No Harm (The Kate Teague Mysteries Book 1)

by Wendy Hornsby

  “That didn’t stop her, though, did it?”

  “No.”

  “What did she want?”

  “Power. She had influence; she got a lot of people together so they could get business deals going. They’d thank her, sometimes give her presents, but she’d be shut out of the real decision making. It galled her. I think she might have been trying to put together something on her own. That’s why I told you about Sy Ratcher. He might have been involved.”

  “Ratcher is a pipsqueak, operates in a muzzy area somewhere beyond the letter of the law. Your mother would work with him?”

  “She might. He’s sort of an old family friend.”

  “I’ll check him out,” Tejeda shrugged. “Since Dolph had charge of the whole pile, your mother was a bigger threat to him than anyone.”

  “I suppose. But he quietly blocked her at every turn. That’s why she went to the press. She tried to pass herself off as a poor, dispossessed widow trying to protect her sick brother-in-law, but it backfired. People in this town have a lot of respect for Dolph. And for Miles.”

  “What about your mother? She must have had some support. Who were her close friends?”

  “Close friends?” Kate paused to think. It was a sad business, trying to find anyone really close to Mother. “Mina, of course, because she was family. And me, I guess, though she was pretty mad at me. She spent a lot of time with Uncle Miles out of a sense of duty.”

  “No one outside the family?”

  “Mother had a way of alienating people,” Kate said. “She had a big social circle. But no one was really close.”

  “No one?” He seemed skeptical.

  “A long time ago Mother, Mina, and Susan Ratcher…”

  “Sy Ratcher’s wife?” he interrupted.

  “No. His stepmother. Anyway, the three women spent a lot of time together. They were in school together, their fathers were partners in a stock brokerage, they married three brothers. Though they drifted apart over the years, I think there was still a bond between them, in spite of all their hardships.”

  “What hardships?” Tejeda asked.

  “Besides the usual deaths, divorces, and squabbles, there was a big scandal in their fathers’ stock brokerage. Happened about the time they finished school. A lot of money disappeared.”

  “Where’d it go?”

  “The way the three families hung together, I suspect they all took a share. But, in the end, Mina’s father got the worst of it.”

  “Why?”

  “He was the only one who actually went to prison, died there a few years later. My mother’s father committed suicide before they went to trial, and Susan’s father made a deal, gave some evidence I think, and he got off with a fine.”

  “Their fathers shafted one another, but the girls stayed together?”

  “Sure,” Kate smiled grimly. “My other grandfather, Grandpa Archie, was the defense attorney. When he lost, he gave the girls each a consolation prize.”

  “What was it?”

  “A son to marry when the scandal had destroyed their prospects.”

  “Just the same,” he smiled, relaxing back toward the personality she was more familiar with, “you’d expect some resentment among the women.”

  “No.” Kate shook her head. “They were all in the same boat, victims of the same crime.”

  “Dammit!” He hit his hand with a fist. “You did it again. Every time I try to get you to tell me why someone might want to get at your mother, you tell me why he or she wouldn’t.”

  She looked at him. “I can’t tell, are you really mad or what?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just trying to figure out what I’m doing here. You’re certainly not what I expected from a detective. One minute we’re running on the beach, the next we’re sitting around your living room and I’m getting the third degree. I’m half-expecting six dancing dwarfs and seduction by a band of gypsies.”

  He looked at his watch. “We don’t have time for seduction.”

  “Abduction.” She felt her cheeks redden. “I meant abduction.”

  “Either way, we don’t have time for it. You ready to go?”

  She stood up. “Go where?”

  “Your house, of course.”

  “With you, one never knows.”

  Tejeda held the front door open for Kate, then closed and carefully locked it after them. Twirling the key ring on his finger he walked beside her to the car. “Abduction? Freud said there are no mistakes.”

  “Freud was mistaken,” she said, getting into the car.

  “Could be.” Tejeda went around to the back of the car and unlocked the trunk. In the crack between the car body and the open trunk lid she could see him, a strip of shirt, a flash of dark blue tie, but she couldn’t see what he was doing. The trunk closed with a whoosh, bouncing the car. He came back to her side of the car cradling something behind the crook of one arm.

  “Hold on a sec,” he said, opening Kate’s door. He squatted in the opening, the door shielding him while he opened his suit coat and tucked a revolver into his shoulder holster.

  “Are we gunning for somebody?”

  “No.” He checked his watch again, covering some embarrassment, she thought. “It’s my kid. First day of the new term they let them out early. I just want to make sure her first day went all right.”

  “Your kid? Is that what we’re doing here?”

  “Sure,” he said, standing up. “What’d you think this was, an abduction?”

  An electronic bell shattered the stillness. Kate looked around for its source, and noticed for the first time the school at the far end of the block. Almost immediately, young teenagers came swarming out of the school gates, making irregular progress toward the street, stopping to make contact with someone, then racing to catch up with someone else, like a wave hitting the pilings of a pier before rushing to the beach.

  Tejeda adjusted his jacket over the holster and shut the door. Hands thrust deep in his pockets, he walked slowly around to the front of the car, watching the emerging children carefully. He straightened as a small cluster of girls came swinging out of the schoolyard.

  Kate strained forward to watch them. All in new, first-day-of-school outfits, their little girl bodies were perched atop long gangly legs, and anchored to the sidewalk by woman-sized feet, as if they were growing from the ground up. Kate smiled to herself, remembering how she had hated private school uniforms and had longed for the freedom to dress like the girls in public school. Though they offered a rainbow splash of color, these girls seemed just as much alike as she remembered the girls in uniforms looking.

  A small girl with long black hair spotted Tejeda and detached herself, amoebalike, from the group. She came down the sidewalk, hair swinging in syncopation with her quick step. As if straining to hold himself back, Tejeda began to walk slowly to meet her.

  “Daddy, what are you doing here?” Kate heard her say in a voice that failed to disguise its pleasure.

  Tejeda bent and kissed the top of her gleaming head. The girl made a quick glance around to see if anyone was watching, as if unsure whether she should be pleased or embarrassed by the presence of her father. Tejeda relieved her of an untidy stack of books and papers. He made a mock-serious face as he aligned the edges of her stack before handing it back. Hands thrust deep in his pockets again, he walked with her until they were abreast of Kate’s car window.

  “Theresa, this is Mrs. Teague.”

  Theresa gave Kate an open appraisal with big eyes, duplicates of her father’s. “Hi.”

  “Hello.” Kate smiled, imagining what the girl must be thinking, to see this grubby-looking woman with a black eye and assorted bruises and abrasions in her father’s car.

  Tejeda gave the child a gentle shove. “Get along. Remember, no TV till you get the algebra done.”

  “Yeah, Daddy.” She hooked a new-looking gym bag over her shoulder, then gave Kate one last survey before turning toward a trim gree
n house with a tricycle on its patch of lawn.

  “Hey you,” he called to her back. “No soda pop at Mrs. Murphy’s.”

  “Aw, Dad.”

  “It gives you zits.”

  She flipped her hair and disappeared into the house. Tejeda watched the door for a few moments, a softness in his eyes before turning back to Kate.

  “Great kid,” he said, getting into the car.

  “With this shiner, she probably thinks I’m a criminal on the way to the slammer.”

  He chuckled. “That, or something worse. She has a cinematic imagination.”

  “Is she your only child?”

  “No. My boy’s a freshman at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in marine biology and surfing.”

  “You have custody of Theresa?”

  “Sure.”

  It intrigued Kate. “Is your ex-wife away working?”

  “No.” Tejeda pulled into the stream of station wagons flowing from in front of the school. “Oh, well, maybe. I don’t know what she’s doing right now. She divorced Theresa and me a year ago. Last I heard from her she was heavily into Hopi mysticism.” He smiled grimly at Kate. “Adolescence is a piece of cake next to the forties.”

  Kate saw a shadow of pain in his smile, like a vein of ore, a bump on the surface that runs deep into the earth. There was something about his silence, as if he were waiting for her to make the next move, to continue the subject or drop it. She cleared her throat. “Adolescence is a hard time for a girl to be without a mother.”

  “Theresa’s okay. In fact, I think she’s handled it a whole lot better than I have. She’s found a sort of mother-substitute next door. She goes to Mrs. Murphy’s every day ’til I get home. Mrs. Murphy has a new baby and a two-year-old. Theresa helps out and Mrs. Murphy mothers her a little in return.”

  “Sounds like a good arrangement,” Kate said.

  “Yeah. You know what’s been the hardest part?”

  She hesitated a moment, expecting him to say something about the cold side of the bed at night. “What?”

  “Food. Neither of us can cook.” When Kate laughed, he smiled. “What was hardest for you?”

  “Swallowing my pride and moving in with my mother.”

  “You didn’t have to,” he said. “You could have afforded a place of your own.”

  “Sure. But I wanted to keep an eye on her. And there was another problem.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t cook.”

  His laugh was a short bark. “Did he get custody of the cook?”

  “He was the cook.”

  “Life’s tough.” Tejeda turned onto Ocean Boulevard, forcing his smog-controlled car to overtake a city bus. When the car had stopped pinging, he gave the seat beside Kate a tentative pat. “Thanks for coming along. You’re a good sport. We could have played it by the book and waited at your place for the surveillance guy to show up. But lately, Theresa needs to know I’m there for her.”

  “I understand,” Kate said. She admired the love he had for his daughter, but it also hit that sore spot in her that longed for a child. A siren wail, like a baby crying at first, broke into her thoughts and upset the quiet of the beach front.

  Tejeda slowed around the last curve before her house. “Gate’s open,” he said. “I told Green to keep it closed.”

  Kate looked up. “The gate moves slowly. Someone probably just came in or went out. Or they’re expecting somebody.”

  The siren caught up to them. An ambulance, its bulk swaying precariously as it sped around the curve behind them, gave three sharp warning blasts on its horn.

  Getting out of its way, Tejeda pulled through the open gates and into the courtyard with a sharp jerk on the wheel. The force knocked Kate’s battered shoulder painfully against the door. But the panicky sound of the siren stuck with them, following dangerously close behind them as if to push through the gate.

  Tejeda pulled to the curb directly in front of Kate’s house, and the ambulance passed, braking to a stop in front of them. The sound of the siren wound down from a whine to flat groan, and that’s when Kate heard Esperanza, crying as she ran frantically across the lawn toward them.

  Tejeda was out of the car and sprinting toward Esperanza before the engine had stopped. He caught her by the arms and was talking to her while Kate, awkward in her terror, fumbled ineffectually with the door handle. Finally, she was out of the car, but she stood frozen on the shimmering hot bricks, not wanting, for an instant, to know what horrible thing had happened.

  Two ambulance attendants brushed past Kate, nearly colliding with her. Following them, like a cyclist in a jet stream, she ran to Esperanza.

  “It’s Mr. Miles,” Esperanza sobbed, dropping to her knees in anguish. “He is dying.”

  SEVEN

  “HE WAS FINE this morning.” Mina punctuated with a cardboard cup of vending machine coffee, her angst apparent with the ever-higher waves of tepid coffee sloshing over the rim. “We talked, had a nice gossip, a little reminiscing. He seemed just fine. I can’t understand this. Damn!”

  Taking advantage of a lull between gestures, Kate took the cup from her aunt’s hand and put it down in its puddle on the cold hospital floor. “Last night he said he was a little dizzy. I wish I hadn’t let him talk me out of calling the doctor.”

  “But this morning he was great,” Mina said. “Not dopey like he is sometimes when he’s on heavy medication. He was more like his old self than I’ve seen him for a long time. Then when Esperanza took his lunch to him as usual, there he was, dead to the world. God, he looked so awful.” Mina looked a little ill herself. “I don’t know how much more we can take, Kate. First your mother. Now this.”

  “Do you believe bad luck comes in threes?” Kate touched the bruise under her eye.

  Mina put her face close to Kate’s, all the pixie sweetness turned down in a frown as she gave a close examination. “Watch out, someone around here is likely to mistake you for a casualty case and find you a bed. Didn’t the leeches work?”

  “Not you, too?” Kate groaned. She leaned back against the slick plastic chair. “God, I hate this place. The ‘dying place’ I used to call it. I remember sitting here with Mother, day after day, waiting for Daddy to die.”

  “You were barely five years old.” Mina took Kate’s hand. “You remember that?”

  “I wish I could forget. Miles and Mother took me in to see him, to say good-bye.” She shivered involuntarily, thinking about it. He’d been unbelievably pale, ghostlike, yellow from the cancer eating his liver. In her mind’s camera she had two pictures of him, one of the big, handsome, forever-sunburned sportsman, the other the wasted figure sunken in a high white bed. Somehow, his ocher-tinged face merged with Mother’s as Kate had last seen her in the morgue downstairs. The dying place. Kate squirmed irritably in her chair. “What’s keeping Dolph and Carl? They’ve been talking with the doctors a long time.”

  “We don’t have to sit here,” Mina said. “Let’s go down to the cafeteria. The nurse can page us there.”

  “Give them five more minutes.”

  She leaned back and waited for what seemed like an eternity, watching the long, empty corridor beyond the intensive care waiting room, expecting every shadow to be Dolph and Carl with news about Miles. A succession of nurses and orderlies crossed her line of vision, and with each she tensed, then sat back, disappointed. Finally two vague shapes appeared outlined in front of the hot white window at the end of the corridor. They moved amorphously toward her, their reflections shimmering on the polished floor like a mirage. She wanted so much for it to be Carl and Dolph that she couldn’t trust her eyes when they loomed out of the white background together. Only when she heard Carl’s voice as he spoke quietly to Dolph could she believe he was more than a mirage.

  Rising, she reached out for Carl to hurry his approach. The realness of his hot, rough tweed coat as he embraced her was beautifully comforting. Her gesture had been impulsive, something akin to muscle memory, but when he kissed her she knew he
had misinterpreted it as an expression of affection. Then she felt slightly abashed, as if she had taken something from him under false pretenses. Nervously, she patted the front of his jacket. “What’s the word?”

  Carl held her hand against his chest. “Looks like a grand mal seizure, but he might have taken something. He’s in a coma. We’ll know more when he comes around.”

  “When he comes around?” Kate asked for reassurance.

  “If.” Carl shrugged. “It’s too early to tell. May have some heart complications. Could be a long wait. Dolph, do you want to take Mina home? I have to be downtown before City Hall closes, but I can stay here with Kate for a while, just in case.”

  As if weighted with grief, Dolph sat down beside Mina, taking her tenderly in his arms. They looked so sweet together, Kate thought, so much a part of each other. Before long she would come here to perform this death watch for one of them, and she had to swallow the tearful lump in her throat. Which one first, she wondered? But it was too hard to imagine Dolph or Mina living without the other.

  “Shall we go, Mina dear?” Dolph asked.

  “Not yet,” Mina said. “I want to stay. I want to be here when he wakes up.”

  “Sweetheart,” Dolph said, “it could be weeks.”

  “So?” She was firm. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll wait. He’d be scared to death if he woke up alone in this place. He’d think we’d committed him again.”

  A warm hand gripped Kate’s shoulder from behind. She turned, half-expecting it to be Lieutenant Tejeda, who had disappeared after he’d driven her to the hospital. Instead, Esperanza stood there, framed against the empty hall beyond.

  “I will wait here tonight,” Esperanza announced. “You all go home and eat the dinner I left for you.”

  Kate kissed her lightly, feeling relieved of a great burden. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course. You see,” she said, pulling a thermos and a book out of her large handbag. “I am prepared for the night. You go. I will call you if there is anything to tell you.”

  “You’re an angel,” Kate said gratefully.

  “And you,” Esperanza scolded Kate, “are in not so good shape yourself. You-know-what are in their jar under the kitchen sink, waiting for you.”