Thyme of Death (22 page)

I flicked off my torch and stood for
a moment in the dark. That Z was remarkably like the print of Meredith’s new
running shoes. The mark of Zorro.

Meredith? That was crazy! Meredith
wouldn’t do something like this.

Yeah, well, maybe not so crazy. Last
night Meredith had announced she was getting a gun. This afternoon, she had
come to the conclusion that Roz had killed her mother. I turned on the torch
and knelt down to inspect the shoe print again. Yes, there was no mistake. It
looked very much as if Meredith had tried to kill Roz.

I frowned. To kill Roz—or to scare
the hell out of her? I straightened up and looked into the living room through
the open casement window. The range was close, no more than four yards. Roz had
been a standing target, easily visible in the lighted room. The assailant had
shot and missed as Roz bent over to pick up her credit card. Then, as Roz
dropped to the floor, the assailant had fired again. That bullet had taken a
chunk out of the stone window sill and ricocheted off. Meredith had said that
she’d taken an NRA course. If she’d shot to kill, Roz would be dead by now. It
looked to me as if Meredith had only tried to scare her.

I went back into the cottage. Roz
was hunched on the loveseat, shaking hands cupped around a mug of coffee. Ruby
looked at me. “Should we call the police?”

“Mr. Cowan’s taking care of that,” I
said. I went to the fireplace and examined the mantel, a foot-thick beam of
solid oak. On the far right end, about an inch from the top, I found what I was
looking for, a neat round hole about the size of my little finger. The first
bullet was embedded in the mantel, and it wasn’t going to come out without a
lot of digging. I’d leave that to Bubba.

I studied the stone wall and rough
pine ceiling, gauging where the second shot would have hit after it ricocheted
off the sill. There was a fist-size patch of plaster missing from a spot on the
wall opposite the window, exposing the stone beneath. I glanced at the floor.
Among the dust and plaster shards was a battered slug. I bent over and studied
it, not picking it up. It was what was left of a lead bullet, probably a
thirty-eight, flattened and deformed.

Two squad cars skidded to a stop in
the alley. Doors slammed. Fifteen seconds later, Bubba marched into the living
room with his hand on his gun, cigar stub clamped in his jaw. “Somebody get
shot?” he asked.

Roz opened her eyes and made a
little whimper.

“Someone shot at Ms. Kotner,” I
said, stepping forward. “Twice. Both misses.”

Bubba shoved back his Stetson with a
thick, meaty thumb and regarded me. “If it isn’t Miz Bayles. You’re a busy
lady.”

“The shots came through that open
window,” I told him. “The first bullet seems to be embedded in the mantel. The
second ricocheted off the stone window ledge and ended up on the floor behind
the loveseat.”

A policeman came to the door, the
same mustached Hispanic who was with Bubba the night before. “All clear out
here, chief,” he reported. “Musta got away down the alley.” He gestured. “Somethin’
out here you should see.”

“Be out in a minute,” Bubba said. He
stepped to the mantel and inspected the hole in the wood, then went behind the
loveseat and hunkered down on his heels to look at the spent bullet. Then he
stood and went to the window and peered out.

“Out there in that patch of weeds,
huh?” he asked me. “That’s where the shots came from?”

“Thyme,” Ruby corrected him. “It’s
an herb, not a weed.” It was a nice effort, but I doubted if Bubba cared about
the botanical distinction.

Bubba growled something under his
breath. The cigar worked its way across his face and his black brows pulled
together like the eyebrows on an animated cartoon figure. “From out there to in
here—pretty close range,” he said. “Ask me, the person doin’ the shootin’ was a
lousy shot.” He turned to Roz. “You Miz Kotner?’

Roz summoned what dignity she could.
“I am.”

Bubba lifted his hat and scratched
his head. “Ain’t you the lady that does tee-vee? Saw you at the service t’other
day.”

“That’s ... right,” Roz said
stiffly.

Having sorted things out, Bubba gave
a satisfied nod. “Well then, Miz Kotner, suppose you tell me what happened.”

“I was on my way to the liquor store,”
Roz said, not looking at me, and then went on to tell Bubba what she had told
me. By the time she finished, she was crying again.

“Then what?” Bubba prompted. “What
happened after the shootin’?”

“They came,” Roz said, gesturing at
Ruby and me. She lay back against the loveseat as if she were exhausted. “They
got here right after it happened.”

Bubba turned to Ruby. “Where was you
and Miz Bayles when the shootin’ was going on?”

“We were going to an art show,” Ruby
replied. She didn’t even look at me. “We were just leaving when we heard the
shots.”

“You didn’t see nobody?”

“We
heard
somebody,” I said, “in
the thyme bed. But whoever it was got to the alley and was gone by the time we
could follow. So we came in here to see if Roz was hurt.”

“It was lucky we
were
here,”
Ruby said. “Whoever it was might have shot a third time.”

Roz moaned and squeezed her eyes
shut.

“Stay put,” Bubba grunted, and
stepped outside. I went to the window. The other cop signaled him, and the two
of them bent over the shoe print. But when Bubba came back into the cottage, he
didn’t mention it. Instead, he pulled out his pocketknife, one of those
six-bladed Swiss Army types that can handle an entire troop of Boy Scouts on a
week-long camp out, and went to the mantel. While I watched, he gouged a hole
in the wood and extricated a misshapen hunk of lead. He picked the other bullet
up off the floor and wrapped both in his handkerchief and stuck them in his
pocket. Then he turned to Roz.

“What’s your guess on this, Miz
Kotner?”

“My ... guess?” Roz asked faintly.

Bubba gave her a patient look. “Who’s
got it in for you? Who wanted you dead—or wanted to scare you?”

Roz sat straighter. “Several people
hate me enough to kill me,” she said. “But I’m sure that none of them would
want me
dead.”

Bubba scowled. “Meanin’—?”

“Meaning that I’ve made a number of
enemies—it’s hard not to, in my business—but none of them can afford for me to
be dead. I’m worth too much.” She spoke with an odd mixture of pride and
bitterness. “Nobody wants to kill the goose that lays the golden egg”

Bubba sighed and took out a small
notebook. “How about givin’ me some names.”

Roz frowned, concentrating. “Well,
there’s my producer, Matthew Harmon. I just turned down his contract offer
and Jane says he’s very upset. But my secretary told me that he’s in Toronto
for a few days.”

“Jane?’

“Jane Dorman, my agent. She’s not
exactly happy with me right now, either, but she’s spending the weekend at her
cottage in Vermont. She called me from there this morning.”

Bubba’s cigar came up. “Anybody
local?”

Roz started to say something, then
paused. Then she shook her head. “No, no one. I knew only one person well, and
she’s ... dead.”

Bubba flipped his notebook shut and
stuck it into his pocket. “Guess that’s it for now,” he said. “When we get it
wrapped up outside, we’ll be goin’.”

Roz sat up. “You’re not leaving! I
need
protection!”

Bubba looked at me and a brief smile
twitched his thick lips. “Looks to me like you got plenty protection. Miz
Bayles is here.”

“But I need
police
protection!”
She held out her hands in entreaty. “Somebody tried to
kill
me tonight!
You’re not just going to walk away from that, are you?’

Ruby intervened. “Don’t forget,” she
said delicately, “that Ms. Kotner is a well-known performer. If anything
happened to her here in Pecan Springs...” She left the sentence dangling, but
the implication was clear.

Bubba’s cigar worked from right to
left. If there was anything he
didn’t
want, it was to have a national celebrity—a
kids’ TV favorite, at that—assaulted under his very nose.

“Well,” he allowed, “reckon I could
send a patrol car down the alley ever’ little bit.”

Roz’s smile was dazzlingly grateful.
“Would
you?” she asked. “That would make me feel so much safer.”

“Yeah,” Bubba said. He glanced at
me. “You stayin?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary, if
your men are patrolling. But I’m close by,” I added to Roz. “If you want me,
all you have to do is yell.” Given her pitch and range, I was sure to hear.

“I will,” she said. “And thank you,”
she added to Bubba, who was walking out the door. “I appreciate the offer of
the patrol.”

Bubba tipped his hat, more courteous
now that he’d reflected on the down side of another attack on Roz. “Don’t
mention it, ma’am,” he said. “G’night.”

I turned to Roz, who was headed for
the scotch bottle. “If everything’s okay, Ruby and I will be on our way. I
guess we’ll have to scratch the art show tonight.”

“Of course everything’s not okay,”
Roz said sharply, glancing up at the patch of exposed stone where the second
bullet had struck. “It wouldn’t be okay if somebody shot at
you,
would
it?” She poured herself a drink. “But I guess there’s nothing more to be done
tonight.”

“I guess,” I agreed. “Just yell if
you need anything.” As we left, I waved at Bubba and the patrolman, bent over the
footprint. Making a casting, I thought. I wondered how many people in Pecan
Springs had bought Sears running shoes recently.

“So we have to reset the trap,” Ruby
said as we went into my kitchen.

“Yeah,” I said. “I figure that Roz
is too out of it to make a pass at the letters tonight.” I cut two wedges of
cold cornbread and put them in the microwave. In my opinion, warmed-over
cornbread is better than cake. “But I’ll understand if you don’t want to do another
stakeout, Ruby. This one didn’t exactly go the way we figured.”

“I can handle it,” Ruby said. “If
McQuaid’s back, though, maybe we can include him.”

I nodded. My thought exactly.

Ruby sat down at the table and
propped her chin in her hands. “So who do you think fired at Roz?”

I poured a couple of glasses of milk
and got the butter out of the refrigerator. I cook with margarine mostly, and
save the butter for when it makes a difference. On cornbread it does. “What
would you say to Meredith?”

Ruby’s copper-colored eyebrows shot
up into her hair. “Meredith? That’s idiotic! What makes you think
she
did
it?”

I explained about the gun Meredith
had said she was going to buy, her state of mind when she’d stormed out of the
house, and the shoe print. While I talked I got the wedges of cornbread out of
the microwave and buttered them. Ruby took one, and I took the other.

“You think she did it?” Ruby asked
incredulously when I finished my story. “You think
Meredith
did it?”

“I think it’s possible,” I said. “When
she left here, she was mad enough to do just about anything, including taking
a couple of threatening shots at Roz. If Bubba knew what I know, he’d think it
was possible, too. In fact, Meredith would probably be at the top of his
suspect list.”

“But those shoes aren’t unique,”
Ruby said. “She got them at Sears. There must be hundreds of people running
around leaving that crazy tread print behind them. And a whole lot of them must
live in Pecan Springs.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But there aren’t
hundreds of people wearing Sears’ shoes and living in Pecan Springs who also
have it in for Roz Kotner.”

Ruby frowned. “It sounds bad, but I
just can’t believe that
Meredith
could be guilty of...” She heaved a
long sigh. “But before this afternoon, I wouldn’t have believed that Roz could
be guilty of murder, either. I guess it’s possible.” She thought of something
else. “You mentioned Roz’s will. If Roz died and left all her money to Jo, but
Jo is dead, would Meredith inherit?”

“The state of Texas treats that
situation differently than some other states.” I closed my eyes and tapped into
a memory from some long-ago exam. “If the beneficiary is related to the
testator, and in the absence of specific alternative instruction, the legacy
passes to the beneficiary’s heir. If the beneficiary is not related to the
testator, the legacy does not pass. The testator is considered to have died
intestate.”

Ruby reached for her milk. “Is that
lawyer talk for no?’

“Yeah. If Jo had been Roz’s sister,
and if Roz hadn’t given other instructions, Meredith could inherit. Jo wasn’t
Roz’s sister, so that’s the end of that. But the situation is different in
different states, and most people don’t know the law. It’s also possible that
Meredith believes that she is now Roz’s heir. It’s also possible that if Bubba
finds out about Roz’s will, he might think Meredith stands to inherit.”