Floral Depravity (15 page)

Opie walked in on my last statement. She looked at me, then at Liv, then back at me. Very softly, she said, “Audrey, there's a medieval peasant who looks an awful lot like Chief Bixby waiting for you out front.”

*   *   *

I was very
grateful that Bixby's allergies had kept him on our front stoop, well away from the door in case any renegade pollen escaped. I'd have a hard time explaining my threat to kill Barry Brooks myself. Although I doubt it's a crime to threaten the life of someone who was no longer breathing. In any case, Bixby had to wait for me to change back into my Joan of Arc costume.

The ride over to Larry's was pretty quiet. Bixby drove. Lafferty claimed the front seat, leaving me in the back with a cage separating us. I tried to ignore the stains and the smell in the carpet and the upholstery. The camp would be worse anyway.

I didn't think I could tell him about my father without falling apart, so I said nothing. And Bixby had apparently thought twice about his promise to brief me, because he said nothing. The only one who spoke was Lafferty, who held up a couple of pictures of what he thought Judith's flowers should look like. When he told me Judith didn't agree, I started ignoring him until he got to his sixth or seventh suggestion that she carry paper roses made from the
Town of Ramble Police Code Book
. At that point Bixby turned on the radio. Loud.

But he turned it off less than a minute later when the police radio crackled out a message. Lafferty translated the codes. “A disturbance out at the campground.”

Bixby had the lights and sirens on in a flash, and the rate at which he tore around those country roads left me scrambling for something to hold on to for dear life. Instead of parking at the bottom of Larry's driveway, he tore up it instead, leaving a cloud of dust in our wake.

The car jerked to a stop and he yanked up the hand break. In one fluid motion, he pulled his gun out of his glove box, checked his clip, and said, “Wait here.” He jogged toward the path with Lafferty close on his tail.

I waited for a good ten seconds before I climbed out and followed them. I figured if he was truly serious about wanting me to stay in the car, he would have locked me in.

I ran, following the clamor of men's voices, and found the disturbance centered around the area that held Hines's blacksmith operation and my father's tent.

“Dad!” I called out, and then hoped my words had been drowned in the confusion of voices. My father didn't seem to be involved. He stood in front of his tent, his hands folded in front of him, looking innocent and practically beatific, while two other men rolled around on the ground. To my relief, they were also not Shelby and Darnell.

One of them, I could tell by the gruff baritone swearing, was Chandler Hines.

The other, a much smaller man, seemed to be eating a lot of the dust from the ground. When he rolled into a fetal ball, I caught a glimpse of his face and identified him as the mousy food vendor.

Bixby made his way to me. “I thought I told you . . . never mind.” He thrust his gun at Lafferty. “Here, hold this. Last thing I want to do is add a gun into that situation.”

Bixby broke through the crowd that had gathered to watch and made his way to where the two men were scuffling. He barked out orders, which pretty much went ignored.

Lafferty bounced on his heels, weaving to get a good view of the action. He tensed when Bixby went down. “Here,
Deputy
, hold this. The chief is right. The last thing that situation needs is a gun.” His words seemed to carry more bravado than actual bravery.

I took his gun gingerly—I can't say I ever held one before—and Lafferty guided my hand toward the ground. “Please don't shoot anybody.” Then he joined the scuffle. Bixby pulled Hines away, and Lafferty attempted to subdue the much small vendor.

I spotted Carol and Melanie a few feet away, so I made my way over to the them. “What's the fight about?”

“Potatoes,” said Melanie.

“Potatoes?”

“The vendor was selling them. Hines found out and had a fit.”

“Why would Hines care if the vendor was selling potatoes?” I realized while gesturing that I had carelessly lifted the gun, so I inched down my arm until the gun was once again safely pointed toward the ground.

“They're against the rules,” Carol said. “No potatoes in the Middle Ages. The Spanish conquistadors didn't introduce them to Europe until the 1500s. They're as strict about potatoes here as they are about cell phones.”

I turned back to watch what was left of the scuffle. The vendor had settled down, but Hines broke free from Bixby and made one last lunge toward the little guy.

Until Bixby got a hold of Hines's arm and wrenched it behind his back.

“That's it. You're going in,” Bixby told Hines, wrestling him against a nearby tree. “Dang! My cuffs are back in my other pants.” He looked to Lafferty.

“Same here,” he said with a fierce blush. “Other pants.”

“May I?” my father said. He pulled a set of cuffs from the long sleeve of his cassock and tossed them to Bixby.

While Bixby managed to cuff a squirming and swearing Hines, my father headed to Lafferty, removed another set of cuffs, and slid them around the vendor's wrists.

“Thanks, but I wasn't going to take him in,” Bixby said. “He stopped fighting as directed, and this guy”—he pointed his head toward Hines—“was clearly the aggressor. This is my prisoner.”

“I know, Chief,” my father said. He gestured toward the vendor. “And this is my prisoner. He jumped a forty-thousand-dollar bond in Houston, leaving his poor mother homeless, I might add, and has evaded police for almost three years. Just remember, I want credit for bringing him in.”

Bixby stopped and studied the crowd for a moment. “How about we all go in?”

*   *   *

Mrs. June's eyes
bugged out when we entered the police station. I couldn't blame her really. We must have been quite a sight. I, in my Joan of Arc duds, was first in the door, followed by my father, still dressed as a medieval friar. Behind us were Lafferty and Bixby in their peasant guises with Chandler Hines and the food vendor both sporting shiny, anachronistically modern handcuffs. And all this in Ramble's police station with its historic colonial brick walls, desks from the seventies, and modern computers.

Organized chaos seemed to ensue from that point, with forms being filled out, fingerprints and photos taken. My father headed to the phones, which he used without asking permission, which oddly didn't seem to bother Bixby.

I leaned against the wall with nothing to do, enough out of the loop that I couldn't help with any of the paperwork or other tasks, but apparently involved enough that I was expected to stay. So while Mrs. June hustled to find the proper forms (“It's a county arrest, dagnabbit,” Bixby shouted), I busied myself by clearing the sludge out of their coffeepot and making more. Coffee, that is. Not sludge.

The pot just finished dripping when Bixby summoned me into his office. “Well, Deputy, would you like to listen in on the interrogations? I did promise to keep you in the loop.”

I nodded, and carefully handed him back his gun.

When he was done glaring at Lafferty, the chief secured his gun in his desk and took Chandler Hines into the interrogation room. Lafferty and I got to watch and listen through that big one-way mirror, the kind on all those cop shows. Only the line of sight wasn't as good as television would lead you to believe. We had to stand on the far ends of the mirror in order to see Hines's face instead of just the back of Bixby's head. And the audio quality was just a little bit better than the drive-through at Chick-fil-A.

At least Mrs. June took pity and carried in a cup of coffee for each of us. And a doughnut. Coffee and doughnuts while watching an interrogation? I felt like such a cop.

Hines was brooding and had to be drawn out. Bixby started by confirming his name and other details.

“Look, can we just get on with it?” Hines said. “I know what I did.”

“You seem to have a pattern of assault,” Bixby said, thumbing through the paperwork. “I take it you have quite a temper.”

Hines didn't answer.

“So tell me what started the fight with Eli Strickland.”

“Who's Eli Strickland?”

“The guy you clobbered in front of a few dozen witnesses.”

Hines squinted. “He always went by the name of Joe.”

“Joe is an alias. He's a fugitive.”

“Well, I'll be.” Hines leaned back in his chair. “Do I get a reward?”

“No, you get arrested. So what started the fight?”

Hines took a deep breath through his teeth, then focused his gaze squarely on Bixby. “It sounds silly now.”

“You must have had a reason.”

Their voices got lower. Lafferty turned up the speaker volume.

Hines looked down and studied his still-cuffed hands. “I guess I take it a little too serious sometimes. But I'm not one of these Johnny-come-latelies that come for the weekend on a lark. I make my livelihood doing these camps. And I spent a lot of hours making everything just so. There are easier ways to work metal than the medieval way. But I stick to the old ways. Have a lot invested in it.”

“And Mr. Strickland did what to threaten that exactly?”

“I don't care what the tourists do when they come in wearing polyester and dressed for the wrong century. But the artisans, you see, the artisans should know better.”

“I don't see what you're getting at,” Bixby said.

“The food vendors are supposed to be artisans as well. They have to do things the way they were done in the Middle Ages. And I guess it is hard on the food vendors, having to keep up with modern food service laws while conforming to medieval society. So I can forgive the occasional food thermometer and cooler. As long as it's disguised, of course.”

“But Mr. Strickland went beyond that?”

“He was serving potatoes,” Hines said. His voice was even-tempered, but his face flushed and a single vein in his forehead pulsed.

While Hines went on to explain the travesty of potatoes, I glanced out at my father, who seemed to be eavesdropping on the interrogation through the door. We shared a glance, then I turned back to watch Bixby question Hines. Once the assault questions were out of the way, he shifted gears to the murder.

“So talk with me about Barry Brooks. Were you angry with him, too?”

“Now, wait a minute,” Hines said, his eyes getting wide. “Just because—”

“Just answer the question. We've established that you have a temper. Were you angry with Barry Brooks? Yes or no?”

“Yes, I was angry with him. No, I didn't kill him.” Hines was definitely nervous now, his gaze darting around the room, focusing at last on the mirror where we stood unseen to him. “I know how this works. You need to send someone up, and I'm convenient. I think I want a lawyer now.” He then set his jaw tight and stopped talking.

“A lawyer you want, a lawyer you get. You can tell him we're booking you on assault. For now.”

Bixby came out of the room, called Lafferty over, gave him some instructions, and soon Lafferty was escorting Hines away, presumably to the county jail.

Bixby whistled when Lafferty was halfway out the door. “Back in uniform first, though.”

“Oh, right.” Lafferty looked down at his clothes, then gestured that Hines have a seat on the bench against the wall. He attached Hines's cuffs to a bracket I hadn't seen before.

Next up in the interrogation room was Eli Strickland. This time my father joined me behind the mirror.

“So this is the guy you were after all along,” I said to him while Bixby rattled off the preliminary questions. “What did he do?”

“Guy was a pharmacist.”

“Hardly illegal,” I said. “There must be more.”

“Oh, yeah. He was watering down the painkillers and other drugs for his paying customers and selling the good stuff out the back door on the street. A lot of people were in a lot of pain because of it. He's lucky he didn't kill anybody.”

“You said his mother lost her house because of him?”

My dad nodded, then scratched at his collar. “Hot in here, isn't it?” He unbuttoned his cassock and removed it, including the paunchy stomach, which appeared to be some kind of prosthetic. The man underneath wore a trim T-shirt and long shorts that wouldn't appear beneath the cassock. He draped the garment on the chair. Now he looked more like the man I remembered, except this man had less hair.

“But yes,” he said. “The DEA confiscated the small drugstore he ran, and his mother was foolish enough to cosign for his bond. She put up her house. When he skipped, she was forced into foreclosure.”

“What mother wouldn't do that for her son? To take her house seems cruel.”

“That's the system.”

I nodded and turned to watch the interrogation, which had gone past today's assault. I turned up the volume.

“Were you acquainted with Barry Brooks?” Bixby asked.

“The guy who got himself killed?”

“Got himself killed?” Bixby parroted. “It sounds like you think he had something to do with his own death. Maybe you think he deserved it?”

“Hey, wait a minute. Don't go putting words in my mouth. I barely knew the guy. Seen him around some.”

“Your paths never crossed before?”

“Why would they?” Strickland looked unconcerned.

“Well, it says here that you were a pharmacist.”

“So?”

I turned to my father and put a hand on his arm. “A pharmacist would probably know about poisons.”

My father patted my hand and turned back to the window.

Bixby went on. “Barry Brooks ran a large pharmaceutical company.”

Strickland turned ashen and his Adam's apple bobbed before he answered. “Brooks Pharmaceuticals?”