Witches' Bane (23 page)

“Why should I? It wasn’t any of Jerri’s business.”

“And you lied to me when you said you believed Sybil’d been killed by a cult.”

“What’d’ya want? I should confess that my wife was killed by some flake who wanted my body?” He shook his head, amused. “No way.”

“And you let the sheriff arrest Andrew Drake.”

“I wouldn’t’ve let them stick him with it. But I figured, a day or two in jail, no harm done. And I kept thinking that they’d check Jerri out. I wouldn’t have to get involved.”

“And now she’s dead.”

“And now she’s dead.” He brought his chair upright emphatically. “Period, paragraph, the end. All she wrote. Right?”

“I doubt it.” I couldn’t help it, I was beginning to hate the guy. It was his slick, smooth arrogance that turned me off, his ability to write two women out of his life because it was inconvenient or uncomfortable to be held accountable for his relationships with them. “If you didn’t want anything more to do with her, why did you invite her to your condo room Monday night?”

He was wary. “You get around some.”

“Why did you invite her?”

“I did not invite her.” He mimicked my clipped tone. “She called me up, said she wanted to come over and tell me how sorry she was about my wife. I told her to forget it, I was totally zonked, a zombie. She came anyway. I got rid of her as fast as I could.”

I changed the subject. “What were you doing Tuesday night?”

He looked surprised. “Tuesday? I guess I did what I did Monday night. That was before the cops let me back in the house. I was in the office until four, four thirty, then I worked out at the gym for an hour.”

“Jerri’s gym?”

“That dump?” He grinned, flashing his teeth. I wondered how much money he had spent to get his mouth to look like that. “Are you kidding? I’ve got the weight room here set up just the way I want it. I happy-houred for a while at Santiago’s Cantina, then I got something to eat at the Steakhouse over on I-35. Then I went back to the condo and watched television.”

“Alone?”

“Of course,” he said indignantly. “My wife had just died. What kind of a louse do you think I am?”

I gave him an acid smile. “I guess that’s the question, isn’t it?”

He pressed his full lips together. “Let me put this in words of one syllable, Miss Bayles. I would have to’ve been crazy to kill Sybil after I found out how things stood with that divorce settlement. But I wasn’t entirely surprised to read in this morning’s paper that Jerri Greene had tanked up and driven herself over a cliff. Not to speak ill of the dead, but she was an unstable bitch with a hyperactive imagination. She was capable of anything—including both homicide
and
suicide.” He glanced at the Rolex. “If you don’t mind, I need to cut this short. Sybil’s funeral is tomorrow, up in north Texas, and I’ve got things to do.”

I was dismissed. As I left, I took pleasure in slamming his office door behind me, startling LouEllen, who was entering numbers from her sales report into a calculator.

I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. ‘Tell the boss I’ll send the newspaper a copy of our interview,” I said, out of sheer malice.

“Super.” LouEllen jotted down a total and started on another column. “Mr. Rand is always glad to get publicity.”

I strode down the walk, fuming inside. I was trained to quarry the truth out of people who wanted to hang on to it, and I’ve developed a nose for a liar. I smelled one this time. C.W. was lying about his relationship with Jerri—the proof was in a bedroom in C7. I could have sprung that on him, but it seemed like a good idea to hold something in reserve. What’s more, I was convinced that he hadn’t known about the will or the divorce settlement before somebody let it slip during the questioning.

Getting in my car, turning on the ignition, I could see the whole scenario, clear and simple, with C.W. standing behind the curtain like a puppeteer, pulling Jerri’s strings. He expected to inherit his wife’s money. He promised Jerri to marry her as soon as his wife was out of the way. He had conspired with her to kill Sybil—had probably even come up with the idea and talked her into it. And Jerri, trained by her father to slit throats with dispatch, had done the job while he was out of town.

But the fact that C.W. wasn’t standing at Jerri’s elbow meant absolutely nothing in the eyes of the law. When two people plan something illegal—the law calls it “acting in concert”—each person is responsible not only for what he or she does and what the two do together, but also what the other does alone. If C.W. conspired with Jerri to kill his wife, his hand was on the knife as well as hers. He was as guilty as she was.

I drove through the gates and out onto the highway, heading toward Pecan Springs, still sorting through the ugly can of worms Rita had opened with her bloody discovery of Jerri’s shoes, burned clothing, and back-up voodoo doll. Once Jerri had done the job C.W. assigned her, she was no longer an asset. In fact, she was a hell of a liability. If I was right, sometime on Tuesday night C.W. had taken steps to remedy the problem. He’d got Jerri drunk and pushed her car over the cliff, intending it to look like one more D.W.I., wiped out on Devil’s Backbone.

But I had learned a long time ago that it’s one thing to know the truth, but another thing altogether to be able to sell it to a jury. Now that I knew the truth, I had a big job. I had to prove that Jerri hadn’t acted alone in her murder of Sybil.
And
I had to prove that she’d been killed by her coconspirator.

It wasn’t going to be easy, but I knew where to start asking questions.

CHAPTER 17

On the way back into Pecan Springs I stopped at the Exxon station and called the nearest D.P.S. district office. Two holds and three clerks later, I asked my first question—where was Jerri’s wrecked Mustang? The answer: the wrecking yard behind Hank’s Auto Repair, on the east side of Pecan Springs.

I got back in the car, noticing that it was half-past lunchtime and feeling distinctly empty inside. It was time to ask my second question, and I headed for Maria’s Taco Cocina, on Zapata Street. The restaurant is crowded into a small frame house behind a bare dirt yard decorated with truck tires painted white and planted with yellow and bronze and red mums, silver dusty miller, and blue salvias, still blooming. Inside, the Cocina is wallpapered with community notices and filled with tables, mismatched chairs from the Salvation Army Thrift Store, and noisy diners. Maria, Angela Sanchez’s aunt, makes extraordinary tacos and tamales. Today I had chiles rellenos—fried chiles—stuffed with Maria’s special mix of beef, coriander, cloves, garlic, and raisins. When I finished, I went into the kitchen where Maria’s helper was cleaning up after the lunch rush, and Maria herself was starting dinner. Maria is squat and strong, and she maneuvers her bulk in the tiny kitchen with the finesse of an astronaut docking the space shuttle. She was stirring a simmering pot of vegetable soup, thick with onions, carrots, corn, and zucchini in a richly fragrant chicken broth.

We exchanged greetings and a moment of friendly chitchat. I got around to my question as soon as I could. “What have you heard about Sybil Rand’s murder?” I’d already answered it to my own satisfaction, but it wouldn’t hurt to check the alternatives.

Maria shook her head and turned from the vegetable soup to a huge vat of chili. She tasted it, then added a few vigorous shakes of comino. “The Santeros, they didn’t do it, China. No way. Nobody made any doll, neither. You tell the sheriff,
comprende”

“You’re certain about the doll?”

Maria gave me a hard-eyed look. “You betcha. My sisters and my mother, they asked all their friends. Nobody knows anything about it. Anyway, anybody can make a doll that looks like a voodoo doll.” She shook her wooden spoon. “You want to, you can do it, easy. You won’t know how to make the magic, but you can make the doll.”

So could Jerri. She could also make two dolls, and send Sybil the best one.

I thanked Maria, bought three pine nut cookies dusted with cinnamon sugar, and went off to ask my third question.

Hank’s Auto Repair is at the end of Zapata, where it meets the southbound frontage road along I-35. Hank has worked on McQuaid’s pickup, put new brakes in my Datsun, and keeps Ruby’s Honda on the road. He’s honest, knows everything there is to know about cars, and has the patience of Job. I polished off the last cookie just as I drove up in front of his shop.

Hank works in a large corrugated iron building behind a gravel apron, where an assortment of ailing cars and trucks are parked in some mysterious priority arrangement. Inside the double doors, three cars were lined up, one of them a Chevy van on a hydraulic lift. Hank stepped out, pocketed his wrench, and wiped his oily hands on a shop rag.

“Howdy,” he said. “Haven’t seen you ‘round here in a coon’s age. That Datsun runnin’ okay?” Hank is lanky, blond, and fair-skinned, pushing forty. He wears grimy khaki coveralls with a red-white-and-blue Perot for President button on one lapel (once a Perot supporter, always a Perot supporter, Hank insists) and a neon yellow gimme cap that says Hank does it FAST. He chews spearmint gum, a considerable improvement over the Red Man tobacco he used to chew. Now, he pulled out a stick, unwrapped it, and doubled it into his mouth.

“She’s running fine,” I said. “D.P.S. says you’ve got Jerri Greene’s Mustang.”

Hank stuck the shop rag in his back pocket, where it hung like a red flag. “Yep,” he said, chewing. “Back there.” He jerked his head toward the three acres of wrecking yard behind the garage. “Shit-pot of trouble, too, gettin’ it up that hill. Second in two weeks. First one was drinkin’ Southern Comfort. This one was gin. Think people’d learn, wouldn’t ya”

I agreed that people ought to learn, even if they died trying. “Wonder if I could take a look at it.”

“Not much to look at.” Hank scratched his chin thoughtfully. “You know what you’re lookin’ fer?”

“Yeah, I’m the one who called it in. McQuaid and I happened to spot the wreck on our way back from Fredericksburg.”

“Must of been pretty grim.”

“You can leave out the ‘pretty.’ Would you mind taking a minute to look with me?”

Hank glanced at the Chevy as if asking its permission, then shrugged. “Might as well,” he said. “Time to take a break, anyway.”

We walked through a gate in the chain-link fence and into the wrecking yard, which was piled with cars in varying states of decomposition. Hank pulls off the high-demand parts, holds onto the hulks until he runs out of space, then puts in a call for the crusher, a big machine that travels from one wrecking yard to another. A forklift skewers the derelict through the windows and drops it onto the crusher, which looks like a giant drycleaner’s press. It flattens the auto into a foot-high hunk of accordion-pleated scrap.

Jerri’s Mustang was in a separate area, where Hank holds towed cars until the owners claim them or the police tell him how to dispose of them. I recognized it immediately. There was a pile of vulture shit on the seat and a few more gouges where it had been dragged up the hill.

“What’re you lookin’ for?” Hank asked. “There ain’t nothin’ on this baby worth salvagin’, ‘cept the tape deck and radio. Anyway, I ain’t got a release from D.P.S.”

I stared at the smashed, scorched hulk for a minute, wondering exactly what I
was
looking for. Maybe Hank could help. “If I wanted to send this car over the edge of a cliff and make it look like an accident, how would I do it?”

Hank took off his cap and scratched his head. His blond hair was mashed flat against his scalp, and there was a ring at the back where his cap fit tight. “You mean, like, to collect the insurance?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, if that was what the lady had in mind,” he said judiciously, “she sure as hell messed up. To make somethin’ like that work, you gotta be around to collect.” He guffawed. “Ya don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figger that out.”

“Forget the lady,” I said. “If I was doing it, how would I do it?”

“Well, now, don’t reckon I know how you’d do it.” He put his cap back on. “But seein’ as how it’s an automatic, which means it creeps in drive if the brake ain’t on, what
I’d
do is I’d stand by the driver’s side with the motor runnin’.”

“In drive?”

“In park for now. Mebbe I’d take me a screwdriver and set up the idle.” He looked at me, judging my knowledge of the car’s insides. “If I was you doin’ it, mebbe I’d forget the idle and wedge the gas pedal with a stick or somethin’.”

I bent over. There was no stick or anything under the gas pedal. Maybe it had fallen out. Maybe it hadn’t been there. “Would the car creep without the gas pedal being wedged?”

“Yep. It’d creep slower, but it’d creep.”

“Okay. So now what?”

Hank posed next to the Mustang, demonstrating. “Well, I’d reach on over, like this, and shove it into drive, like—”

I grabbed his hand. “Don’t touch that shift,” I said, thinking of fingerprints.

“Oh, yeah?” He tipped up the bill of his cap, really interested now. “Well, once I got it in drive, I’d just step on back and watch’er creep, right on over the edge. Simple as hell.”

I remembered the burned spot beside the road. “What if I wanted to make sure the car burned when it got to the bottom? How would I set it on fire?”

Hank pondered for a minute. “It’s tougher to burn a car than most folks think. Me, I’d put a hole somewhere in the fuel system, so it’d keep runnin’ and pumpin’ gas. This is what, an eighty-two? When this baby was built, there weren’t no automatic fuel cutoffs, the way they got now. ‘N even now, them things don’t always work. Or they work when they’re not s’posed to. I had a brand-new Le Baron in here just the other week for that very problem.”

“C. W. Rand’s Le Baron?” I asked. My skin prickled. There it was. The evidence I was looking for. Well, close.

“Yeah. Sure couldn’t be nobody else. He’s got the only one in town. Had to tow it in from his office out there at the resort.” He laughed. “That Rand feller, he was kinda hot under the collar when I told him it was a malfunction in a safety device that kept his car from runnin’. People get kinda upset when it’s somethin’ like that. But hell, it weren’t no skin off his nose. Chrysler dealer in Austin picked up the tab.”

“Could I have a look under the hood?”

“It’s jammed down tight.” Hank looked at me. “You really wanna do this?”

“It could be important.”

He heaved a big sigh and sauntered back to the shop. He returned with a rusty iron bar, which he inserted under the crumpled hood. “Guess it won’t hurt if I bend things a little more,” he said, putting his weight on the bar. The hood popped up with a screech. He wedged the bar under it to keep it open.

The engine was a smashed, scorched mass of parts and half-melted hoses. I frowned, trying to make sense of the mess. “Where’s the fuel pump?”

“Down here.” He pushed some debris out of the way. He frowned. “Hey, looka this.” He was pointing at a melted blob of plastic in the line that ran from the fuel pump to the carburetor. “Ask me, the fire started here.”

“How can you tell?”

“That glob is what’s left of the fuel filter. Say it got punctured while the engine was runnin’, the fuel would just keep on comin’ out. When it gets on somethin’ hot enough, mebbe the exhaust manifold, you got yourself a dandy fire.”

“Could I puncture the fuel filter myself?”

“Don’t see why not. Just take yourself a sharp screwdriver or an ol’ ice pick, somethin’ pointy like that, and stab a couple holes in it. When the gas starts spurtin’ out, light yourself a match and Katie bar the door.”

I frowned. “But why didn’t the car burn up?”

“Like I say, kinda hard to actually burn up a car, ‘less a course you get rear-ended and the gas tank goes wha-boom. This case, I’d guess the engine stalled when it crashed, so you got no gas pumpin’ up front. And from the look of things, the fuel tank ruptured and the gas ran downhill.”

“Causing a grass fire,” I said, remembering the burned patch on the hill below the car.

“Might not of been much fuel in the tank, neither.”

“And I could punch a hole in the fuel filter up on the road, before I put the car in drive, and light it then too?”

“If you was aimin’ to torch it, that’s what you’d do.” He bent over and peered at the engine, then straightened, frowning. “Thing that gets me is it’d almost have to happen that way. No reason why this fuel filter should’ve ruptured in the crash. The line’s flexible, and I don’t see no damage in this area.” His frown deepened. “Them highway patrol guys got the same ideas you got?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “The investigating officer seemed to think it was just another drunk driver. And when you pried open the hood just now, it was the first time it’d been opened since the crash jammed it shut.”

Hank spit out his gum. “Prob’ly I should give ‘em a call.”

“It probably wouldn’t hurt to give them the benefit of your thoughts on the subject,” I agreed.

“Prob’ly won’t listen.” Hank got out another chew. “Hardly ever do.” He jerked the bar out and the hood fell with a crash. “But mebbe I’ll do it, when I finish up the Chevy. Don’t reckon this Mustang’s goin’ anywhere.”

Hank stepped back under the van and I got into my car and sat there for a few minutes, thinking. Question number three was the real pay-off. It looked more and more as if Jerri had not been the victim of an accident, but of a plot to kill her and conceal the murder. C.W. could have gotten the idea for the fire from Hank when he brought his LeBaron in for repair. But unless he’d left prints on the shift console— and I’d bet he hadn’t—there was no physical evidence to connect him to the wrecked Mustang. I’d have to look somewhere else for proof that C.W. was the killer.

But first I had to check on something. C.W. might not have waited until Jerri got drunk and passed out before he did his dirty work with the car. He might have knocked her out before he sent her over the cliff. I stopped at a gas station and called the Travis County Medical Examiner’s office, hoping to find out whether Jerri had suffered any injuries not accounted for by the accident.

“This is Mattie,” I said, “at the sheriff’s office in Adams County. You got anything on the Greene autopsy yet?”

The clerk left the phone and came back a minute later. “We don’t have a Greene autopsy here. You sure you got the right county?”

“Oops,” I said, “I meant to dial Bexar. Sorry I bothered you.” I dialed the Bexar County M.E. and repeated my question.

“Didn’t Pete get through to the sheriff this morning?” the clerk asked, sounding confused.

“I guess not,” I said. “Sheriff Blackwell just got back from lunch and asked me to call. He didn’t say anything about talking to Pete.”

“Well, the report won’t be ready until tomorrow,” the clerk said. “We’re backed up here. Noon, at the earliest, and no orals. Sorry, but we’re swamped.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Everybody gets behind now and then. I’ll tell the sheriff.”

I hung up. That line of inquiry would have to wait until tomorrow, but there was something else I could try in the meantime.

* * *

I was back at Thyme and Seasons by quarter past two. Ruby was gone, and Laurel was watching both shops. Things were looking up. She’d sold a seventy-dollar grapevine wreath, plus three or four flats or plants, quite a few toiletries and dried herbs, and a half-dozen books.

“I hope Ruby did as well on Fannie’s talk show as we’re doing on the register,” I said.

Laurel laughed. She’s a slim woman in her late twenties, dark-eyed and demure, with a dimple in her left cheek. She was wearing her dark hair in twin braids laced with rawhide strips, and a checked cotton shirt with jeans and a tooled cowboy belt. Her full name is Laurel Walkingwater Wiley. She and her husband—an environmental engineer—are from Albuquerque. She’s studying herbs of the Southwest. “Ruby did pretty well,” she said, “even when she was accused of being a witch.”