Thyme of Death (25 page)

“Thank you,” Violett muttered,
clutching the sack.

Young Mr. Cavette looked at his
watch. “Guess I’ll be seeing you at church in a little while. I understand
Bobbie Jean Sawyers will be offerin’ us a soprano solo.” He rolled his eyes. “Fine
singer, Bobbie Jean, although them high notes are a little hard on my ears.”

“I can’t come this morning,” Violett
said, ducking her head with the guilty look of a child playing hooky. “But
please tell Reverend Block I’ll be there tonight.”

Young Mr. Cavette grinned jovially. “Faithful
as you are, Miz Hall, I’m sure the good Lord won’t strike you dead for missin’
one service.” He went back into the store, the door swinging shut behind him.

“You have company?” I asked.

Violett colored. “Just... a friend,”
she muttered. “Ms. Bayles, I’m thinking maybe I should take you up on your
offer yesterday. I need to talk to a lawyer. How much do you ...” Her voice
wavered uncertainly. “I mean, is it expensive?”

“If you have a legal problem, I’d be
glad to give you some advice. No charge.”

That seemed to reassure her. “Rosalind
Kotner and I had an agreement,” she said, putting the words together slowly, as
if she were stringing a bead necklace, selecting each bead separately. “She
paid me some money, but now she says she’s selling out and she won’t give me
any more.” She swallowed painfully. “I was thinking that maybe a lawyer could
tell me what to do.”

I frowned. Why had Roz been paying
Violett? “I close the shop at five today—how about if I come over after that?”

Violett gave me a grateful look. “Thanks,”
she said. “I’ll see you then.” She hurried off.

I went into Cavette’s and bought a
half dozen fertile brown eggs, a jar of my favorite strawberry preserves, and
some feta cheese to dress up my breakfast. At home, I shoved the wet clothes
into the dryer, stripped the bed and the bathroom towel racks, and threw the
sheets and towels into the washer. I scrambled two eggs with the feta cheese,
added some basil and thyme, topped the cooked omelet with yogurt and chives,
and sat down to eat and think. By the time I’d finished the eggs and a slice of
toast with jam, the clothes in the dryer were ready to be folded, the washer
was ready to deliver a load to the dryer—and I was still wrestling with the
question of who had tried to kill Roz.

I pulled the sheets and towels out
of the dryer and heaped them on the bed. If I was any judge of character (which
I was), and if I had any skill in questioning a suspect (which I did), I’d say
it was ninety-ten that Meredith hadn’t shot at Roz. But if she hadn’t, who had?
Roz thought it was Violett, but Violett had appeared genuinely surprised when
I told her about the attack. And Violett’s fear of guns and the story behind it
seemed believable. If she was lying, she was far better at it than I would
have predicted. Still, Violett shooting at Roz didn’t seem any more or less
unlikely than Meredith shooting at Roz.

I finished the sheets and started on
the towels, going back to Meredith. My reluctance to consider her a serious
suspect was a right-brain hunch that my left brain was beginning to
question—probably legitimately. What if my judgment was colored by our
friendship, and by my love for Jo? What if I had put too-easy questions to her
and swallowed her too-quick answers—simply because I
liked
her? It was
a possibility I couldn’t discount.

I was putting fresh sheets on the
bed when the phone rang. The voice was clipped and brusque, words bitten off
and spit out fast, New York style. “Jane Dorman,” it announced.

“Hello, Jane,” I said, sitting on
the half-made bed. “I hear you’re in Vermont.”

Jane gave a short laugh. “Yes,” she
said. “I’ve been reading, watching the lake, relaxing. It’s beautiful up here,
and very remote. Not even a phone. But I’ve been worrying about Roz, and when I
came to town this morning for supplies, I thought I’d call you.”

“Worrying?”

“She’s acting strangely. I don’t
know if she told you, but she turned down a big contract, an
enormous
contract.
Not only that, but she doesn’t seem to want to return to New York. You don’t
have to run right out and check on her, China, but I’d feel better if you kept
an eye on her. Give me a call at the office if there’s something I should know.”

“Sure, I can do that,” I said. I
wondered if I should tell her about the shooting, but I decided against it. If
Roz wanted her to know,
she
could tell her. “When will you be back in
your office?”

‘Tomorrow or Tuesday.” Jane thanked
me and hung up. I sat on the bed with the phone in my hand, staring at it for a
moment and thinking that Jane wasn’t the type to worry about her clients’
welfare unless their welfare affected hers. But she had a big investment in
Roz, and she didn’t know about the Disney deal. She probably wanted somebody to
spy on Roz, and I was being recruited.

I got up and finished changing the
bed, a job that I actually kind of like, at least now that I have time for it.
There were plenty of years when I slept more often than not on six-week-old
sheets. I was topping it off with Gran’s last quilt, a red-and-white pattern
called Drunkard’s Path because it is such a weird arrangement of curves and
angles, when Bubba Harris knocked at the kitchen door. I invited him in,
accepted without surprise his refusal of a cup of herb tea, and asked him,
cigar and all, to sit at the kitchen table. At least he wasn’t smoking the damn
thing.

Bubba took off his Stetson, laid it
on the table between us, and got right to the point. “Miz Bayles, what d’you
know about Meredith Gilbert?”

I thought rapidly. Unless Violett
had floated a lot more loose talk than I thought, and unless Constance had
babbled, it wasn’t likely that Bubba had stumbled onto the rumor about Jo and
Roz. He probably hadn’t discovered the incriminating running shoes yet, either.
But Bubba’s thorough. It
was
likely that he had found out about the thirty-eight.
Either late last night or first thing this morning, he’d rousted out the local
gun shop owner and checked the store’s records. When he got around to asking
Meredith for the gun—if he hadn’t already—he’d do a routine print check on it
and turn up mine. Sooner or later I’d find myself being asked to explain how
and when I had handled that particular gun. Better to take the offensive now
than be put on the defensive later.

“What do I know about Meredith
Gilbert?” I asked thoughtfully. “Well, I know she came to Pecan Springs to be
with her mother. I know she’s staying at her mother’s house until she decides
what to do. I also know that she was so upset by Friday night’s burglary that
she went out yesterday afternoon and bought a thirty-eight.”

Bubba was suddenly still. He pulled
his cigar out of his mouth and laid it on the table beside his hat. “You don’t
say,” he said, very slowly. “And just how d’you happen to know that?”

“Because Ruby and I went over there
last night after the shooting,” I said. “Meredith showed it to me. She’d tried
it out on the range at the shop.”

Bubba pushed out his lower lip,
pulled it back in. “The gun’d been fired recently?”

“Yes.”

He picked up his cigar and rolled it
between his fingers, his eyes level on mine. “D’you know of any reason why Miz
Gilbert might have it in mind to kill Miz Kotner?”

I ran swiftly through the
consequences of a truthful answer. Given the state of those slugs, a ballistics
test could be inconclusive, leaving the possibility but not the certainty that
the bullets had come from Meredith’s thirty-eight. Besides the gun, there were
the shoes, clean but probably also inconclusive. There were probably a dozen
similar pairs within a six-block radius. If I handed Bubba a motive—especially
the powerful motive I had in mind—he would be greatly tempted to haul Meredith
in for questioning, perhaps even charge her. And although my left brain
accepted the fact that Meredith
could
have tried to kill Roz, my right
brain maintained that she hadn’t. As far as I was concerned, the jury was still
hearing arguments. Bubba could hunt up his own motive.

“No,” I lied, “I can’t think of a
reason. Meredith
knows
her, of course—Roz Kotner was her mother’s
friend. Roz and Meredith and I went out for dinner on Thursday evening. But a
motive...” I shook my head. “You’ve got me, Chief Harris. Have you asked
her
that question?”

Bubba stuck his cigar back in his
face and hoisted his bulk out of the chair. “Not yet, but I’m fixin’ to.” He
picked up his hat. “How about you, Miz Bayles?” he added, with perfect Columbo
timing. “You got a motive?”

“No,” I said. “I do
not
have
a motive. I’m not in the habit of shooting at guests who are occupying my cottage.
It’s inhospitable.”

Bubba jammed his hat on his head. “Don’t
reckon you’d tell me if you did,” he reflected without animosity, and started
for the door. He paused. “Oh, by the way, I been readin’ that book.”

“Book?”

“Final Exit.”
He paused. “Miz
Gilbert ever ask you to help her kill herself?”

“No,” I said„“she didn’t.”

“Think she might’ve asked her
daughter?”

“Meredith’s already answered that
question, I believe.”

He pulled his cigar out of his mouth
and stuck it into his shirt pocket. “Yep,” he said. “She has.” He started
toward the door again.

I didn’t get up. “Let me know if I
can be of any more help.”

Bubba turned with his hand on the
knob, his hat pulled down over his eyes. “Guess I don’t have to tell you that
two on-the-scenes in two nights is pretty much a record for a person in this
town. Even for a slick ex-lawyer like you.” His look was bland. “Coincidence,
huh?’

“Yep,” I said.

Bubba gave his pants an irritated
hitch and left.

For a moment, I debated whether I
should call Meredith and warn her that the cops were on the way. But if I did
and Bubba found out, he’d assume that Meredith had something to hide, or that
I had something to hide, or both. In fact, if Bubba was the smart cop McQuaid
insisted he was, and if he had the idea that Meredith and I were in this
together, he might have dropped in to panic me, betting that I’d alert
Meredith. Nope, no phone call. Meredith would have to handle Bubba without any
help from me. And Bubba’s interest in the book worried me. I thought I could
see where he was going with it, and I didn’t like it.

I put in another load of laundry and
made a quick tour of the living room with lemon oil and a dust cloth. In
between, I placed two calls. The first was to Ace Car Rental, where a harried
female voice informed me that the computer was still down and there was no
chance of getting the information I wanted until tomorrow. The second was to
Helen Jenson, on the off chance that she’d gotten back early from Waco and
could check on Roz’s flight schedule. But I struck out there too. No answer. I’d
just put the phone down when it rang.

“Chief Harris was here,” Meredith
said. She sounded calm but worried. “He knew I’d bought the gun. I guess he
found out from the shop owner.”

“Did he take it with him?” Dumb
question. Of course he took it with him. At this very moment, he was probably
having somebody run ballistics.

“Yes, he took the damn thing,”
Meredith said. “He took my shoes, too. And he says he wants to keep the book a
while longer.” She gave a nervous laugh, high-pitched, edgy. “But he didn’t
take
me,
not yet, anyway. He just told me not to leave town.” The laugh
again, higher-pitched, edgier. “At least I know a decent lawyer.”

I laughed too, making a joke out of
it. “Yeah, I can probably give you a good deal. My overhead’s pretty low these
days.”

There was a silence. When Meredith
spoke next, her voice was lower, more controlled. “Any developments on the Roz
front?”

I hesitated and decided against
volunteering the information about Roz’s visit the night before. “My friend
with the travel agency isn’t home yet,” I said. “And Ace’s computer is still
down. We’ll get on it first thing tomorrow.”

Meredith made an impatient noise. “I
didn’t shoot at Roz, but maybe I wish I had. I’m scared that she’s going to
skip town before we’ve come up with any concrete proof that she killed my
mother.” There was a brief silence. When she spoke, her voice was low,
anguished. “God, China, I can’t
stand
this ... this sitting around,
knowing the truth but not able to act on it. I need to
do
something.”

I didn’t know how to respond. “Well,
I’m open to suggestions,” I said at last. “Have you got a better solution?”

“Yeah,” Meredith said. “Poison.”

CHAPTER 15

It was eleven forty-five, and I was
finishing the last of my housekeeping when I heard the shriek of a siren coming
down Guadalupe. It turned into the alley and died abruptly.

I went to the kitchen door and
looked out. An orange-and-white EMS ambulance had pulled up in the alley behind
the cottage, the blue light on its cab flashing. A man and a woman jumped out.
The woman ran around the cottage and banged on the front door. The man went to
the rear of the ambulance and pulled out an equipment bag. By the time he got
to the door, I was there too.

“No answer,” the woman said. She was
a slender, dark-haired woman with regular features, a firm jaw, and dark-rimmed
glasses. She wore navy slacks and a gray uniform shirt with a shoulder patch
that said CITY OF PECAN  SPRINGS,  EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICE.

Her gray plastic nametag said that
she was A.
garza, senior med.
TECH.
She carried herself like a woman in charge of decision-making.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Medical emergency,” the man said.
He dropped the equipment bag, tried the knob, and pushed at the door with his
shoulder. His brushy crew cut was the color of weathered brick and his face was
pockmarked with ancient acne scars. His nametag said he was p. D.
schwamkrug, med. tech.
It was the kind
of name that sounded like it should be printed in Gothic letters, with lots of
curlicues: “Door’s locked. How do we get in?”

“Follow me.” I ran to the south side
of the cottage, the man and woman on my heels. “What’s wrong?”

“A woman called in a medical
emergency, dropped the phone, and left an open line,” Garza said. “The 911
operator dispatched us here.”

I pushed open the French doors and
stepped into the darkened bedroom. “Roz,” I yelled. “Hey, Roz!”

No answer. I glanced around. The
bedroom was empty, the bed unmade, its blue coverlet flung back. The blue
velvet slipper chair in the corner was buried under an untidy heap of Roz’s
lingerie, and a pair of pantyhose was draped like a silken snake over the
closet door. The silence was heavy, ominous, spiced with a strange coppery odor
with an undertone of garlic, as if Roz had been cooking.

The medical technicians pushed past
me into the hall and I followed. The odor was sharper. The receiver of the
white wall telephone an arm’s reach from the bathroom door dangled by its
spring-coil cord. There was a bloody handprint on the white-painted wall beside
it, and beneath that a long bloody smear, as if someone, falling, had put a
hand on the wall for support. Bloody footprints on the beige carpet led from
the bathroom to the phone and back again. In the bathroom door was a pair of
pink running shoes, soles up and bright red, like rubber stamps inked in blood.
Inside the shoes were Roz’s feet.

When I looked into the bathroom,
what I saw made my breakfast rise in an acrid bubble at the back of my throat.
Roz was still dressed in the pink sweats I’d seen her wearing earlier, but the
pink was mostly red. She was face down on the tile in a puddle of blood and
vomit that had spread around the toilet and under the sink. The toilet was full
of blood, there was bright red blood in the bathtub, and blood in the bathroom
sink. She was clutching a blood-soaked washcloth in her left hand. The scene
looked like something out of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Garza pushed the door open all the
way and stepped over Roz and into the bathroom. She knelt in the blood to feel
for a pulse at Roz’s throat. “No carotid,” she said after a moment. “No
apparent respiration.” Her voice was calm and steady. “Let’s put her on the monitor
and see if we get any cardiac.” Schwamkrug disappeared. Garza pulled Roz’s
sweatshirt up and scanned her back, flopped her over and quickly inspected her
chest. Seeing Roz’s face, I swallowed. Her bloody mouth was open in a last anguished
gasp, and her face was the color of washed-out denim. The color of
asphyxiation.

“No wounds,” Garza said. “I’d say
bleeding ulcer.”

Then she pulled Roz’s head back,
cleared her mouth, and began doing chest compressions.

A bleeding ulcer? I remembered Roz
saying something about an ulcer. But she hadn’t seemed to think the condition
was serious, certainly not serious enough to erupt like this, in a spewing
volcano of hot red blood.

A minute later, Schwamkrug
reappeared with a black case and what looked like a small duffel bag. I stepped
aside and he leaned into the bathroom, putting the case on the floor. “Any
luck?” he asked.

“Unresponsive,” Garza said. She did
one last chest compression and sat up straight. She yanked some wires out of
the case and deftly attached them, one to each shoulder, a third to Roz’s chest
wall. I heard a thin, continuous
bleep
and the small green scope on the
monitor showed a flat line. Garza pulled two paddles out of the case and
adjusted a knob. “Stand clear,” she said.

I turned away from what came next,
but I could hear the small clap of the defibrillator. The
bleep
didn’t
change.

“She’s gone,” Schwamkrug remarked
clinically.

Garza shook her head. “Give me an
airway. No, a P.T.L.” Schwamkrug pulled a cellophane-wrapped package out of the
duffel bag, and a cylinder of oxygen. A moment later Garza had inserted a
plastic tube in Roz’s throat and the oxygen began to hiss.

While Garza worked, Schwamkrug went
to the wall phone and dialed. A moment later I heard him talking in low tones,
first to the dispatcher, then to the hospital. He came back and spoke briefly
to Garza. “Doc Bennett says to give her five minutes. If you don’t get
anything, he’ll issue a T.O.D.”

‘Time of death,” Garza said to me.

The next five minutes ticked out
endlessly while the three of us waited: Garza kneeling on bloody knees beside
Roz’s bloody body; Schwamkrug with his arms folded across his chest, leaning
against the doorjamb; me alternately pacing up and down the hallway and
crowding into the doorway beside Schwamkrug, watching Garza’s effort to hiss
the life back into Roz. This pair saw death every day, and maybe they got
accustomed to its faces, its smells, its taste. But not me—and this was the
second corpse I’d seen in a week. One part of me was already making a list of
questions. But another part, the operative part, was still coping with the
sight of so much blood, with Roz’s blue-denim face, with the coppery, garlicky
smell of vomited death that hung in the room like stale kitchen odors.

Garza looked past Schwamkrug to me. “Friend
of yours?” she asked, her voice colored with professional sympathy.

“I knew her,” I said. “This is my
cottage.” I looked at the blood pooling in the floor. “You said it was an ulcer?”

“That’s what it looks like,” Garza
replied. “She would have died from the bleeding in pretty short order if she
hadn’t asphyxiated first. She must have passed out when she was making the
call, recovered enough to drag herself in here, started to vomit, passed out
again, asphyxiated.”

“What could have triggered the
bleeding?” I
asked.

“Something corrosive, maybe,” Garza
said. “Or maybe she developed a severe gastroenteritis, and the vomiting kicked
up the ulcer.”

Beside me, Schwamkrug straightened
and looked at his watch. “That’s five,” he said.

Garza sat back on her heels. “Okay,”
she said. “Get Bennett.” She looked at me. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling a sweep of
pity. “Me too.” I hadn’t liked Roz, and all the evidence led me to believe that
she was a murderer. But nobody should have to die this way, gasping for air,
choking on blood and vomit, knowing she was losing it—

My racing mind pulled up like a car
screeching to a hand-braked stop. Last night there had been two shots through
the window. This morning, Roz was stretched out on the floor in the final
agonies of death.

Call it intuition, a hunch,
whatever. There wasn’t any visible evidence, but I knew, just the same. I
turned as Schwamkrug went to the phone. “After you talk to the doctor,” I said,
“you’d better get Chief Harris over here. I think she’s been poisoned.”

The cop showed up at the kitchen
door five minutes later. He was a chunky, broad-shouldered man in his late
twenties. He wore a thick blond mustache and his brown eyes were narrowed and
alert. He stood easily, arm held out slightly from the holstered .357 Magnum at
his hip. The nametag on his pocket said he was Officer Petersen.

“Understand there’s been a death,”
he said, glancing past me into the empty living room. “A poisoning?”

I didn’t answer his question, just
stepped back to let him in. “In the bathroom,” I said.

He went into the hall, where Garza
and Schwamkrug were packing up their equipment. After a few words with Garza,
he stuck his head in the bathroom. A moment later, he came back into the
living room. “What makes you think she was poisoned?”

I put my hands in my pockets. I didn’t
want to tell the complicated story twice. “Is the chief on his way?”

Petersen raised both yellow
eyebrows. “It’s Sunday,” he said, as if that explained something. I gave him a
blank look and he added, “The Cowboys are playin’ the Packers.”

“When you call him,” I said, “tell
him that Rosalind Kotner is dead.”

Petersen heaved a sigh. “Look, lady,
I don’t mean to be offensive at a time like this, but I don’t think we should
bother the chief this after—”

“The woman’s name is Rosalind
Kotner,” I said. “StrawBerry Bear.”

“StrawBerry—” He looked at me for a
minute, and then it dawned on him. “The lady who does the tee-vee show?”

“That’s the one.”

His brown eyes widened. “No kiddin’,”
he said. “Hey, my girls watch that bear every single Saturday. They know the
words to all the songs.” He frowned. “But I still don’t think it’s a case for
the chief—especially seein’ as how it’s Green Bay.”

“The chief might think so,” I said
quietly. “Somebody took a couple of shots at her last night. He handled the
investigation himself, and when he was done, he sent out a special patrol to
keep an eye on her.”

Petersen looked at me. His tongue
went out, licked at the corner of his yellow mustache once, twice. Then,
without another word, he turned and went through the door. A moment later, I
could hear the crackle of a squad car radio out in the alley.

The medical technicians came into
the living room, Garza in her socks, carrying her bloody shoes. The knees of
her slacks were bloody too, and there were smears of blood on her sleeve. “I’ll
get on the radio and let the dispatcher know what’s happening,” she said. She
handed Schwamkrug a clipboard. “While I’m doing that, P.D., you can get started
on the report.”

Schwamkrug looked pained, as if he
didn’t like taking orders from a woman. But when she had gone, he sat down in
the chair across from the loveseat, pulled out a pen, hunched over and began to
fill in blanks.

While he was writing, I stepped back
into the kitchen and did a quick scan. There was no sign that Roz had eaten
breakfast that morning. The stainless steel sink was empty and wiped dry, and
the kitchen counter was bare except for a plain water tumbler beside the sink.
Traces of tomato juice stained the sides and in the bottom I could see the
residue of an incompletely dissolved powder. I bent over and sniffed it, not
touching. Garlic, faint but definite. Roz must have used the glass for her
morning cocktail. But what was the residue? Was she adding some sort of herbal
powder to her garlic cocktail? Or had somebody put something into it—something
deadly?

There was a box of tissues on the
counter. I pulled one out and went to the refrigerator. Using the tissue and
two fingers, I opened the door. The refrigerator was nearly empty, with that
abandoned, sterile loneliness of unused refrigerators. On the top shelf was a

glass bottle of tomato juice, half
full, and beside it, the small bottle of garlic extract Roz had bought from me
on Thursday morning, about two-thirds full. I’d handled that bottle of garlic
extract at least twice, once when I stocked it and again when I sold it. Unless
it had been wiped, my prints were all over it. My prints on Meredith’s
thirty-eight, my prints on the extract bottle. Two more coincidences for Bubba
to chew on. Not counting the fact that Roz had died in the bathroom of my
cottage.

I bent down and peered at the tomato
juice bottle. It was hard to be sure because of the natural cloudiness of the
juice, but it looked like there was a very thin layer of undissolved residue in
the bottom of the bottle, like the powder in the glass. I guessed that a fair
amount of something powdery had been added to the tomato juice and shaken up in
a hurry, without a great deal of effort being given to dissolving it. The
killer would have counted on the cloudiness of the juice to mask any
undissolved powder. I’m no toxicologist, although I’ve picked up quite a few
things during various pretrial investigations and I’m familiar with the diagnostic
characteristics of plant poisoning. I knew about one poisoning that had
resulted in the kind of severe hemorrhagic gastroenteritis that could have
triggered Roz’s ulcer. The victim—the owner of a large fruit shipping company
in the lower Rio Grande Valley— had apparently failed to hold up his end of a
bargain with a dope smuggling ring operating between Brownsville and Mexico
City. One of his former colleagues tied him up and dosed him with malathion, a
pesticide used to spray fruit. The first symptom was massive nosebleed, quickly
followed by bloody vomiting and bloody diarrhea, cardiac arrhythmia, and pulmonary
edema. He died within hours from respiratory failure. It wasn’t my case, thank
God. I preferred the kind where I could develop some personal sympathy for the
defendant, even if I privately thought he—or she—was guilty as hell.