Death of a Prince

by Susan P. Baker

Raymond pulled at her arm. “Sandy, please. You’re hurting her. ”

  “I’m going to hurt her a lot more if she doesn’t tell me right now just what the hell she is talking about.” Sandra had

  the strength of ten men at that moment. Raymond couldn’t budge her. She glared at the young woman whom she had pinned against the courthouse wall. As angry as she was, she wanted a quick answer, before Edgar came through those double doors.

  “Sandy, it’s not my fault. Really, it’s not. It’s just that the other night I found out that somebody stole my gun.”

  “Je—sus Christ! And this was something you didn’t think you ought to tell me?” Kitty’s perfume smelled sweet and flowery. Sitting next to her in the courtroom, it was tolerable, but now that their faces were only a few inches apart, it was too strong mixed with the smell of the Dentine gum Sandra had made Kitty spit out before entering the courtroom. Sandra dropped her arms and took a couple of steps back. “Okay. And what kind of gun is it that you are missing?” She didn’t bother asking why she owned one, being a model. It wouldn’t have made any difference. Besides, this was Texas. She wouldn’t go so far as to say everyone owned a gun, but many did.

  Rubbing her arms, Kitty gave her a petulant glance. “It was a little one. Fit in my purse.” She held her two forefingers several inches apart. “ ’Bout that big. Silver.”

  “No. I meant what caliber? What size bullets?” Sandra had a thing about guns. She didn’t think that people who couldn’t spell the word should own one.

  Raymond interrupted them. “It was a .25. I gave it to her for protection.” He brushed past her and took Kitty’s hand. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Officer Bradshaw pushed through the courtroom doors behind them. Edgar followed, lugging his huge leather briefcase. “We’ll discuss this later,” she said. “Keep your mouths shut, both of you.”

  Edgar said something to his assistant. She took off down

  the hall. Turning to Sandra, he said, “Ready to go to Miss Haynes’ house?”

  Sandra watched his eyes as they traveled to Kitty and Raymond. She knew Edgar well enough to know the thoughts that were behind them. She’d have to face that later. Just now, they all needed to be certain that it was Lizzie who lay dead. “Be in touch with you later,” she said to them with her darkest look. She didn’t apologize for her roughness. It might just be the beginning of some tough times between them.

  Edgar and Sandra walked across the parking lot to the garage. She could feel the heat from the asphalt through the bottoms of her shoes. By the time they reached his Jeep on the far side, her clothes were damp with perspiration. She peeled off her jacket before she got inside. The interior of the Cherokee was much cooler because of the covered parking than it would have been had he chosen a space in the lot outside the courthouse. Once he turned on the air-conditioning, they had relief from the heat in a matter of minutes.

  They didn’t speak much. Just because they rode together didn’t mean they weren’t adversaries. Sandra was doing him a favor; that was all. And she had her own motives besides the protection of her mother. She wanted to see the premises. Would there be something to help her figure out what was going on? Why Lizzie was killed? Who might have had a motive? And was it related to Phillip’s murder? A small hope that it wasn’t lurked in the recesses of her mind.

  The idea of Lizzie being dead invaded her emotions like sap oozing from a tree: slow, but unstoppable. She’d been trying not to let herself feel anything from the moment she’d heard those words. Now she began to feel overwhelmed. Staring at the plethora of hotels, motels, and restaurants that flew by as Edgar drove down the seawall toward the West End of the island, Sandra’s breath seemed harder to draw. Her eyes burned. She swallowed many times over rather than attempt to respond to Edgar’s efforts at conversation. She’d just talked to the woman a few days ago.

  Two marked city police cars blocked the driveway. A white unmarked sedan at the curb indicated that Dennis Truman had arrived. An ambulance stood at the end of the sidewalk. Edgar parked across the street. They walked over to Lizzie’s house. Sandra had been inside several times. It was in an area they used to call “down the island” when she was growing up. What had been grazing land for dairy cattle was now a subdivision that had sprung up a number of years earlier. The houses were mostly two stories, ultra-modern, squeezed on too-small lots. They were like miniature mansions. Lizzie’s even had a circular staircase, but it came right down within a few feet of the front door. Galveston Island had its geographical limitations, but some designs were downright ridiculous.

  Dennis met them at the door. “The doc is in there now.” “Is it ... is it her?” she asked.

  Dennis glanced at Edgar and then at Sandra. “I’m pretty sure. You here to make an official ID?”

  Sandra nodded. Dennis stepped aside to let them enter. Everything seemed in its place. “Forced entry?”

  “No. We already checked all the doors and windows. Nothing unusual. Seems like she musta known the perpetrator.”

  Sandra grimaced. She didn’t want to hear that. She wanted to hear that the back door had been busted open. That the place was trashed. That she came home and got it from a burglar.

  Edgar walked toward the rear of the house. The bedrooms were in the back. Lizzie had a large master bedroom with a king-sized bed, an enormous oval-shaped sunken tub, and a

  wall of closets. Of the other two bedrooms, one was set up as a guest room and the third was utilized for extra closet space and storage.

  “Not there,” Dennis called out.

  Edgar stopped. “Then where?”

  “The kitchen.”

  “The kitchen,” Edgar repeated.

  Dennis shrugged. “She was fixing dinner from the looks of things.”

  Sandra walked toward the kitchen, afraid of what she would see but wanting to get it over with. “How did she get it?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “Two to the back of the head.”

  “Ugh.” She stopped. “With a large caliber or small caliber?” If it were very large, two shots to the back of the head wouldn’t leave much of her face and head. On the other hand, knowing that Kitty’s alleged “missing” gun was a .25 made her hope it wasn’t a small caliber.

  “Pretty small, Sandra. Don’t know how small, but there’s no exit wound.” He walked a few steps behind her. “Let me see if the doc is about to wrap it up.”

  Dennis and Edgar went into the kitchen. Sandra backed against the wall and waited. She needed time to steel herself for what she would see. She could hear them talking softly.

  Dennis said, “Can you give us a rough estimate of when she died, Doc?”

  The M.E., whose deep smoker’s voice she’d just heard that morning, said, “It wasn’t today . . . more than likely yesterday evening.”

  “Yeah,” Edgar said, “she’s stiffer than—”

  “Let’s get Sandra in here,” Dennis interrupted. “We can talk about this later.” He poked his head around the corner and called her name. Edgar came and she could feel his hand

  on her elbow. Generally, she wasn’t reticent around bodies. Generally, she didn’t have to see two people she knew lying dead within ten days of each other. It was cool in Lizzie’s house, but the air-conditioning recycling the air had caused the aroma of blood to hang above their heads like smoke in a bingo hall.

  Dennis helped Dr. Michaels and Lawrence turn Lizzie over. Her body was as rigid as a bed frame. An outline on the floor showed how she had fallen. The stench of death assaulted their nostrils anew. Lawrence picked up a large, ex- pensive-looking camera and flash and shot photographs from several angles.

  The long, flowered sundress Lizzie wore was twisted around her ankles. Bare feet protruded from under light-colored fabric. Her skin looked unreal, like wax, except the side of her face, which had been down, was purple, like a huge birthmark. Smears of dried blood glued reddish-blond tendrils of hair to her face. A broken wineglass stem stood next to her like an arrow protr
uding from the kitchen tile. Shards of glass sparkled from the light streaming through the miniblinds. Sandra kneeled on the other side, wanting to straighten her dress, brush the glass away, and scrape the blood off her cheeks. But she knew the police were letting her do more than they should by even allowing her inside the house.

  People often say that dead people look like they are sleeping peacefully, but Lizzie didn’t. Lizzie looked like she was in pain. But she was, at last, at peace. Lizzie had been so worried about her future, her financial security, what was in store for her. If she had only known.

  Sandra said a silent goodbye to Lizzie, nodded to Dennis Truman, and walked into the blazing sun where she waited next to the Jeep until Edgar came out. By the time she saw

  him, the tears had dried. She could again speak without her voice breaking. She asked him to drop her at her office. She needed to see her mother immediately.

  “You seem upset,” Edgar said as he started his engine. “You going to want to proceed with the examining trial?” Since she didn’t trust Edgar Saul and she knew him not to be an empathetic person, Sandra glanced at him sideways. What was going on in his little computer-like brain? “What are you getting at?”

  He reached out, his hand halting before actually touching her, wavering above her arm. “You need a couple of days?” “For what?”

  He glanced at her face and jerked his hand back, grasping the steering wheel with both hands. “I just thought—”

  “You just thought that if you could get me to agree to a postponement for a few days that would give you time to pin this murder on my client, too. Is that it?”

  “Well, uh, if she did it ... I guess I could always get her later.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. So, no, I won’t take any continuances, by agreement or otherwise. You got anything else you want to discuss?” She shot him a look that would have shriveled a blooming flower and turned away for the rest of the drive.

  Barely a ripple disturbed the clear, green Gulf of Mexico. An oil rig several miles out appeared to be only a hundred yards away. Sandra didn’t see dolphins breaching, but so many mullet jumped that they looked like schools of flying fish.

  Traffic was stop-and-go all the way back as tourists searched for parking spots on the seawall, blocking traffic when they found a space they thought they could squeeze into. Bathing suit-clad people jaywalked between cars. If it had been any other day, Sandra would have been happy to see that business was booming. Just a few years earlier, tourism had been down. But back then the city mothers and fathers had gotten the inspired idea of hiring a contractor to suck sand from offshore and dump it in the eroded beaches. “THE BEACH IS BACK” pictures had been plastered on billboards across the state. Tourism improved overnight.

  When Edgar dropped Sandra off, the only thing she could think of was whether the bad news about Lizzie would cause Erma to have a relapse. After the events of the past few days, Sandra didn’t know what she’d do without her mother.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Erma walked her client to the door and waved goodbye before kicking off her shoes back in her office. She stood on a thick rug and wiggled her toes. Goddamn, that felt good. One of these days she was going to switch to soft, flat shoes like nurses wore, but not yet. She liked the way heels made her legs look. She liked to be taller. She liked to feel younger. But man, did she pay for it sometimes with hurt feet. She wore a long, straight black skirt, a cream-colored rough-silk tank top, and her opera-length pearls. All she had to do was throw on her jacket and she’d be ready for a formal dinner. She and Phillip would have had their monthly dinner that night, had he not died. So, in his memory, a few days earlier, Erma had called Lizzie to dine with her. She’d gotten to dress up anyway. Lizzie had still been pissed, but Erma told her she was going to try to help her come up with a solution to her financial situation. Erma didn’t know what Phillip had been thinking when he made such a minor provision for Lizzie. When Erma had tried to broach it with him, he had told her in no uncertain terms that the subject was not open to discussion. He had been her friend, but sometimes he could be an asshole. She told him so, frequently.

  Patricia sat reading the newspaper at the serving bar in the kitchen. Erma got herself a cup of coffee and the last donut and sat next to Patricia. “That’ll be a nice fee,” she said.

  “You’re feeling better today. I’m glad,” Patricia said.

  Erma dunked her donut into the coffee and took a bite. The lemon filling oozed out. She licked it with the tip of her tongue. “Yep. You can’t keep an old broad down, Patricia. You know that.”

  “Hey, I’m not anywhere near as old as you are, Missus Townley.”

  “Missus Townley. I wish you’d quit that Missus Townley bullshit. You’ve been with us what, a year?”

  “Give or take. But you are the boss and I am the employee. It’s only a sign of respect.”

  Erma patted at the white sugar on her lips and dipped her donut again. “I think we’re more than that by now, Patricia, my darling. We’ve weathered a few things together. I think we’ve become a family.” Erma swallowed some coffee and chased it with the donut.

  “Why, I’m touched, Missus Townley. I really am.” Patricia straightened up a little on the stool.

  “Okay, okay. Here’s what we’ll do. You call me Erma except when there are clients around and then it’s Missus Townley. Same as you do with Sandra.” Erma smiled and patted Patricia’s shoulder with the clean part of her napkin. “Deal?”

  Patricia laughed. “Deal. Erma.”

  “Goddamn that’s better.” Erma laughed and finished off her donut and coffee. “Okay, I’m going to wash up and then get started on that estate. It’s a couple of hundred thou.” She smiled and slid off the stool, heading toward the restroom, a little bounce in her hobbled walk.

  Sandra slipped her key into the deadbolt and threw open the door. “Work slow this morning?” she asked Patricia.

  “It’s just after noon, if you haven’t noticed.”

  Sandra picked up the empty donut box. “What’s this? Y’all taking advantage of my absence?”

  Turning the page of the newspaper and smoothing it down on the counter, Patricia said, “You’re in a mood.”

  “My mother here?”

  “You know I am,” Erma called from the open door of the restroom. “You parked next to my Lincoln and waited until you thought I left the room to come in.”

  “You don’t miss a trick, do you Erma?”

  “No, Sandra, I don’t. You don’t miss many yourself.” Erma came out, tucking her tank top into her skirt. “And yep, we drank coffee and ate donuts. What are you going to do about it?”

  Sandra dropped her briefcase on the counter and stalked to the refrigerator. “You know you aren’t supposed to have all that sugar and caffeine.”

  “Who gives a flying fart? Not me.” Erma laughed. Sandra just looked at her. “Something the matter?”

  Patricia turned another page of the newspaper.

  Sandra found a Dr Pepper, slammed the refrigerator door, and popped the top on the can. She took a swallow and held the can up to her forehead. “There’s a storm brewing in my head.” She swayed and reached for Patricia, who was the closest.

  “Are you all right?” Patricia slid from her stool and helped Sandra to one of the chairs at the dinette table.

  Erma said, “You getting another headache? Something happen at the examining trial?”

  Sandra closed her eyes a moment. “I suddenly feel exhausted.” She breathed deeply. “And I wish I wasn’t an only child.”

  Patricia sat across from her. “Can I get you anything?” “Something for this headache.” Sandra rested her forehead on the table. She opened one eye and peered at Erma, who had sat in the chair next to her.

  “What was that crack about being an only child about?” After Sandra took the pills Patricia brought her, she said, “Mom. More bad news.” She laid her head back on the table.

  “Judge Perez found probable cause that K
itty murdered Phillip and bound her over to the grand jury?”

  “No,” Sandra said. “Worse than that. We’re in a recess until tomorrow morning. I’ll tell you about that later.”

  Erma looked at Sandra’s tensed brow. She could see her daughter was in pain. “Want to talk about it? You could go into your office and put your feet up.” She toyed with her pearls and watched Sandra’s face.

  Sandra’s cheek was smushed on the table and her voice came out strangely, like she had a mouth full of candy. “No, got to tell you now. What are you all dressed up for, by the way?”

  “It’s my night for dinner with Phillip.”

  Sandra sat up and then grabbed the back of her neck. “Oh, don’t worry, Sandra, I remember he’s dead. I’m taking Lizzie to dinner instead. Goddamn, I made a rhyme.” Erma chuckled.

  Sandra got up and went into her office. She plopped down in her executive chair. “Don’t turn on the light,” she said when Erma and Patricia followed.

  They sat across from her. Patricia kept glancing from one to the other of them, like watching a tennis match, and not saying anything.

  “No, you’re not taking Lizzie to dinner. Lizzie can’t go to dinner because Lizzie is dead.”

  “Dead?” Erma stared at Sandra, not sure she’d heard correctly. “Oh my God!” She grabbed Patricia’s arm and squeezed it hard.

  Patricia said, “You did take your blood pressure medicine this morning, didn’t you?”

  Erma swallowed and then began breathing deeply. She wondered if she had imagined that Sandra had said Lizzie was dead or had Sandra really said it. She’d talked to Lizzie a few days ago. Made plans for dinner. Calmed her down about her inheritance from Phillip. Dead?

  They sat that way for several minutes. Sandra lay back in her chair with her eyes closed. Erma gripped Patricia’s arm for dear life. Patricia was transfixed. It was like someone had punched the pause button on a DVD player. Finally, Patricia pried Erma’s hand off her arm and retrieved the box of tissues. She pushed them at Erma, who had tears streaming down her face without even knowing it. The spell broken, Erma shuddered. She wiped her face and hugged herself. She sighed and in doing so, seemed to come back alive.