Wildcat Wine (17 page)

Figuring Henry for another breaking-and-entering project, I phoned him at Gracie's, where he was hiding from Tired. Gracie didn't want to admit that Henry was there. But when I insisted that I already knew Henry was at her house, she put him on the line. Henry took some serious convincing, but I told him we needed to be sure there was nothing at Ken's that would hurt Bonita. That pretty much did the trick in the end. Reluctant Henry and I made a date for 2
A.M
. at my house as the staging zone and I told him not to wear a suit and tie this time. Then I went home and made coffee and paced until Henry drove up, right on the dot of two.

Ever the Girl Scout of the B&E set, I handed Henry plastic kitchen gloves, put my own yellow gloves in the hip pockets of my black jeans, and we tiptoed outside, me hoping Covenant Nazi next door wasn't peeking out her windows at me.

“I'd better . . . drive, eh, use . . . take my car, van, because your car, Honda, is already . . . so—”

“Conspicuously well known in the neighborhood?” I finished up for him, as I was in a bit of a hurry.

“Yes.”

“Good idea. Your green minivan will blend right into the neighborhood out there.”

Thus agreed, Henry drove us out east, down Fruitville Road and toward the country estates known as Oak Ford.

Though he might have thought of it on his own, I told Henry to park on the opposite side of the street, a few houses down from Kenneth's house. We sat in the van for a minute or two, listening for dogs suddenly barking or lights flashing on.

Nothing happened. So we slipped out of his van and walked quickly, but quietly, to Kenneth's, where we saw the yellow police crime tape and all kinds of warnings not to trespass. But, as if that rule only applied to the front, we went around to the back.

Fortunately for us, the back door was neatly hidden from view on one side by a trellis with some kind of climbing vine and on the other by a decorative wall inlaid with Mexican tiles, most of which appeared to have butterfly artwork on them.

Musing that the builder certainly hadn't been home-security-oriented, I held the flashlight on the door lock for Henry, secure in the belief that the glow of the light was hidden from the neighbors by the wall and the trellis. The door itself consisted of a wooden frame painted a pale yellow, with a stained-glass insert in a butterfly design. Wearing his kitchen gloves, Henry pulled out little, shiny stick things and started tinkering with the lock.

And he tinkered.

And tinkered.

And muttered, and bleated, and danced and strutted a bit on the stage of the back patio, full of sound and fury after he jabbed his thumb with a sharp tool, and my arm was getting tired from holding the flashlight, and I snapped, “Would you hurry up.”

“This is hard, difficult . . . it's a good lock, not like that one at your office.”

Tinker, tinker, tinker.

My nerves were fraying. In the ultrasilence surrounding us, I could hear little tiny snapping noises inside my head as the synapses popped off my nerve endings and landed not axon to dendrite as nature designed them to do, but leaping off wholly into the open space of my gray matter.

My God, I could hear the internal combustion of my own mind going nuts.

But even as I listened to my brain break down, I stood there holding the flashlight for Henry. Sweat trickled down my neck. Inside my gloves, my hands were hot and sticky.

I lowered the flashlight to rest my arm, provoking whiney noises from Henry, and in the lowered light I saw a row of potted impatiens and begonias by the decorative wall of tiled butterflies. Nice touch, I thought, Kenneth must have hired a gardener.

“Light, I need light,” Henry whispered.

Help was what Henry needed. With my gloved hands, I picked up the closest clay pot of impatiens from the patio and swung it back as far as I could, then forward with some serious energy, and I knocked out the glass pane in the back door. “Works every time,” I said as Henry began to make sputtering noises.

“I could have done that,” Henry said, “if I'd wanted to disturb . . . wake up . . . alarm the whole neighborhood.”

So how loud was that? I wondered. We both stood there, waiting for any neighborhood lights to flash on, burglar alarms or sirens to shriek, dogs to howl, guns to blast out in the night, or any other obvious or nonobvious sign that we should run like greyhounds toward the van down the street.

Seconds, maybe minutes passed. I guessed soundproofing was one of the virtues of five-acre lots and plenty of trees and houses with air conditioners running behind shut windows.

But when not even a dog barked, we looked at each other with some amazement and not a little relief, and I stuck my hand through the hole in the glass, popped the lock and turned the door handle, and we went into the house.

Flashlights in gloved hands, we wandered to the front-entry hall, where in a moment of perverse something or other, I studied the blood splatters of Kenneth's last milliseconds among the living, and Henry made little gulping noises.

All right, I reminded myself, don't take Henry on any more B&Es. The man was not cut out for it.

On the other hand, I suddenly realized I was having fun. Not with the blood splatters, no, that was gross, but with the idea that I could plunder Kenneth's house and seek his secrets and, perhaps, unravel the various mysteries circling us like bats out of a belfry and hopefully help Bonita by finding something about Kenneth's threatened fraud suit against her.

“Let's get out of here,” Henry said.

“Yeah, let's find his bedroom and start there.”

“I mean, let's get out of here.”

“Oh, the house. Not on your life. We came here to help Bonita. You forgetting that?”

“Then hurry.”

Yeah, all right. Leaving the scene of the murder, we prowled down the hallway of the big house until we found the master bedroom. With Henry pleading with me in a truly irritating mantra to rush, I searched the obvious places first, the chest of drawers, the closet, under the mattress, behind the picture frames (no safe), et cetera, et cetera. Kenneth's jewelry box, a large, carved wooden thing with a toy lock that Henry popped open in a second, contained a modest coin collection, a Rolex, a diamond pinkie ring tacky even for Kenneth, and six antiquey-looking rings. Women's rings. I wondered a bit at that as I admired them. One of them had a diamond, another a ruby, and one a light blue stone I couldn't place. All very nice. I slipped the rings in my pocket while Henry pretended to search through Kenneth's shoe boxes. Then I slipped the pinkie ring, the Rolex, and the box of coins into my purse, which I was lugging around for precisely this reason.

Other than pulling up the carpet, I couldn't think of anything else to do in the bedroom, and Henry was whining again that we were taking too long, so I sent him to the next bedroom, and took a gander at Kenneth's bathroom.

His prescription medications were useless to me. Typical middle-aged man with good insurance and discretionary-funds stuff—Viagra, Rogaine, and Renova.

“Lilly, Lilly, come here,” Henry fairly shouted through the dark house.

I scampered down the hall to the other end of the house where Henry was standing in front of a room that logically should have been a den or office.

Peeking in, I shouted, “Whoa,” myself, and stood back, then stepped into the room through a screen door behind the wooden door that Henry had opened.

At once, I could feel the temperature change. Moist and warm. The air smelled like privet and honeysuckle in the spring. Things hummed in the corners. Henry and I shined our flashlights about the room. All about us were ferns and violets and hanging baskets and willowy plants with delicate flowers or spikes of bloom.

And butterflies.

Hundreds of them.

I eased into the room, fully amazed in a way that's hard for me to be.

Kenneth had built a butterfly garden in his den.

Henry shut the wood door. No doubt the botanist in him wanted to keep the environment right for the butterflies and ferns and violets.

Henry kept repeating, “Oh, my lord, oh, my lord.”

I needed to turn on the overhead light and see this more fully. I stepped over to the one window in the room and checked it out. Plantation shutters, behind which a thick blind covered the glass pane.

Surely that would block the light from any curious neighbor. I went back to the door and switched on the overhead.

Once the room was fully illuminated, I could see rows of lights in the ceiling and various other machine-type things in the corners.

Butterflies flittered about, gracing the air with a hallucinogenic quality.

“Grow lights,” Henry said, and pointed at the ceiling. “Misters and climate control and . . .”

I stopped listening to him and just looked. Once Delvon and Dave and I had gone to Pine Mountain in western Georgia because Dave wanted to consult with the head gardener at the resort about the proper blend of cow poop and lime and rock phosphate to plump up our native sand on clay, and Delvon and I had wanted to go for a long ride. At Pine Mountain, there had been a butterfly garden, a netted structure of green and light and butterflies, which had been a total wonderment to us. Delvon, Dave, and I had stood in delight inside that butterfly garden, and we'd promised to return, though we never did. But I never imagined anyone could build one inside his own house.

“This would cost a fortune,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Henry . . .” I didn't know what to say. Had this been the obsession that drove Kenneth to cheat and push and grab so for more and more money?

“We need to get out of here,” Henry said.

We backed out the door, I turned off the light, and we made a whirlwind tour of the rest of the house.

Though I couldn't entirely shake the mood the butterfly room had cast upon me, I focused back on the job at hand.

Two bedrooms were completely empty, and Henry and I together ransacked Kenneth's home office without finding anything of particular value or interest, but I added Kenneth's laptop to the collection of things I was going to take with me when we left.

In the hutch in the formal dining room, I found a box of antique silverware, which I figured might have been the ex-wife's. “Might as well make it look like a burglary,” I quipped to Henry, and tucked the box under my arm. I couldn't carry both the laptop and the silver, so I handed the laptop to Henry and braced for protest. But Henry's expression indicated he'd entered a zone beyond comprehension of the petty, and he took the laptop like a man sleepwalking through a jungle of butterflies.

Kenneth's kitchen indicated that he didn't cook much, but drank a great deal of orange juice. The freezer had only ice, designer coffee, and a collection of frozen orange juice. The refrigerator had beer, wine, three containers of not-from-concentrate orange juice, and a plate of pellets that looked vaguely like what one might feed fish or birds or something like that.

The kitchen done, I glanced at my watch. It was getting close to five, a time when paper boys come and alarm clocks go off. But we'd found nothing concerning Bonita. Nothing helpful.

“We've got to go,” Henry said for the twelve-hundredth time.

On a final spin through the den, I contemplated where else Kenneth might have hidden something about Bonita.

“Okay, stay here and get caught . . . discovered . . . eh . . . arrested. I'm leaving.”

Henry started toward the front door, but I ran up to him and said, “Back door,” and in concert we turned to leave the way we'd come in.

After easing out from the rear, we hid in the bushes that surrounded the house as we slipped around front and ran like scared bunnies toward his van and then drove home in an odd silence.

Back at my house, I kissed Henry on the cheek and thanked him for being a proper escort. As if he had been my companion at the theater.

“Well, I guess we've broken enough laws for one night. I'm going home now,” he said, but he carried the laptop inside for me while I lugged the rest of Kenneth's loot that we had appropriated for study and to cover our tracks.

After washing off my breaking and entering in lots of hot, soapy water, I napped fitfully for an hour, and woke, startled, just seconds before the alarm went off to signal another Monday.

Chapter 26

The first shoe dropped
about two-fifteen the next afternoon.

At precisely that time, Philip called me with the news that the autopsy report on Kenneth showed he had been shot by a .38.

Yeah, okay, just about the most common gun in America, I thought. That ought to be a big help to Tired.

“How are you such buddies with the medical examiner that you get autopsy reports?” I asked.

“I have my sources,” Philip said.

Okay, the deep throat of the criminal-defense system. Of course, I had my courthouse spies too, as did most good litigators.

“But here's the particularly intriguing aspect to it,” Philip added, then paused dramatically, waiting for the tension to build.

“I'm not on a jury, just tell me.”

“The bullets, all six of them, were of an unusual make. An old-fashioned type of bullet.”

So, what, an old-fashioned type of killer shot Kenneth? How was this helpful?

“They're 158-grain roundnoses. Not the FBI load, which are hollow point, but the older kind. Ever heard of those?”

For a moment I couldn't breathe. I had the distinct sensation that I was choking and I put the phone down so Philip wouldn't hear me in the final death throes of asphyxiating from stress.

Of course I'd never heard of a 158-grain roundnose bullet before last Saturday when I'd found a box of them in Farmer Dave's backpack in my house, back when I was a relatively normal person with a passably pleasant life, and not the karmic center of lunatics and dead people for Sarasota County.

“Lilly? Lilly?”

I picked up the phone. I made a noise that sounded like choking to me, but must have sounded like “Please continue” to Philip.

“In the old days, when the .38 was standard police issue, 158-grain roundnoses were widely used. But those bullets didn't expand. Not only that, the roundnoses were poor performers in soft tissue and sometimes could yaw 180 degrees in living tissue. In forensic circles, those bullets became notorious for exiting the target and hitting innocent bystanders.”

Oh, yuck. Please, spare me some details, I thought as I made another choking noise.

“So, that particular bullet is rarely used anymore. Given its rarity, Tired and his crew might get a break in tracking Kenneth's murderer. It's only a remote possibility though. They don't have the manpower to check every possible outlet for old bullets. Plus, now, with the Internet, the shooter could have purchased those bullets on-line.”

“So, it doesn't really mean much, does it? That the bullets were, er, unusual.”

“No, probably not, but it's interesting.”

Oh, yeah, it was that. Interesting that the bullets that probably killed him had been in my spare guest room just days before Kenneth learned whether there is an afterlife.

For the time being, I decided to keep this information just between me, and me.