Witches' Bane (12 page)

McQuaid chuckled. He pulled up my blouse and cupped both breasts. “I can’t think of anything better to do, can you?”

I couldn’t.

A little while later, lying beside McQuaid with his arm under my head and the smell of mesquite smoke drifting through the open window, I thought again of my question. What more did I want? I was beginning to think that I might very well want McQuaid on a long-term if not permanent basis, although the thought of moving to the city when McQuaid found a new teaching job was totally unthinkable. And even if I got past that part of it, there was Brian. I doubted very seriously whether I could take McQuaid’s son, the son’s dog, and assorted friends and iguanas into the bargain.

Fifteen minutes later, I had shelved the question. The ribs were crisp and brown outside and juicy inside, the beans agreeably spicy, McQuaid’s jalapeno hushpuppies soul-searing, and the strawberries ripely cool. While we ate at the picnic table on the patio, I gave McQuaid my side of this morning’s story and answered his cop-type questions, which were pretty much the same questions Blackie had asked. When I told him about Sybil’s visitor, I added, “It crossed my mind that it might have been Ruby’s Andrew. I saw him with Sybil at his grand opening. They looked ... intimate, I guess you could say.”

McQuaid raised his eyebrows. “I noticed that he didn’t volunteer his life history the other night at Lillie’s. Did you mention him to Blackie?”

I shook my head. “Ruby was there. If I dragged Andrew into this, she’d never forgive me. Anyway, I could be wrong.”

“Maybe. But Ruby doesn’t want to be mixed up with a guy who’s mixed up with a married woman.” It’s the Eagle Scout in him. Totally out of touch with the way people carry on their affairs, but I rather like it.

“Actually, she’s pretty interested,” I said. “She might be willing to overlook a few small details.” Ruby is no Eagle Scout.

While we washed the dishes, McQuaid recounted the latest episode in his long-running feud with his department chairman, a man named Patterson. McQuaid has already published more articles and given more conference papers than anybody else in the department, a fact that Patterson regularly overlooks when it comes to recommending merit increases.

“He’d better put me in for a big raise in the next budget.” McQuaid attacked the bean pot as if it were Patterson. “Or I’m going to get my resume together. I’ve got another article coming out next month, and I’m giving a paper at the conference next week, as well as handling most of the shitwork. I do it because I like it, but it ought to be worth a little extra in the pay envelope.”

I didn’t say anything. I usually don’t, when McQuaid talks about updating his resume. I’m afraid he’ll ask me to go with him, and I don’t want to have to say no. But I can’t say yes, either, which leaves me with nothing to say.

I hung up the dishtowel. “I have to get home,” I said. “Leatha will be here in an hour.”

McQuaid put sudsy hands on my shoulders and kissed me. “Are Brian and I going to get to meet your mother at last?”

“Depends on how long she stays.” So far, I’d managed to avoid introducing McQuaid and Leatha, which seemed to me to smack of permanency. With any luck at all, she’d get bored and go back to Houston the middle of the week. “Anyway, you’ll be busy with the conference.”

“Call me,” McQuaid instructed. “We’ll work something out.”

The front door slammed and the dishes rattled in the cupboards. Brian came into the kitchen, Howard Cosell shuffling after him, dragging his ears. “What’s for dessert?”

“Strawberries,” McQuaid said.

Brian clutched his throat, gagging, and staggered to the refrigerator. “Barf-o. Good thing I wasn’t here. Got’ny ice cream? Howard wants some.”

“See you later, guys,” I said, and fled.

I got home with forty-five minutes to spare, but I still had to find fresh towels, make the bed in the guest cottage, and sweep. I’d been drying herbs in the cottage, and the floor was littered with leaves and seeds.

I was heading out the door with a stack of fresh sheets and towels when the phone rang. It was Ruby.

“Andrew just left,” she said. Her voice was brittle. “He saw a story about Sybil on the TV news.”

“Oh, yeah?” I tucked the phone under my chin and reached for the lemon oil and a dusting rag.

Ruby paused. “He didn’t know I’d already talked to the sheriff. He asked me to ... to say he was here last night. All night.”

My attention was suddenly riveted. “What did you tell him?”

“That I’d already told the police I was alone last night.”

“Did he say why he needed an alibi?”

“I got the impression that he and Sybil had some sort of business arrangement, and he was afraid that the sheriff might... well, you know. Find a way to connect him to the crime.”

“Ruby,” I said quietly, “the sheriff can’t connect Andrew to Sybil’s death unless he
is
connected.”

When Ruby finally spoke, the words were chipped out of ice. “I know you don’t like him, China, but that’s no reason to think he killed Sybil.”

I softened my tone. “It’s not a matter of liking or not liking, Ruby. We’re talking about facts. Blackie won’t go looking for Andrew unless he’s got some reason to suspect him. Fingerprints, a witness, something concrete.”

“Facts don’t always tell the truth,” Ruby said stubbornly. “You know yourself, the fact can be right but people interpret it wrong. You can’t trust facts.”

I tried again. “Did Andrew say where he was last night?”

“He went to San Antonio, but he got back pretty early.”

“How early?”

“Around ten.”

“Well, if Andrew were my friend, I’d tell him to let Blackie know about his arrangement with Sybil, whatever it was. I’m sure Blackie would appreciate it all to hell. He might even look kindly on Andrew for helping with the investigation.”

Ruby hesitated. “I can tell him, but I don’t think he’ll listen. He doesn’t want to get involved.”

People who don’t want to get involved are usually already in it up to their eyebrows. “Well, then, if I were you, I’d consider talking to the sheriff myself.”

“But Andrew would think I betrayed him!”

I spoke slowly, giving the words extra weight. “Wouldn’t it be better to run that risk than to be an accessory after the fact?”

Ruby’s voice was a crescendo of injury. “So now
I’m
guilty!”

There wasn’t any point in reminding Ruby that her knife had killed Sybil and that she had no alibi either. I excused myself, went out to the guest cottage, and began to make the bed, wishing that Leatha had stayed in Houston. But the tension at me back of my neck wasn’t due to my mother’s visit. People don’t go around asking other people for a fake alibi just for the hell of it. Andrew must have felt pretty desperate, or he wouldn’t have asked Ruby to cover up for him. Cover up what? What was the connection between Andrew and Sybil? Had they been business associates? Friends? Lovers?

For a moment, I toyed with the idea of telling McQuaid that Andrew was alibi-hunting, counting on him to get the word to Blackie. But that kind of back-channel communication was pretty underhanded. If I felt this was something Blackie should know, why didn’t I call him myself? I knew the answer to that. If I told the sheriff, I’d feel like a traitor to Ruby. Damn.

I put out the towels, turned on the hot water heater, and checked for scorpions in the shower, then started on the living room. Once upon a time, the cottage had been a stone stable. The architect who remodeled the house did the stable, too, rather nicely. The walls are rough plastered and painted white, the floors are red clay tiles, and a stone fireplace with a heavy oak mantel dominates the living room. The kitchen is compact and tidy, and French doors in the bedroom open out onto a thyme-bordered patio. I’ve been thinking of renting it and I just might, if the financial situation gets any shakier. This year, I’ve used it to dry herbs, and the whole place smells like a meadow under a hot July sun. I swept the tile floor, trying to remember if Leatha was allergic to anything hanging from the beams.

I checked the refrigerator and turned it on, found a bottle of scotch and a half bottle of gin on the shelf, and carried them with me back to my place. It took just one drink to get Leatha loaded. The trouble was, as George Burns once remarked, you couldn’t be sure whether that drink would be the thirteenth or the fourteenth. Leatha could bring her own poison.

Eight o’clock came and went, then eight-twenty. I wasn’t surprised. Leatha has spent years cultivating the critical social skill of correctly calculating just how late everybody else will be. Nevertheless, she’s an alcoholic with a driver’s license. I was almost glad to see her when she finally knocked on the kitchen door at eight thirty, a basket in her hand.

“China,
darlin’“
she said in the rich slow drawl that always reminds me of magnolias and N’Awlins cafe au lait, “how absolutely
marvelous
to see you! I’m awfully sorry to be late, honey, but I had a visitor this afternoon, an’ the time just flew away.”

We exchanged obligatory hugs, and then I stepped back, surprised. Leatha had gained ten, maybe fifteen pounds since I’d seen her in May. Scotch and cigarettes kept her weight down, and she’d always been wiry and taut. I remembered having a distinct preference for Aunt Hettie Greenfield’s bosom over my mother’s. Aunt Hettie was the black woman who came in to cook around the time I was four and stayed until I went to middle school. Under her starched white dress and apron, she possessed a motherly bosom on which I pillowed my head while she held me and read Grimm’s fairy tales. My mother didn’t have a motherly bosom. She didn’t read fairy tales to me, or anything else for that matter.

When I got over the shock, the extra weight actually looked good. She was impeccably dressed in a Lord & Taylor silky gray shirtwaist with a two-strand rope of pearls, and she was elegant. There was something different about her hair, though. It was the same artful bouffant, a shade lighter than champagne, but I could see silver in it, and the roots were definitely silver. Only her hairdresser knew for sure, but I had my suspicions.

I must have looked surprised, because Leatha laughed. Her hair might be going natural, but her laugh was the same lightly artificial tinkle, like harp strings sounding up and down the scale, that used to infuriate my father. Her laugh annoys me, too, even though I know she shares the affectation with other southern women. For her, laughter is like a conductor’s baton. It’s an instrument for bringing everybody into tune, for harmonizing the social exchange.

My grandmother died when Leatha was born, and she was raised by her daddy and his sister Tullie in a plantation house near Greenville, Mississippi. One wall in her bedroom is hung with framed photos of herself as a deb, smiling, radiant, a vision in white tulle. After that her proud daddy sent her, accompanied by Aunt Tullie, to Sophie Newcomb College for Women, next door to Tulane University in uptown New Orleans. Leatha moved into Josephine Louise Residence Hall and Aunt Tullie moved into a small apartment across Broadway. Leatha took art, music, and literature, became a Kappa, and dined every evening with Aunt Tullie and several times a month with her daddy, who regularly came to the city to see that she was behaving.

In her sophomore year she met my father, Robert E. Bayles, back from three years in me Pacific, a student at Tulane Law and editor of the Law Review. The Bayleses were true Brahmins, with a huge pillared house behind a wrought-iron fence just off St. Charles, uptown. Grandfather Baxter Bayles was Tulane, Boston Club, and Rex, Comus, and King of Carnival. Grandmother China Bayles was president of the Newcomb alums, organized charity bazaars, and worked in her extravagant gardens. It was Gram who gave me my name and my love of plants.

The oil portrait that commemorates my parents’ wedding at me end of my mother’s junior (and last) year at Newcomb, hangs over the fireplace in her living room. She’s sitting in a chair gazing up at my father, the antique lace train of her elaborate satin gown carefully arranged in folds that exhibit its opulence. He’s standing beside her, strong and powerful, eyes forward. His hand rests firmly on her shoulder, as if to keep her from rising. The pose mirrored their marriage. After the wedding, they moved to Houston, where my father joined a large corporate law firm and my mother vanished into the big house in University Hills. Even in those days, Houston was a far cry from either Greenville or N’Awlins, and Leatha was totally overwhelmed by it. Lacking light of her own, she became my father’s satellite, his dark moon, always in his orbital shadow. After a while, having nothing else to do, she learned to drink. As time went on, she drank to forget that my father hated her because she drank.

Leatha laughed her harp like laugh again, and touched her hair. “Don’t you think it’s time I let myself have a few gray hairs? After all, I’m old enough to be a grandmother.”

I didn’t know what to say, especially to that dig. I’m not likely to give her any grandbabies. But then, I hardly ever have anything to say. My mother and I never developed the ability to talk to one another.

I fell back on the social graces. “I’m sure you’re tired. It’s a long drive. Let me show you to the guest cottage.”

“It’s only four hours, honey,” Leatha said. “I’m not that tired.” She put the basket on the table. It was garnished with a cleverly tied bow and filled with little boxes of gourmet teas. Coals to Newcastle. There was enough tea in the shop to float the
Titanic.
“I thought we might have a cup of this nice tea an’ a good little talk.”

I cleared my throat. “I guess I’m the one who’s tired. Someone I know died last night, and I spent the morning with the sheriff.”

Her “Oh?” lacked curiosity.

“It was a murder,” I said. Perhaps I wanted to shock her into interest. “It’s been a
very
difficult day,” I added, exaggerating. “Extremely tiring.”

She was sweet. “Well, then, we’ll just put off our little talk until you’re rested. I wouldn’t dream of makin’ your day a minute longer than it needs to be.” Aunt Tullie had taught Leatha to yield to the wishes of others and never,
never
show impatience or anger. My father knew exactly how to take advantage of this discipline of concealment. I was taking advantage of it now.