Death Come Quickly (23 page)

I could hear Johnnie's ringing disgust as he said, “This witness is excused,” and strode back to his seat.

It was a Bad Day at Black Rock for Ring-a-Ding, who might have remembered a classic line from that film: “You want to register a complaint? To register a complaint, boy, you've got to have evidence. You got evidence?”

Johnnie's strategy was to challenge the credibility of the investigation, the evidence, and the witnesses, and he was off to a good beginning on cross during the prosecution's case. When it came time to open for the defense, he put on a series of witnesses, each of whom reminded the jurors of what they already knew, that Bowen was a Good Samaritan who spent all his spare time contributing to the welfare of the community. Then he put on several witnesses, including Florabelle Gibson and Bowen's boss, Jimmie Lee Hanson, both of whom testified that Bowen had come to work the morning after the murder as cheery as he always was—“not at all like a man who had bludgeoned his neighbor in a fit of rage just a few hours before,” as Hanson put it.

Johnnie also called the neighbor across the street, Mr. Davidson, who testified that Mr. Bowen was a “trusting sort” who often left his garage door open and had invited the neighbors to borrow his garden tools, as long as they were returned in good condition. “Kind and considerate,” was the way Mr. Davidson put it. “He'd go a mile to help you out.”

As his final witness, Johnnie called Detective Barry Rogers. Judge Sparks wouldn't let the defense offer up an alternative suspect, but he gave Johnnie some latitude in using the evidence to suggest that there was one. Under Johnnie's questioning, Rogers testified, reluctantly, that the padlock on the inside of the back gate had been unlocked and the gate left open, presumably by Ms. Morris. That although the house contained a great many valuable paintings and Ms. Morris was concerned about theft, the alarm system in the house had been turned off at the console, presumably by her. And that there was an unopened bottle of champagne in the refrigerator and two crystal flutes on the kitchen counter. Johnnie could have brought out these facts on cross in the prosecution's case, of course, but saving them for the defense made a much greater impact.

All these facts added up, Johnnie said in his closing argument, to the likely presence of someone whom Ms. Morris expected, who had come in through the back gate, carrying the defendant's golf club and wearing his shoes.

“But the police don't have a clue about this person,” Johnnie said, with his trademark sarcasm, “because they didn't bother to ask the neighbors what they might have seen or heard. They had already made up their minds that my client was guilty, and that assumption led them to conduct a sloppy, careless, incompetent investigation. Ladies and gentlemen, the unlocked gate, the silenced alarm, the champagne glasses, the possible bloody print of another shoe—they all add up to a reasonable doubt. And when there's doubt, you must acquit.”

To which the jury, after deliberating for a very brief two hours and twenty-two minutes, agreed. They found Richard Bowen not guilty of the murder of Christine Morris. And that was that. Time to break out the bubbly.

But who
had
killed her? In the process of reading, I learned that Douglas Clark had a very firm alibi for the night of the murder. Like the dog that didn't bark in the night, he was in the hospital, recovering from an unscheduled emergency appendectomy. As far as the police were concerned, that removed him from the suspect list. They didn't appear to have considered whether he might have hired a hit man to do the dirty work for him.

And they didn't reopen the case, either, after Bowen was acquitted. I'll bet if I knocked on Bubba Harris' door right now and asked him if he thinks they got the right man, he'd say, “You damn betcha we got him!
His
weapon,
his
shoes. It was him, all right.”

As for Dick Bowen, he had insisted on testifying in his own defense and had done quite a credible job of it. “I have nothing whatsoever to hide,” he insisted—although of course he did, if Florabelle Gibson was to be believed, or if I was to credit Johnnie's remark that his client wasn't exactly pure. Bowen was hiding a big pocketful of bribes, paid to him by Douglas Clark. But of course, none of that was brought up. The transcript shed no light at all on that little caper, which now appeared to me to be completely irrelevant.

Or rather, if there was any relevance, I wasn't seeing it. And when McQuaid came into the room and began to strip for bed, I was happy to lay the transcript aside and get on with . . . um, more immediately relevant and interesting matters.

• • •

I
was up early the next morning, and dressed in a slim khaki skirt, brown tank top, colored scarf, and low heels for my one-day excursion to Houston. I was putting on my makeup (I was a little out of practice because I don't wear it very often) when McQuaid asked me where I was going. I told him I was planning to drive down to Houston for the day to see Lucia Bettler, who teaches cooking classes and owns and manages an herb shop called Lucia's Garden.

It was true. Lucia is a good friend, and I try to see her whenever I'm in Houston. She's a great fan of the work of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and I thought she might be able to tell me something about María Izquierdo. I had phoned her the evening before, to make sure she'd be in the shop today.

Of course, I was seeing someone else, too. But McQuaid knows Aaron Brooks and doesn't trust him—not because he's jealous, necessarily, although that might be part of it. But they had butted heads in a murder trial when McQuaid was with Houston Homicide, and McQuaid still remembers. I would tell him tonight, after the fact, when he could see that I was home safe and sound—and entirely unmolested.

The sky was a gloomy gray, overcast with low clouds heavy with moisture scudding up from the Gulf. Unfortunately, in Texas, clouds don't necessarily signal rain. They just mean that the day will most likely be a bad hair day, if your hair is inclined to get lank when the weather turns muggy, the way mine does. I wasn't in a very good mood, anyway. I hate the drive to Houston—or rather, I hate the last sixty miles of it, when the traffic picks up and everybody drives as if they are doing laps on the Indianapolis Speedway on Memorial Day.

It's odd, but I don't remember feeling this way when I lived and worked in Houston, when my whole life—every personal and professional moment of it—was spent in the fast lane, actual and metaphorical, pedal to the metal as hard as I could to stay ahead of the competition. I guess I was so habituated to the insane speed at which everybody operated that I simply didn't notice. Maybe all of us were like that, frogs swimming in water that is rapidly coming to a boil, and we didn't notice a thing.

I notice now. Life in Pecan Springs isn't nearly as simple as I had expected it to be. But it is definitely slower and sweeter, and the commute between our house in the country and my herb shop and gardens in town is a cakewalk. If I had to drive on the Houston streets and freeways five days a week, every hair on my head would be gray and my nails would be bitten down to the bloody quick.

Last year, McQuaid (whose watchword is safety first when it comes to cars and guns) bought me one of those hands-free cell phone devices to use when I'm driving. It came in handy today, because there were several calls. The first one was from Brian, who couldn't find his favorite shirt (it was in the dryer, which is totally off his radar). What that boy will do about his laundry when he goes off to college next month is beyond me. Do they teach Washing and Drying 101?

The second call was from Caitlin, who told me with great excitement that Mrs. Banner (the neighbor who is having a baby) has a friend who has a rooster who would love to have some hens for his very own (he lives with another rooster, who is selfishly hogging all the hens for himself). Mrs. Banner's friend hates the thought of having her rooster for Sunday dinner, so she would like to find him a new home. If we adopted him, he and the girls could have s-e-x, couldn't they? And then the girls wouldn't just have eggs, they would have baby chicks, wouldn't they? And she would call him Lucky Boy, because he was lucky to escape being Sunday dinner.

I deferred a ruling on the request until we had a chance to sit down and discuss the pros and cons of giving Lucky Boy his very own harem of hens. But I did remark that if the girls were allowed to have baby chicks, there wouldn't be just one rooster. There would be
more
roosters (the gender distribution of chickens is probably like that of humans, I would guess, approximately fifty-fifty, boys and girls). And more roosters would lead to the same uncomfortable situation in which Mrs. Banner's friend found herself. Are we willing to have roast roosters for Sunday dinner, and if so, who will do the terrible deed? This question was met with a long silence, and then Caitlin made kissy noises and went off to think about it.

The third call was from Ruby, who had returned from her Web-surfing expedition with some interesting information about María Izquierdo.

“She was born in 1902 in a small Mexican village,” Ruby read from her notes. “When she was fourteen, she was married off to an army colonel and had three children, one, two, three, just like that. It's probably fair to say that this wasn't her idea. In 1923, her husband moved the family to Mexico City, where she took art classes whenever she could manage to get away. Four years later, she left her husband and children and went to study art full-time.”

“Really?” I broke in. “That was
brave.
”

“Oh, you bet,” Ruby said. “And there's more. At the Academy of San Carlos, María met Rufino Tamayo. He was an artist, and it wasn't long before they were lovers. She also met Diego Rivera, who took her under his wing. She had her first exhibition in 1929, in Mexico City—and that same year, her work was shown in New York. In fact, she was the very first Mexican woman to have a New York exhibition. Then, in 1936, she had an exhibit in Paris.”

“My goodness,” I said, checking my rearview mirror. There was a large truck on my bumper and I sped up. “She sounds
important.
”

“She was, apparently. Her work was praised everywhere. She and Tamayo lived together for four years, but he left her in 1933 for a younger woman. She was distraught, and the breakup led to a depression that affected her painting for several years. A French poet named Artaud wrote that her paintings have the ‘color of cold lava, as if in the semidarkness of a volcano.'”

“Ah,” I said, remembering the painting on the wall. Betrayal, desolation, loss, unbearable pain, symbolized by the flower.
Muerte llega pronto.

“In 1945,” Ruby went on, “María was invited to paint a mural in Mexico City. But she had made some powerful enemies by speaking out against some of the prevailing trends in Mexican art, and they were able to block the commission.” She took a deep breath. “After that, her career suffered. She began having nightmares. She painted one of them—she called it
Sueño y Pensamiento
, Dreaming and Thinking. I've seen a photograph of it, China. She's painted herself holding her own severed head out of a window, while her headless body disappears—literally—into the distance. The year after that, she suffered a debilitating stroke. It more or less ended her artistic life. She died a few years later.”

“That's tragic, Ruby.” It was, but I was finding it a little hard to concentrate. I was trying to get away from the truck and watching for the turnoff—a left exit—from 290 onto I-610 South.

“And prophetic, too, wouldn't you say?” Ruby asked. “I mean, she paints a severed head, and then she suffers a stroke that virtually incapacitates her. It's as if her dream foretold the future.”

I began edging left, sneaking in behind a pickup loaded with cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic. Flags of ripped plastic were peeling off in the wind and flying across the freeway. “Yes, prophetic,” I said and moved one more lane to the left, to avoid the flying plastic, which could blanket the windshield and leave me sightless. “Yes.”

“But wait, there's more!” Ruby exclaimed, like that voice on the television commercials that wants to sell you two or three of something you don't want even one of. “I found out that Izquierdo's work is really hot right now. That painting I just told you about—
Sueño y Pensamiento
? It sold at Sotheby's recently for a whopping four hundred fifty thousand dollars!”

“Wow,” I said, slipping between two cars to get into the near left lane. “Nearly half a million! That's a
lot
of money, Ruby.”

“Right. And now the Mexican government has declared Izquierdo a national treasure, which means that her paintings can no longer be taken out of the country without the government's approval.” Ruby took a deep breath. “That would tend to drive up the prices even more, wouldn't it?”

“I'd think it would make her paintings harder to get,” I said.

“Oh, and guess what! That painting you showed me in the Sotheby's catalog, the one Karen marked with the yellow sticky? I checked the Web page for that auction lot.
Muerte llega pronto
went for far more than the estimate. In fact, it sold for twice what they estimated, China. A cool quarter million.”

A quarter of a million dollars. I wondered whether it had gone to a museum or disappeared into a private collection, where it wouldn't resurface until it was put up for sale again. I thought of the painting I had seen on the wall of the Morris Museum—and Ruby
hadn't
. How was it related to the painting that somebody had bought at Sotheby's? Why did Karen have the Sotheby's catalog in her briefcase? Did she know something about that painting—those
two
paintings—that might explain her death? And why couldn't Ruby see that painting when it was hanging right in front of her eyes?