Rosemary Remembered (18 page)

ready accepted the offer, or would, within the hour. However, wasn't it
lucky?
She just
happened
to have a
brand-new
listing on the same street, only a few blocks away, and much,
much
nicer, really, a gem of a house, very sweet, with
fantastic
buyer appeal.

"Why don't you drive your client by and have a look this afternoon, Patricia? There's new floor tile in the kitchen and a lovely screened-in porch out back and a brand-new thirty-gallon energy-saver gas water heater in the utility room. Oh, and the bedrooms have all been freshly painted and the drapes dry-cleaned. I did a walk-through yesterday, and I'm sure it'll move fast. This weekend, in fact. I've sent a couple of agents by already." She paused, doodling on her desk pad. "That's right, six-twelve Macomb. The owner's been transferred and is ready to sell and I mean
really
ready, just bring her an offer and watch her jump for it." Another pause, then briskly: "Sure thing, Patricia. If I can help, just whistle. I'll be here another couple of hours. After that, you'll get my pager."

She hung up the phone, flashed me a smile that was even more superficial than the first, and held up her finger to indicate one more moment. She punched a number into the phone as if she were punching somebody's lights out, turned away from me, and spoke in a half-whisper into the phone, very angry. I moved two paces to my right, listening without shame. Some of my old habits are harder to break than others.

"Howard? You better get your ass moving on that contract on eight-oh-eight. I've had two calls on it this morning." Her voice sharpened, impatient, angry. "No, of course I didn't. You think I'm stupid or something? I sent them both to six-twelve, which is a dog, needs a lot of work, but it's our only other listing in the area. You said you'd have that contract to the owner by seven last night, and it's already noon." A pause. "I don't give a shit
why
you haven't. Just get the fuck out of that bed and
do
it." Her hang-up barely missed being a grand slam, and only because she'd suddenly remembered that I was there.

The woman's recovery reminded me of those comediennes who do impersonations. One minute they've got one face and voice, then a turn, a twist of the shoulder and a turn back, and voila! You'd swear to God it wasn't the same person. This gal wasn't that good, and it took her several seconds to recompose her face and flush the anger out of her voice. But when she stood and spoke to me, the corners of her mouth were turned up nicely, there were fetching dimples in her cheeks, and her expression was cheerfully bland.

"I'm Linda Rhodes," she said, extending her hand. "Glad you stopped by. What can I show you today?" Her smile showed white teeth that were either the result of good genes or expensive preteen braces. She gestured toward the wall. "If you're interested in that three-two-two, I'd be glad to take you by. Rosewood school district, four blocks from the supermarket, very quiet neighborhood, lovely landscaping. You'll
love
it. Everything you've ever wanted in a house, and then some."

Linda Rhodes. Did that make her Rhodes's daughter, his sister, or his wife? I couldn't tell without asking. But the Howard she'd chewed out on the phone must be the Howard I wanted. Her tone had suggested that he was either her husband or her brother. Women don't usually talk to their fathers that way.

"My name is China Bayles," I said. "I'm looking for Howard Rhodes."

Her gray eyes slitted and her smile went away. "Junior or senior?"

A complication. There was no way to segue gracefully

into this one, so I put both feet in it. "The man I'm looking for spent some time in the federal facility at Bastrop."

Her face wrenched. She sat down and reached for a pack of Virginia Slims and a red plastic Bic. "What do you want him for?" She didn't look up and she didn't invite me to sit down.

"I want to talk to him about Rosemary Robbins."

That brought her eyes up, and fast, nostrils flaring. "That
bitch,"
she spat out. "I read about her in the paper." She had to flick the lighter once, twice, three times to get it going. "She deserves to be dead. Too fucking bad somebody didn't blow her away years ago."

Definitely a woman with a grudge. "You're Mrs. Rhodes?"

A short, quick shake of the head, eyes down again. A hard pull on the cigarette. "His sister?"

Eyes up and flinty, jaw working. She took her time answering. Finally, she said, "I'm Howard Rhodes's daughter. Excuse me, but just who the hell are you and what business is this of yours?"

His daughter. So the Howard on the phone — presumably a late sleeper or a drunk or both—was most likely Howard Junior. Her brother.

"My name is China Bayles," I said. "I was told that your father might be able to shed some light on Rosemary Robbins's death. Can you tell me where I can reach him?"

The laugh was brittle as old glass. "Cypress Springs Memorial Gardens. Row twenty-three, plot fifteen. I doubt he'll have much to say." Her voice cracked. "The dead don't, you know."

I looked at her. Beneath her bitterness was etched a cross-hatching of fresh, raw grief. "When did it happen?" "Three weeks ago yesterday." She leaned back in her

chair and exhaled a stream of blue smoke from her nostrils. "Time flies, whether you're having fun or not." She examined the tip of her cigarette. "Are you going to ask how?" "How?"

She bit her Up and half turned away, but not far enough to hide the pain. "He drove into a concrete overpass abutment south of Austin at something over ninety miles an hour."

"He was alone?"

She turned and met my eyes, not flinching. "Alone, broad daylight, dry pavement, no skid marks, no blood alcohol. That tell you anything?"

It did. Some people do it with a gun, some barricade themselves in the garage with the motor running, some put the accelerator to the floor and ram the nearest solid object. The next logical question — had her father's life insurance been in force long enough for his suicide to be covered?—was not relevant to my inquiry. And since he had died more than two weeks before Rosemary was killed, he couldn't have killed her. It was entirely within the realm of possibility, however, that his death was the
cause
of hers. The woman in front of me looked angry enough to kill.

"I'm sorry for your loss," I said.

She shrugged. The grief had gone and there was only a sour resignation left, mixed with bitterness — and anger. "We'd already gotten used to handling the business without him, Howard and me. Slamming himself into the abutment didn't make a dent in Rhodes Real Estate." She darted me a venomous glance and stabbed her cigarette out in a black ashtray shaped like the state of Texas. "You want to know about Robbins? Well, let me tell you, lady. Robbins was a vampire. First she seduced him, then she tried to blackmail him — "

"Blackmail him? Do you have any evidence of that?"

"What evidence do I need? She told him she needed this and this assurance about the accounts and oh by the way it would be nice to have a raise, too. In my book, that's black-mail.

"How do you know this?"

"Because I was there when she told him what she wanted."

"You were there?"

"Well, sure. I was handling his books, wasn't I? I may have been just a teenager, but I knew enough to get the numbers in the right columns."

"What did your father do when she said she wanted more money?"

"He told her to go to hell. That's when she turned him in to the IRS. She was the reason he went to prison. I laughed when I read that she was dead." Her voice went up a notch, shrill. "Laughed, do you hear? The bitch ruined my father's life, turned my mother into an old woman and my brother into a drunk." She cocked her finger and aimed it at me as if it were a gun. "A bullet to the head is what she deserved. It's about all she was worth."

I regarded Linda Rhodes with some distaste. The picture she painted of Rosemary Robbins — seductress, blackmailer, IRS stooge—was ugly and maybe even accurate, but I couldn't be sure. Her father had killed himself. It was natural for her to blame someone, and Rosemary Robbins (who could no longer defend herself) was a logical target.

But whatever Rosemary had done, the Rhodes family couldn't blame all their troubles on her. I knew businessmen who survived a tax conviction to build a stronger business, wives who endured their husbands' disgrace with equanimity, sons who lived through their father's dishonor without becoming drunks. And daughters who were not ready to kill the cause, real or imagined, of their family's humiliation. Was Linda Rhodes harboring enough blunt, unreasoning rage to murder the woman she blamed for her father's suicide? Had she, or her brother, or the two of them working together, shot Rosemary Rob-bins?

"I need to know where you were on the Fourth of July," I said.

There was dead silence. Then she dropped her hand, lifted her narrow chin, and gave me a defiant smile. "That's the night she was killed?"

I nodded.

Her smile became mocking. "On the day before the holiday, my brother and I drove my mother to Houston to visit my grandmother. My father's mother." The smile shattered and her eyes suddenly, without warning, filled with tears. "She's ninety-six, in a nursing home. We had to tell her that her only son was dead, and that we'd already buried him." She struggled with the tears for a moment, then opened her drawer and began to search. After a minute she found a wadded-up tissue. She used it to wipe her eyes and blow her nose, then said, "We stayed with my aunt in Bellaire over the Fourth, and drove home on the fifth. Does that satisfy you?"

"For the moment," I said. "I'm sorry I had to ask."

I'd bet that her alibi would check out. And if the Rhodes children had paid someone to shoot the woman they blamed for their father's downfall, it would be tough to prove.

The energy of anger and grief were both gone from her face, leaving the mouth pinched, the cheeks sagging, the eyes empty. "Yeah," she muttered. She looked away, looked back, reached for the Virginia Slims and the red plastic lighter. "I heard on TV that her boyfriend killed her and ran off to Mexico. Is that true?"

"That's an avenue the police are exploring, I believe."

She leaned forward, body taut, voice bitter. "I need to know who killed her. Whether it was her boyfriend, or somebody else, I want to thank him. I can sleep nights, because of what he did." She balled her hands into fists and pressed them to her chest, as if she were holding the pain, like a knife, against her heart. "I don't have to think of her alive and happy and remember him wrapped around that abutment so tight it took two wreckers to pry him loose. I can imagine her with her head blown off." When the phone rang, I was glad. Her malice was a dark, acrid whirlpool, its vortex sucking her down and down, and me with her.

The phone rang again, and she reached for it. As she did, her face began to change, to lighten, to grow less tense. Her lips curled up in the corners, and she raised her shoulders. On the third ring, she picked up the receiver and spoke into it, a chirpy smile in her voice.

"Good afternoon, Rhodes Real Estate. Linda Rhodes. What can I do for you this afternoon?"

Chapter Thirteen

Lavender's green, riddle diddle

Lavender's blue.

You must love me, riddle diddle

'Cause I
love you.

Folk rhyme

I drove back to Pecan Springs, trying to sort out what I had learned. In one sense, it amounted to nothing,
nada,
a big cipher. Robbins and Rhodes—as well as Rhodes's daughter and probably his son — had had plenty of reason to kill Rosemary, but no opportunity. The long morning and a good hunk of the afternoon had been totally wasted.

But from another point of view, I had learned quite a bit. I might not be any closer to Rosemary's killer, but I felt a good deal closer to Rosemary herself. I had seen her through the eyes of two people who remembered her quite clearly.

But how accurate wer
e their recollections? Curt Rob
bins's bitter memory of his wife was colored by the un-happiness of their marriage, a marriage marred by passion and violence. Rosemary may have done what a thinking woman should do: reject the violence, put it out of her life, and find someone else who could love her gently, tenderly, who could make her happy. Linda Rhodes's memory of Rosemary was filtered through her father's conviction for tax fraud.
There was no concrete evidence
that Rosemary had seduced him, attempted to blackmail him, or turned him in to the IRS. In fact, she may have simply been doing what a good accountant ought to do: question the numbers the client gives her and charge more for an account that posed difficulty. I sighed heavily as I drove up the long drive to The Springs Hotel. All I had really learned this morning was how Rosemary was remembered. I wasn't much closer to the woman herself.

I had planned to talk next to Carol Connally, the bookkeeper at the Springs. I struck out on that, but the trip wasn't wasted. I ran into somebody who told me a great deal more than I might have gotten out of the bookkeeper.

Her name tag said Hi! I'm Priscilla! She was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the file cabinet, a stack of manila folders in the lap of her floral print dress. She was probably thirty pounds overweight, a fact that her girlish dress only exaggerated. Her plain, square-jawed face would have been more attractive without the purple eye shadow and the frilly ruffle at her throat. Her expression conveyed an anxious eagerness to please and the simultaneous and almost hopeless conviction that whatever she did would
not
please.

I gave her my name. "I'm looking for Carol," I said.

Priscilla scrambled heavily to her feet and shook her head. "I'm afraid I'm the only one in the office today. Lily's in Lubbock. Her mother had surgery." She glanced at the phone on Lily's desk, where the red button was lit opposite Matt Monroe's name. "Mr. Monroe's on the phone. Maybe I can help you." There wasn't much conviction in her voice.

"That's too bad about Lily's mother," I said, shaking my head. "It isn't as if she didn't have enough on her mind, what with —
"I
waved my hand toward Jeff Clark's office door. "You know."

"I sure do," Priscilla said earnestly. She was wearing so much mascara that her eyelashes were little black twigs. "Everybody's in a state of turmoil, especially after the police were here on Monday. I just can't believe it was Mr. Clark's gun that — " She bit her lip and blinked hard. "It's just too awful for words."

"What about Carol?" I asked with concern. "She's not sick, is she?"

"Nuh-uh. Her sister Nancy had a baby." She bent over and picked up an armload of folders and put them on the desk. "She went to Austin to help with the kids for a few days."

"Not many sisters would do that," I said. "Do you happen to know Nancy's address?"

Priscilla's face brightened. "Oh, you're going to send a present! That's nice. / did, a kimono trimmed in pink and white checks. It's a girl, you know. Jennifer, if you want to put her name on the card. I think it's wonderful for mothers to get presents when their babies are born, even if. . ." She shifted her bulky shoulders. "I guess you know that Nancy isn't married. But Carol says it doesn't matter. She was just happy that the baby was healthy and Nancy was okay. And under the circumstances, I'm sure she was glad to have an excuse to get out of the office. But I do have Nancy's address. I had to get it yesterday to give to the police."

"The police have talked to Carol?"

"I don't know. I suppose so. They talked to me, and to Lily, before she flew to Lubbock. We couldn't tell them much, though. We don't know any of the facts, and it doesn't seem right to . . . well, you know." She wrinkled her nose. "Dish the office dirt."

You'd be surprised how many people think it's their duty to conceal gossip from the police during an official investigation. They confuse talking to the cops with testifying in court, where they're permitted to say only what they can swear to. As a result, the police often miss out on some very useful information which an informant may be quite willing to share with a less intimidating person in a less formal interrogative situation — like our chat just now.

"I suppose Carol has some
real
information," I said. "Especially because she and Mr. Clark used to be
..."
I
let the sentence float like a dry fly on a swift current. "But you must know about all that, too," I added, giving the lure an extra tweak.

The glitter in Priscilla's eye and her voluminous sigh told me what I needed to know. This overweight, un-pretty girl felt herself to have been an important, if peripheral, participant in what amounted to an office triangle: the bookkeeper in love with the boss, a rival murdered, the boss himself suspected of the crime and on the lam. She might not have many "facts," but she was dying to share her impressions, romantic as they were. It would have been unkind of me not to encourage her.

"Oh, yes, I
do
know," she said passionately. "We talked every day for the past three or four months. Carol said that the only thing that's kept her sane is being able to talk about it. And of course she felt so much
worse
after Miss Robbins was shot."

She paused, and I
wondered briefly why Carol Con
nally had chosen this inexperienced, unsophisticated young woman as a confidante. Perhaps it was Priscilla's romantic naivete" that had invited Carol to open up to her, her willingness to accept and trust another person at face value, as she had accepted and trusted me because she thought I was nice enough to send a present to a new mother. I felt awkward about violating that trust, but I was pulled, forward by the intuition that there was something important to be learned here.

"By worse,' " I prompted gently, "you mean — " She twisted her mouth. "Well, like it was her fault, or something. Of course it wasn't." "Her fault?"

"You know." Priscilla waved her hand vaguely. "Well, Carol was
very
jealous of Miss Robbins. And she was very mad at Mr. Clark for being such a snake. For breaking their engagement."

"I didn't know they were engaged."

"It wasn't formal or anything, and they hadn't set a date, but she considered herself all but engaged. She really loved him, I mean
really."
Priscilla's eyes, brown spaniel eyes, were teary with the romance of it. "I've never seen anybody love a person the way Carol loved Mr. Clark."

All but.
I wondered how many women broke their hearts over
all but.

"Well," Priscilla hurried forward with her story, "like I say, she was already very hurt about Air. Clark jilting her, and when she found out Miss Robbins was preggie, she just about — "

"Carol knew that?" I asked. I spoke more sharply than I meant, but Priscilla was so involved with her story that she didn't appear to notice.

"We both knew it, Carol and me. We overheard Miss Robbins telling him after she found out from the doctor. It really made Carol crazy, believe you me." The sympathy was drawn on Priscilla's face, together with an appreciation of the drama of the situation. "Wouldn't it you, if you came back from a nice cheeseburger and fries at Wendy's, all unsuspecting, and overheard some woman telling the man you loved that she was going to have his