Thyme of Death (28 page)

On the bed, Violett moaned again,
and I turned to her. Her eyes were open and glassy in her pale face and her
chest was heaving. She was gasping for breath in deep, labored gulps. I yanked
the bedspread loose on one side and pulled it over her, then bent down and smoothed
her wispy brown hair.

“You’ll be okay, Violett,” I said,
with more conviction than I felt. She looked inches away from death. “Help is
on the way.” But I wasn’t sure she wanted help. She had chosen to die. And if
she lived, she’d have to face the law.

She shuddered convulsively, trying
to bring her eyes into focus. She tried to say something but her lips couldn’t
form the words. Then her eyes rolled back in her head until there were nothing
but whites, and she lapsed into unconsciousness. She was still alive, but there
was no telling how long she’d stay that way.

A siren wailed. I ran down the
stairs, dashed through the house to the front door, and flung it open to Garza
and Schwamkrug. “This way,” I said urgently, ignoring their blinks of surprise.
“Hurry! She’s upstairs, still alive.”

Garza turned to Schwamkrug. “May be
a transport. Get the scoop and the stretcher.” Schwamkrug headed for the
ambulance. Garza followed me to the back of the house and up the stairs,
carrying the defibrillator and the bag with the oxygen equipment. In the bedroom
she went to work expertly on Violett’s wax like, unmoving body, following the
same routine she’d followed with Roz. The monitor showed a faint, arrhythmic
beeping, but the electrical shock of the defibrillator seemed to regularize it,
at least temporarily. She’d already set up oxygen and an
IV
when
Schwamkrug arrived with two aluminum slats, each about a foot wide, linked
with crosswise straps.

“Another one?” he asked, taking in
Violett’s un-moving body and the pan of blood-stained vomit. “What is this, an
epidemic?”

“Get the scoop under her,” Garza
said, pulling off Violett’s shoes.

Schwamkrug slid one of the straps
under Violett’s right side, the other under her left, and fastened the straps
across her. She was trussed up and immobile.

“We’re ready to transport her,”
Garza said to me. “Can you carry the oxygen and the
IV?”
With me
close behind, linked to Violett by two plastic umbilicals, the techs picked up the
scoop and headed for the steep, narrow stairs. I imagined disaster, but they
successfully wrestled her down. In the kitchen, Schwamkrug had already set up a
wheeled aluminum gurney. I ran to open the front door.

In the lane, a squad car pulled up
in back of the ambulance and the cop with the yellow mustache got out and
started up the walk, leaving the car door open and the radio playing. I could
hear Frank Gifford doing the play-by-play of the Dallas-Green Bay game. Garza
and Schwamkrug, with an inert Violett on the gurney, brushed past him on their
hurried way down the walk to the ambulance.

Petersen stared at their backs, then
turned to me. His eyes narrowed. “You again?”

“Yeah,” I said grimly, watching
Violett being hoisted into the ambulance. “Same song, second verse.”

Petersen followed my look. “Dead?”

“Close enough.” I sighed. “You’d
better call the chief.”

Petersen glared. “Look, lady, the
chief’s still got his hands full with the
last
one you called in. When I
left, he was on the phone to the mayor. This one will have to wait. I’ll get a
couple of patrolmen to come and secure the place until he gets around to—”

“Yeah, sure,” I said agreeably. “But
if I were you, I’d get on that radio and tell Chief Harris that there’s been a
poisoning, and that the symptoms are similar to those displayed by Roz Kotner.
I’d also tell him that there’s a suicide note, a can of ant poison, and a gun.”

It took Petersen ten seconds to make
up his mind. Then he turned and sprinted for the patrol car.

I stood for a moment, thinking about
the note and about what I’d seen. Then I went back into the house. Cat was in
the kitchen, polishing off the last of the cream in the blue bowl in the
corner. He licked his whiskers, raised his elegant head, and stared at me,
asking for more.

“Sorry, Cat,” I said. “I’d hate to
feed you something that had ant poison in it.” I went to the sink and looked
again. Yes, I’d recalled correctly. There was one skillet, one plate, and two
glasses. Violett had had company for breakfast, but only one of them had
eaten. Which one? I could guess.

I turned to the kitchen table and
looked at the typewriter, a polished black Royal, probably dating from the
thirties. It was undoubtedly the machine on which the note had been typed. I
stared at it for a minute. Violett said she’d never learned to type.

I took the stairs two at a time. I
reexamined the note.

I’d been right the first time. There
was not a single error, not a strike over, and the spacing and weight of the
keystrokes were equal—all this on an old-style, unforgiving machine. Whoever
typed it had been an experienced typist.

I looked again at the gun. It was a
long-barreled thirty-eight, like an old-fashioned police service revolver—
not
the same thirty-eight Meredith had shown me, now in Bubba’s possession. I’d
bet dollars to doughnuts that this was the weapon that had been fired at Roz. I
was even more sure when I looked down and saw the shoes that Garza had pulled
off Violett’s feet— running shoes. I picked one up. The sole had a zigzag tread
pattern. I put it down again and stood, thinking.

By the time the siren had sounded
out front I was back downstairs, sharing the sofa with a lazy trio of gray
tabbies. To the tune of Petey’s liquid glissandos, I’d sorted my thoughts and
drawn at least one conclusion—one that I didn’t like, because it took me absolutely
no place where today’s poisonings were concerned.

Bubba shouldered his way through the
door, trailed by the yellow-mustached patrolman and a disdainful white cat with
a fluffy tail as big as an ostrich-feather boa. Bubba’s face was grim, his hat
was yanked down over his eyebrows.

“What’s this bidness about a note?”
he demanded. The cat wound itself affectionately around his ankles, leaving
feathers of white fur on his tan polyester pants.

“It looks like a confession note,” I
said. “Murder-suicide.”

Bubba reached for the unlit cigar in
his stained pocket. “Claimin’ responsibility for the Kotner kil-lin?”

I nodded. “The note and the gun are
upstairs on the bedside table. The poison’s in a can on the kitchen table,
beside the typewriter on which the note was apparently typed.”

“Who wrote the note?”

“It’s signed with the name Violett
Hall,” I said. “That’s the woman the med techs just took out of here. But I don’t
think she—”

Bubba looked distastefully at his
pant cuffs, then pushed the cat aside with his foot. “That’d be old Finney
Hall’s girl, I reckon,” he said. “This was his place, the old son-of-a-gun. He
was one to kick ass and take names, ‘cept where his wife was concerned. ‘Round
home, I heard, she did the ass-kickin’.” He looked around at the tidy living
room, the antimacassars and tabbies on the sofa, the Jesus picture, the birds
in their cages. “What’s Finney Hall’s girl got to do with the Kotner woman?”

I stood up, scattering cats. “Look,
Chief Harris,” I said, “maybe I should just tell you how I happened to find
Violett Hall and why I don’t think—”

But Bubba decided there’d been
enough chitchat.

“Stay put,” he commanded for the
second time that day. “I’ll be back.” He disappeared toward the back of the
house, followed by the other policeman.

I sat back down. I could hear
footsteps moving around in the kitchen, then tramping heavily up the wooden
stairs. There was nothing to do but wait. The white cat with the feather-boa
tail jumped on the coffee table and blinked at me. It was sitting on the
magazine picturing Roz on the cover, enthroned like a queen on a pyramid of
pink StrawBerry Bears. I nudged the cat aside and picked up the magazine. When
I turned to the article, I saw that someone had neatly clipped it out.

I stared at the cover photo for a
minute as something began ticking at the back of my mind. Then I looked around
for the stuffed bear I’d seen the day before. I found it on the floor, half
under the sofa. StrawBerry Bear. Probably half the little girls between the
ages of four and eight wanted one, and the other half owned one. It was the
mass-market answer to their fondest wish.

But when I held the bear in my hands
and looked at it closely, I realized that this wasn’t a mass-market bear. Its
clothing and hat were obviously handmade, not of the cheap materials used by
most toy manufacturers but of fine cotton, with handcrafted ribbon flowers
painstakingly hand-stitched onto the handmade straw hat When I took off the
hat, there was an embroidered label inside it:
violett  hall,
and a date— the same year that Roz had gone
off to New York in search of fame, carrying an original bear who turned out to
be worth a fortune. And then I knew, with a jolting clarity, exactly what it
was that Roz had taken from Violett.

A minute later, I heard footsteps
clomping back down the stairs. Bubba came into the living room, followed by
Petersen, who went on through and out the door, presumably to radio for a
photographer and a fingerprint team. The white cat jumped off the coffee table
and followed him.

Bubba wore an immensely satisfied
look. “Well,” he said vigorously, all but rubbing his hands, “guess that about
wraps this baby up.” To celebrate, he tossed his old cigar in the wastebasket
beside the sofa and took a freshly wrapped one out of his shirt pocket.

I stood up again. “So you’re
satisfied that the note is genuine?”

“Sure as hell am,” Bubba said. He
unwrapped the cigar, crumpled the cellophane into his pocket, and licked the
length of the cigar before he stuck it in his mouth. “Murder-suicide.” He
sounded as if he were rehearsing his presentation to the D.A. “Violett Hall got
it some way into her poor weak head that Miz Kotner was a bad person. She began
to believe that the Lord wanted her to do something about it. She tried first
with the thirty-eight, but she’s no Rambo. So she found a can of ant
poison—probably some old Finney Hall had stashed in the shed out back—put a
couple ounces in one of them spice bottles on the kitchen table, and doctored
Miz Kotner’s tomato juice with it. Then she began to have second thoughts and
it seemed like the Lord had another job for her. She typed the note, took the
poison, and went upstairs to die. And she would’ve, too, if you hadn’t come
along.” He frowned at me, ready now to get back to the information I had tried
to volunteer early. “Just why
did
you come along, Miz Bayles?”

I stuck my hands in the pockets of
my jeans and balanced myself on the balls of my feet, leaning forward
slightly. It had once been a favorite courtroom stance. “I ran into Violett
this morning shortly before eight, in front of Cavette’s Grocery,” I said. “You
can confirm that with young Mr. Cavette, who spoke with both of us. She asked
if I would see her this afternoon about a legal matter on which she wanted my
advice. I was supposed to arrive at five. I came early. When there was no
answer to my knock, I went around back and knocked. I let myself in, found her
on the bed upstairs, and called EMS.” I shifted my weight. “I find it difficult
to believe,” I added carefully, “that Violett Hall tried to kill herself.”

Bubba eyed me, understandably
reluctant to entertain any notions that might contradict the murder-suicide
theory that neatly wrapped up both crimes and got him off the hook with the
D.A., the mayor, the Senator, the Texas Rangers, and the FBI. And God. “Oh,
yeah?”

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t think that
anything short of hard physical evidence would persuade him, or any cop, for
that matter. That’s how they’re trained. But I had to have a try. “Number one,
someone was here this morning with Violett. It doesn’t make sense that she’d
trot over to dump poison in Roz Kotner’s tomato juice, come back here and cook
breakfast for a friend, then poison herself. The psychology is all wrong.”

“How do you know someone was here?”

“Violett told me when I saw her this
morning. She told young Mr. Cavette, too, and she bought extra groceries.
Further, there are two glasses in the kitchen sink.”

Bubba shrugged. “Could be she lied.
Mebbe she wanted to cover her tracks. I checked the kitchen. There’s only
dishes for one—eggs and mushrooms, looks like, with garlic. If she bought extra
groceries, doesn’t look to me like her company touched ‘em.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested pointedly, “her
company didn’t feel like eating. Perhaps there was something toxic in the
omelet, and the killer used the garlic to mask any taste.”

“Mebbe,” Bubba said, with a look
that said
Sure as the Pope wears pantyhose.

I sighed. I had the feeling that the
rest of my evidence was going to meet the same objections, but I went on. “Another
thing. Violett is terrified of guns. I doubt that she could bring herself to
touch one, let alone fire it.”

Bubba sighed a long-suffering sigh. “How
d’you know that?’ “She told me.”