Rosemary Remembered (5 page)

rosemary bush, nearly four feet high, lush, green, and fragrant.

Ah, rosemary, I thought, with a sharp sense of sadness. Ah, Rosemary. There's rue for you.

Chapter Three

It's hard to overestimate the passion people all over the world have for eye-watering, mouth-searing, tongue-numbing, sweat-inducing chile peppers. Revered in ancient civilizations, nearly worshiped by some chefs, eaten daily by people from Mexico to Thailand, from Indonesia to Africa, the chile pepper is, for many, the
spice of life.

Jim Robbins

"Chile Peppers: The Spice of Life": Smithsonian, 1992

To get to the house where McQuaid and Brian and I live, you drive west on Limekiln Road for just over twelve miles, until you see a sign with the fanciful name, Meadow Brook, done in fading calligraphy and decorated with bluebonnets. Turn left and follow the lane about a quarter of a mile until it ends in a gravel drive in front of the house. It's a big house, surrounded by a green lawn and separated from woods and meadow by a low stone wall, nearly obscured now by July wildflowers: lemon-mint monarda, which looks like purple pagodas and makes an effective insect repellent and a tangy tea; brown-eyed Susans, whose root juice the Cherokee used to treat earache; and buffalo gourd, its vines like hairy green snakes crawling over the rocks. A century ago, the Tonkawa and Waco tribes crushed the plant's roots to wash clothes, boiled and ate the green gourds, and painted the dried ones to use as rattles and ritual bowls. The meadow is a virtual cornucopia of useful plants, all of which thrive in the heat and less than thirty inches of rain we get each year.

This is the Edwards Plateau, commonly called the Hill Country. The rolling hills are covered with Spanish oak, live oak, cedar, and mesquite. In the spring, the meadows are gaudy with bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush, and the translucent yellow flowers of the prickly pear; in the fall, garnet red prickly pears, flaming sumac, and purple gay-feather brighten the fields. A couple of hundred feet beneath the stony surface lie the porous sandstones and cavernous limestones and dolomites of the Lower Cretaceous period: the Edwards Aquifer, an underground river that flows from northwest to southeast and emerges along the Balcones Fault as the Pecan River, the Blanco, the San Marcos, and the little creek that meanders through our meadow. It's also an endangered river, because the water demands of the residential and commercial development between Austin and San Antonio far exceed the aquifer's recharge capacity. Scientists at the Edwards Aquifer Research and Data Center at San Marcos say it will disappear in another decade or so. It's hard to imagine what this part of the country will be like when the springs have vanished, the rivers are gone, and the wells are dry. That's the trouble. Nobody wants to imagine it until they have to, and by that time it will be too late.

All three of us — Brian, McQuaid, and I—wanted Meadow Brook. McQuaid wanted it because there's a workshop and space for his gun collection. Brian wanted it because of the creek and the frogs. I wanted it because the sunny space behind the house is perfect for a large herb garden, and the round room at the top of the turret is perfect for Khat and me. And, of course, because of the five bedrooms. If push comes to shove, I can always move into one of those extra rooms. So far, that hasn't been necessary, but that's not to say that it won't.

It was McQuaid's night to cook and wash dishes. (It's a proven fact that if the cook has to wash, he or she goes easier on the pots and pans.) He was already in the kitchen when I got there, hacking at a charred poblano pepper. Judging from the rest of the ingredients on the table, we were having enchilada casserole. And judging from his assault on the roasted poblano, he had something other than enchiladas on his mind.

He looked up with a fierce scowl. "Why didn't you tell me about Rosemary?" he growled. Howard Cosell lying on the floor beside McQuaid's foot, gave me a reproachful basset hound glance.

"I
did
tell you," I said. I got two glasses out of the refrigerator freezer. "I left a message on your answering machine. I also said that you needed to do something about renting a car." I glanced out the window at the blue Ford in the drive. "Which I see you did, so you must have gotten the message."

McQuaid misses being handsome by a nose (his having been broken twice, once on the football field and once in an altercation with an incensed drunk). He has black hair, slate-blue eyes in a tanned face, and a pale scar (courtesy of a druggie) that zips diagonally across his forehead. His eyes turn dark blue when he's angry. They were dark now.

"Yeah, the answering machine. I had to hear about Rosemary Robbins getting murdered in
my
truck from an answering machine!" He slashed at the poblano. A hunk of it dropped beside Howard Cosell, who sniffed it and sneezed.

I stared at him, nonplussed. Was that what he was so angry about? A simple telephone message?

"What else was I supposed to do? I had no idea where you were. I had a thousand errands to run, and I couldn't keep calling back. I did what I thought — "

"I was in the departmental library. You could've told the secretary. She would've come and got me."

"I didn't think it was that important." I put the glasses on the table. "I don't mean that. Of course it was important. I just mean — "

"Not important!" McQuaid is a powerful man, six feet, one ninety, muscular shoulders, deep voice. When he's upset, he's powerfully fierce. "You didn't think it was important that Rosemary Robbins was murdered in
my
truck, when Jake Jacoby is on the loose?"

Loud voices make Howard Cosell nervous. He lumbered to his feet, walked ponderously across the floor, and pushed his head and shoulders under my Home Comfort gas range.

"Excuse me for being dense," I said, "but I fail to see the connection."

McQuaid put down his knife, leaned on the table, and eyed me narrowly. "You're telling me that with all your criminal experience, it hasn't occurred to you that Jake Jacoby might have killed Rosemary?"

"Jacoby?" I rolled my eyes at this far-fetched theory. "I have to confess that the idea hadn't even crossed my mind." What had crossed my mind, tantalizingly, were twin margaritas, one for McQuaid and one for me. I opened the refrigerator crisper to look for a lime, but all I saw was a bunch of wilted cilantro, half an eggplant, a bag of carrots, and one very small, very dead fish, laid out on a saucer like a body on a slab at the morgue.

In my former life as a single person, my refrigerator harbored no surprises. The mayo and mustard routinely lived on the door shelf, the milk was top left, and Khat's fresh chicken livers were in a green bowl with a red cover on the lower shelf. Now, the lid to the mustard was missing, there were two open cans of dog food in the middle of the top shelf where the milk was supposed to be, and a dead fish in the crisper.

I was still staring at the fish when McQuaid came up and put both arms around me from the back and pulled me against him, my back to his front. He shoved the crisper shut with his foot and closed the refrigerator door so hard I could hear the catsup bottle fall over inside.

"Will you
lis
ten
to me, Bayles?" he said gruffly against my ear as I struggled to pull free. "Rosemary Robbins looked enough like you to be your sister. She left here last night driving a truck that you drive a couple of times a week. When she got where she was going, somebody shot her. You damn well better believe it could've been Jake. He could've thought he was killing
you."

I stopped struggling and stood very still. The room was loud with the humming of the refrigerator and the idiosyncratic tock-tick-tock of the hundred-year-old school-house clock that hangs on the wall over it.

"Me?"
I said finally. "You think Jacoby mistook Rosemary for
me?"

His arms were so tight around me I couldn't move. "It's possible."

"It's also possible that her ex-husband killed her," I said. "In fact, it's very likely. She made a DV call last winter. He hung around the hotel where she was working. She thought he was stalking her."

He was stubbornly silent, still holding me tight. I was suddenly conscious of the strength of his arms around me. I felt the flash of warmth that comes with desire, and relaxed a little against his hard body.

"It happens, McQuaid," I said. "Read the papers. Spousal abuse is the leading cause of injury among women aged fifteen to forty-four. Three out of ten murdered women are killed by a spouse or a lover."

"It's also possible," he said quietly, "that Jake Jacoby killed her because he thought she was you. Seven out of ten murdered women are killed by somebody else."

I was leaning against him, wanting him, even in my anger —or perhaps the wanting was fueled by anger. That's the nice thing about living together. You can be angry and want somebody, and know they'll still be there and you'll still be wanting when the anger has passed. "But Jake's a free man," I said. "As long as he meets the terms of his release, he can go anywhere in the state. El Paso, Dallas, Lubbock — "

He kissed the tip of my ear. "New Braunfels."

New Braunfels was less than twenty minutes away. "Why New Braunfels?"

"Because that's where his mother lives." He cupped my breast with his right hand. "Because that's where he's supposed to live under the terms of his release."

I twisted in his arms until I could turn and face him. There was a deep worry furrow between his eyes, but they were light again. "We're lucky to find out where he is," he said. "Most of the time people don't get told when a criminal is back on the streets. But this is different, because — "

"Because you're a former cop," I said. "And cops look out for their own. Excuse me. Their
ex-own."
If it had been a lawyer who was threatened, you can bet your sweet bippy that the cop fraternity wouldn't have phoned to tell her about it.

"Put it that way if you want to," McQuaid said. "But you and Brian aren't safe as long as Jacoby's within spit-

ting distance." He reached up to brush the hair off my forehead. "Rosemary's murder—it's just too coincidental, China. You've got to be careful."

My mouth tightened. "A case of mistaken identity. Isn't that a little far-fetched?"

McQuaid dropped his arms. "Bubba Harris thinks it's possible."

I wasn't surprised that McQuaid had talked to Bubba about the murder, and about Jacoby. Bubba belongs to the fraternity, too. Ex or no ex, they're still blood brothers.

"What about Curtis Robbins?" I asked dryly. "I don't suppose he's been questioned yet."

McQuaid ignored my sarcasm. "Robbins ate at his sister's house last night, and the two of them watched the late movie. He didn't get home until nearly one." He paused. "The man is well-known around town, China. Somehow I can't quite picture him doing this."

"Oh, yeah?" I laughed shortly. "Where is it written that well-known people lead blameless lives? And since when has Bubba Harris started buying alibis from relatives?" McQuaid stepped back. "Did anybody question Rosemary's neighbors?"

"The woman across the street said she heard a gunshot around nine-thirty. She mentioned it to her husband, but he thought it was a firecracker. Last night was the Fourth, remember?"

I went back to rooting for limes. "Who's doing the autopsy?"

"Travis County was backed up, so the body went to Bexar." McQuaid was chopping another poblano.

I made a face. Adams County is too small to have its own medical examiner, so it buys autopsy services from neighboring counties. The Bexar County medical examiner's office is understaffed and overloaded. This was Thursday. If somebody worked over the weekend, Bubba might get an autopsy report by Monday. That would fix the time of death — more or less. I hadn't found the body until nearly ten, and the truck had been sitting in the sun. It would be hard to get the TOD down to less than a ninety-minute range. Until Bubba had something better, he'd use the neighbor's statement about the nine-thirty gunshot as a reference point.

"They found the spent bullet on the floor of the truck," McQuaid said. "A .38. Oh, and the truck was covered with prints." He pushed the chopped poblano into a neat pile. "Ours. Fortunately, we have an alibi for the time of the murder."

"No other prints?" I averted my eyes from the block of Velveeta McQuaid was cubing. The rule is no carping when the other one cooks, even when they're doing something unspeakable.

"Rosemary's, of course." He dumped the cubes and a can of evaporated milk into a bowl and added the peppers. "But nothing else." He stuck the bowl into the microwave and pushed some buttons.

"I wish I'd known her better," I said thoughtfully. I found a wizened lime in the bag of carrots and went to the cupboard to look for the salt. I found it, but the box was empty. "I might have a clearer idea who killed her."

"You still don't get it, do you, China?" McQuaid banged the heavy black cast-iron skillet onto the front burner of the Home Comfort, which has at least a decade on me but still bakes an admirable souffle". "I am telling you,
you
were the mark. Jacoby aimed to get to me by killing you, but he screwed up and got Rosemary instead." He poured olive oil into the skillet and dropped in some chopped onions.