Death at China Rose (Sunshine State Murders), page 26
* * *
“Any more detours?” Berry asked.
“No.” I just needed to pick up my wheels at the megamart.
No lights or sirens this time—Berry was in slow mode. “So how did the murder go down?” he asked.
“On Saturday Harry made his usual cocktail of vodka and Tang, not realizing that the Smirnoff’s had been replaced with grain alcohol. After a few slugs of that poison, he passed out on the porch, a lamb waiting for the slaughter.”
“Who switched the booze?”
“The killer, or an accomplice.”
Berry thought about that. “It had to be somebody close.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “This person had access to Harry’s house, but not just access—he was a regular visitor. In fact, my bet is that the booze was switched on the day of the murder. If it was switched too much earlier than that, Harry might have gotten wise.”
“Or somebody else could have drunk the shit,” Berry added. “So who made the switch?”
“I see four obvious candidates.”
“Four?” Berry sounded doubtful. “I only count two—Bambi and Ancy.”
I agreed—Bambi or Ancy could have easily made the switch. “Charlie belongs on the list, though I don’t think it was him.”
“Who’s the fourth?”
“Moss.”
“Why would the bartender want Harry dead?”
“I’m just saying Moss had opportunity.” I didn’t want to tell Berry that Moss had a motive as old as time—revenge. I’d handle Moss on my own terms. Still, it didn’t take a lot of imagination to see how it might have gone down.
Both victims of Harry, Moss and Bambi made a devil’s pact. With Harry out of the way, Bambi promised to sign the bar over to Moss, resurrecting his dream. In exchange, all he had to do was provide an alibi. So last Saturday night—between stocking the buffet table and doing dishes—Bambi slipped away and killed Harry. Moss stated flatly that Bambi couldn’t have killed her grandfather, that she was in and out of the dining room all night long. I wasn’t sure who the mastermind was, but there was a cold intelligence between these lethal machinations that set my teeth on edge.
“Damn, this guy’s scary smart,” Berry said, as if reading my mind.
“But who’s to say it’s a guy? Give the ladies a little credit—remember Dolores said a woman could have done it.” It was just a smart-ass remark, but then I thought that the evidence did suggest a woman. After all, someone had fixed Harry so that he was incapable of fighting back. Didn’t that suggest a physically weaker adversary?
“You know what I can’t get my mind around? How was it that Ancy’s excavation was in the exact spot as Rose Ware’s grave?”
I nodded but said nothing. Obviously the list of people who knew, or might have known, where Rose was buried was short. Charlie knew and Harry might have known, though I doubted he would have protected his daughter’s killer. That left one person—Bambi Ware.
* * *
When I finally got home, I was too wired to sleep. I thumbed through the sketches CSU had generated of the crime scene, laid them out on the coffee table. Next I located Dolores’s autopsy report.
I liked to knock Berry for forming assumptions too quickly, but I’d fallen into the same trap. Like Berry, I’d been assuming that the killer had been a bloody mess after the murder. But was this a correct assumption? And if correct, just how much blood?
In her report Dolores concluded that Harry had been lying on his side when the first blow was struck. The first strike to the right temple started the flow of blood, and all subsequent blows—Dolores counted two more—were responsible for any blood spatter. I studied the sketch of the porch.
CSU calculated that the blood traveled in a 180-degree radius, away and toward the wall. The back of the cushion caught most of the spatter, though a small amount reached the wall. Since the blood moved with the force of the blows, some of it must have landed on the killer—but how much?
I’d seen that bloody murder scene up close and personal. I knew the image of Harry on that blood-soaked sofa would never leave me. The old man’s face a mask of blood, his long steel-gray hair dyed red. His long hair.
This wasn’t in my wheelhouse, but the facts led to certain conclusions. Harry’s shoulder-length hair had been saturated with blood. Surely that reduced the amount of blood that had been transferred onto the killer. Was it possible that the murderer had escaped with a minimum of blood on his hands? If true, this would reduce the time the killer had spent in removing the traces of his crime.
Which placed Ancy firmly in the suspect pool, but he wasn’t swimming alone. Apart from Moss, anyone at the bar could have snuck away and killed Harry. And then there was the wild card, Eve White. Had she been at China Rose that night? Perhaps lurking nearby or huddled in her car, waiting for Harry to pass out before she went to work.
I yawned and stretched, ready to sleep at last. I was close. Call it the mark of Cain or blood spatter or DNA, but murderers never escaped clean. They all bore traces of their kills, a stain that could not be washed away. Some murderers—like this one—were simply more skilled at deception than others. But the mark was always there, always there.
And tomorrow I’d find it.
Chapter Twenty-Four:
A Voice from the Grave
“Give me a second.”
I nearly stepped on Jinks as I scooped the pile of papers off the coffee table. I shoved them inside the manila envelope. For good measure, I thrust the envelope containing the murder book under the sofa cushion. I wasn’t sure if Brad was wise to Berry’s play.
“I thought you were stopping by at ten—it’s not even nine. Coffee?”
“Sure.” Brad stooped to pet the manic pug. “Berry told me about your date last night.”
“Yeah, it was tons of fun.” I poured two coffees and joined Brad on the sofa. Jinks jumped between us.
“Did you also hear about my lovely evening with Kelly Kozuba? You should have told me about the feds, Brad.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
Brad was right, which just made me mad. “You know, the thing I don’t understand is how Kozuba got to my sister Angie.”
“You told Kelly about your sister, not me.” Brad reminded me about the conversation he and I had after Harry’s autopsy. “I tried to get you to take it down it a few notches. Kelly heard every word.”
“Oh.” I picked up the morning Courier. “I didn’t read anything about Charlie’s innocence—you still sitting on that?”
“I’m going to let that rabbit out of the bag later today. Bambi’s coming down to Headquarters at two—I’m going to tell her about Adu’s video then.”
“She’s not going to like it.”
“Berry told me you think she’s involved.”
“Only up to her neck,” I muttered darkly, “but you may as well let her know the murder investigation is wide open. Maybe it’ll shake her up, though I doubt it.”
“Well, I didn’t come about that—I want to talk about the pickax.”
“Like I told Berry last night, Ancy knew the murder weapon was his ax because he was at the scene. I should have shared this earlier, but—”
“That’s not what I want to talk about. I know you have a theory about the ax—you’ve been talking about it since day one. So take me through it—how did the ax wind up in the murderer’s hand?”
I drank my coffee and gathered my thoughts. “It started when Charlie pulled into Ancy’s campsite in his ATV. It wasn’t long before the two started going at it. Charlie grabbed the first thing he could get his hands on.”
“A pickax.”
“One of Ancy’s special jobs,” I said with a smile. “Anyhow, the fight petered out pretty quick. When Charlie was back in his ATV, he realized he was still holding the ax. He threw it on the passenger’s seat and drove back home. He packed his things and got out of Dodge.”
“Where the murderer found it later that night,” Brad said.
“Or day.” I reminded Brad that Charlie left China Rose at five in the afternoon. “In fact, it’s more likely that the ax was taken in the daylight.”
“So the killer walked by the ATV, saw the pickax and said, ‘Huh, this’ll make a great weapon for later when I kill Harry Pitts.’”
“Not quite,” I said with a little laugh. “The choice of murder weapon wasn’t entirely random. Remember that the ATV was parked in front of Charlie’s trailer. The killer assumed he’d taken Charlie’s ax.”
“So the plan all along was for Charlie to take the fall.”
“Yeah, and as it turned out, using Ancy’s pickax was a lucky accident for the killer—I wasted a lot of hours trying to untangle that mystery.” I sipped my coffee, which had grown cold. I grabbed the pot from the kitchen and warmed both our mugs. “You know, something’s been bothering me...”
“Famous last words—what is it?”
I told Brad my half-baked ideas on blood spatter. “If Harry’s hair caught a lot of blood, the killer might have gotten out of the murder house relatively clean.”
“I’ll run it past Dolores.”
“Are you going to Harry’s memorial tonight?” I asked.
“People don’t have much fun when they see the sheriff.”
“A memorial isn’t exactly Mardi Gras.”
Brad smiled. “If it’s Harry’s memorial, it should be more like Fat Tuesday than Good Friday.”
“I tried to taunt Ancy into showing up.”
That caught Brad’s interest. “You think he might show?”
“It’ll probably take more than a taunt to pry Ancy from his compound.”
Brad’s cell rang. He frowned at the ID and glanced at me. I went to the kitchen to brew another pot and give him privacy. But I kept my ears perked and heard everything.
It sounded like a scheduling conflict. Some person had to talk to the sheriff—blah, blah, blah. Then Brad said a name that had me salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs: Etta Bell.
After ending the call, Brad said, “Sorry, but I got to cut this short.”
“No problem,” I said, nearly pushing him out the door.
At the doorway, he asked if I knew Etta Bell.
“Etta Bell?” I echoed, scrunching my face. “Never heard of her.”
* * *
Etta wasn’t a happy camper. I put my foot in the screen door before she slammed it shut.
“We have to finish what we started, Etta.”
The old lady didn’t want to let me in, but she was smart enough to realize she didn’t have a choice—any more than I did.
Once again we sat in that prim kitchen. While I poured myself a cup of coffee, I spied the plate of cinnamon buns on the counter. She’d been expecting company, but not mine.
“When I took your case, I asked you why you waited so many years before looking for Rose. You never answered that question.”
“I did.”
“Every answer you’ve given me so far has been shit—and you know it.”
She met my gaze with her half-blind eyes. “It wasn’t all sh...untrue. When I learned that Bambi was back, I did start thinking about my niece, but Rose was never my first consideration.” She put a spoonful of sugar in her mug and stirred.
“So who was your first consideration?”
The old lady placed the spoon on the napkin and sipped.
“Was it Harry? Or Bambi? I know it wasn’t Charlie.”
She looked at me, defiant. “It was China Rose.”
“China Rose?” I heard Moss’s smooth voice telling me that it was about China Rose. Had he been right all along?
“Harry called me several times. The first call was back in June. The last was two days before he died.”
So Harry had reached out to his sister before the search for Lafitte’s gold had heated up. The roots of decay went deeper than I’d imagined.
“I want you to tell me about these calls, in as much detail as you can recall.” I was struck almost speechless by the inscrutable expression on the old face. “What is it, Etta?”
“I recorded our conversations—all of them.”
* * *
There were four calls in total, though the wily old lady admitted that she’d missed a portion of the first one.
“I remembered the recording button on my answering machine after Harry had been jabbering for several minutes,” she explained, pointing at the antique answering machine on the kitchen counter. She had me place the machine on the kitchen table so she could work the controls. Etta pressed a button and Harry’s voice filled the small kitchen.
“...and there’s no fool like an old fool, I always say.” Harry laughed.
“Speak for yourself, Hairy.”
Most of the initial call was unremarkable—a brother reaching out to a sister. They were both feeling their way. Harry slipped in his bombshell just before signing off: Bambi had returned to China Rose six months earlier.
“Bambi?” Etta had gasped. “What does she want?”
To his credit, Harry replied in a matter-of-fact voice, “I reckoned she wanted to come home.”
The second call was much like the first, though the siblings were on firmer footing. I sensed the emergence of familiar patterns in their talk that hearkened back to childhood. Harry teased and Etta disapproved.
Did people ever really change? Maybe, but not always for the better.
When Etta asked after Bambi, Harry struggled for words. “She’s different from before. I don’t know if it’s gonna work out. It might be best if she moved on.”
“It’s your decision,” Etta had said.
The third contact was all about Lafitte’s gold, with Harry apoplectic with joy. “Daddy’s dream is coming true, and I want you to share in it.”
Etta had cooed at that. “Why did we waste so many years, Hairy?”
But by the final conversation on July 10, the dream was on life support. “I been lied to, Etta. Everything’s a goddamned lie.”
Etta pried for details even as she chided Harry for language.
“Charlie’s off his nut and Bambi’s acting...Bambi’s not the same girl. Do you understand? I’m surrounded by a bunch of cottonmouths that keep shedding their skins.”
“I haven’t changed, Hairy.”
A deep breath and a long pause. “That’s why I’m leaving China Rose to you. It’s got to stay in the Pitts family—that’s the important thing.”
“Harry, that’s wonder—”
Etta had pressed Stop.
“Etta?”
“That’s the end.”
I didn’t have time to argue. The sands were running fast. “Why did you hire me?” I had a good idea of her answer, but needed to hear it from her.
“I had to know what was going on at China Rose. There was too much to lose. I’d heard about you last year with that business at Mystic Cove. I figured you could sort it out for me.”
“Why didn’t you level with me after Harry was murdered?”
“What difference would that make?”
“It might have helped me find his killer.” I scraped my chair back and topped off both of our mugs. Regaining my seat, I said, “You think you’ve got China Rose in your pocket because of this tape, but I’m not sure a recorded message is enough to challenge Bambi’s inheritance.”
“Harry told me he’d made a new will.”
“Where is it? Do you have it? Because I can guarantee you that it’s not at China Rose.”
Etta’s lower lip trembled. “Harry said he’d mail it to me.”
“Harry’s been dead for a week. If Harry mailed the will, you would have gotten it by now.”
“My lawyer thinks I have a good case.”
“Your lawyer?” I glanced at the buns. “I was wondering who those were for. Are you bringing your lawyer with you when you see Sheriff Spooner?”
“How did you know about that?”
Suddenly I was tired of sparring. “Look, I just have a few questions about Bambi, and then I’ll leave you alone.”
The hunt for Harry’s killer had led to Bambi Ware’s door and I still knew so very little about her. I had not yet seen the real Bambi, and at this point I had no one to turn to for information aside from this old woman—everyone else close was dead.
“All right,” Etta said.
“What was Bambi like as a child?”
“Bambi was sweet if simpleminded as a child. She always struggled in school. When she lived with me, she was failing arithmetic.”
“Maybe she was traumatized, given what she’d been through.”
“No, she was always a little thick.”
“Did she have any special interests?” I asked, but the question drew a blank. “Did she like dinosaurs? Did she have any special TV shows?”
“She liked the Disney Channel...” Etta’s voice trailed off, one finger tapping the table. “She did like animals, especially dogs. She used to pester Rose to get her a puppy.”
Dogs? Funny, she didn’t care much for Jinks, but he was a bit of an acquired taste.
The next question wasn’t pertinent to the matter at hand, but I was curious. “Why did you take Bambi in?”
“It was my duty.”
“A cold sort of duty.”
“When I was younger I wanted children, but Mr. Bell...” Etta’s old hands twisted, one in the other.
“Your husband was with you then?”
“No, he left years earlier, but when Charlie proved incapable of caring for Bambi, I said she could stay with me. But from the beginning I told Charlie it was a trial arrangement. When I saw that it wasn’t going to work, Charlie sent her to foster care, not me. Oh, Addie, I’m not the best person to talk to about Bambi. I never really knew the girl.”
