Hangman's root : a China Bayles mystery

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  Dottie laughed harshly. "If Harwick wanted to do it that way, he wouldn't have to try very hard to create a motive. Anybody who served on a committee with the sonofabitch probably wanted to do him in—not to mention the animal rights people." She frowned. "Or maybe one of them actually did it. The animal rights people, I mean. It seems kind of farfetched, but I suppose it isn't out of the realm of possibility."

  Dottie didn't seem to have a clear sense of her own danger. "Did the chief want to know anything else?" I asked.

  "Just to see my cattery, so I gave him the grand tour. Then he left." She ran a hand over her hair. "He asked me not to leave town without letting him know. Does that mean anything?"

  "Not necessarily." The cattery? That was odd. I couldn't imagine Bubba being overly fond of stray cats.

  She was going to gnaw that lip raw if she didn't stop. "It's that letter I'm worried about, China. The last one." She hesitated. "To tell the truth, I wrote it."

  "I figured that out," I said. Bubba would, too, but not right away. In the meantime, the death threat gave Dottie a convincing motive for murder. It looked as if she had decided to kill Harwick before Harwick killed hen

  "You already had the other two threats, which were genuine," I said. "Why did you need a death threat?" I was asking for the record. I already knew that, too.

  Dottie looked sheepish. "Actually, I got the idea from you. If I wanted to take legal action against Miles to keep him from harassing me about the cattery, you said I needed more ammunition than the first two letters." She kicked her foot back and forth, back and forth. "I guess I was being pretty childish, huh?"

  "Yes," I said, not cutting her any slack. "You were. You know I didn't mean that you should manufacture evidence." I let that soak in for a minute. "But it's already done, and we have to assume that Chief Harris got what he went looking for."

  "What should I do?"

  I hestitated, considering. Should Dottie tell Bubba what she had done, or wait until he asked? I usually subscribe to the view that it's a bad idea to volunteer incriminating information. But this was different. If Bubba knew that Dottie had written the letter, he'd probably scratch her off as a suspect. Not even a total nincompoop would forge a death threat from a man she was about to murder On the other hand, I couldn't be sure that Bubba had the letters, or even that he suspected Dottie. I came down on the side of waiting. It couldn't hurt.

  "For right now, my advice is to sit tight," I said. "Go home, pour yourself a stiff drink, climb in a hot bath, and relax. Sooner or later, you'll have to tell Chief Harris what you did. But let him ask first."

  She ran her fingers through her hair, looking frazzled. "I can't go home. I borrowed a friend's truck and I'm on my way to the animal holding facility."

  "A truck?" I stared at her. "What/or?"

  "I have to pick up the guinea pigs." At my look, she added defensively, "I can't just leave them there to suffer, can I? I dragged Castle down to the basement and made him look at the situation. He admits it's pretty awful. Something has to be done."

  "Why didn't he do something before?"

  "He said he didn't think it was that bad. Anyway, it was Miles' turf, and he didn't want to interfere. He said he'd dispose of the guinea pigs—sell them to another lab, probably But I told him I'd make room in the cattery. I guess he didn't care enough to argue."

  "Dottie," I said, "what the hell will you do with a hundred guinea pigs?"

  She tapped the ash off her cigarette, frowning. "Do with them?"

  I pictured a hundred caged guinea pigs, which would, in the natural course of guinea pig events, soon be a hundred and fifty, and then three hundred, and then—

  "Do with them?" she repeated slowly. She sounded as if she might be asking herself that question for the very first time. "Why are you asking?" She looked at me. "Why do you have that expression on your face?"

  I shrugged. "It's a reasonable question, isn't it? Well? What are you going to do with them?"

  Her jaw was working. "I don't know. I guess I hadn't thought that far." There was another long silence. Finally she shook her head. "I really don't know, China. Maybe I shouldn't be talking to a lawyer. Maybe I should be talking to a shrink."

  I stood up. "I can make a referral," I said. "Come on. I owe you three bucks."

  "Pentobarbital sodium," McQuaid said. "According to Sheila, it was in Harwick's coffee."

  We were in the truck again, on Saturday evening, on our way to see another house. McQuaid hadn't previewed this one, but it sounded big enough to house the three of us plus our respective toys and animal companions, with a separate shop for McQuaid and three (count them) bathrooms. It belonged to an English prof who was taking an extended sabbatical.

  "Pentobarbital sodium.^" I repeated dubiously. "That's a new one on me."

  "Not a very common barbiturate," McQuaid said, stopping for the light.

  "The dose was big enough to be lethal?"

  "The M.E. didn't think so. Could've made Harwick pretty groggy, though. By the way, he died on Wednesday night."

  I nodded.

  We turned the corner onto Limekiln Road, which heads west out of town, up and across the abrupt escarpment of the Balcones Fault. You can see the escarpment from 1-35, which parallels the fault zone as you head from Austin to San Antonio. The older, harder rocks of the Lower Cretaceous rise to the west along the rim of the Edwards Plateau, while the younger, softer rocks of the Upper Cretaceous, deeply eroded and layered with what the farmers call "black gumbo," drop toward the east and the Coastal Plain. It was this topography that the Spaniards called Los Balcones. That's what it looks like, a balcony—right now, a balcony planted with flowers. The shoulders of Limekiln Road were heaped with meadow pinks and prairie phlox and wine cups, like mounds of pink and magenta shells cast up along a beach. The sun was setting over the hills, and the variegated pinks of the western sky matched the flowers, shading into saffron close to the horizon and into deep, rich lavender as it arched eastward over our heads.

  But lovely as the landscape was, I hardly saw it. I was more interested in what McQuaid had just told me, and what had been

  on my mind since Dottie had gone off to rescue her hundred guinea pigs.

  "Dottie had a visit from Bubba today," I said. "He asked where she was on Wednesday night and questioned her pretty carefully about her relationship with Harwick. He also asked about a threatening letter she claimed Harwick wrote hen" I sketched the details. "By now, he's probably dug up all three letters."

  McQuaid whistled under his breath. "Not real smart of her, under the circumstances. If Bubba decides that Harwick was murdered—"

  I finished it for him. "—Then Dottie's going to look like a logical suspect."

  "Not 'look like,' China. From what you've told me, she is a logical suspect. Maybe the suspect."

  "But only if you don't know that she forged that letter," I pointed out. "Why would she do that, if she planned to kill him? It doesn't make any sense." A whitetail doe bounded out of a cedar brake and across the road in front of us, followed by a fawn as fleet as a shadow. "Anyway, I know Dottie," I added. "She'd rather punch the guy out than kill him. Once he was dead, she wouldn't have anybody to go up against." As I heard myself saying it, I knew it was true. Dottie was confrontational, but it was up-front confrontation she thrived on. She might kill somebody in the passion of hand-to-hand combat, especially in defense of her animals, but murder by stealth wasn't her style.

  McQuaid shook his head, frowning. "You're seeing it from your angle, China. Look at it from Bubba's. Physically, Dottie could've strung the guy up. Does she have an alibi.^"

  "She was feeding strays," I said.

  He looked at me and shook his head.

  "Innocent people don't go around building airtight alibis," I said defensively.

  He picked up the hand-drawn map that lay on the seat and squinted at it. "Looks like our turnoff should be coming up any

  moment, on the left. A sign with flowers painted on it. Mead
ow Brook."

  "Bubba's angle be damned," I said spiritedly. "Dottie didn t do it. I was with her when Rose Tompkins came screaming down the hall that Harwick was dead. I'd been with her for almost the whole hour before that, looking at the animal holding facility in the basement. Harwich's animal holding facility. She was planning to use that situation to discredit him, and she expected to have a lot of fun doing it. She had no idea he was dead."

  "We must be almost there," McQuaid said, peering down at the odometer. "Four miles from the crossroads."

  I pointed. "There's the sign. Meadow Brook. I'm telling you, McQuaid. She ^/^;7'/."

  "I hear you." McQuaid turned onto a gravel lane. "But if you're right, that leaves only two possibilities. One, Harwick really did kill himself, although that doesn't seem likely, given the circumstances."

  A split-rail fence ran along both sides of the road. Behind it, a flock of wild turkeys was picking sedately among the grasses. "Dottie suggested that he might have committed suicide with the intention of pinning it on somebody else," I said. "Don't frown," I added. "It's been done."

  "Yeah, sure. There's nothing new under the sun. Harwick was the type to do it, too. I served on the library committee with the guy last year. But that still wouldn't explain how he managed to put the rope over that pipe. He's too short to—"

  "Maybe he meant that to be a clue," I said. "He could have put some books on the desk, climbed up, pushed the rope over, and then put the books away again. That's how I'd have done it if I wanted to make it look like murder."

  "Aren't you unnecessarily complicating this.^" Mcquaid asked. He slowed down to cross a cattle guard. "If Harwick was serious about framing somebody, he'd have planted an obvious clue."

  I gave him a somber look. "Maybe he did."

  "Like what?"

  "Like pentobarbital sodium," I said.

  "Maybe." He sounded doubtful. "The other possibility is that somebody else did him in. He had more than enough enemies. Some of the members of his own department wouldn't speak to him."

  "I wonder if anybody actually liked the guy," I said. "Castle, maybe. They were pals. Although it's hard to tell whether he liked Harwick or simply found him useful."

  "Any family?"

  I shook my head. "As to friends, I only know of that guy Bob mentioned. Oh, lookV

  We had turned a corner, and the gravel lane was doubling back on itself in a circular drive in front of a two-story Victorian painted in period colors of blue, gray, and mauve. It had a gingerbread-trimmed porch and a three-story turret crowned with an iron horse whirligig. Forsythia—exactly the bushes Howard Cosell preferred above all others—bloomed yellow around the house, and there was a large pecan tree in the middle of the carefully tended lawn, exactly what Khat required for his daily tree-climbing exercises.

  McQuaid parked the truck and leaned his forearms on the steering wheel, looking around. "What do you think?"

  I didn't want to tell him that in my childhood imagination I had built a house just like this one, where on winter nights I could curl up before the fire with a big bowl of popcorn, a mug of mulled cider, and a book. "It's big," I said, carefully noncommittal. "Probably an acre of floors. It'd be a job to keep them clean."

  "Sure would," McQuaid said. He eyed the turret. "And I'd hate to fix that roof. Probably fall off and break my neck."

  "Probably," I agreed. The lawn curled around the house like a green velvet shawl, separated from the woods beyond by a rock

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  Hangman 'j Root 103

  wall. Yellow desert marigolds and huisache daisies were scattered along it like little chips of summer sunshine in the springtime grass. In the back, I could see a large sunny yard, perfect for an herb garden.

  McQuaid had one hand on the door. "Do you want to go in? Or is it too big?"

  "Well, we're here," I said, very casual. "I guess it won't hurt to take a look."

  "The rent's too high," McQuaid said. We were back in the truck, heading for town. "I wasn't expecting to shell out that kind of money. And it's really too big for us."

  "And it's a two-year lease." I hadn't gotten past the first week, let alone two years. What would happen if we signed the lease, moved in, and discovered that proximity killed intimacy? A lease would cast in concrete what had been flexible, open, free. A lease could kill us. Why hadn't I thought of that sooner?

  McQuaid was silent for a minute. "But I have to admit to lusting after that shop," he said finally. The English prof fancied old automobiles. The shop was a converted three-car garage, more than adequate for a mere gun hobby.

  I didn't answer For my part, I had to admit to lusting after the gracious rooms, the polished wood floors and woodwork, the high ceilings, and the cozy window seat in the round room on the third floor of the turret. And there was the sunny yard behind the house, sloping to the willow-shaded brook, and the barn, and the—

  Hey, wait. Not very long ago, I was in the habit of coming home sometime between ten and midnight to an elegantly modem condo whose furniture and accessories had been selected by a decorating service, whose interior was spiffed up by a maid service, and whose lawn was mown and vacuumed by a lawn-mowing

  service. With a great deal of psychological restructuring, I had graduated to the neat four rooms behind my herb shop. To take on a rambling Victorian in the country was too much, even if. . . It was too much, period.

  "We need a house that costs less and doesn't have a lease," I said. "And fewer bedrooms." I had counted five. Five! Who needs five bedrooms?

  "Right," McQuaid said. "So we keep looking."

  "Right," I said.

  He sneaked a look at me. "Too bad. Fve never seen a shop like that one."

  I thought of the window seat. "Let's go to Bean's and have a beer," I said.

  Bean's was crowded. Somebody had punched up a medley of Dolly Parton songs, the dart-board gang was firing on the governor and her white motorcycle, and the bar was jammed. It took Bob ten minutes to bring our pitcher When he did, he had something on his mind besides beer and chips.

  "See that guy at the bar?" he asked, out of the side of his mouth. "That's Max."

  "Max who?" McQuaid asked.

  "Max Wilde," Bob said. "Makes wood furniture over around Wimberley. You know, stuff like wooden beds with the bark still on, stuff like that."

  "Not interested," McQuaid said. "We haven't found a house yet. It's too early to think about beds, with or without bark." He dipped a chip into the salsa, tasted it, and winced. "Hot enough to melt teeth," he muttered happily, and dipped again.

  "I'm not talkin' beds," Bob said. "I'm talkin' information. As in Harwick."

  "Oh," I said. 'That Max." The man to whom Miles Harwick

  had occasionally talked on Saturday nights. I stood up and peered over the crowd. "Which one is he?"

  "The one in the leather—" Bob started to point and broke off. "Shit. Musta just left."

  I sat back down. "He was a friend of Harwick? A close friend?"

  Bob shrugged. "Dunno 'bout close. Don't think anybody was close to Harwick. The guy was kinda a strutter, 'fya know what I mean. But Max was sayin' a minute ago that he figgered he knew Harwick about as well as anybody. Said they had some kinda business deal goin' a while back."

  I sipped thoughtfully at my beer. "Where around Wimber-ley?" Wimberley is a small town about twenty miles northwest of Pecan Springs. The first Saturday of the month, the Lions Club hosts a huge flea and craft market that attracts people from as far away as San Antonio and Houston and creates a humon-gous traffic jam on FM-2325. Wimberley is also famous for being an artists' colony. The two facts are not unrelated.

  "Dunno," Bob said. "Shouldn't be too hard to find, though. Wimberley ain't that big."

  "Thanks," I said. "Maybe I'll look for him."

  When Bob had returned to the bar, McQuaid cocked an eyebrow at me. "You're not turning lawyer again, are you?"

  "Not on your life," I said fervently.

  "Then why would you go lookin
g for Wilde?"

  "Because I'm curious. According to Dottie, Harwick couldn't research his way out of a paper bag. Castle claimed he was the academy's best and brightest. You say that nobody at the university liked him. Maybe Wilde will be a little less biased." I gave him a cocked eyebrow. "Want to help me shop for a handcrafted wooden bed with the bark still on it?"

  McQuaid dipped into the salsa again. "We don't have anywhere to put it," he said. He shook his head pensively. "Did you

  see the size of that master bedroom? We could sleep an army in there. Great view, too, out over the meadow."

  "Not to mention a great rent," I reminded him. "A great big rent. With a great big long lease. And we're not an army."

  "Yeah," McQuaid said. He looked at his watch. "Fifteen more minutes, and I've gotta split. I promised Brian Fd be home by ten." He grinned at me. "When we find that house, we can go home together. That'll simplify things, won't it?"

  Actually, it would. But it might have been nice if he'd put it a little more romantically. And I wasn't sure I liked the thought of being expected home by ten by somebody who had not yet attained puberty.

  44 4

  Sunday morning is my fooling-around time. Sleep late, do the laundry, cook something fun for breakfast. I woke up early, thinking of driving to Wimberley to look for Max Wilde. But it was too early to start, so I put in a load of sheets and towels and let them wash while I rounded up two eggs, what was left of a jar of caviar Ruby had given me, some yogurt, basil, and chives. I was getting ready to whip up an omelet when the phone rang. It was Dottie, with news that made me postpone breakfast.