Thyme of Death (30 page)

“An old brown one,” Miss Ima
replied. “I told Erma it looked like that car of Freddie’s.”

Miss Erma gave her walker a futile
hitch. One aluminum leg was mired in the dirt and I went to help her pull it
out. She gave me a quivery smile. “Men are so foolish about their cars, don’t
you think, dear? At least Freddie was, back when that one of his was new. He
had a real hissy fit when Maude backed into the light pole and dented the
bumper.”

“What kind of car did Freddie have?”
I asked, hoping to nail something—
anything
—down.

“I’m not so good on car names,” Miss
Ima said. “A Custer, maybe. A light-brown Custer. You know, George Armstrong.”

“Buster,” Miss Erma corrected
loudly. She clipped a red chrysanthemum and dropped it into her basket. “It was
a two-tone brown Buster that Freddie had. I remember
exactly.
He never
did get that bumper fixed, and every time he got to tippling, he’d throw it in
Maude’s face. It’d been me,” she added acidly, “I wouldn’t’ve let him talk to
me that way, ‘specially after he ran into the gravel truck the afternoon he
took Celeste McGraw out for a ride.”

“You didn’t happen to get a license
number on this brown car, I suppose,” I said to Miss Ima.

Miss Ima’s plucked white eyebrows
were indignant. “A license number? Why, that would be
snooping!”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “It’s
possible that whoever put that car in Violett’s garage did her harm. If I can
find out who—”

“I don’t remember any numbers,” Miss
Ima said thoughtfully, “but I do recall a
letter
or two. And of course
there was that bumper sticker.”

“What were the letters?”

“Bzz.”

I looked at her.

“B-Z-Z,” she said patiently. “Bees.
I don’t remember me last of it, but that was the first part. B-Z-Z. Bzz. Like
bees.”

“What about the bumper sticker?”

Miss Erma shifted her walker back
onto the grass. “I saw one the other day,” she said. She looked at me. “Maybe
you know what it means, dear, seeing as you were a lawyer once, weren’t you? It
said ‘Lawyers do it legally.’ Do what, I wonder.”

I cleared my throat. “I’m afraid I
don’t know,” I replied.

Miss Ima had an explanation. “I
guess it means that anything lawyers do is legal.”

Miss Erma wasn’t entirely satisfied.
“If that’s what they mean, why don’t they just come out and
say
so?
Really, I don’t understand what gets into people. Talk, talk, talk all the time
but don’t say what they mean.”

I was beginning to get a headache.
The bumper sticker wasn’t worth it. Even though I had only a fragment of the
plate, I could probably get a make on the car when the Highway Department
opened for business in the morning. But I wanted to wrap it up, so I gave it
one more try.

“What about the bumper sticker on the
car in Violett’s garage?” I asked Miss Ima. “I don’t suppose you remember what
it said.”

“Of course I remember.” Miss Ima
gave an impatient snort. “It said ‘Rent A Wreck.’ Now, isn’t that the most
ridiculous thing you ever heard? Don’t people have enough wrecks of their own
without renting other people’s wrecks?”

Miss Erma dropped her shears in the
basket along with the snipped chrysanthemums and jockeyed her walker a hundred
and eighty degrees to the left. “Just goes to show,” she said, her breathing
labored with the effort of dragging the walker through the ankle-high grass. “People’ll
put anything on cars to get attention these days. Why, just the other day I
saw—”

“What time did you see this car in
Violett Hall’s garage?” I asked Miss Ima hastily.

“I like to walk late in the evening.
Makes me sleep better. I saw the car at nine-thirty. I know, because I checked
my watch under the streetlight.”

‘Tell her what else you saw,” Miss
Erma prompted, leaning heavily on the walker, which was tilting to the right.

“It wasn’t a what, it was a
who”
Miss
Ima said. “I saw him through Violett’s living room window.”

“A man?” I asked, frowning.

“Shame to say,” Miss Erma said.

Miss Ima nodded. “He and Violett
were standing in the living room, talking.”

“Couldn’t’ve been Mr. Peavy?” Miss
Erma asked hopefully.

“He was tall and thin,” Miss Ima
said. “Mr. Peavy is short and fat.”

“How do you know it was a man?” I
asked. “Did you see his face?”

Miss Ima shook her head. “Just his
back. Couldn’t see him real well. But he was one of those long-haired types.”

Miss Erma sighed, “litem’s the ones
I just can’t figger. Why a man would let his hair grow down to his—”

“That’s everything?” I asked Miss
Ima. “The car in the garage, the person you saw through the window—”

“A man,” Miss Ima said. “I always
call a spade a spade, no matter how much it shocks Erma.”

“—behind,” Miss Erma concluded
triumphantly.

That was it. I resisted the offer of
a cup of tea and more conversation, got back on my bike, and rode around the
block to Violett” s.

The investigating team had arrived
and was at work. I asked for word of Violett and was told to call the Adams
County Hospital, where an edgy charge nurse informed me that her condition had
deteriorated and would I please not call back for at least an hour because she
had other patients to tend to. I asked for and was given permission to search
for a key—clearly, none of the cops had the slightest interest in looking after
the animals and were glad to palm the job off onto somebody else. It took only
a few minutes to locate Violett’s purse in the laundry hamper in the closet
off the kitchen (where she had gotten it the day before) and to find her key
ring, on which there were two neatly labeled keys, one to the front, one to the
back. I stuck the back door key in my pocket.

Then I did what I’d come for. I went
through the purse. In an inside zipper pocket, I found a bank passbook. The
savings account balance now stood at $9,600. For four years, until last month,
Violett had made regular monthly deposits of two hundred dollars. She hadn’t
withdrawn a penny. Two hundred a month probably seemed like a lot of money to
her until she read the story in
People
magazine and learned that
StrawBerry Bear was raking in millions. And then, just when she figured out
what her claim was really worth, Roz must have told her she was cutting her off
completely.

I glanced at the passbook, wondering
whether Roz had paid by check—in which case the payments could be traced
through Roz’s bank—or by cash, and whether Violett had kept the envelopes in
which Roz had mailed the payments. Evidence like that could help establish that
Roz had made an oral contract with Violett and perhaps even to acknowledge her
as StrawBerry Bear’s real creator. But Roz had apparently found it
inconvenient, maybe even embarrassing, to give Violett the proper credit. And
when she got the chance to sell to Disney, she feared that any acknowledgment
of Violett’s rights would jeopardize
her
claim, or tie her up in court
until Disney lost interest.

I dropped Violett’s purse back into
the hamper, frowning. That line of reasoning gave Roz a motive to kill Violett,
not the other way around. For a moment I played with the possibility that Roz
had brought the ant poison
here
this morning, sprinkled it on Violett’s
breakfast while her victim’s back was turned, and managed somehow to
accidentally poison herself. It was an interesting theory but I couldn’t make
it work. You don’t accidentally put ant poison into your own tomato juice in
your own refrigerator.

But more persuasively, there was the
car in Violett’s garage. Somebody
else
had been here last night and this
morning. A tall, thin, somebody—a man, if Miss Ima was to be believed—who drove
a brown Rent A Wreck car. I made a face. Better not tell Ruby that Miss Ima had
put a man on the scene. She’d have Arnold Seidensticker back on the suspect
list.

I went back into the kitchen, found
a cupboard full of every imaginable brand of cat food, opened two cans, and
began to dish out fishy-smelling portions among the half-dozen bowls on the
back porch. But
was
Miss Ima to be believed? Just because she immediately
jumped to the conclusion that the tall, thin person had been a long-haired man
didn’t mean it was. I put the empty cat food cans in the trash, thinking of the
tall, thin people I knew who also knew Roz and Violett. Tall, thin people who
drove Custers or Busters or...

A bell rang at the back of my skull,
and my eyes narrowed.
Was it possible?
I sat down at the kitchen table
and began to sort through objections, laying the case out in my mind, arranging
it the way I’d arrange Violett’s defense. Yes, it was
possible,
if I
changed one basic assumption I’d been living with all week. But even though I thought
I knew who and how, I couldn’t come up with why. It was clear that the killer
had poisoned Violett in order to make it appear that Violett had poisoned Roz.
But why Roz, the goose who laid the golden egg? It didn’t make sense.

I filled the cats’ water dish and
checked the bird cages. When I left, Cat jumped off the porch swing and
followed me to the end of the walk. As I got on my bike and rode away, I
glanced back over my shoulder. He was sitting on his haunches, black tail
curled around four charcoal feet, observing me thoughtfully.

It was four-thirty when I got back
to the shop.

“What
took
you so long?” Ruby
demanded. “Not that we were busy,” she added. “It’s been quiet as the grave all
afternoon.”

“It was quiet as the grave at
Violett’s too,” I said, reaching for the Austin telephone directory. “How about
closing early?”

“Do we have a suspect?” Ruby asked
eagerly.

“Actually we do,” I answered,
thumbing through the Yellow Pages, “although I have to confess that it’s sheer
speculation.”

Ruby gave me a mystified glance. “You’re
looking for a motive in the Yellow Pages?” Then she went off to lock both front
doors and hang up the
closed
signs.
When she got back, I was on the phone.

“Who are you calling?”

“Rent A Wreck,” I said, counting the
sixth ring. “The biggest and best downscale auto rental agency in America. We’re
looking for a brown Duster.”

Ruby frowned. “What do we want a
Duster for? I had one once, and it was a bitch on cold mornings. Something
about the automatic choke. It died at every corner.”

Somebody snatched up the phone in
the middle of the eighth ring. “Rent A Wreck,” a man said in a gravelly voice,
fast and out of breath. “Sorry, I was out in the lot.”

“This is Officer Byerley at the
Pecan Springs Police Department,” I said. “We’ve had a report of a minor
hit-and-run involving one of your vehicles. There was no damage, and the driver
might not even have been aware of the accident. The car is a brown Duster, license
plate BZZ, no numerals reported, bearing your decal.”

“Way it goes,” the man said
philosophically. “Glad there wasn’t much damage. The driver called in a half
hour ago, wanting to be sure that somebody’d be here for check-in at six this
afternoon. Party wants to catch a seven o’clock plane.”

“Party’s name?” I asked.

“Hold on a sec,” the man said. “I’ll
get it.”

I was gripping the phone the way I
hold on to the tow rope when I’m water skiing behind McQuaid’s big boat. I was
holding my breath, too. I do that when I’m water skiing because I’m a lousy
skier and I never know when I’m going to get dumped in the drink. I did it now
because of the suspense.

A moment later, the man was back
with the name. I let out my breath. I’d been right.

CHAPTER 18

Pecan Springs is located off 1-35,
an eighty-mile concrete ribbon that stretches straight to San Antonio sixty
miles to the south and to Austin thirty-five miles to the north. I can make the
trip to Austin in about forty-five minutes when the traffic is reasonable. But
this was late Sunday afternoon and the traffic was slowed by construction,
which funneled everybody between scarred concrete barriers. While I negotiated
for a moving patch of highway with boxy Greyhound Ameri-cruisers and tanker
trucks built like submarines on wheels, I told Ruby the whole story: what I had
found at Violett’s, what I had learned from Miss Ima, and what I had concluded
about the original StrawBerry Bear,
Violett’s
StrawBerry Bear. When I
finished, it was five-fifteen, and we were still twenty miles from
the
place
where I hoped we’d tag up with the person we were looking for. Ruby cracked her
knuckles for the third time. “We don’t even have a gun,” she said. She glanced
at me. “Do we?”

I shook my head. The Beretta was
still cached under the stairs. In Texas, the law about carrying handguns is
murky. I felt I could justify the gun, but if I got stopped and a cop found it,
he’d confiscate it. It wasn’t worth a possible delay.