lay in the drawer beside the guns. Some listed the original owners’ names. Others confessed to a lack of knowledge about the items’ past.

  “I don’t suppose any of these belonged to the hic—Hidalgos.”

  “Well, that’s the disappointing news,” said Bennett. “I checked our records. None of the Navy revolvers in our collection belonged to the Hidalgo family, that we know of. I’m sorry.”

  I inhaled deeply and nodded. Disappointing, but not surprising.

  “That said,” he added, “it’s certainly possible that a Hidalgo owned one. It was a common gun.”

  “I see. Well, thanks.”

  “Any particular reason why you wanted to confirm that a Hidalgo owned a Navy revolver?”

  “Well, it’s the gun that killed Captain Dusenberry, I believe. Hic. And I’ve found some ... information that implies the Hidalgos might not have been pleased with him.”

  I hadn’t told Bennett about the stash of letters I’d found beneath the floor of my dining parlor. I knew I should; if I were virtuous, I’d donate the letters to the museum, but I felt reluctant to part with them. They were my link to Maria and the captain and their romance.

  “Even if we could prove that a Hidalgo owned a Navy revolver,” he said, “that wouldn’t be enough to lay Dusenberry’s murder at their door. There were just too many of the guns around.”

  “But if we did find a gun that belonged to the Hidalgos, wouldn’t ballistics be able to match it to the bullet?”

  “Maybe, if we had the bullet. As far as I know, we don’t.”

  I nodded. “Well, thanks for your ti—hic—time.”

  “You’re welcome. Good luck with your conundrum.”

  I glanced at him as we climbed the stairs back to the modern world, wondering why he’d chosen that word. He returned a grin, but didn’t elaborate.

  I walked home slowly. The rain had diminished to a faint drizzle, and for a few paces I left my umbrella closed, enjoying the moisture on my face.

  Finally I shielded myself from further dampening, and sighed. I wasn’t making much progress in solving Captain Dusenberry’s murder. Or Daniel Swazo’s, for that matter. For a corpse magnet, I was a pretty poor sleuth.

  In both cases, I was somewhat at a loss to identify a killer. I had potential motive if the Hidalgos were indeed set against Captain Dusenberry joining their illustrious family. But was murder really the only solution to that disagreement?

  I wished, for perhaps the hundredth time, that I had Captain Dusenberry’s side of the correspondence, not just Maria’s. Sonja at the archives had come up blank when I’d asked her for Maria Hidalgo’s papers. No doubt, Maria had either burned the captain’s letters or hidden them so well they were as yet undiscovered.

  A sudden desire to pull up the floor of the former Hidalgo hacienda gripped me. I suppressed it by shifting my thoughts to the more modern problem.

  Why would anyone want to kill Daniel Swazo? Or, if they didn’t actually want to kill him, why beat him up?

  Something to do with the meth. But every time I tried to picture him involved with drugs, my mind rebelled. My knowledge of him was scant, but my instinct in this case was strong.

  I knew very little about Daniel’s community, or even his family. To learn more I’d have to go to the pueblo and ask nosy questions, and I hesitated to intrude on them that way. I could ask to visit Iz, but that would be imposing on her. It didn’t feel right.

  This wasn’t my responsibility. Detective Walters would undoubtedly pester the people of Tesuque Pueblo more than enough. Maybe I could get Walters to share some of that information with me.

  Fat chance.

  It was almost four by the time I got back to the tearoom. I left my wet umbrella in the stand by the front door, hung my coat in the hall, and stepped into the gift shop, where Dee was helping a customer choose some leaf tea. Nat had stayed home because of the weather. I glanced at the reservation screen: the alcoves on the south side were all vacant. I could meet with Willow in Hyacinth, perhaps.

  Hyacinth was one of two tiny alcoves adjacent to the gift shop. They might eventually go away, if adding the space to the shop would be more profitable than keeping it for guests—a complicated equation on which Kris had been working for a month or so. But for now, they stayed, set off by screens and sharing the fireplace, which currently held the embers of a lovely fire. Hyacinth would be cozy.

  No, Violet. Willow would want to see the tribute to Vi. And we might talk about things that I wouldn’t want anyone in the gift shop to overhear.

  Dee’s customers departed. I asked her to bring cream tea for two to Violet at four o’clock. She checked her watch.

  “That’s in five minutes.”

  “Right, so you’d better get—hic—started. I’ll keep watch in case anyone comes in to browse.”

  Dee headed for the pantry, and I made a quick visit to the main parlor. One nice, older couple from Michigan sat in Lily; I chatted with them briefly and learned that this was their first time in Santa Fe. I made a couple of recommendations about things to see, then left them enjoying their tea.

  The only other party was a pair of young women in Iris, who were so deeply engrossed in conversation that I decided not to intrude on them. I headed back to the gift shop.

  The front door opened as I crossed the hall. It was Willow, wearing a black raincoat sprinkled with moisture. I led her back to Violet, where Dee had been quick to set two places for tea.

  “This is lovely,” Willow said as she removed the raincoat. “You’ve redone it.”

  “Let me take that for you. Yes, we wanted to honor Vi.”

  She nodded. “The portrait is perfect.”

  I stepped into the hall to hang up Willow’s coat. The shop was still empty, so I snagged a fresh log from the holder in Hyacinth and returned to Violet, whose fireplace (shared with
Dahlia) was back to back with the front one. One large chimney served both sides, and the same arrangement was reflected on the north side of the house, with a single chimney serving fireplaces in the main parlor and the dining parlor.

  Willow had made herself comfortable in one of the wing chairs in Violet. The embers in the fireplace matched those on the other side; I added the log and poked the fire back to life.

  “I haven’t heard back from Detective Aragón,” I said, taking the other chair.

  Willow leaned forward, reaching her hands toward the fire. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me, about Daniel Swazo.”

  “Oh?” I glanced toward the gift shop, trusting that no one was there to hear.

  She lowered her voice so that I could barely hear her. “I don’t believe knives are generally used in the preparation of meth for consumption.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m not an expert, but one hears about ‘cutting’ cocaine. Not so much with meth, I think. You could ask the detective. What I’m getting at is that it’s unusual to have found meth on the knife. For one thing, I would think it wouldn’t stick.”

  “Maybe their tests are ve—hic—very sensitive.”

  “Maybe. But why would a meth user handle the drug that way?”

  “I have no idea.” I tried to think of a different subject. Talking about the knife was making me really uncomfortable.

  “Well, neither have I,” Willow said. “It’s been bothering me. It doesn’t fit.”

  Dee came in with a pot of tea and a small tray of scones with clotted cream and lemon curd. “Thank you, Dee,” I said as she poured for us.

  She gave me a fleeting smile and left. Willow picked up her teacup. “This is lovely, thanks.”

  “Perfect on a rainy day,” I said, adding a dollop of milk to my cup.

  “Yes. I could get addicted to tea.”

  “I already am.”

  “Speaking of addictions, I don’t think Daniel was a drug user,” she added, helping herself to a scone.

  “I don’t think so either.”

  “Which means it fits even less.”

  I sighed. “There’s something I’m not understanding. That’s why I keep ha—hic—ving these dreams.”