The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  I sat there trying, via ESP, to get Eileen to cry, but it didn’t work. She sat, head slightly bowed, eyes veiled. The jury stared at her.

  Gary’s voice intensified; he spoke not faster but more sharply. “The truth is, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that Eileen Tenaway did not murder her own baby. It is an abomination beyond words that she stands accused, hauled into jail by the police, who found evidence of at least one intruder. But after the crime, the intruder was nowhere to be found. Eileen Tenaway, on the other hand, was right there. She herself called the police. Goodness, how convenient. The police came, they looked around, then a short time later, they came back and clapped her in handcuffs.”

  He ran his hand behind his neck and slouched slightly. “Then on top of it, we have the district attorney swallowing the police’s theory like an oversized hamburger.”

  The jurors smiled at the image, glancing at the robust figure of Tracy Beck-Rubin. At that moment I hated and loved Gary equally ferociously.

  “Unfortunately,” Gary said, now back to a restrained, reasonable tone, “in this case a theory just isn’t good enough.” He talked about time frame, police reports, forensic tests. He moved his body powerfully as he spoke, his shoulders and hips square, his hands emphasizing the points he made. “So we naturally ask: If Eileen Tenaway did not administer a fatal dose of drugs to her daughter, who did? We would all like to know, none more than Eileen Tenaway. Well, my job is to prove to you there is reasonable doubt in the state’s case against Eileen. And I will. Ladies and gentlemen, there is enough doubt to fill the Grand Canyon. But perhaps also we’ll uncover the real truth in this trial.”

  He glared at Tracy Beck-Rubin and sat down.

  All the movies I’d seen, all the television I’d watched, all the improvisations I’d done pretending to be in a courtroom—they were nothing compared to actually being present—feeling the vibes, seeing the players writhe and fight. The trial wasn’t so much a show, I realized, as a chess match, or a political campaign. Yes, that was it: who are the voters going to like more: Eileen Tenaway or Tracy Beck-Rubin? And who understands the voters better: Tracy Beck-Rubin or Gary Kwan?

  I found myself thinking hard.

  That first week, every night after putting Petey to bed I got on the Internet and reviewed famous murder trials, reading transcripts I downloaded from law school archives. I read about Tracy Beck-Rubin’s cases. How does she operate? Could her moves be predicted? I brewed coffee and downloaded newspaper accounts and magazine analyses of the Roscoe Jamison trial and read those too.

  During a recess a few days in, I asked Gary again about the ball cap in the bushes. “Isn’t there some way we can try to find out whose cap it was? I mean, the DNA from the hair—”

  “The DNA on the cap is only relevant to us because it suggests a stranger was around that night. Remember, Rita, we don’t have to prove anything. It’s not up to us to solve this case.”

  “But if we could—”

  “Our job is to represent Eileen’s interests.”

  As far as keeping a low profile, I was aware of the reporters, and quickly walked away, eyes down, whenever one approached me. They were always trying to get close to the principals. All of us had to dodge the press. “It’s hard to hit a moving target,” quipped Steve Calhoun.

  At least half of what went on zoomed over my head: reasons for certain objections, the little huddled conferences with Judge Davenport, the threats to make some motion or other.

  But I liked it. And as the trial went on I got better at understanding things.

  I realized that a trial is the tip of the iceberg, bobbing up from the ocean depths. There was much more ice beneath the surface. And the jury would never see it. As I read and thought and watched and tried to coach Eileen, I began to want to know about that big hunk of ice down there.

  Chapter 12 – Rowe Rocks the Baby

  OURO PRÊTO, BRAZIL

  For his guide George Rowe wanted an old person because old people tend to be better at keeping their mouths shut, and they tend to be inconspicuous. The old person had to be agile, because Rowe might want to do some walking in the hilly countryside of Minas Gerais, the France-sized mining region of Brazil. He had spent several unsuccessful days in São Paulo trying to get information from various ministries of records and certificates. The old person had to be male, because this was after all rural Third World.

  Rowe did not know Portuguese or even Spanish, but he learned the words for good day, please, and thank you, and this served him all right. The guide would translate everything else for him.

  He avoided the tourist-bureau guides who approached him as soon as he got off the bus in Ouro Prêto, which would be his base. He walked into town and ate a meal of sausages and grilled bananas at a café. The food smelled and tasted good. He watched the people in the café and on the street without staring. Portuguese, its vowels sandwiched tightly between hunks of consonants, sounded different from the more liquid Spanish. Rowe enjoyed the strangeness of the steep old colonial town, all blocky buildings and wavy tile roofs. The buses that clanked by were quaint in the sense of being mechanically obsolete but with good paint jobs. He enjoyed the forthright sounds of the language, the flash of a smile beneath a businessman’s Panama hat, the switch of the waitress’s bright-pink skirt over her wonderful calypso hips. He had never realized how much he liked the color bright pink.

  Rowe left the café and went to the Escola de Minas, the mining college. There were several colleges in Ouro Prêto, and at this one he expected to find English speakers with common sense and current knowledge of the mining scene. After walking around and talking with a few people, he found himself having coffee with a middle-aged professor of mathematics who spoke English well.

  Rowe introduced himself frankly as an investigator from America looking into the death of an American mining businessman. He made it clear he was eager to pay good money for the right guide.

  The professor, a thin-waisted man with upsticking salt-and-pepper hair, was named Tony Ferré. He knew instantly who Rowe was talking about, since the discovery of Richard Tenaway’s body had occurred near Ouro Prêto and had been big news there—rich American run afoul of something, who knew what? He said he would like to be Rowe’s guide himself since he had lived in Minas Gerais all his life, but due to his teaching obligations he could not. However, he knew just the man.

  As a token of goodwill, Rowe gave Tony Ferré two hundred reals—about a hundred dollars. Money is a very easy way to make your way around. In a city this size, about sixty thousand people, Rowe knew he could give money to people and even if they talked about it he would not attract too much attention for a while.

  That night, Rowe went to Tony Ferré’s house for dinner. The professor lived in a small house on a slope that overlooked the town. The house was tidy, the table set. The professor introduced him to his wife and teenage daughter, who spoke only a little English. A chicken was stewing on the stove. Then he led Rowe outside to a chicken coop the size of a small cabin. Rowe noticed a chopping block with a patch of recent blood, and a pair of contented-looking cats lounging near it.

  The professor rattled the coop’s wire door. An explosion of clucking. From the darkness burst a flurry of feathers and stinking guano dust, then a cloud of tobacco smoke and a little man. He was about a head shorter than Tony and had the same tiny waist and upsticking hair, only his was pure white. His face was seamed and very dark brown. He smoked a short cigar. His eyes were quick and candid and somewhat crazy.

  Tony said, “This is Raimundo Ferré, my father.”

  They waited while the old man set down his cigar and washed at a spigot.

  Over dinner, Rowe did not talk much. He gathered that Raimundo generally preferred the company of chickens to humans, but lately he’d been bored. When young, Raimundo had been a laundryman and a garimpeiro, or independent miner, and these days he raised chickens and sometimes drove a taxi on the streets that were not too steep to drive on. Tourists with good lung
s loved Ouro Prêto because you had the upper and lower cobblestone streets to yourself, and it was pleasant to hike around the clean, interesting neighborhoods.

  _____

  This part of Brazil was hot now. The high grasslands had been made more arid by logging and strip-mining. Of course, this had been, for the Portuguese explorers, El Dorado. They had found gold here, and they arranged for slaves to dig it up for them. The minerals had been replaced by blood and bones. Warm brooding fogs often wrapped the land and made everyplace feel secret.

  Rowe told Raimundo he wanted to talk to some of the garimpeiros, the hardscrabble miners who worked ditches in the countryside looking for imperial topaz. He might also want to go to Itabira, where emeralds were excavated from deep shafts in the bedrock.

  As his son had done, Raimundo nodded when Rowe mentioned the American businessman who had met his death around here half a year ago. “Yes,” he said, in a raked-gravel voice, “all the people, they knew of it.”

  “Knew of what: the man going missing,” Rowe asked, “or the man turning up dead?”

  “Turning up dead.”

  The old man was perfect for George Rowe. Lean and quick, with tough hands and feet, good English because he had wanted to be a smart trader with the North Americans, and a sense of humor. Nothing funny had been said, but Rowe perceived this. He had learned that if you choose your associates with care and keep your own counsel, you’ll be all right.

  _____

  The next morning Rowe and Raimundo walked out of town, on the road north into the hills. Their short-sleeved cotton shirts soon became soaked with sweat. Rowe carried two bottles of water and some other things in a paper sack.

  Raimundo’s mood was buoyant. He had strapped a leather-sheathed hunting knife to his belt and put on a canvas sun hat. As they walked he told Rowe about Ouro Prêto, the town named for gold, the town that existed solely for the purpose of extracting gold from the mountains, so much gold that King Asshole of Portugal had to build a whole fleet to carry it away. That was the term he used, “King Asshole.” Rowe laughed when he heard it, and that gratified Raimundo.

  Rowe felt good today too. The clean mountain air filled his lungs with optimism.

  Raimundo asked Rowe, “Do you have interest in sexual tourism?”

  Rowe walked along, his hands in his pockets, his sack beneath his arm. He thought about his last girlfriend. She was cute but difficult, always finding fault with herself and depending on him to cheer her up. At first he could improve her mood by complimenting her petite figure or her gentleness, but over time she required more and more cheering up, involving gifts. At first a bottle of perfume would do it, but over time the only thing that would work was a new outfit from some boutique, or a trip to Las Vegas.

  It was too bad, but he’d had to get away from her.

  He thought about the pink-skirted waitress in the café. He would like a simple, romantic relationship with a woman. Bawdiness was OK, but the crudeness of being a john turned him off.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Business first, anyway.”

  “Yes, yes,” agreed Raimundo.

  In half an hour they came upon a couple of men digging a trench next to the road on a government right-of-way. The road itself was red dirt.

  The garimpeiros showed Raimundo and Rowe how they scraped away the gravel and washed it in wooden trays, hauling water in buckets from a nearby creek.

  Raimundo said, “They only find a few crystals a week, but it is enough for feeding themselves and their families. They give a little to the state agent so they can mine here.”

  The men’s bodies were as hard and fat-free as the rocks they dug. They wore the kind of motley clothes you’d find in an Ozark storm shelter. One man’s T-shirt said BALLOU FAMILY REUNION beneath two donkeys wearing boxing gloves. Rowe didn’t like it that such clothes were all that these fine-looking men could afford.

  He squatted and removed a photograph from his paper sack. It was of Richard Tenaway at a charity ball, smiling smugly into the camera, glass of champagne in hand. The men looked blank. Rowe took out another photograph, a larger one, of a man lying on a mortuary table. The picture showed just the naked upper body. The man’s eyes were half open and empty, his skin white and thick-looking. Stubble covered his jaw. The central fact of the photo appeared to be a purple gash in the middle of his forehead. He looked a little damp, as if he’d just been carried in from outdoors. His hair lay in greasy tendrils.

  “Ah,” said the men when they saw it, and he could see they now realized it was the same man in both pictures. Raimundo translated, and Rowe learned that they had sold stones to Gemini’s local representative in town. The oldest of the garimpeiros had sold stones to Tenaway himself, but that was a long time ago. They also sold stones to another buyer, a big mining company.

  Raimundo himself had never met Tenaway. He explained there were several mining corporations in the area: they sank shafts into rock and stripped dirt from hillsides to extract bulk minerals like kaolin and feldspar as well as the vastly more valuable emerald, topaz, and tourmaline.

  The miners had heard of the unusual death of Richard Tenaway—an American of the sort who stayed out of real trouble.

  Rowe would have liked to solve every aspect of this Tenaway thing, but he only had time now to focus on whether Tenaway had faked his death.

  Granted, a death certificate had been produced, as well as the morbid photo of the dead body. Eileen Tenaway had returned from here with those things, as well as Tenaway’s ashes.

  An expert at Fenco had told Rowe the photo was an actual color print, not digital, and it had not been manipulated.

  Rowe asked the garimpeiros if they knew who found the body, but they did not. They suggested the police might know, since they had handled the situation. All the men shared a shrug at the mention of police.

  Also visible in the picture was part of a floor, tiled in a complicated black-and-white pattern, as well as the corner of a device that looked perhaps like a heart-lung machine or an oxygen apparatus. Rowe had found out, though, that it was an embalming pump.

  So the picture definitely had been taken in a mortuary. It didn’t matter which mortuary, really, but he wanted to know who had made the photo.

  The two other investigators Fenco had sent over to look into the claim in the first place had simply walked around Ouro Prêto like adolescents, asking questions randomly of the police and whoever else they bumped into. They wrote things down and believed so much in their superiority to these backward people they thought if there had been a conspiracy it would be sitting there in the wide open.

  Eileen Tenaway might have taken the photo (hence been in on the scam from the get-go) but Rowe felt she had not. She and her husband would have needed local help in staging it, and Rowe’s gut said it was not the kind of job Richard would entrust to his wife anyway.

  Rowe bought three topaz crystals from each of the garimpeiros for thirty reals apiece, which Raimundo thought a fair price. The men were happy and urged Rowe to come see them again at their small camp.

  The crystals were dry and only faintly amber-colored. He rolled the largest one back and forth in his palm. It was oblong, and even though rough, its planes showed the mineral’s natural order. Imperial topaz, he had learned, was called that because of its golden-orange hue, rare and unlike ordinary topaz, which is commonly yellow or blue. Rowe understood that when cut—when the outer rough bits were chipped off and the stone was faceted—it would be a tongue of flame.

  Rowe and Raimundo returned to town and ate lunch in a different café than the one with the pink-skirted waitress, but this one also had a beautiful waitress. There was one plain one as well, who clearly disliked the beautiful one. Raimundo reached out and pinched the beautiful one’s ass through her skirt, which was blue stretch denim. She slapped his hand and flung an insult. Rowe would have liked to be slapped by that waitress too, but he kept his hands to himself.

  _____

  “Thanks for making t
he time,” he said when the buyer at Gemini Imports opened the office door. “This is Raimundo, my guide. He found these stones and thinks they’re worth something.” Of the six stones he’d bought from the garimpeiros, he drew only five from his pocket, having decided to keep the biggest one.

  The gem buyer was a tall young Brazilian who spoke reasonable English. His name was Esteban and he was so happy to have educated company that he slobbered all over them. “Yes! Please be seated! What may I do for you? Would you like a snack, some coffee?”

  Rowe had introduced himself on the phone as Tom Webber, a Canadian tourist. He smiled at Esteban’s use of the American word snack, with just a tiny hesitation, but then a going-ahead with it, a plunge into the word. Snack!

  Rowe was here to take his measure.

  Esteban looked at the crystals under a stereo microscope and said he would buy them, but they were not worth more than ten reals apiece.

  “Never mind, then,” said Rowe, “I’ll buy them from him myself, for souvenirs. I’ll pay him more than that.”

  Esteban offered twenty reals apiece.

  Raimundo shook his head.

  “It’s all right,” Rowe said. “Never mind.”

  Raimundo suggested, “Forty reals.”

  “OK,” said Esteban.

  Raimundo was quietly beside himself with joy at Rowe’s profit.

  After the sale, which Esteban paid with a note from a local bank, the men talked, and Rowe learned that Esteban was tired of Ouro Prêto and wanted to go to America, “or at least Miami.”

  Rowe laughed so hard that Raimundo reached over and pounded him on the back. Rowe asked Esteban if he’d like to have a drink sometime. Esteban said he would.

  When Rowe and Raimundo got back out on the street, Rowe asked, “Where do the delinquents hang out?”