Blood Orange: A China Bayles Mystery

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Charlie Lipman is a big guy, balding, thick through the chest and hips, and perennially untidy, with cigar and cigarette ashes scattered liberally on his rumpled suit, coffee stains on his tie, and a shirt left over from the day before. It’s hard to tell whether this country-lawyer look is part of his act or the consequences of a life without a significant other. All I can tell you is that, once upon a time, he was trim and rather good-looking and smiled nicely, just like everybody else. Now, his shoulders sag, the pouches under his eyes sag onto his fleshy cheeks, and his belly sags over his belt. He doesn’t smile much anymore, and when he does, he doesn’t look like he means it. I don’t know whether his profession has soured him, or whether a string of unhappy love affairs are the cause of his unhappiness. I worry that his drinking and his personal problems, whatever they are, are taking the edge off his professional abilities. Even McQuaid says Charlie’s not quite as sharp as he used to be.

  Maybe. But he needed only a few moments to see what I had seen in the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom. And he saw something else—or rather, he didn’t see something he was expecting to see. In search of it, he opened the drawers in the bedroom dresser, looked under the bed and quickly through her suitcase, then checked the shelves in the closet and the cupboards in the bathroom and kitchen.

  We were standing in the bedroom, and I saw his glance flick across the bed and note that it had been slept in, but only by one person. Kelly hadn’t entertained an overnight guest. He pulled out a cigarette, caught my warning look, and put it away.

  “Were you here when she moved in?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I checked her in on Friday afternoon, about five o’clock. I walked her through the house, showed her the controls for the air conditioning, the breakfast arrangements, the locks on the doors, the emergency phone numbers, my home phone, that kind of thing.”

  I don’t want my guests to be unduly alarmed, but security is always on my mind—not so much when there’s a couple, but certainly when a woman is staying here alone. The cottage is on the alley, and the nearest neighbor is Mary Beth Jenkins, on the opposite side. And then there’s old Mr. Cowan. I usually tell my guests that they are likely to hear his dog, a yappy little Peke named Miss Lula, who feels it her duty to alert the neighborhood to every trespassing cat, dog, and bird.

  “How did she seem?” Charlie asked. “Was she nervous? Concerned? Did she say anything about why she was staying here? Or mention anything about—” He glanced at me under his eyebrows. “Her dealings with me? Her job?”

  “She was a little nervous, maybe,” I said.

  Come to think of it, more than a little, although she’d been trying not to show it. In her mid-thirties, pretty, with short-cropped blond hair and a wholesome girl-next-door face that doesn’t require a lot of makeup, Kelly had reminded me that we’d once worked together on a couple of garden projects and asked if I ever needed help in the shop gardens. I’d said something like, “Sure, love to have you,” which was definitely the truth. I can use all the volunteer help I can get.

  “She didn’t say anything about you,” I added. “Or about her job. She let me know that staying here had something to do with a family situation. She said she was getting a divorce.” If I’d thought about it, I probably would have attributed her nervousness to that. Now I wondered why he was asking about her job.

  He nodded toward the open suitcase. “Was that all she brought? Just her bag?”

  “No, she—” I stopped, suddenly remembering. “She had her computer with her. It was in one of those black wheelie cases that are designed to carry a laptop and a printer or a scanner. And she made a point of getting the Wi-Fi password and the login procedure, so I thought she might be intending to use it.”

  “Yes. Her computer.” Something was going on behind Charlie’s eyes. “Which doesn’t seem to be here now.”

  He was right. There weren’t many places where she might have stashed the case, and we had already looked in all of them. I paused, wanting to cover all the bases, then suggested what seemed to me to be a reasonable alternative.

  “Maybe she decided to take it with her. When she left, I mean.”

  Charlie gave me a reproving look that said, Can’t you do better than that? “This is her purse, I assume.” He went to the shoulder bag on the dresser, opened it, and silently held up her car keys.

  We already knew she hadn’t taken her car. “She could have gone away with someone,” I said lamely.

  In answer, Charlie reached back into the handbag. “Without this?” He pulled out a red leather wallet. “You might not carry a lot of money around with you, but I’ll bet you don’t go anywhere without your ID and your credit cards.” He dropped the wallet back into the purse and fished again. “And here’s this.” He held up her cell phone. “You go places without your cell, do you?”

  That did it. “Look. I’m not trying to intrude on attorney-client privilege, Charlie. But Kelly Kaufman is a sweet young woman, and I care what happened to her. What’s more, she is my guest, and she seems to have disappeared from my premises. So if you have any idea where she is and with whom, I would appreciate hearing it. If you don’t, I think we ought to let the police know what’s happened.” I paused. “Just in case,” I added. I didn’t like to think what that might mean.

  Charlie thought for a moment, pushing his lips in and out, then gave me a nonanswer. “If I did have an idea, you already know I’m not gonna tell you what it is. But I have no objection to you callin’ the cops. Just in case.” He took out his phone. “But let me make a couple of other calls first.”

  He went out on the deck and closed the door behind him—checking with a member of Kelly’s family, I assumed. Her husband, maybe, or somebody else who might have a line on where she was.

  But he must have been unsuccessful. When he came back, he said, “No problem with me if you want to call the cops, China.” Lawyers involve the police only when they can no longer avoid it—that is, only when not to call might result in a bit of unlawyerly unpleasantness, such as an obstruction of justice charge. If the call was to be made, I would be the one making it. He eyed me with wry amusement. “You want to go straight to the top and call your buddy Chief Dawson?”

  There’s no personal animosity between Charlie and Sheila that I know of, just a mutually wary professional respect. They have been known to get crosswise occasionally, however, since Charlie represents his fair share of the men and women arrested by Sheila’s officers. Every now and then he accuses her of kowtowing to the politicos on the city council and she charges him with being anti-cop, but it’s a kind of ritualistic sparring. They haven’t come to blows. Yet.

  “We don’t need the chief,” I said. “Let’s just get somebody over here who will put this situation on the record.” I reached into my jeans pocket, pulled out my cell phone, and punched in 911.

  Twenty minutes later, the officer—a slight but serious-looking young Latina—was following us through the house, asking all the right questions and making detailed notes. When we got to the bedroom, she opened the doors onto the deck, looked around, and said exactly what I’d been expecting to hear.

  “There’s no sign of a struggle and nothing to suggest that Ms. Kaufman didn’t leave with a friend who dropped by unexpectedly.” She glanced at Charlie. “Maybe she just forgot about her appointment with you.” She looked at me. “And left in such a hurry that she forgot to take her purse and lock the door.”

  “Left without breakfast, huh?” I said skeptically.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time. You’d be amazed by what people do when they’ve got something urgent on their minds.” The officer paused, then added significantly, “Given all that, do either of you want to file a missing persons report?”

  Charlie wasn’t looking at me, which I took to be a strong signal. “Not right now,” I said. In Texas, there’s no official waiting time for a missing persons repo
rt. “I would appreciate it if you’d give me the ID on your incident report, though. I’ll call with an update if I have any new information to add.”

  The officer nodded. “Here it is,” she said, and I wrote down the number she gave. “I suggest that you lock this place until Ms. Kaufman shows up again,” she said. Or not, I thought, which would make it a crime scene.

  After the officer left, I looked for the key and found it on the bedroom dresser, lying in plain sight right next to the shoulder bag. I put it in my pocket. If Kelly wanted to get back in, she’d have to get in touch with me. I scribbled two notes with my cell number on both. I would post them where she would see them when she came back. When, I told myself firmly. Not if.

  “Nothing more to do here,” Charlie said. “I need to get on my way.”

  Accompanying him to the front door, I said, “I assume that your phone calls went to Kelly’s husband. And the hospice where she works.”

  Charlie considered, then decided he could tell me that much. “To her husband, yes. He hasn’t heard from her since last Thursday. But not to the hospice. She doesn’t work there anymore.”

  “Oh, yeah?” That was news to me. “Where does she work?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “Give me a break,” I said impatiently. “That’s not privileged.”

  He thought about that, frowned, and gave in. “I believe she’s currently unemployed.” He opened the door to leave, then thought of something else. “Hey, China, would you tell McQuaid I’m not going to need him for that El Paso job? Instead, I want him to go down to Brownsville for me. Not right away—maybe in a couple of weeks.”

  “But he’s already in El Paso,” I reminded him gently. “He drove out there last Thursday.” If Charlie had forgotten that McQuaid was clocking billable hours on his tab, he really must be losing his grip.

  Charlie chuckled, happy to put me in my place. “Well, if McQuaid’s in El Paso, it’s not on my nickel. In fact, he hasn’t worked for me for over a month now. He knew that the El Paso investigation might not gel. So tell him Brownsville instead. Or don’t tell him anything—I’ll call him next week, when I know what’s what.”

  I stared at him, feeling suddenly disoriented. “But he called me last night from El Paso, Charlie. He mentioned talking to a former cop buddy—Willard Beck—at the Border Patrol Museum there.” I had assumed that his visit to the museum had something to do with the case he was working on, although now that I thought of it, I didn’t know that for sure. He and Beck had worked together in homicide, back in Houston. Maybe he’d just dropped in to catch up on the news.

  “And I know he said he was working for you,” I added.

  Charlie raised one eyebrow, thinking about that, then gave me a casual Don’t-ask-me-I-don’t-know-a-thing-about-it shrug—what guys do when they’re covering for a friend. He raised a hand. “If you hear from Kelly, tell her I need to talk to her. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. I shut the door and leaned against it, frowning, still trying to puzzle this out. McQuaid had called me late the night before from his room at the Holiday Inn in El Paso. Of course, he hadn’t talked about the investigation he was working on—he rarely did that, and I rarely asked about it. As I had told Ruby, I’m out of the crime business and I try to keep it that way. But if he wasn’t working for Charlie, what was he doing out there?

  And then another thought: he hadn’t called from the phone in his room, but from his cell phone. Which meant that he could have called from anywhere. What made me think he was staying at the Holiday Inn? He hadn’t said so last night, had he? I went back to the conversation we’d had while he was packing. That was when he’d mentioned the Holiday Inn, the one at Sunland Park Drive and I-10, where he’d stayed on earlier trips.

  And then something else snaked into my mind, a deeply unsettling memory that doesn’t trouble me often but one I can’t easily dismiss. Her name is Margaret. Margaret Graham, a Texas Ranger with softly waved dark hair, a rich contralto voice, and deep-set eyes the color of smoky lavender. A very attractive, very sexy woman with whom McQuaid had had a brief affair the year before we were married. If I remembered right, Margaret had been promoted to lieutenant—the highest rank ever held by a female Texas Ranger—and transferred to El Paso.

  At least, that’s what Sheila had told me. As a fellow female law enforcement officer, Sheila knows Margaret quite well and has kept track of her upward progress through the ranks of the Texas Rangers. Which I’m sure isn’t hard to do, given that there are only two female Rangers in that bastion of Anglo male supremacy. When the first female Ranger was hired, back in the 1990s, a male Ranger was quoted in the press as saying, “Texas is going to have to change a hell of a lot before a female can ride into some dusty little town and tell the sheriff, ‘Hey, I’m the resident Ranger on this case.’ I don’t care if she’s nine feet tall and meaner than a barrel of alligators. He’s not going to cooperate with her.”

  Things hadn’t changed that much since then, and I didn’t envy Margaret. Her job was even harder than mine had been, back when I was slugging it out in a profession dominated by competitive males who were ten feet tall and meaner than two barrels of alligators. But I certainly respected her for trying and for getting out there every day and going toe-to-toe with lawmen who thought they owned the right to enforce the laws of Texas.

  But respect is simply that: respect. What I felt was a wedge of the old, cold fear deep down in my belly, like a large chunk of the ancient Antarctic that refused to melt. I had long ago made my peace with McQuaid over his affair with Margaret. I’d made my peace with Margaret, too. Yes, I’d been jealous of her, so jealous I felt as if I’d swallowed burning acid. But after McQuaid was shot and nearly killed, Margaret and I teamed up to finish the job he had started. And when push came to shove, in the midst of all my pain and anger, I found that I couldn’t help respecting the woman for her competence and courage—and even liking her. A little.

  But I liked Margaret best as long as she was part of the past, the distant past, and behind us. McQuaid and I were married now, and happy. At least I thought we were happy. I was happy, anyway. And I didn’t want Margaret, or anybody else, to share our present. I shut my eyes and wrapped my arms around myself hard, hating the memory of McQuaid with her. Hating—

  Stop! I commanded, and opened my eyes wide.

  You quit this shit right now, you hear, China Bayles? You have no idea what’s going on out there in West Texas—if anything at all. You don’t know that Margaret is in El Paso, or if McQuaid is seeing her. You can just stop worrying and trust your husband. You got that, girl?

  I’m no girl, but I got it. I shook myself, straightened up, and went toward the bedroom. I needed to lock up Thyme Cottage and keep it locked until Kelly returned or—

  I didn’t want to think about that, either.

  But still, when I went through the bedroom to lock the French doors, I paused, seeing that open shoulder bag on the dresser. I frowned at it, weighing my aversion to snooping in Kelly’s private life against my concern about what might be going on with her.

  The concern won out. I reached into the bag, pulled out her wallet, and began to look through it. There was money—six brand new fifties that looked as if they’d just come from the bank—as they had, for with them was a withdrawal slip for three hundred dollars. Also in her wallet: four credit cards, a driver’s license with an address on Post Oak Drive, a health insurance card for a regional HMO, a card identifying her as a licensed RN, a membership card in the Fancy Dance Gym, and an ID card identifying her as an employee of the Pecan Springs Community Hospice—out of date, according to Charlie, since she didn’t work there now.

  And then another ID card identifying her as an employee, a new employee (since the card bore a start date from the week before), at the Madison Health Clinic on Greenbriar Drive.

  I glanced at the orange scrubs on the chair. It looke
d like she’d gotten a new job in the same line of work—which didn’t explain why Charlie had told me that she was currently unemployed. Lawyers don’t know everything, however, even when they think they do.

  I took out my cell and punched in the number of the Madison Health Clinic. When the receptionist answered, I asked for Kelly Kaufman.

  “Hang on a minute,” the receptionist said. A moment later she was back with, “Sorry, she’s not here. Looks like she’s not scheduled to work for the next few days.”

  “Oh, dear,” I said. “I’m a friend. I hope she’s not sick.”

  “No, just taking some personal time. Do you want to leave a message?”

  Why not? I thought. “Sure,” I said. “If she phones in, tell her that if she wants to get into the cottage, she needs to call China Bayles for the key.” I gave her my cell number for a callback and clicked off.

  I looked through the purse more carefully now. I found two sets of keys—one to her Kia, and on a separate key ring, what looked like house keys, probably to the house on Post Oak Drive. In addition to her cell phone, I also found a miscellany: compact, comb, lipstick, breath mints, a tampon in a purple plastic tube, an assortment of coins. I held the cell in my hand. It was turned off. I debated whether to turn it on and check for calls. But that would be an even more serious invasion of her privacy, and a violation of one of my firm personal rules.

  I found a pencil and paper and noted the address on her driver’s license and the addresses of both the Pecan Springs Community Hospice and the Madison Health Clinic. I folded the paper and tucked it into the back pocket of my jeans, put the purse out of sight in the bottom drawer of the dresser, and went to the patio door to lock it and draw the drapes.