Lalla Bains 02 - A Dead Red Heart (24 page)

"That was a proposal? Was not."

"Was too."

"No ring, Caleb. Admit it. You're not ready to take the leap again."

"Am too."

"Are not."

He leaned back and pulled a small box out of his pants pocket. "I've been carrying this damn thing around for months, except that I didn't have it in my pocket the other day. The velvet on the box is a little worse for the wear, but if it's the ring you think has been holding me back, well this should settle your mind."

He thumbed the lid open, and in the light from the foyer, I saw a twinkle of a diamond. "It's not as big as your last one, or even as big as you deserve, but it's paid for. Can't take it back, so you might as well put it on."

I leaned over to look inside the box.

"It's also your wedding ring," he said. "I thought since we'd both been married before, and you don't like fussy, that this would be a secure setting for the stone." He took it out and held it up between his fingers.

In the dim light my vision wavered with tears.

"Come on, give," he said. Motioning at my left hand he put it on my ring finger.

"It's perfect, Caleb. This is all I'll ever need."

I got up and stepped around his knees to sit on his lap. "Thank you, my darling," I said, kissing him once, then again.

He nuzzled my neck and in a husky whisper said, "I love you, too. Your dad shouldn't be the only one having fun; come home with me tonight."

I stood up like I'd been shot out of a cannon.

"Now what? You're not mad 'cause I said something about your dad, are you?"

"It's not that. Let's take a walk," I said, pulling him to his feet. We walked out under the stars, arm in arm, admiring a barely visible dark side of a quarter moon.

Where to start? My growing suspicions about Rodney needed to be put to the test.

"Caleb, I think Rodney may have bugged your house, maybe mine too."

I felt him tense against me. "I know you don't like the detective, sweetheart, but he'd need a court order to do that, and by now a friendly would have alerted me."

"Then why show up at your house when he did?"

"He came to give you the good news, though he wasn't entirely surprised to find you'd gone AWOL. That old door latch sometimes doesn't catch when I leave, so he stepped inside to wait. I got home and said no more than two words when you came in and I didn't have time to ask him anything, like, did he put a bug on my phone?"

"The bedroom! He's kinky enough,
 
and I wouldn't put it past him."
 
I had another thought. "Didn't you tell me that Billy Wayne finished his tour of duty in the Far
  
East?"

"Yes."

"I keep coming back to why Billy Wayne spent so much time at Mr. Kim's. Did you know that Mr. Kim fed him? Or that he loaned Billy a book of Japanese Haiku?"

"What do you think that was about?"

"I'm not sure. It seems odd, doesn't it, that Mr. Kim would choose to feed Billy Wayne
 
when there must be dozens of homeless men looking for handouts."

"Odd doesn't begin to describe it. Perhaps the connection was poetry since Haiku is a pared down form of poetry, sort of like the art of pruning plants down to miniature, like those Bonsai that the Japanese are so fond of. I don't think I ever told you this, but after Billy Wayne got out of prison I tried to spend some time with him. He said something that only makes sense now that I know about his heart transplant.

"Billy Wayne said, 'Second chances seldom happen, and when they do, maybe they shouldn't.' Then he thanked me for trying, said he was sorry if he hurt my feelings, but he just couldn't have friends."

"That feels like his last words to me, 'The more there is, the less you see.' Do you think he knew he was going to be killed?"

"I think anything is possible."

I patted his cheek. "'Second chances seldom happen' could just as easily apply to us, Caleb. You're my last hope for finding any kind of real happiness, not to mention sanity."

He held our hands between us, smoothing the ring on my finger. "Too bad Billy Wayne didn't see it that way."

"I still don't understand why he didn't want the operation."

"A highly decorated warrior who puts his body on the line for his fellow Marine but can't transcend from warrior to selling cars or shoes or insurance is sad, but it happens. Not everyone comes back from the war in one piece." He sighed and looked out into the night. "You should have heard the tantrum his heart doc had when he found out Billy Wayne was murdered. 'Useless waste of the tax payer's money,' he said. Heartless bastard. He was steamed about losing a viable heart to a convict, sure that Billy Wayne deserved to die."

"Sounds like the hate mail Mrs. Dobson showed me."

"We've been rerouting all of her mail. Not that it does any good."

"Why do you say that?"

"Wackos mostly, but with two bomb threats in those letters, our resident FBI agent is staying busy. The poor guy gets to drink our lousy coffee and check out the kooks."

"Roxanne said something that I just can't get out of my head."

"What was that?"

"She said, 'What would you do if your brother had lost his chance at a heart transplant 'cause it went to a prison inmate?'"

His look reflected everything he knew about me, that I wasn't one to take offense against a family member without some kind of retribution, or revenge.

He said, "I suppose we'd better take a serious look at the list of patients who were on the waiting list at that time. One more thing, you said Grace Kim found you?"

"Yes," I said. "I can understand her reluctance to be there at all."

"Sorry, sweetheart but that's not the way Grace tells it, and since you chose not to report the incident, the police department is taking her word that she was never there."

"What do you mean, she was never there?" So much for thinking I needed to protect Grace. I could feel the anxiety gripping my vocal cords again.

"That's a lie! Caleb, not only was she there, but she looked as if she'd been part of it. Her bowtie was cockeyed, her shirt was smudged with dirt, and trust me on this, that's not a look that describes Grace Kim. There must be a record of someone across the street calling Mr. Kim's. Someone ordered that Chinese food."

He rubbed a hand wearily over his forehead. "If that's true, then she was there before you were knocked to the ground. Why didn't you tell me this sooner?"

"I guess I didn't trust what I was seeing. I mean, Del lurched into me, I fell, hit my head, and passed out. The next thing I knew Grace was kneeling over me, calling my name. I couldn't believe she would go along with somebody's sick joke to toss Del in a hot airless trunk. Not when it was a hundred plus in there."

"Yes. Tough way to die."

I'd been avoiding the one question I really needed to know. "Did... did he die from being in my trunk, or was he already dead when they tossed him in?"

"I don't know yet, and Lalla, you couldn't have known he was in the trunk of your car."

"But, they booked me and finger-printed me!"

"That was for reckless driving. The book is still out on Del's death."

"I'll go to prison for it, unless someone else falls into their hands."

"No. You won't. You had no reason to kill him. We'll sort this out, I promise you. You never saw who attacked you? You don't remember hearing a voice? Footsteps coming up behind you?"

"Nope. Think I should ask Pippa to make another stab at hypnotizing me?"

When he didn't answer, I said, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you about Grace, but if Grace was part of the attack, then why stay to make sure I was okay?"

"Maybe Grace simply balked at hurting an innocent woman."

"Pick her up and ask her?"

"That's the other thing; Grace has skipped. She's not at her apartment and no one from her work admits to seeing her."

Grace Kim either witnessed or participated in my attack at the evidence building, denied it, and now she was missing? Had she run because of her complicity? Or was she now the killer's second victim? Which brought me back to Rodney. "Detective Rodney's behavior lately is just suspicious."

"Rodney, again? You're way off base with him. I know his methods are strange, but he's a good cop."

I remembered someone else telling me about what good cops did and didn't do, just before he was killed. "Weren't you the one who told me that Billy Wayne was a sniper somewhere in the Far East? And didn't you say that Mr. Kim was adjunct for Viet/American military? And doesn't heroin come out of Southeast Asia?"

Caleb blinked. "I'll check on Mr. Kim's history with the military. Now, give me your cell. I think the only person I can trust for this is the lonely fed who's been camped out at the police station for this last week. I can trust him to sweep my house and check the phones without it getting back to Rodney. But, if you're wrong about any of this, you owe me a date night."

In spite of the dark threat in his voice, I smiled.

Chapter twenty-two:

As I walked to the office in the early morning light I felt a light breeze lift the hair at the back of my neck. I inhaled the sweet loamy fragrance of recently irrigated land and the rich scent of ripening fruit. Too bad it would all soon be replaced by housing developments and a charter school.

In the office, I printed out triple digit checks for Av Gas and supplies, then posted invoices, and because I was an optimist, balanced the cost of supplies, pilots, ground crew, hull and liability insurance against price cutting scum bags like Margrave who barely kept his license but managed to nip off our business.

I came back to the present when I heard my name on the VHF. I punched the on-button. "This is base, Mad-Dog, go ahead."

"Lalla, I just laid the borders, and the first couple of passes, and there is no way a second load is going to finish this. Are you sure the work order is right?"

"Stand by and I'll check." I'd been writing up work orders since high school, but lately I've had my share of distractions, so I plucked my copy of the work order off the spindle and computed again, then looked at the map the farmer had given me. Sixty acres, the hand drawn map said. One pint per six gallons. Two loads of wet in a hopper that held two-hundred and eight-five gallons.

I hit the talk button. "Base to Mad-Dog."

"Mad-Dog to base, go ahead."

"You checked your swath width?" I was asking because even though the calculations for the fifty-four foot wing span of the Ag-Cat was a standard number, the width of the sprayer was adjustable and could have been changed between jobs.

"I checked. Sixty feet should be right on the money."

I didn't want to talk about it over the VHF because it was an open airway and this was the way our pirating competitor, Junior Margrave, managed to weasel his way into Mrs. Warren's good graces. "See me when you come in for the next load."

I went outside to check the pile of extra material we kept in the event that we went over the allotted amount. I stared at the extra bags of Comite for a few minutes then went back into the office and called Patterson's Chemical.

Not long after, Mad-Dog walked into the office, got a cold drink of water then slouched onto the couch across from my desk.

I said, "I wondered why Patterson's said they've got a grief factor worked into the price. They'll replace the extra Comite we used."

"You want me to map it?" Mad-Dog asked. We're paid by the acre, and so are the pilots.

"Too late for that, but I'll see that you get paid for the extra work." I was tapping my lip with a pencil while I thought about it. "Patterson's office manager said she
forgot
to mention why they always pad this customer's chemical order. Evidently, he's some big-shot Modesto lawyer, doesn't understand farming for beans, but he likes to figure out his own formula for the spray. Problem is, he's always short and threatens to sue when the bugs aren't dead."

Mad-Dog noticed the far-away look in my eyes and grinned. "What're you thinking, Lalla?"