The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery (15 page)
Read The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery Online
Authors: Ann Ripley
Tags: #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction
In spite of the rather hostile words, she forced a smile. “I have all the best intentions, Mr. Payne—”
“Oh, just call me Mark,” he said, as if bestowing a gift on her.
“Well, Mark, my producer’s out here in Boulder, we’ve hired a local crew, and we’re shooting quite a lot of footage for my
Gardening with Nature
television show. Did you know I have a garden show on PBS?”
“Actually, yes. Harriet told me all about you. She’s my great-aunt—now, did you know
that?
I bet any money Ann Evans told you that.” Ann Evans: a sore point with this man.
“Let’s see,” Louise countered sweetly, “it’s a little confusing, meeting so many new people at one time. Were you up at Porter Ranch the day jimmy Porter—”
“Hey!” He laughed. “No way was I up there—not before the shooting, not in all the fuss that went on afterward. No, we leave stuff like that to our talented sheriff. He’s got a great record for closing cases.” He gave her what he obviously thought was an ingratiating look. “I hear from Harriet you solved some crimes back East.”
“Yes.” She decided a little self-promotion wouldn’t hurt with this man. “Actually, I’ve been commended on occasion by the Fairfax police for my help.”
But more often
, she thought wryly,
I’ve been chewed out for interfering with their investigations
. She thought fondly of a red-faced Detective Michael Geraghty.
“What kind of crimes were they?”
She looked Mark Payne over for a minute, then leaned forward dramatically and whispered, “Murders.
All
murders.”
“Oh.” That was enough for him, and he got up from his chair. Somehow, he couldn’t fit Louise, a woman who solved murders, into his preconceptions of what womankind should be like. “Well, we sure won’t need you on this one. Earl’s going to solve Jimmy Porter’s death—if he hasn’t already done it.”
“And what about Sally’s accident?”
“Yes, that, too,” he assured her. “Earl will get all that figured out. And I’ll see you around, Louise.”
She watched him saunter out of the room, then turned to see the sheriff standing at the door to the inner offices, staring at her. “Ready, Miz Eldridge?”
He motioned her into a visitor’s chair and sat at his desk. In the institutional setting of the Boulder County Justice Center, this oversized mahogany desk stood out as something special. It was free of clutter, containing only a silver-framed picture, an eight-inch-high geode with an intense blue concavity, and a single tan file folder. She looked over its brown expanse at die sheriff. Without sunglasses and with protruding stomach concealed behind desk front, he was an exceptionally handsome man. And sincere: he
looked
like a sheriff, albeit some taxpayers may have thought this desk too fancy for a public servant. Then again, she reflected, he probably brought it from home.
He leaned back in the elegant leather swivel chair and frowned importantly. The only flaw in this picture was his nervous fiddling with his fountain pen. He proceeded to sketch out Sally Porter’s accident for Louise. Sally’s car had fallen fifty feet or so down a cliff off the back road to Porter Ranch, with both Sally and her car totaled by the impact. Louise tried to stifle a shudder.
“According to our detective team, it looks like she drove right off into space,” concluded Tatum. “Car crashed onto the edge of the road below, in a little field of wildflowers. Now, I wanted to talk to you because I hear you had dinner with the deceased last night. Wondered just how she acted, and what you talked about.”
Louise shook her head. “There’s nothing much to tell, Sheriff. I was meeting the woman for the first time. She didn’t talk much, and when she did, she was full of reminiscences of her childhood on the ranch, about how she
used to ride a horse down to school in Lyons—things’ like that.”
He said, “I’m waitin’ for the team to turn in its report, but I personally am startin’ to believe this is suicide.”
Louise sat very still in her chair. Finally, she said, “That’s entirely your call, Sheriff. All I have to say is, Sally Porter did not sound suicidal. On the contrary, she had a meeting scheduled this morning with her brothers and their family attorney. But draw your own conclusions.”
Tatum leaned forward and looked at her as if she had given the wrong answer. “Fine, I will draw my own conclusions. I could conclude, from what you just said, that the lady was sad and nostalgic over her daddy’s death.” He took a deep breath, as if ready to step into something unpleasant. “Now, Mrs. Eldridge, I know you might feel the need to investigate. I’ve heard about your
limited
reputation for crime solving. You may have the desire to make this more complicated than it is, like you and Pete did the other day when Jimmy Porter’s body was found. I urge you not to do that. I urge you to withhold judgment until this investigation is over. Believe me, I have a whole slew ’a people investigatin’ both deaths.” He nonchalantly waggled a hand back and forth. “They’re checkin’ for tire marks on that back road, that sort of thing.”
In the back of her mind a question was forming. All those people investigating—why was the sheriff getting so involved in an “accident” case? She said, “I’m glad to hear that, and of course I’ll stay out of it—it’s none of my business. When will the investigation be over?”
“Could take months, maybe years.” He shuffled the papers in the tan folder. Then, as if he had forgotten she were there, he said sourly, “Deaths on Porter Ranch never get resolved.”
“Oh? Are you referring to those deaths years ago…?”
Tatum looked at her sharply. “No, ma’am. Actually, I didn’t mean Sally’s
accident;
I was talkin’ about Jimmy’s
shootin
. As for those earlier deaths, they’ve long been closed matters—not very suspicious, if that’s what you’re aimin’ at. Bonnie Porter, for instance, died in a genuine barn fire. And you wouldn’t know just how dangerous fire still is, up there where there isn’t hardly a fire truck or organized water supply for miles.”
She smiled apologetically at him, as if reluctant to bother him. “There’s just a couple of little things, Sheriff, about Sally. Why did she go by the back road? Who else uses that road, besides her brothers and Miss Bingham? And—”
The sheriff put up a hand and half rose out of his chair, as if the interview were over. “Whoa. I’ll answer that, just t’getcha off my back. The boys say Sally always used that road t’go back and forth t’ town; so did the boys when they lived there. Harriet—Miss Bingham—she goes by the main road because it isn’t so steep.” He rested his weight on his hands and looked at Louise, as if expecting her to get up, too. “Is that it for questions?”
She looked serenely at the law officer, unmoving.
“Oh, all
right
,” he said impatiently, sitting again. “Since you’re so inquisitive, I’ll tell ya something in confidence about the Jimmy Porter case. There’s just plain
no
evidence in that crime ’cept a couple of spent shells.”
“No tire tracks that day, no cars heard or seen leaving the ranch?”
Louise could see he was having trouble curbing his temper. “I told ya, nope to all of that. Nobody heard a car, because who’d hear it? You only have Harriet and a few ranch hands. The hands start early and leave early, so they were done for the day, and Harriet’s a little deaf. Jimmy got shot a good hour before you got there. As for tracks, ground’s too dry for tire tracks, and poachers like to use
little trail vehicles. Fact, there’s a real steep mining trail that comes in between the two ranches up there. We figure maybe they coulda walked up that way, even though it doesn’t appear t’be big enough for a vehicle.”
“Wasn’t it odd that the assailant was so close to him? And what about the trajectory of the bullets?”
“The
bullets
, you say?” In exasperation, he flipped his pen into the air and it clattered noisily onto the desk surface, where he subdued it with one hand. Tatum seemed aghast at her ignorance. “There aren’t any bullets in a shotgun. There’s
shells
in a shotgun.” He gave her a jaundiced look. “Well, guess ’twon’t hurt to tell you this, since you already saw it. He took a full charge of shot from about ten foot away. It came in at an odd angle—”
She sat forward. “Is that so…”
“Even you might be impressed, Miz Eldridge,” he interrupted, “by the fact we went back up there and used our laser pointer to get the exact angle so the coroner could make an accurate determination. We figure Jimmy was crouchin’ to spring, and therefore, had his head at a much lower angle than the killer.”
With this, the sheriff got up and swiped his hands together, as if wiping Louise out of his further considerations. “You see how forthcoming I’ve been with you? Now, will you let your curiosity go, you and your friend Pete, and let me get on with my work?” He smiled a broad, toothsome smile, and with one hand smoothed back his iron gray hair. She realized Earl Tatum had gotten a lot of political mileage out of those rugged good looks.
She was dismissed. Before she left the office, however, she leaned over to examine the photograph of the youthful woman in the wide silver frame. “Pretty desk. Pretty young woman. Is she…” Louise stopped before she said the wrong thing; it might
not
be his daughter.
“That’s my wife,” he said tersely.
Before she got herself in more trouble, Louise left the office and found Ann Evans sitting in the anteroom, wearing a dark linen pantsuit as if in mourning. She was hunkered forward in the chair, blond hair falling over her red-rimmed eyes. She probably felt guilty for getting so angry last night at Sally’s apparent betrayal of her father’s wishes. Now that she thought of it, Louise felt a slight twinge of guilt herself about Sally. She hadn’t told Ann, but in the back of her mind, she’d thought the emotionless Sally might have been her father’s killer. As Louise passed her friend, she put a hand on her shoulder and murmured, “I’ll meet you here later.”
R
OCKS ARE BIG IN GARDEN
landscapes these days, both in size and importance. Horticultural design has become more daring, to the point where’ “bold” has become one of the designers’ favorite adjectives. These days, huge rocks and boulders are becoming part of the design plan of private homeowners. With a house under construction, it’s considered a bonanza to find big rocks in the foundation; once, such large, “found” rocks would have been reburied or hauled
away. Now, they’re like a gift from the earth—hosed off, then carefully placed where they fit best. Importing rocks from a stone yard is an expensive business, but in the eyes of many people, well worth the money. They are a permanent, no-care, important structural element of a yard-and-garden plan.
Some stand alone, some don’t
. Sometimes these massive rocks are set in an array and combined with water accents, such as pools, streams, and waterfalls. Other times, they are used by themselves, or form a simple rock garden. One homeowner bought a cluster of gigantic rocks for his grandchildren to play upon—the idea being to jump from one huge rock to another.
City parks today feature climbing rocks for kids, while other parks treat rocks much more soberly, as objects d’art, much as stone and rock have been treated through the ages, from the gardens of Kyoto to the Alhambra. Today’s design artists will group rocks, or scatter rocks on a site, making them into earthworks. Stonehenge, by the way, is also considered an earthwork, though the people who put it together may have had a spiritual, or possibly scientific, motive, and not an artistic one.
Even the British are getting bold
. Not only in America is big rock popular: Even the correct and seemly Wisley Garden, in Surrey, England, has “bold new patterns” that include huge blocks of stone in its rock garden. Artful arrays of plants soften their look, as they perch in the crevices and spill down the rock faces.
The use of stone and rock goes far back in the history of man and of gardening. It was used not only for decoration, but also to impart deep spiritual ideas and beliefs. Chinese gardens often have rockeries, which sometimes are whole structures with passageways of mortared rocks, and represent mountains, with nearby water features representing the sea. The Japanese use rocks more sparsely in their gardens, but bring just as much meaning to them; each stone is seen as an individual, whose full character is revealed when its best “face” is put forward. The popular Japanese style has been replicated in many U.S. botanical gardens, and in American backyards. Many an American homeowner is out there raking the gravel areas between rocks.
If you can move it, you can’t see it
. A landscaper’s rule of thumb for using rocks is this: If the rock can
be carried by a human, it will not show up in the landscape. Even a one-ton rock will have a minimal effect. On the other hand, and even though “big and bold” is in, simple rock gardens are still the most popular. Those who call themselves “rock gardeners” are usually plant experts, specializing in alpine and other often smaller-sized plants. Their aim is always to achieve a balance between rocks and plants. They often prefer rocks of a smaller size that one or two persons can move from place to place on the site. These gardeners know that there must be unity in color between the rocks themselves, and the popular fine rock gravel used as mulch in these gardens. In other words, don’t set out orange sandstone boulders on a platter of white gravel, or ruin the beauty of gray granite boulders by spreading pink gravel beneath them. Alpines, and many other plants, in fact, thrive in gravel mulch.
Even a small yard can use a few boulders
. As gardening moves into the twenty-first century, the backyard plant enthusiast has become ever more experimental. One sign of this is the proliferation of water gardens. And where there is water today, there are more apt to be piles of stone and boulders rather than the mere rims of concrete
or tile used in the past. Even a very small, narrow yard can hold a plentiful cluster of medium-sized boulders to surround a pool or waterfall.
As for the suppliers, they are happy at this new trend to punctuate yards and gardens with rocks and boulders. It’s a far cry, indeed, from the days when people’s ideal was enormous, tidy, but sometimes boring emerald green lawns, and flowers and evergreens all in neat rows.
…
During the Renaissance, Duke Vicino Orsini, a wealthy Italian member of the literati and a professional soldier, sculpted one of the most unusual rock gardens of them all. This is the startling Bomarzo garden, outside of Rome, a thirty-year effort of Orsini, who was born in the early 1500’s. His huge rock sculptures are now thick with mosses
*
and the patina of age, the envy of any rock-loving gardener.
The rocky site was a former Etruscan
village with neighboring necropolis. Orsini made it into what he called his
sacro bosco
, or “sacred wood.” Some thought it blasphemous, with its stone carvings of Cerberus, Persephone, and Demeter, its entrance to Hades, and its sculpted ruins of an Etruscan tomb, all implying this was the underworld. In the garden are enormous stone depictions of hands and feet, bare-breasted harpies, and a general atmosphere of violence and paganism.
The garden was abandoned for years, until a visit by artist Salvador Dali renewed interest in the place in the 1950’s. Now it is a popular visiting spot for those who want the ultimate rock garden experience.
*
If mosses grow where you live, then collect a moss-covered stone from a site similar to yours, and position it near your new, mossless stones. Sprinkle the new stones with a mixture of sugar and water, and keep them moist. They, too, will soon grow moss.