Spanish Dagger Page 5

  Sheila pushed her cop cap back on her head. “Where are you two headed?”

  “We’re out to steal some yucca,” I said. “Carole’s teaching a papermaking class on Saturday, and she covets a couple of buckets of leaves from those plants along the railroad track.”

  “Steal it? The railroad company ought to pay you to take that stuff.” Sheila looked doubtful. “You’re telling me that you make paper out of it?”

  “Oh, yes!” Carole exclaimed. “Yucca fiber makes wonderful paper—strong, flexible, lovely texture and color. Come and take a look when the class is over.”

  “I will if I can,” Sheila said.

  I doubted that she’d do it. She’s putting in sixteen-and eighteen-hour days right now, and doesn’t have much free time. In fact, we haven’t had a girls’-night-out for several months, and recently, it’s been impossible to catch her for lunch. Even when we’re together she often seems to be somewhere else. Something about the job must be giving her trouble. I don’t blame Smart Cookie for being so totally preoccupied with her work that she doesn’t have time for her life. I know about that, for there have been times when I’ve been too busy for friends. But that doesn’t keep me from missing her and wondering, often sadly, whether we will ever be as close as we once were.

  Now, she stepped back from the van and raised her hand in a friendly salute. “Have a great day, guys.”

  “We will,” Carole and I chorused in cheerful unison.

  Had we but known.

  IF you think of yucca as a plant that grows only in southwestern deserts, you’d be wrong. This spiky plant, which belongs to the genus Yucca, in the Agave family, has an enormous distribution, ranging from the Atlantic (Yucca filamentosa) westward to the Pacific (Y. whipplei), and from Canada (Y. glauca ssp. albertana) south into Guatemala (Y. elephantipes). There are some fifty species native to the United States and thirty more to Mexico and Central America, some tall, some short, and all with starbursts of sharp, spiny leaf tips, sometimes at the base of the plant, sometimes near the top of a stalk. If you’re looking for yucca, you’ll probably find a native in your neighborhood. And where it’s not native—the Atlantic northeast and the Pacific Northwest—it has escaped from people’s gardens and hightailed it for the wilderness, so you’re likely to find it growing there, too.

  Texas is home to about twenty species of yucca, in a variety of sizes and shapes. The smallest is Arkansas yucca (Yucca arkansana), which produces thigh-high clumps of spiny, flexible leaves and head-high spikes of heavy, waxy flower bells—striking in a garden. The largest is soaptree yucca (Y. elata), which has a thick, strong trunk and can grow to thirty feet high when left to its own devices for a century or so. All these yuccas share the common names Spanish dagger, Spanish bayonet, and Adam’s needle, the reason for which you will understand if you ever get jabbed by one of its stiff, spiny points. This morning, I was taking Carole to the sprawling colony of twisted-leaf yucca (Y. rupicola) that thrives in the rocky caliche soil along the Missouri Pacific Railroad. She’d find all the leaves she wanted: new, pliant leaves; stiff, mature leaves; and dead leaves, brown and half-decayed. Each makes a different paper—different color, different texture, different weight. She could mix and match to her heart’s content.

  We turned at Beans Bar and Grill, which is located in the building between Purley’s Tire Company and the Missouri Pacific Railroad, across the street from the old fire house, recently converted into a dance hall. I pulled through the parking lot and steered Mama down a narrow dirt track beside the tracks, along a row of straggly desert willows and poverty weed. You may not think of railroad tracks as being the prettiest places in the world, and usually they’re not. But native plants sometimes survive along the railroad right-of-way when they are grazed or plowed out of existence elsewhere, and that’s what has happened here. Since this was April, the six-foot embankments were strewn with spring wildflowers: bluebonnets, scarlet paintbrush, red and gold Indian blanket, and drifts of bright yellow coreopsis, like spilled sunshine. Sadly, the embankments were also strewn with the usual vacant-lot litter: newspapers, empty liquor bottles, beer cans. The Herb Guild has talked about adopting this space and making it into a pocket park—which is not a bad idea. With several small Xeriscape gardens, a few gravel paths, and some regular attention, this could be a very pretty space.

  I stopped under a mesquite tree, its pale green leaves spreading a feathery umbrella that would shade Mama from the morning sun. Carole and I got out, unloaded the buckets and other gear, and started off. We were headed toward a sizable colony of yucca on the south side of the tracks. It had been a warm spring and the plant was already in bloom, with four-and five-foot spikes of white and pale green pendulous flowers, tinged with purple. They have the distinction of being pollinated by only one creature: the female yucca moth. No moths, no pollination; no pollination, no fruit. It’s as simple as that.

  “Beautiful, beautiful,” Carole muttered. She was gazing covetously at the leaves and totally ignoring the stunning flower stalks.

  “Oh, but look at the flowers,” I urged. “Aren’t they gorgeous? And they’re a delicacy, too. You can chop up the petals and use them in soups and salads—or fry them like fritters. I’ve never tried pickling the buds, but people do. The fruits come along later in the year, and the local Indians roasted them in hot ashes, like potatoes, and ate them. Or they dried and pounded them into flour, or fermented them into booze and—”

  “Stop already,” Carole commanded. She handed me a pair of gloves and clippers. “You cut those green leaves. I’ll get the brown ones. We don’t need a lot—just fill the bucket, that should do it.”

  We worked in companionable silence for a few minutes. It would have been impossible to move through the dense colony without getting thoroughly spiked, so we moved around it, cutting here and there as we went. My bucket was full when I straightened and caught sight of a heap of old clothes, half-visible among the spiny clumps.

  I gave the offending heap a fierce scowl. “I wish people wouldn’t litter,” I said peevishly. “Maybe, if we turn this into a park, they won’t be so quick to dump—”

  I stopped. Something about the heap of clothes didn’t look right. Stepping carefully, I saw a sneaker, then the stretched-out leg of a pair of jeans. And then I realized what I was looking at. A man, sprawled facedown in the yucca, his face half-hidden by one arm, flung up. He was out cold.

  Carole wrinkled her nose. “Somebody did too much celebrating at Beans last night, I suppose. He couldn’t have been sober, or he wouldn’t have been walking through this patch of yucca. It’s murder.”

  “Maybe he was walking along the railroad tracks and fell down the embankment,” I said. “And he could be passed out on dope, not booze.” Small towns are no longer the safe havens from drugs that they used to be. Pecan Springs is located on the I-35 corridor, which carries drug traffic from the Mexican border to San Antonio, Dallas, and points north. I reached for my cell phone. “Well, we can’t just go away and leave him here—he’ll get heatstroke. I hate to call the cops because they’ll just throw the poor schmuck in jail. But at least he’ll get medical care, if that’s what he needs.”

  But while I was punching 911, Carole had ventured into the yucca. With an effort, she pulled the man onto his back. What I saw made me gasp and drop my phone.

  The man was neither drunk nor drugged. His red shirt was soaked with dark red blood.

  He was Colin Fowler, and he was dead.

  “POOR Ruby,” Carole breathed, wrapping her arms around herself and shivering, although the temperature was already pushing eighty. “She may have broken up with him, but I’m sure she still cares. What in heaven’s name are we going to tell her?”

  We were watching a team of Pecan Springs police going over the crime scene with tape measures and cameras—slowly, because the needle-sharp leaves of the yucca plants were making their work painfully difficult. EMS had arrived and the medics were standing by. But they had turned off the emergenc
y lights on the ambulance and were in no special hurry. There was nothing they could do for Colin. Anyway, they had to wait for the justice of the peace, who is required by Texas law to certify every unattended death, whether it happens in a hospital, at home, or in the middle of a yucca patch.

  “I guess we have to tell her the truth,” I said grimly. My heart had slowed from a hammer to something like a reasonable pace, but my mind still refused the reality of Colin’s death. It had reminded me, like a sock in the stomach, that we only think we are in control of our lives. I hadn’t liked the man, or trusted him, but that only made it worse.

  Carole looked away from the scene. “I think you have to be the one to tell her, China.”

  “Yeah. But I sure as hell don’t want to do it over the phone. When you talked to her this morning, did she say when she was coming back?”

  Carole shook her head. “It’s up in the air. Her sister is driving down from Dallas to help. They have to move their mom’s stuff into an assisted living unit, and she wasn’t sure how long that might take.” She paused, frowning. “There was something about her grandmother, but I didn’t quite catch it.”

  “That’s Grammy,” I said. “Doris’ mother. She’s a wonderful old lady—must be eighty-something, but she’s sharp enough to win every Scrabble tournament she enters. She and Doris live in the same retirement village.” I paused, considering. “Sounds like Ruby might have to stay in Fredericksburg for a while, which is not all bad. There’s nothing she can do here, anyway. The autopsy will take several days, and the body won’t be released until—”

  I stopped. There was a hand on my arm, and I turned to see Sheila.

  “I’m glad you found him, China.” Her voice was thick and her lavender eyes were dark with pain, reminding me that she and Colin—Dan—had been lovers. “I hate to think of him lying here for days and days, nobody knowing or caring. I—” Her voice broke and she tried to blink back the tears.

  I fought off the impulse—a powerful one—to gather Sheila in my arms and hold her while she cried. She may be a cop, but there’s a human being under that uniform, and humans hurt when someone they’ve cared for is murdered. However, a pair of young uniforms were watching her curiously, and she had turned so they couldn’t see the pain that was written on her face. Sheila is a pro, and when she’s on the job, she’s nothing but a pro. She obviously didn’t want her officers to know that she had any personal connection to the dead man, or that this was anything more than a routine investigation.

  So I cleared my throat and spoke with all the composure I could muster. “Carole and I were trying to decide what to do about telling Ruby. I was saying it might be better to hold off until she comes back. She’s got her hands full with her mother. She doesn’t need the trauma of—”

  “Hey!” An urgent male voice hailed us from a short distance up the tracks, and all three of us turned. “Hey! What’s happening? Somebody die?”

  It was the press, Johnny-on-the-spot. More specifically, it was Hark Hibler, the editor of the Pecan Springs Enterprise. Technically, Hark is my boss, since I edit the paper’s weekly Home and Garden page. My copy is usually late and whenever I meet him, I have a tendency to feel like a freshman who hasn’t handed in her English homework. But Hark wasn’t looking for me. He had a camera in one hand and a notebook in the other, and he was closing in on us at a gallop, his dark hair flying, the just-gotta-know juices rushing through his veins, and the irresistible urge to report written all over his face.

  I wasn’t surprised to see him. The Enterprise building fronts on Alamo Street but looks back on this stretch of railroad track and vacant lots. He probably glanced out his office window, noticed the commotion, and came to have a look. That’s life in a small town. You can’t hide a thing, especially a dead body—although I thought it sadly ironic that this particular body had lain more or less in plain sight for some time without anyone noticing. How long? It was likely that Colin didn’t show up for his date with Ruby some thirty-six hours ago because he couldn’t. He was already dead, or about to get that way.

  Hark wasn’t headed for us. He was zeroing in on Colin’s body, which was lying faceup now, as Carole and I had left him.

  “Fowler!” he gasped, astonished. “My God! I figured him for a dead doper! But it’s Colin Fowler!” He raised his camera to snap a quick picture, but Smart Cookie was quicker.

  “Drop it,” she yelled, and before he could react, she had closed the distance and seized the camera.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Hark bellowed, then saw who it was and turned down the volume. “What’s wrong with a photo? It’s just for the record. You know I won’t print it.”

  It’s true. The Enterprise is a family newspaper—although it isn’t as squeaky-clean as it was when old Arnold Seidensticker was both editor and publisher. Arnold always insisted on scrubbing the dirt off the news before it appeared in the paper, which made Pecan Springs seem like the cleanest little town in Texas. This was a perfectly misleading picture, of course, for Pecan Springs has never been the cozy retreat from the realities of human greed and violence that the Chamber of Commerce likes to pretend that it is. Hark owns the paper now, and prints more of the truth. But not always all of it, especially when special handling is required. Photos of dead people definitely fall under the “do not print” rule. No matter how many corpses the children of Pecan Springs see on TV cop shows, they won’t see any in our local paper.

  Sheila wasn’t taking any chances. “No photos,” she repeated grimly, handing the camera to one of the cops. “You got that, Hibler?”

  Hark heaved a heavy sigh. “I got it.” With a look of mingled pity and distress, he took in the blood that soaked Colin’s shirt. “What’s your best guess, Chief?”

  “He’s dead. That’s my best guess.”

  “No, I mean when and how.”

  Sheila’s mouth tightened. “No comment.”

  “Stabbed, looks like. A deep jab in the chest. Bled to death.” He shook his head. “Last night?”

  “No comment.”

  Hark is persistent. “Robbery, maybe. Did you check his wallet?” He frowned, something registering. “Hey. That’s a shoulder holster he’s wearing under that shirt. But it’s empty. You find the gun?”

  “No comment,” Sheila snapped. “I mean it, Hark. When I have something definitive to say about the investigation, you’ll be the first to know. Until then, lay off the questions.” Her voice was low, gritty. “Just lay the bloody hell off.”

  “You don’t need to jump down my throat,” Hark said with offended dignity. He pushed his dark glasses up on his nose. “I’m a newspaperman, remember? It’s my job to report the news. And murder is definitely news.”

  I went over to join the conversation, such as it was. The Enterprise comes out twice a week now, so there couldn’t be any story until Saturday. We don’t have a local TV station, and the San Antonio and Austin stations probably wouldn’t do anything more than mention this killing. Of course, once the boys at the Nueces Street Diner heard that Colin Fowler was dead, it would be all over Pecan Springs quicker than you can say “boy howdy.” But if we could keep the story off the front page of Saturday’s paper, the news might not get to Fredericksburg for a while.

  “Listen, Hark,” I said quietly. “It would be good—really, really good—if we could spare Ruby, at least for a few days. Her mother’s not very well, and she’s trying to hold things together in Fredericksburg.”

  At the mention of Ruby’s name, an expression of deep concern crossed Hark’s face. He and Ruby dated before Colin came on the scene, and for once in Ruby’s life, a man had cared more for her than she’d cared for the man. In fact, Hark had told me once that he’d hoped to marry her, and I confess to wishing that their relationship might turn into something permanent. He reminds me somehow of Garrison Keillor—sloping shoulders, soft voice, a perennially rumpled personality. He’s not very exciting, maybe, and he certainly doesn’t have any of Colin’s barely di
sguised bad-boy attraction. But while thrills and chills may be what you want for the short term, comfort, reliability, and trustworthiness count most in the long haul. And now that he’s lost some fifty pounds and grown a dark mustache, Hark is not at all bad-looking.

  “I can’t kill the story,” he said finally. “But I can put it where it won’t be noticed—much. But that’s just for the Saturday edition,” he added hastily. “Tuesday, it’ll be front page. After all, Fowler owns a business here. He’s a member of the Chamber. He—” His eyes went to the body and he seemed to flinch. “Damn. I didn’t like the man, but…” His voice trailed off.

  “You didn’t like him?” Sheila asked sharply. “Why not?”

  I knew it wasn’t an idle question. Hark has a nose for a story and keeps his ear to the ground. And at any given time and on any given subject, he always knows twice as much as he can print. Sheila was hoping that he’d picked up something that might lead to Colin’s killer.

  Hark slid her a cautious glance. “Let’s just say I didn’t think the best man got the girl.”

  “Ah,” Sheila said, getting the point. She eyed him. “Nothing else? What do you know about his friends, his business associates?”

  “Only what everybody else knows, I suppose,” Hark said with a shrug. “He opened his store not quite a year ago. I interviewed him for the paper, but he was pretty evasive. I couldn’t get much out of him about his past. Where he lived, what he’d been doing before he came to Pecan Springs, that sort of thing. Odd, though. He wasn’t anxious for me to run his photo. I couldn’t figure that one out. Usually, people with a new business want all the publicity they can get from us.”