Rosemary Remembered - China Bayles 04 Read online

  Bubba is in his mid-fifties, with hair going grizzled and a paunch that sags over his hand-tooled Western belt as if the last dozen plates of barbecue are still settling. His gray shirt was wet under the arms, and his unlit cigar — I've never actually seen it lit—was clamped in one corner of his mouth. He growled around it.

  "McQuaid's truck, ain't it?"

  I wasn't surprised that Bubba recognized The Beast. He and McQuaid, cop and ex-cop, have a fraternal relationship.

  "I came to pick it up," I said. "Rosemary borrowed it yesterday evening about six to move some furniture she'd bought—what you see in the back of the truck. McQuaid offered to give her a hand, but she said she could handle it by herself." Typical Rosemary. She was the sort of woman who handled everything by herself. She didn't ask for a thing.

  Bubba's heavily jowled face was dark, thick brows pulled down. Like most cops, he doesn't much like lawyers, even ex-lawyers. On the other hand, he likes

  McQuaid, and the fact that McQuaid likes me complicates the matter somewhat. Over the several years we have known one another, he has grown more tolerant of me.

  "Any idea who might've done it?" he asked. "Assumin' she didn't do it to herself."

  I shook my head. A flash flared as the photographer did his work. Grace Walker was hunkered down beside the door, dusting for prints. Gomez was beginning a search of the area around the truck. A fourth cop was motioning to a passing motorist who had stopped his car to gawk, directing him to drive on. Bubba turned to the truck and Grace straightened up and stepped aside. He felt rapidly and deftly under the body.

  "Doesn't 'pear to be a gun," he said.

  "Wouldn't hardly be, I don't reckon," Grace said dryly. "Wound on the left side and the angle the way it is, she'd almost have to hold it in her left hand. It'd be in her lap or on the floor, and it isn't."

  Bubba did not seem pleased that a mere female had noticed these things, but he only grunted.

  "Had her legs swung partway 'round like she was get-tin' out," Grace went on. She was about to say something else, but Bubba turned away. The EMS van had just pulled up at the curb, followed by another car, a green Oldsmobile. Maude Porterfield, Justice of the Peace, got out of the Olds, conferred with the EMS techs for a minute, then came up the drive toward us, leaning on a cane.

  In Texas, the law requires that a JP rule on every suspicious death. This requirement sometimes gives law enforcement officials heartburn, but not when the JP is Judge Porterfield. At seventy-three, she has served the county for forty-two years. Her white hair may be a little thin, but her hearing and her right knee are the only things about her that don't work at an optimum level. In addition to being a JP, she teaches criminal procedure in the seminars conducted by the Texas Justice Court Training Center, headquartered in the Criminal Justice Department at CTSU. Judge Porterfield and I had met at one of the center's social functions and hit it off immediately. As we say in Texas, she don't take no bull.

  "Mornin", Earl," she said. "Hot as a pistol." She straightened the shiny belt of her red watermelon-print dress and nodded at me. "Mornin', China. How you been?" Without waiting for my answer, she switched back to Bubba. "Got a problem here, 'pears like."

  Bubba plucked his cigar out of his face and raised his voice two notches. The judge wears a hearing aid in her right ear. "Mornin', Judge Porterfield. A shootin's what it is.

  The judge, who isn't much more than five feet high, rose on her tiptoes to peer through the open door of the truck. She made a tch-tch noise with her tongue against even white dentures. "Suicide?"

  "Murder," Bubba said.

  "Domestic violence?"

  Bubba looked at me. "The gal was married?"

  "Her name is Rosemary Robbins," I said. "She was divorced, or about to be." Rosemary had mentioned the divorce in passing, but hadn't elaborated. Our encounters, while pleasant, had been focused on business and rather hurried. She was always checking her watch, as if she had to get on to another business engagement. It was a restless habit that had reminded me of myself, in my former life. "She was married to Curtis Robbins," I added, offering up the last bit of personal information I had.

  Judge Porterfield pulled her sparse white eyebrows together. "Robbins? Manages Miller's Gun and Sporting Goods?"

  Gomez came around the truck. "That's him," he said. "Too bad she didn't file a complaint when she had the chance."

  "You been out here on a DV, Hector?" Bubba asked.

  "Yeah. Back 'round Christmas. She phoned in a complaint, but by the time I got here, she'd decided not to press charges. Usual story."

  The judge took a notebook out of her purse, which was red and shiny and shaped like a slice of watermelon. She looked at Gomez, obviously not accepting the "usual story" bit. "What did he say when you questioned him?"

  Gomez colored. "He was gone, an' she didn't want me talkin' to him. Said she thought it might make him worse. She didn't want ever'body in town readin' in the paper 'bout her gettin' beat up."

  Grace Walker shook her head gloomily. "Everybody'11 be readin' about her now."

  The judge looked from Grace to me. "She and Robbins have any kids?"

  "Not as far as I know," I said. "She had a business. She was a CPA."

  "Woman with a business probably doesn't want any kids," Grace remarked sagely.

  Bubba gave her a warning look. "This their place?" he asked me.

  I shook my head. "I don't think so. I got the impression she lived here alone. Her office is in the back of the house." That much I knew, because we'd met there to go over my tax stuff.

  "Mebbe we better take a look at the office, Yer Honor," Bubba said.

  Judge Porterfield sighed. "Right, Earl. It'll get us out of this gol-durn heat." She and Bubba walked toward the house.

  Gomez blinked. "Earl?"

  "She used to teach the chief in Sunday School when he was a kid," Grace said. "Earl's his real name."

  "Earl," Gomez mused. "How 'bout that."

  Grace turned to me. "You wanta give me your statement now, Miz Bayles?"

  When that was done, I promised to stop at the police station and leave my prints for elimination purposes, then got back in my furnace of a car. ABC Rentals would have to deliver those -extra tables to the hotel, and McQuaid would have to rent a car. It'd be a few days before Bubba turned The Blue Beast loose. She'd done a lot of things during the course of her long and checkered career, but I'd bet this was the first time she'd been a murder scene.

  By two o'clock, the temperature was an infernal ninety-nine, and the buildings and trees were shimmering under the blazing sun. I'd plowed through two-thirds of my list of things to do for the herb conference. Next was The Springs Hotel, where I needed to check on last-minute details. That's where I was headed now, the sun visor pulled low against the glare of the aluminum sky and the air conditioner turned up to gale force. Jeff Clark owned and managed the hotel, which had been a family business for several generations. I needed to talk to him.

  But my heart wasn't in the herb conference any longer. I was remembering Rosemary Robbins, sprawled on the seat of McQuaid's truck, an obscene hole in her smooth cheek, flies buzzing in her hair. It was oddly intimate, this meeting in death, in contrast to the impersonality of our meetings while she was alive.

  Tax accountants are a lot like doctors and priests. They plumb the secrets of your innermost being, peer into your most private places, probe parts of you that nobody else is permitted to see. Rosemary Robbins had explored all my hidden places. She knew where I was succeeding with the store, where I was failing, and probably (damn it) why. She knew about my investments, smart and stupid, and about the financial aspects of my living arrangements with McQuaid. And since she did his taxes as well as mine, she had a pretty clear picture of the two of us and our relationship. Visiting Rosemary was like making a trip to the confessional, leaving my sins behind, large and small, and taking away none of the priest's.

  That was the interesting part. Rosemary knew a great deal about me, b
ut I had only vague impressions of her, the way you know a doctor as a crisp figure in white jacket and stethoscope, or a priest as a dim shadow behind the confessional screen. The times we had met, she'd impressed me as a woman who managed her personal life like her business, with such competent organization that it demanded very little of her.

  But judging from what Hector Gomez had said, Rosemary Robbins's personal life had been deeply shadowed, her cool orderliness a camouflage for a relationship out of control. There isn't anything paradoxical about this, actually. A dozen years ago, I defended a wealthy woman who had confessed to murdering her husband, a well-known Houston optometrist. In her guarded self-control, that woman reminded me of Rosemary. For weeks, she refused to tell me why she had killed her husband, although she was perfectly willing to talk about how she had done it. At first I attributed her reluctance to some sort of confused consciousness of her guilt. But when she finally broke down and revealed the abuse that she'd undergone for over ten years, I understood why she guarded herself so closely. The woman was afraid of betraying her deep shame — not the shame of a murderer, but the shame of a victim. Had Rosemary Robbins been unwilling to reveal herself as a victim, fearing that this truth would compromise her public persona? Had her abuser become her murderer? Or was her killer someone else altogether, someone out of her past or her present? I was turning these questions over in my mind as I drove out to the hotel to talk to Jeff Clark.

  The Springs Hotel is six miles north of town. It overlooks Pecan Lake, a three-acre man-made lagoon formed by a dozen crystal-clear underwater springs that geyser up out of the limestone of the Edwards Aquifer. The hotel was built by Nathan Clark as a resort for the wealthy back at the turn of the century, before anybody bothered to calculate the square-foot cost of air-conditioning and heating. The original building was a three-story Victorian wedding cake, decorated with turrets and towers and frosted with white-painted gingerbread. Mr. Clark owned and managed it for fifty years, adding a wing in 1916, another in 1925, and a nine-hole golf course and stables in 1928, on the theory that Texas oilmen and their families deserve to take a few days' respite from the tedium of pumping money out of the ground. The Depression took the starch out of the big spenders, though, and for a while it looked as if the hotel might not survive.

  But with frugality and careful management, Mr. Clark —now old Mr. Clark —held on. He sold off forty acres of horse trails, shut down the stables, and closed a wing, and the hotel was still a going concern when he died in 1945. It went to his only son, Charles, whose tastes, unlike those of his frugal father, tended toward wine, women, and song, all in the pursuit of business, of course — or "bidness," as we say in Texas.

  Over the next thirty-five years, Charles, or Big Chuck, as he was known, built a reputation as the most flamboyant host in all of Texas. He refurnished the hotel and reopened the wing his father had closed. He restocked the stables, built four lighted tennis courts, and piped the artesian water to a newly-built swimming pool. His friends and customers were wealthy, prominent, and legion. To suit their Texas tastes. Big Chuck threw dozens of Texas-sized parties: Superbowl parties featuring a half-dozen barbecued steers, rattlesnake canapes, and jalepeno-flavored vodka; political wingdings hosted by Lyndon and Ladybird, with country music by Willie and Waylon and the boys; a Dallas charity bash where guests came duded up in purple ostrich-skin boots, the caterer's crew were real Kiowas, and Larry Hagman auctioned off a Waterford cut crystal cowboy hat and a four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser rigged for the Ultimate Hunt with two phones, a stereo, and a wine rack complete with a magnum of Chateau Petrus 1961.

  But even good parties come to an end. Big Chuck died and the hotel went to his son Jeff and daughter Rachel. The high-rolling days ended, too. By the late eighties, Texans were saying the R-word out loud and whispering the D-word in their sleep. The bottom fell out of oil, real estate, beef, high tech — everything but tumbleweed and fire ants. With $93 million worth of personal debts, former Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie took Chapter 11 and auctioned off their personal belongings. Socialites filled up their Neiman-Marcus shopping bags with excess glitz and sent them with their maids to the consignment shops. I remember a bitter joke that made the happy-hour rounds in Houston in those nail-biting years: How do you become a Texas millionaire? Start off as a Texas billionare.

  With Big Chuck dead and the economy gone bust, The Springs no longer hosted outrageous parties. Jeff Clark had to struggle to keep the hotel alive — and it wa*> a struggle, too, especially when his sister Rachel (who handled the advertising and part of the operations) was diagnosed with cancer. When she died, she left her half of the hotel to her husband, Matt Monroe. Matt had increasingly involved himself in the business as his wife's illness progressed, and by the time of her death, he had taken over a big chunk of the day-to-day operations. The hotel was now owned jointly by Jeff and Matt.

  It was Jeff I had come to see. I parked my Datsun under a feathery mesquite tree behind the hotel, picked up my folder of conference plans and notes, and crossed the patio to the office entrance. I like Jeff. It's true that he has the temperament of a red wasp, the social grace of an armadillo, and the imagination of a slide rule. But in spite of his flinty personality, Jeff is deep-down fair. And he's a friend of McQuaid, who once did a small security job for him. They keep up the connection over late-night poker and on occasional early-morning or late-night fishing trips to Canyon Lake. Very occasional. Jeff doesn't seem to have much of a life except for the hotel.

  I paused at the door to the main office. There were two desks, both empty. One belonged to Priscilla, the receptionist, the other to Lily Box, the office manager. Lily herself was at the Xerox machine, humming a tune while she filled the paper tray.

  "Is Jeff busy, Lily?"

  Lily turned around with a smile. "Oh, hi, China. He's gone fishing. Mart's around here somewhere, though. Or maybe I can help?" She pushed the paper tray back into the machine.

  "Jeffs gone fishing? In the middle of the week?"

  "Yeah. Surprised me, too." Lily raised the lid on the copy machine and put a paper on the glass, punching buttons. Lily is what every office needs. She's built as solid as a Mack truck, about as elegant and every bit as dependable. She was wearing black slacks, a white blouse, and an open vest that hung down over her hips, obscuring her actual size. "He went down to South Padre Island," she added, as the machine spat out copies. "Good fishing down there. Tarpon, red snapper, bonito, Spanish mackerel. My father used to go whenever he got the chance. Me, I'd settle for a beach-front hotel, a pool, and plenty of sun."

  "South Padre?" The island's a nine-hour drive, as far south as you can get without bumping into Mexico. I began to feel frantic, thinking of the list of details and problems that needed immediate solutions. "I thought he'd be here for the conference. He didn't tell me he was going away."

  Lily lifted the lid and deftly replaced the paper. The machine zipped out several more copies, fast. "Forgot, probably. The trip's been in the works for a couple of weeks now." She jiggled the copies to even them up. "What the heck, he's got it coming. He hasn't taken more than a few hours off since I've been here, and that's three years. Maybe a little relaxation will sweeten him up some." She glanced at my folder. "It's nothing to worry about. Whatever you've got, I can probably figure it out. And if I can't, Matt can."

  "Sure," I said. Lily was right. Jeff could use the time off, and she could deal with just about anything. "But maybe I ought to check in with Matt. Where is he?"

  "Right here," he said, from the door to his office. "At your service, ma'am."

  Matthew Monroe is a charmer with a ready smile.

  brown eyes, and brown hair—what little is left of it. There's a lot of shiny, freckled forehead between his eyebrows and his hairline. But surprisingly, his baldness isn't the first thing you notice. It's his easy amiability, his howdy-ma'am friendliness. Everybody says that big, beefy, back-slapping Matt, with his booming voice and hefty shoulders, takes after Big Chuck
a lot more than Jeff does.

  Matt thrust out his hand and I shook it. He was wearing an embroidered pale blue Western shirt and a bolo tie with a rattlesnake rattle tie slide, Western-cut blue slacks, snakeskin boots, and a belt with an ornamented silver buckle. He looked as if he'd just stepped out of Texaj Monthly's Twenty Texas Big Shots issue.

  "Good to see you, Miz Bayles," he said heartily. "Sorry Jeff s not here. Everything shaping up okay for your big weekend?"

  "More or less," I said. His face wasn't quite as ruddily affable as usual, and his grin seemed taut. I guessed that he wasn't entirely happy about Jeff s taking off to South Padre and sticking him with the work this weekend. I took my notes out of my folder. "I do have some questions about the table decorations for tomorrow night's reception."

  "You'd like some herby-type stuff, I bet." Matt turned to Lily. "Hey, Lil, you got that list?"

  Lily found a paper on her desk and handed it to him. He glanced at it. "Says here that Patty, over at Florio's Flowers, is making up wreath centerpieces with parsley, oregano, marjoram, lamb's ears, green and gray santolina, basil, and rosemary—all fresh, of course. Courtesy of the hotel."

  I was surprised. "Hey, that's terrific!" Better than ter-

  rific, it was a lifesaver. "Where'd you get the fresh herbs?"

  "From a grower in San Antonio." Matt frowned. "I didn't screw up, did I? You don't market the fresh stuff out of your shop?"

  "Not right now," I said. "By next spring, I probably will." Until McQuaid and I moved to the country, I hadn't had room to grow fresh herbs as a sideline product. Now, I was considering planting a large herb garden in the backyard and marketing the produce to upscale restaurants and groceries in San Antonio and Austin. Basils, thymes, shallots, chives, oregano—they'll sell well, once people get used to having them available.