Thyme of Death (32 page)

I ducked left around the
buy now
trailer. Jane was racing across
an open space, angling left toward me. But the gravel here was sharper, and it
slowed her down. I was out of shape and breathless, but I was wearing sneakers.
I closed the distance between us, lowered my head like a left tackle coming
hard off the line, and drove my shoulder into her black-and-white checked
fanny, giving it all I had. With a loud
whoomf,
she sprawled face down
in the gravel. A second later, I was on top of her and Ruby was shouting ‘Touchdown!”

Manuel ran up, puffing with exertion
and obviously revising his estimate of the situation. There was only one thief.
“Hey, good deal, you got her, the lousy
ladrona”
he said. He rubbed his
hands together and grinned at me, showing one gold tooth. “You
muy hombre.
Mebbe
you should try out for the Cowboys.”

“Next season,” I said. “Right now,
maybe you could call the cops.”

Jane was stirring, beginning to
heave her butt under me. But there wasn’t much fight left, and I figured I
could hold her for a while. Or Ruby could sit on her shoulders while I sat on
her behind. I wasn’t worried about anybody’s dignity.

Manuel bent over Jane, waggling a
thick finger. “The cops, you betcha, you fuckin’
ladrona!”
he said
loudly, as if Jane had lost her hearing as well as her ability to move. “You
know how much that sign cost me? Rodriguez painted it, and he overcharged, that
sorry son-a-bitch. One-seventy-nine-fifty, not counting the paint and the
plywood, which ain’t good for nothin’ now you smashed it up.” He jabbed the
finger in her face. “You gonna pay, you hear? Every
peso.”

“Want
me to
call me cops,
China?” Ruby asked.

“I don’t care who does it,” I said
wearily. “Let’s just
do
it. Okay?”

As Ruby turned to head for the
trailer, light tires crunched on the gravel. It was the ragged can-picker who
had nearly been wiped out by the Children of Jesus.

The can-picker jumped off his bike
and shoved down the kickstand. He wore an old Army fatigue jacket and a filthy
vee-necked white tee, dirty jeans with both knees out, and tennis shoes that
looked like they came out of St. Vincent DePaul’s dumpster. “No sweat,” he
said. “I
am
the cops.” He glanced at Jane face down on the gravel with
me on board. “She the driver of that hit-and-run?’ Beneath me, Jane moaned.

“Yeah,” I said. The can-picker’s
face was sooty with an uneven stubble of three-day beard. His shoulder-length
hair had been butchered with a dull knife and he wore the faint cologne of too
many days without a bath.
“You’re
the cops?’

The picker reached down and pulled a
plastic shield out of one dilapidated sneaker. “Officer Pollit,” he said. “Narcotics.”
He turned to the Hispanic. “Get a backup in here, Manuel,” he said crisply. “On
the double.”

Manuel’s black eyes had become huge,
but he responded with alacrity.
“Si, senor,”
he said, and hastened
off.

With a practiced gesture, Pollit
pulled out a snub-nosed revolver. “You can get up now,” Pollit said to me. He
fished a pair of handcuffs out of his fatigue jacket and tossed them to me. “Cuff
her,” he said. “Please.”

It was a pleasure.

The narc prodded Jane’s hip with the
toe of his sneaker. “Roll over on your back.”

With an effort, Jane flopped over.
Her hair had come loose from its chignon, the white linen collar of her chic
coatdress was ripped, and there was a smear of dirt and blood on her chin where
she had scraped her face in the gravel. Both knees were ripped out of her black
pantyhose, and the right kneecap was darkening with a nasty purple bruise. I
wondered if she’d banged it when she whammed the Children of Jesus.

“I’m arresting you on a charge of
leaving the scene of an accident,” Pollit said. “You have the right to remain
silent...” He rattled off the rest of her rights from memory, fast and
word-perfect. “Is that clear?” he asked when he’d finished.

Still flat on her back, Jane flashed
a venomous glance at me. “Yes,” she muttered. “Just keep that crazy woman away
from me. She has no right—”

I looked at Pollit. “This is Jane
Dorman. She’s wanted for murder and attempted murder in Pecan Springs.” Almost.
She
would
be wanted, when Bubba and the D.A. got their act together.

Pollit arched both black eyebrows
quizzically. “Oh, yeah? Who’d she murder?”

“You’re crazy!” Jane struggled to
sit up. It wasn’t easy, cuffed as she was. Pollit motioned her back down with
his gun. “She’s crazy!” she cried.

“Not so crazy, Jane,” I replied conversationally.
“We know everything. We know you took two shots at Roz last night, and we’ve
got a witness who places you at Violett’s an hour later. We know you poisoned
Roz’s tomato juice and Violett’s omelet before you planted the note, the gun,
and the shoes. We know—”

“Poison?” Pollit said, impressed. “She
involved in a poisoning?”

“Two
poisonings,”
I said. “The stuff she used was pretty potent, too.”

Jane gave a scornful laugh. “Poison?
I tell you, Officer, this woman is crazy. In fact, this whole thing is
ludicrous. I was returning a rental car when she tried to ram me. Where was I
supposed to find ant poison? I don’t—”

She stopped. Her tongue shot out and
licked the corners of her lips. Her eyes darted from me to Pollit. I turned to
Pollit. “You hear that?” I said.

Pollit frowned. “Yeah, I heard,” he
said. “Ant poison, wasn’t that what she said?”

Jane made a low, despairing sound.

“Good,” I said, as sirens came up
the hill. “Don’t forget it”

When we got back to Pecan Springs, I
called the hospital. Violett had died.

CHAPTER 19

After Violett’s funeral, the three
of us—Meredith, Ruby, and I—conspired to obstruct justice. We burned Roz’s
letters, her will, and Jo’s journals in the fireplace in Jo’s living room. They
made a satisfactory blaze.

‘Tell me again why this is an
obstruction of justice,” Meredith said, as she tossed in the last letter.

“Because we’re destroying evidence that
might bear on a criminal prosecution,” I said, wondering briefly what McQuaid
would say if I told him what we were doing. I didn’t plan to tell him. We’d
talked a couple of times before he took off for his job interview at New Mexico
State. He was moderately upset when he learned that Ruby and I had gone
trucking off to Austin after a killer without saying a word to Bubba or to
him—as if he and Bubba were the sole guardians of law and order in Pecan
Springs.

“The evidence we’re destroying might
bear on Roz’s prosecution for the murder of Jo?” Ruby asked.

“That’s moot, since Roz is dead,” I
replied. “But if I were building a strategy for Jane’s defense, I’d try to pin
Roz’s murder on Violett, just the way Jane set it up. I’d use Roz’s letters to
convince the jury that Violett had a strong motive to kill Roz. She thought
Roz murdered Jo, and the letters are the strongest evidence.”

“Don’t forget the Everclear and the
Hot Shot,” Meredith said. “That proves Roz killed Jo.”

“We
know about
that,” I said, “but Jane’s lawyers probably wouldn’t dig it up. It was just
good luck that we found it out.”

“Good luck, my ass,” Ruby said
indignantly. “It was my superior investigating!”

I grinned at Ruby. “Yeah,” I said.

“When did you first suspect Jane?”
Meredith asked.

“Not until late Sunday afternoon,” I
replied. “Actually, I thought I’d caught a glimpse of her on Friday evening,
parked on the street behind the cottage in a dinged-up brown Duster. But it
wasn’t Jane’s kind of car, and the driver had her hair down and was wearing
something shapeless and sloppy. Roz told me that Jane had gone to Vermont, so I
pushed the whole thing to the back of my mind. In fact, I didn’t even think
about Jane again until Sunday morning when she telephoned. She said she was
calling from Vermont to ask me to keep an eye on Roz.”

“But she wasn’t in Vermont,”
Meredith said. “She was right here.”

“At Violett’s,” Ruby said. “Cooking
up an omelet.”

I helped myself to some potato chips
and another glob of clam dip. “What happened is that Jane phoned her secretary
from here and told her she’d flown back to New York and was driving to Vermont.
She asked her to pass the word along to Roz.”

Ruby shook her head admiringly. “What
great sleight of hand. While Roz and Violett are getting poisoned, everybody
thinks Jane is a couple thousand miles away.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It wasn’t airtight,
because the airline roster on Thursday night—the night she was supposed to fly
back to New York—doesn’t show her name. And of course there’s the rental car.”

“Right,” Ruby said. “She had to use
her driver’s license to get the car.”

“But if she succeeded in pinning Roz’s
murder on Violett,” Meredith said, “nobody’d check flight rosters or rental
cars.”

“And she could be pretty safe in
figuring that her scheme would work,” I said, licking clam dip off my fingers. “Roz
was a celebrity. The local cops would be under enormous pressure to find her
killer in a hurry. Jane must have figured they’d jump at a plausible
murder-suicide package, just to get the case wrapped up.”

Meredith frowned. “I’m not sure I
know how Jane and Violett got together,” she said. “They seem like a pretty
unlikely pair.”

“I have to admit that I’m really
guessing on this,” I said. “I saw Jane and Violett talking at Jo’s memorial
service. Violett must have told Jane at that point about her claim to
StrawBerry Bear, hoping that Jane, as Roz’s agent, might help her get something
out of Roz. That gave Jane the bright idea of killing two birds with one stone.
By that time, she’d already decided she had to kill Roz. Now she could see that
she had to get rid of Violett, too.”

“That’s right,” Ruby said
emphatically. “She couldn’t let Violett go around telling people that
StrawBerry was
her
bear. That could cause no end of trouble.”

“Exactly. So Jane decided to set it
up so that Violett looked like Roz’s killer. She saw Jo’s sister off on her
flight home to Hawaii, then headed into Austin, rented the Duster, shopped at
Sears for shoes and less noticeable clothes, and checked into the Marriott,
where she slept Thursday and Friday nights. She lucked out, because the Knife
and Gun Show opened at the City Coliseum on Saturday. She bought the
thirty-eight from a private owner who didn’t bother with the paperwork or check
to see if she was a Texas resident.” For a dealer, that kind of transaction is
highly illegal and subject to a ten-thousand-dollar fine and imprisonment. The
last dealer who got caught selling a handgun to a nonresident got slapped with
both. But private owners can get away with murder.

“So Saturday night’s shooting was
dead serious,” Meredith said. “Jane wasn’t just trying to scare Roz.”

I nodded. “If she’d succeeded, she
would’ve shot Violett with the same gun. Murder-suicide. When she blew the
shooting, she probably decided it was too high-risk to try again with the gun.
She’d been at the party the time Roz complained about the fire ants, and she
remembered the poison. So she lifted it, then went over to Violett’s and gave
her a song-and-dance about needing a place to stay. That was about nine-thirty,
when Miss Ima saw her at Violett’s and mistook her for a man. The next morning,
she waited until Roz had gone walking, then sneaked into the cottage and poisoned
the tomato juice Roz used for her garlic cocktail. Then she went back to
Violett’s and cooked her a toxic mushroom-and-garlic omelet.”

“What’s the significance of the
garlic?” Ruby asked curiously.

“The ant poison is a compound called
thallium sulfate. When you sniff it, it has an aftertaste of garlic. So Jane
masked it with real garlic. Smart lady.”

Meredith shook her head. “I see why
Jane had to kill Violett, but I still don’t see her motive for killing Roz. She
apparently didn’t know about the Disney deal. So even if Roz was acting flaky
about the contract, she still, presumably, had the potential of producing big
dollars for Jane’s agency.”

“Remember that argument we
overheard?” I asked. “It’s my guess that Roz foolishly warned Jane that she was
having the royalty account audited. Jane was afraid the audit would uncover
some big-time embezzling. It was a powerful motive for murder.”

“Sure,” Ruby said. “And once Roz was
dead, Jane would have a free hand with the royalty account. There wouldn’t be
anybody around to protect Roz’s interests.”

“I wonder if Jane knew about Mother
and Roz,” Meredith said, poking the fire thoughtfully.

I shook my head. “If she did, Roz
and Violett would both be alive—or Jane herself would be dead, courtesy of Roz.”

“How come?” Ruby wanted to know.