Hangman's root : a China Bayles mystery Page 3

  "You can say goodbye to that orange cat of yours, Riddle. I caught it trespassing on my property a few minutes ago and—"

  "Orange cat?" Dottie's raspy voice hiked up a notch.

  "You know. Scrawny, one ear." The tip of Harwick's nose pulled down to his thin upper lip when he talked, and his eyes glinted under those eyebrows. There was something about him that suggested a frustrated libido, channeled into an immature and spiteful pettiness, like a little boy who banged his head on the floor when he couldn't get what he wanted. "It was in my yard, destroying the catnip plants I just—"

  "Ariella!" The word was a roar. "You lured Ariella into your yard!"

  The eyebrows were righteous. "Damn thing was tearing up my herbs. Deserved to be trapped." The eyebrows became fierce. "What's more. Riddle, I intend to trap every single cat that strays onto my property, so you'd better—"

  "You turn Ariella loose this minute, Harwick!" Dottie said, her tone ferocious. "This minute, do you hear? She's diabetic. She has to have insulin every day."

  "Not on your life, Riddle. The xdams Count}^ animal control officer loaned me the trap. She told me I have the legal right to trap and dispose of every stray that comes on my propert}."

  I didn't see Dottie pick up the hammer. But I saw her brandishing it, the sinews of her wrists like iron struts, and I instinctively stepped in front of her Harwick retreated while he tried to decide what to say next. I hoped it w asn't the wrong thing. If it

  was, Dottie might lose whatever self-control was keeping her from braining him. The possible charges against her ran through my mind: threat of serious bodily injury, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, second-degree murder.

  I turned my back on Harwick and grabbed Dottie's arms, wrestling them down. It took all my strength. "We'll get Ariella," I said. "But this isn't the way. Believe me, Dottie. You're not going to make the world any better by—"

  "By bashing his bald skull?" Dottie struggled to pull free. "You bet I'll make the world better!"

  I tightened my grasp on Dottie's wrists. I tended to agree with her, but now was not the time to say so. I gave Harwick my nastiest glare. "If you've got an ounce of brain you'll release that animal on the double. You're facing at least two criminal charges, and I can probably think of others."

  The tip of his nose quivered. "Criminal charges?"

  "Theft, since you've already admitted to knowing that Dr. Riddle is the cat's owner. And if you deprive the cat of medical attention, you'll face a cruelty charge."

  The eyebrows were unrepentant. "You can't scare me with your threats."

  "Then go home and wait for the sheriff," I said. "And while you're waiting, you treat that cat like she was your next of kin."

  The nose went up and down while Harwick assessed his options. With one last glance at Dottie's hammer, he slipped through the gate. Safely on the other side, he gathered courage, like a little kid with one foot on the sidewalk, the other in his family's front yard. He raised his voice, taunting. "You'd better make damn sure your cats stay out of my yard, Riddle. Next time, I won't bother to tell you. I'll just get rid of them."

  "Go to hell!" Dottie yelled after him, and threw the hammer. It missed his head by inches and shattered the garage window. Harwick turned tail and ran.

  "Sonofabitch," I muuered, almost as angry at Dottie as I was at Harvvick. People who sling hammers at other people, regardless of the provocation, are liable to find themselves in jail.

  Dottie dropped down onto the picnic bench. "I have to get Ariella back!" she said desperately. "Maybe I could—"

  "Dottie," I warned. "Don't even think it." I wasn't sure I could trust her to stay away from Harwick. But it was getting late and I had to get to the store before closing.

  "Look," I said. "On the way back to town I'll stop and ask the sheriff to talk to Harwick." Sheriff Blackwell—Blackie—had gone to school at Sam Houston State with McQuaid, and the two were fishing buddies. Also, I'd given Blackie a hand in solving a difficult matter a few months before, and he still owed me one. I could probably persuade him to take a personal interest in the matter.

  Dottie jumped up. "Then get going!" she gritted. "Send Blackw ell out here as quick as you can—before I kill that filthy bastard!"

  Things never quite turn out the way you'd like. When I got to the Adams County sheriff's office, I learned that Blackie had taken his son's Boy Scout troop to Lost Maples State Park on a weekend campout. According to the deputy, a dour, heavyset man in a wrinkled uniform, the sheriff wouldn't be in the office until the next morning. The deputy wasn't overly enthusiastic about sending somebody out to Falls Creek to mediate a dispute over a trapped cat, even a diabetic cat. When I got to the shop, I had to phone Dottie and tell her to hang on until first thing in the morning, when I was positive the sheriff would order Ariella's release.

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. "I see," Dottie said. Her voice was flat. "Thanks anyway, China."

  Her tone bothered me. "Dottie, I hope you're not considering anything..."

  Sudan Wittig Albert

  "Rash?" She barked an ascerbic laugh. "You mean, Hke kilHng the son of a bitch? Dont worry, China. Whatever I do, I can't afford to get arrested. Not when I'm the sole support of a hundred and fifty-seven cats."

  But as I hung up the phone I had the disquieting sense that Dottie had something up her sleeve. And it wasn't catnip.

  The next morning, I learned what Dottie had in mind. I had hiked to Blackie's office at the crack of dawn and found him behind his desk. I explained the circumstances of Ariella's imprisonment and mentioned, parenthetically, Dottie's suspicion that Harwick was sending her poison pen letters. He agreed, a little grumpily, to drive to Falls Creek and check things out. Then I went for an hour's bike ride, which is my version of jogging. Back home, winded but virtuous, I fed Khat, brewed a pot of spearmint tea, and sat down at the kitchen table to brood on the intractable problem Fd avoided the day before—how to expand something that's already as big as it can get.

  Fortunately, the space problem does not extend into my living quarters, which are more than ample and quite lovely. The kitchen is roomy, with limestone walls, a wide-planked wood floor, and a high pine ceiling supported by cypress beams. There are three other rooms behind the shop, also quite large: a living room, a bedroom with bath, and a workroom where I do herb crafting—a very messy operation that litters the floor with dried plant materials and bits of twiggy. There's also a second-floor loft, accessible by a ladder through my bedroom, and a remodeled stone stable at the back of the lot that serves as a guest cottage. The loft handles storage and the cottage doubles as a classroom,

  although it's not large enough to put up the work tables for herb-craft classes.

  No, I told myself as I poured a cup of fragrant tea, my living quarters are quite ample. The problem's in the shop, where there simply isn't another spare inch. And while I was taking inventory, I might as well admit that the shop wasn't my only space problem. The herb gardens around the building are almost lilliputian. Seven people roaming the paths constitute a crowd, ten a herd, twelve a vast migration. Yesterday evening I noticed that my favorite rosemary had been trampled, and several pots of calendula were knocked over. You can't expect people to stay on the paths if there isn't any room on the paths.

  I shifted in my chair. This was one knotty problem that no amount of brooding was likely to unravel, so I might as well think about something else, such as the hundred or so things I need to do on the one day a week the shop is closed. The hummingbird feeders ought to be filled and hung, because the first contingent of black-chins would be arriving from Guadalajara, ravenous after their long commute. The sage should be trimmed. The artemisia needed thinning {where was I going to put the thinned plants?), and I needed to take a sharp spade to the cost-mary and horehound, both of which are determined to take over the place. Horehound blooms early here. The bees flock to its white flowers, which dry into gray knots that look nice in wreaths. Costmary leave
s make a nice herb tea and are delicately fragrant in potpourri and sachets. My grandmother tucked them between the pages of her Bible to mark her place and keep out paper-eating bugs. Both herbs are worth having, if you have the stuff to be stern with them.

  But instead of rising immediately to the challenge of the herb garden, I poured another cup of tea and reached for the phone. The night before, I had dreamed about Dottie and Miles Harwick, one of those absurd chase dreams my psyche dredges up out of my

  unconscious every now and then. Dottie, astride a ferocious, lion-sized Ariella, was chasing a terrified Harwick around the neighborhood, cracking a whip over his head with a loud "Take that, you flea-brain!"

  It was a comic dream, but the real situation was serious enough. Dottie definitely had it in for Miles Harwick, who for his part seemed to get a charge out of provoking her. She was wildly passionate in her defense of cats and emotionally unpredictable: Witness the hammer-slinging incident. I wanted to check in on her and reassure myself that she had not gotten up in the night and bludgeoned Harwick in his bed.

  The phone rang as I reached for it. It was Blackie, calling from his car. Blackie sounds the way he looks: square shoulders, jutting jaw, regulation haircut, regulation posture. He's a dry, by-the-book man, but he also has both the intelligence and the wisdom (the two aren't always the same thing) to know when to put the book aside. Right now, his voice was metallic.

  "I wanted to let you know that your friend took matters into her own hands sometime last night."

  Uh-oh. My insides went cold. My dreams are almost never hooked to actual events, but there's a first time for everything. "What did she do?"

  "A little breaking and entering. With a bolt cutter." He chuckled wryly. "Of course, she denies it."

  I relaxed a little. Bolt-cutting, while legally impermissible, is more acceptable than head-bashing. "If she denies it," my lawyer-self challenged, "how do you know she did it?"

  Funny how I slip into that adversarial stance every time a cop and I discuss anything more significant than the drought or the Dallas Cowboys. For a decade and a half I took one side of the law, the police took the other. They got the crook, I got the crook off. It's a habit I haven't been able to break.

  "How do I know?" He made an exasperated noise. "China,

  who else but that fruitcake would cut the padlock on Harwick's garage, snip the trigger rod on the trap, and leave without taking anything but a cat?"

  A reasonable question. Too bad I couldn't think of a reasonable answer. "What^oe^ she say?" I countered cautiously.

  Another exasperated noise. "She says the cat came home by herself early this morning. Very convenient, huh?"

  "Convenient for Ariella," I replied. I was glad he couldn't see me smile. "What did you do?"

  "I lectured Harwick on theft and cruelty to animals and impounded the damaged trap. I got nothing out of him when I mentioned the letters. Then I went next door and lectured your friend on trespass, destruction of county property, and assault with a deadly weapon." There was a moment's accusing silence. "You didn't tell me about the hammer."

  I cleared my throat. "That's because she missed."

  "Damn good thing she did. That woman's got the arm of a blacksmith, and he's kind of a wimp. As far as the letters are concerned, I'd say the hammer makes it about even." There was a hint of a grin in his voice, and I breathed a little easier. "If I were you," he added, "I'd tell her to cool it. The county's out forty bucks for that trap she disabled."

  "I'll see that the county gets its money," I said, "but I'm not sure it'll do any good to tell her to back off on Harwick. Especially if she gets another letter threatening her cats."

  "Sounds like you've got a zoo on your hands," he said, and rang off.

  Well, that was that. Dottie might have broken a law or two, but not fatally. With Ariella safely at home, the worst was over. I dialed Dottie's number but there was no answer. She'd probably already gone to the university. Or maybe she was out looking for a twenty-four-hour security guard. I put down the phone. Anyway, she was an adult woman, responsible for her actions.

  I wasn't going to give her a hard time about liberating Ariella, and I couldn't ride herd on her or her animals. Blackie's remark to the contrary, it wasn't my zoo. In the meantime, there was the garden.

  I went out to the storage shed behind the kitchen to look for the spade. But before I could locate it in the messy clutter of tools, garden equipment, and empty pots that fills the storage shed and overflows into the area around it, I was attacked.

  "Gotcha!" McQuaid said with lustful enthusiasm, and fastened his arms around me from behind like a grizzly bear grabbing an unsuspecting camper. His elbow shoved a bag of sulphur granules off the shelf. My foot hooked a hoe, which fell over with a crash and took the hedge clippers with it. There's not enough room in the shed for heavy breathing, let alone a wrestling match.

  "Hey!" I caught a box of plant stakes. "Watch it!" Then, as he kissed the back of my neck, under my hair, I stopped squirming, turned around in his arms, and joined in. I'm always surprised at the way McQuaid can arouse me after three years, going on four, of pleasant intimacy. But it was my day off and I had things planned, so after a few minutes I pulled away from what could have turned into something more than an incredibly sexy good-morning kiss.

  "Want to help me go after the costmary?" I asked seductively. "I'm sure I can find another spade."

  He shook his head. Sex having been postponed, he, too, had something planned—breakfast. He lifted a small white bag. "Lemon custard. How about coffee?"

  I put the spade back. "You sure know how to put the screws on," I said. I stay away from sugar, and I cut back on fats where I can. But wave one of the Doughnut Queen's lemon custard doughnuts at me, and I'm tempted. Offer me two and I'm done for.

  McQuaid sat down at the kitchen table while I got a bag of coffee beans out of the freezer. He's big—six feet, one-ninety plus— and his presence always seems to organize the space around him. It's not just size that does it, either. He has the commanding presence you'd expect in an ex-cop who is also an ex-UT quarterback. It's in his nature to know what he wants, what it will cost, and how to go for it. He got his nose broken going for extra yardage against A&M on Thanksgiving Day. He got the jagged scar across his forehead going for a druggie with a knife in the parking lot behind the Astrodome. Someday he will leave CTSU, which is pretty small potatoes where criminal justice is concerned, and go after a full professorship in some topflight CJ program. He'll get it, too. He's got the street experience, the academic credentials, and the ambition.

  "I thought you had class on Monday morning." I measured Irish Cream decaf into the coffee grinder and flipped the switch.

  "Spring break," he said, over the racket.

  "Already?" I glanced at the calendar, surprised. "How time flies. Last I looked, the semester had just started." I dumped the ground coffee into the coffee maker, added water, and flipped it on.

  "Yeah, spring break." He pushed a boyish shock of dark hair out of his face. McQuaid is thirty-six to my forty-four, a fact that I mostly manage to forget. "Time flies, all right. Two years, in the blink of an eye."

  "Beg pardon?" I asked, thinking I had missed something. I got out two plates and opened the bag. Enough jelly doughnuts for an orgy. I put two on McQuaid's plate, one on mine, and stashed the fourth in the cupboard behind the canned soup. No point in bingeing. I'd save it for an emergency.

  "My lease has expired," McQuaid said. "Mr. McCreary's nephew is getting divorced and needs a house. He gave us sixty days' notice." Mr. McCreary owns the small fifties bungalow

  y

  occupied by McQuaid, his eleven-year-old son Brian, and an irascible basset named Howard Cosell, together with McQuaid's gun collection, Brian s Star Trek memorabilia, and numerous rats, spiders, and snakes on temporary loan from Brian's friends.

  "Oh." A one-syllable response. Keeping my back to McQuaid, I found two mugs.

  "Yeah." He got up from the tab
le, put a hand on my shoulder, and turned me around. "Time to fish or cut bait, China."

  I had admitted to McQuaid over a year ago that what I felt for him was love, mixed with good friendship and healthy lust, in approximately equal proportions. The trouble is that McQuaid's teaching stint at CTSU is only temporary. Thyme and Seasons, on the other hand, is definitely permanent. If McQuaid and I got married, I would inevitably have to face the time when he'd want to leave Pecan Springs and I wouldn't. Such a fundamental difference of opinion did not presage a calm and hafmonious marriage.

  Living together didn't seem like an answer, either. Brian is a bright and amiable child, and I am actually quite fond of him, although I'm not sure about living in sin with an eleven-year-old kibitzer. But there's Howard Cosell, whom I've grown to dislike almost as much as his namesake, and lizards and spiders et al. That may seem like a minor pain, but minor pains can speedily mutate, in the aggregate, into a jumbo-size agony. Moving in with McQuaid meant that two adults, one dog-hating Khat, one Khat-hating dog, and a kid would try to cram themselves and their likes and dislikes into the same space. Heaven forfend.

  I took a deep breath. "Do we have to talk about this now.^"

  "Yes," McQuaid said quietly and firmly. "I realize that your mother drank, your father was a workaholic, and your family was dysfunctional. But it's time you outgrew that shit."

  "This has nothing to do with my family," I said, feeling besieged. (Actually, it did, but that was beside the point.) "I like

  living alone. I like leaving the bathroom door open when I pee. I like knowing that when I put something down, it'll still be there when I come back. I like things neat and uncluttered and—"

  "Sanitized," McQuaid said. "Controlled."

  I frowned. "Now listen here—"

  "No,3/ow listen, Bayles." His slate-blue eyes were steely. "I've let you dictate the terms of this relationship for the last three years. It's my turn. I'm not saying we have to get married. But I am saying that I have to get a new place, and that I love you enough to want to live with you." He gave me a dark look. "Although I have to admit that the reason for this madness eludes me at the moment."