And as I said the words, I was thinking of Friday night. After the shot had been reported, Sheila and I had hurried to the Obermann house up a dark path lined with oleander bushes. Oleander, a deadly plant poison, responsible for a rash of recent suicides and murders in Sri Lanka, where the shrub is native, plentiful, and readily available. Oleander, which had been featured as a murder weapon in a movie that had been reviewed not long ago in the Enterprise . Which can cause gastric inflammation and cardiac irregularities. Which can kill, especially the very young and the very old.
I reined myself in. There is a substantial evidentiary gap between noticing oleander bushes in a backyard and proving the owner guilty of murder. Without a confession or eyewitness testimony, it’s notoriously difficult to make a poisoning charge stick.
“I think we’d better get moving,” I said, returning the photo to its envelope. I opened the pantry, found a box of plastic zipper-top bags, chose one, and slid the envelope into it. The picture was evidence. I didn’t want to be accused of contaminating it. Finding it, yes—and maybe even a tad bit illegally. But not contaminating it.
Ruby was rummaging under the sink. I turned just as she dragged something out.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m taking out the garbage,” she said. “There’s no point in leaving it to stink up the house, is there?”
“Leave it,” I said. “If the cops come back here—and they might—they’ll want to search the garbage.”
Ruby looked down at the bag, a curious expression on her face. “You don’t think there’s anything interesting in there, do you?”
“Not interesting enough for me to go through it,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “We need to leave Sheila and her boys something to do. Come on, Ruby. We still have to get Juan some clothes.”
Juan’s room was even messier than Brian’s, and it took a few minutes to find reasonably clean shirts, jeans, underwear, and a pair of running shoes. While Ruby was doing that, I took a quick look through the small desk in Hank’s room.
In the drawer, I found what I was looking for: Hank’s checkbook. He had been meticulous about keeping the check register, with checks, cash withdrawals, and deposits duly noted. If the Obermann sisters had given him money to persuade him to keep his story to himself, he hadn’t noted it in the register.
Ruby came to the door with a large paper bag in her arms. “Ready?” she asked.
“Ready,” I said, and closed the drawer. The cops would want to look at that checkbook, too.
When we walked out of the house, we took two things that didn’t belong to us, the Polaroid photograph of Andy Obermann’s corpse and the bag of Juan’s clothes. We left Hank Dixon’s garbage behind.
Chapter Nineteen
PERSONAL FRAGRANCES
To make your own personal fragrance, add 20 drops of essential oil to 2 tablespoons jojoba oil. Some combinations to try: bergamot and lemon (perky, citrusy); patchouli and sandalwood (luxurious, musky); ylang-ylang and rose (sweetly exotic).
“Okay, Sherlock,” Ruby said, getting behind the wheel. “Now what?”
I’d been thinking about that. “The corpse in the photo belongs to Blackie,” I said. “It’s his case and his jurisdiction, and normally I’d turn the photo over to him. But if we’re right about who killed Andy Obermann and why, that puts the matter into a whole different light. One of Andy’s murderers is still alive and at large.” It didn’t matter who pulled the trigger—if the Obermann sisters had paid for the job, they were as guilty as the man who fired the gun. “And she may have murdered again,” I added.
“Murdered again twice,” Ruby muttered, starting the car. “Hank . . . and Florence.”
“And that’s Sheila’s case,” I said, taking my cell phone out of my purse and punching in her number. “What’s more, a hot case takes precedence over a cold one. Let’s go talk to Sheila.”
Sheila didn’t answer the phone until the third ring, and when she did, her voice sounded groggy. “The lights have been off for a couple of hours,” she said. “I’ve had a helluva day. I decided to go to bed early.”
“Well, you’ll have to get up again, Smart Cookie. Ruby and I have uncovered some important evidence in the Hank Dixon shooting. We’re bringing it over.”
“Evidence? What evidence? What are you talking about?”
“Seeing is believing,” I said. “We’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t go back to bed.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Sheila muttered, and banged down the phone.
After I finished talking to Sheila, I phoned to check on Brian and make sure that everything was all right at home. McQuaid picked up the call.
“Where the dickens are you?” he asked, sounding aggrieved. “I thought you were going to be home this evening.”
“Ruby came over, and we decided to go out,” I said evasively. The explanation was long and convoluted. I needed to be looking into his face when I told him what had happened—otherwise, he’d never believe me. “We’re going over to Sheila’s,” I said. “Don’t expect me home right away.”
“Girl talk, I suppose,” he said, and chuckled in an irritatingly patronizing way. “What are you and Ruby up to now? Trying to get Sheila and Blackie together again?”
“Not . . . exactly,” I said. The two of them would have to collaborate to assemble all the pieces of this complex puzzle, past and present. If they were going to reconcile, they’d have every opportunity. But that was beside the point. And there was that troubling business of Sheila’s relationship to Colin. Even under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t have attempted to play peacemaker between Sheila and Blackie. With Colin involved (and he was involved, I was sure of it), it was definitely hands-off.
“Well, enjoy yourselves,” McQuaid said, and added, “Brian said you helped him bury his lizard.”
“With full military honors. It was an impressive ceremony. How come you never manage to be present at these occasions?”
There was a smile in McQuaid’s voice. “Just unlucky, I guess. See you later, babe.”
I made kissy noises into the phone and clicked it off as we pulled into Sheila’s driveway.
When Sheila was appointed chief of police, she bought a modest frame house on the west side of town—a move that I see now, in hindsight, as indicative of her reservations about her engagement to Blackie. The house was built in the thirties, in one of Pecan Springs’ first subdivisions, before developers discovered that people would actually buy houses built from lot line to lot line, with lawns the size of a paper napkin. Sheila has a large fenced yard, with an enormous old pecan tree out front. A couple of the tree’s smaller limbs had come unhitched and were lying in the drive, and the grass was littered with pecans, but the storm didn’t seem to have caused much damage.
The power had been restored, too, and Sheila had turned the porch light on for us. Barefoot and wearing a pair of lace-trimmed red silk pajamas, she opened the front door to Ruby’s ring.
I raised my eyebrows. “Woo-woo,” I said, glancing at her attire. “The chief’s sexy sleepwear.”
“They’re almost too pretty to sleep in,” Ruby said.
Sheila looked down at herself and colored. “Oh, these,” she said, as if she’d forgotten she had them on. “They were a birthday present. I thought I’d try to get some use out of them.” She knuckled her eyes, smearing her mascara, and yawned sleepily. “This had better be good, you guys, and I do mean good. I was dead to the world, and I meant to stay that way until the alarm clock went off.”
I sniffed. She was wearing perfume—ylang-ylang and rose, I’d bet. I suppressed a quick quip about women who slept in their makeup and perfume and handed her the plastic bag with the envelope in it. “This’ll wake you up, Smart Cookie.”
She held the bag at arm’s length. “And what the hell is this?” From the tone of her voice, you’d have thought she was already smelling Hank’s garbage.
Ruby flapped her blue sleeves. “It’s a photo of a corp
se,” she announced triumphantly. “Listen, Sheila, China and I have just solved three murders. The story is so incredible that you’ll never guess it, not in a gazillion years.”
Sheila looked her up and down, eyeing the blue batik top and mermaid earrings. “Is that your official crime-solving getup?” she asked grumpily. She turned to me, her hands on her hips, her head tilted to one side. Not only was she wearing mascara, but lipstick and blusher. “And you’ve only solved three murders? Well, heck. I figured you’d cleared my entire cold case file.”
“I’m really sorry we got you up,” I soothed. “We’ll explain the whole thing, but we’d better have some coffee.”
It took a couple of cups of hot coffee (and more important, a plate of double-chocolate brownies) to get all three of us through the explanation and the subsequent questions and answers. But by the end of the story, Sheila was definitely awake and listening.
When we concluded our narrative, she gave her head an I’m-not-believing-this shake. “I know for a fact that Howie Masterson is planning to ask the grand jury to no-bill Jane Obermann in the shooting of Hank Dixon, on the grounds that she killed him during an attempted armed robbery.”
“Oh, lordy,” Ruby said, rolling her eyes. “Howie the Ding-Bat Masterson. I forgot about him.” Ruby and I are among those who have no respect for our new D.A.
“Yeah,” I said bleakly. “Howie’s probably looking forward to it. A made-for-TV production, starring himself as guardian of the Second Amendment and defender of every citizen’s right to self-defense.” Howie would go through the ceiling when Sheila put a revised list of criminal charges in front of him.
“Yeah, right,” Sheila said ironically. “So now you’re saying that I have to tell Howie to forget his plan to canonize Jane. Instead, I have to tell him that I want her indicted on three counts of murder.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “She hired a hit man to kill her nephew. She lured the hit man’s son to her house and shot him. And then she poisoned her sister to keep her from spilling the beans.” She paused for effect. “Anything else you two amateur sleuths want me to add to the list? A little embezzlement, maybe? Drug smuggling? Gun running?”
Ruby cleared her throat. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”
“As my father used to say, it is going to be tougher than a horny toad’s toenails,” Sheila replied grimly. “To make matters worse, Miss Obermann was a big political contributor this year. And Howie’s campaign spent one helluva of a lot of somebody’s money on those billboard ads—could’ve been hers.”
I had to smile at that, even though there was nothing funny about it. Howie’s billboards had shown up all over the county, featuring a twelve-by-twenty-foot photo of himself in chaps, leather vest, and a white Stetson, sitting behind the steering wheel of his Dodge Ram truck, equipped with a grill guard heavy enough to shove an elk off the road, mud flaps that looked like they belonged on an eighteen-wheeler, and a .375 H & H elephant gun slung in the rear window. The ad had a two-word caption: Texas Tough.
“I didn’t think about that,” Ruby said. “Politics is everywhere these days.”
“It’s not just politics, or Howie’s plan to set himself up as the Defender of the Faith,” Sheila said, sounding resigned. “It’s community reaction. Jane isn’t much liked, but the Obermann name carries a lot of weight. There’s the hospital, the library, the new theater—” She stopped, pursing her mouth. “None of which means that she’s safe from prosecution, of course. It just means that this won’t be an ordinary case. And the evidence against her is going to have to be pretty extraordinary—if only because the D.A. is not going to be anxious to try this case.”
To say the least. “I’m sure you won’t go to Howie until you have all the evidence lined up,” I said cautiously. “There’s this photo, of course, which documents Andy Obermann’s death—and probably has both Hank’s and his father’s fingerprints on it.”
I stopped, momentarily distracted. Where the heck was Sheila going to get Gabe Dixon’s fingerprints for comparison? Had he been in the armed forces, maybe? I took a breath and plunged on.
“You’ll probably want to request that Florence Obermann’s autopsy include several toxicological tests. Helen Berger’s list will narrow down the possibilities. And McQuaid will be glad to give you a statement about his interview with the women, and about that gun cabinet.” I frowned. There was something else. Now, what was it?
“You said that Gabe Dixon shot Andy Obermann from behind.” Sheila was looking down at the photograph. “Was the slug found? Does the sheriff have it?”
Oh, for Pete’s sake. “No,” I said, reaching for my purse, “the slug hasn’t been found—at least, not yet.” I took out the little plastic bag containing the casing that Brian had given me earlier that evening. “However, this is the casing.” I’d put it into my purse, intending to take it to Blackie in the morning. Now, it might be more relevant to Sheila’s investigation.
Ruby was staring at the casing. “Where in the world did you get that, China?”
“Brian picked it up in the cave,” I said, “before he knew that his caveman had been shot to death. He gave it to me tonight, when I told him what I’d learned from Alana Montoya. I was going to drop it off at the sheriff’s office in the morning.”
Sheila shook the casing out onto the table and peered at it. Without saying anything, she left the table and came back with a magnifying glass.
“It’s got USCC and the number 18 stamped in the base,” I said, “but I have no idea what they mean.”
“I do.” Sheila studied the casing through the magnifying glass. After a minute, she put it down. “The letters are military identifications. The number refers to the year of manufacture. This cartridge is a .45 caliber ACP, made in 1918.”
“1918,” I said slowly. “World War One.”
Ruby wrinkled her forehead. “What does ACP mean?”
“Automatic Colt pistol,” Sheila replied. “It was used longer in the military than any other firearm—adopted in 1911, and not retired until 1985.”
Ruby frowned. “So Gabe Dixon shot Andy with a bullet that was almost sixty years old? Isn’t that kind of old for ammunition?”
“Not if it’s stored correctly,” Sheila said. “There’s a lot of old wartime ammunition out there, both First and Second World Wars.” She slid the casing back into the bag and looked at me. “The gun I took away from Jane Obermann on Friday night, China—it was a seven-shot .45 caliber Colt automatic. Her father’s gun, if you’ll remember. And the ammo she used had been in the gun for some time, and it bore the same markings as this. Somebody in ballistics can compare the two casings, but they look identical to me.”
I thought about that. “You took the gun out of Jane’s hand. How many bullets were in the magazine?”
“Four,” Sheila said. “And there were two in Hank Dixon.”
“And one in Andy Obermann,” I said. “Four plus two plus one is seven.”
“Oh, good Lord,” Ruby said in a whisper.
“So it looks like Jane shot Hank,” I went on, “with the same gun—and the same ammunition—that Hank’s father used to kill Andy.”
“We have the slugs we dug out of Hank,” Sheila said. “If we can locate the slug that killed Andy, we’ll compare them. With luck, we’ll get a match.”
“But the same gun!” Ruby protested incredulously. “That’s just plain stupid—and Jane Obermann isn’t a stupid woman.”
“Maybe she never knew which gun Gabe used to kill Andy,” I replied. “Or maybe she just forgot. After all, it was a long time ago. Or maybe it was the only one of the three guns in the cabinet that happened to be loaded.”
“It was,” Sheila said quietly. “I checked. The other two guns, a Mauser and a Luger, were both empty. And there was no ammo in the cabinet.”
“And of course,” I added, “Jane had no idea that Andy’s remains had been found. She must have been feeling pretty secure after all these years. So even if she did know that
Gabe had used that Colt, it might not have mattered to her.”
“Or maybe she thought it was poetic justice of some sort,” Ruby said darkly. “Somebody who is devious enough to invite Hank to her house and set up his murder so it looked like she was shooting a burglar—that kind of person is capable of anything.”
“What about the knife?” I asked Sheila. “If Hank thought he was going to get his payoff, it doesn’t seem likely that he would come armed—at least, not with a butcher knife. Is it possible that the knife is a throwdown? That it actually came from the Obermanns’ kitchen?” “Throwdown” is cop talk for a weapon that is planted at a crime scene.
“I don’t know,” Sheila said. “I’ll get a warrant and search the kitchen for similar items. Of course, the knife will already have been checked for Hank’s prints. But I’ll see that we get Jane’s prints, too, and have them matched against anything else that might show up on the knife.”
“So what’s left?” I asked. “Florence’s autopsy?”
Sheila nodded. “You say that you’re getting a list of those plants from the nurse?”
“First thing tomorrow,” I replied. “I’m thinking that oleander is a good bet. The bushes that line the path in the backyard—they’re oleander. It’s definitely toxic enough to do the job, and it matches Florence’s symptoms.”
“How would she . . . how would she have done it?” Ruby asked hesitantly. “Brew it up as a tea?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “From what I know of oleander, the toxins aren’t soluble in water. She might have chopped up the leaves and put them into something she baked.”
“Be sure I get the list as soon as it’s available,” Sheila said. “The M.E. down in Bexar County won’t have started the autopsy yet, so I’ll have time to talk to Doctor Mackey and amend the request.” She rubbed her fingers across her forehead as if she had a headache. “Got any other little problems I can solve for you?”
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