Mistletoe Man - China Bayles 09 (11 page)

"Reckon I
will," Bull said, deciding that the trees weren't something he ought to
worry about. "I got me plenty o'thangs to do." He lowered his head
and shook it, and I could see where he got his name. "Ask me, wimmin don't
got no bidness in law enforcement," he muttered. "Who's gonna stay
home and mind the kids?"

Blackie hooked his
thumbs in his belt and smiled a long, lazy smile. "Why, Bull, I just might
do that, if the chief and I ever decide to have any. Sure beats rounding up
hit-and-run drivers."

Without a word, Bull
stalked off, climbed into his Jeep Cherokee and spun his wheels, splashing mud
over us.

"Sonofabitch,"
McQuaid muttered.

The
deputy looked down at his mud-spattered slicker.

"That's why we signed on to be
cops," he said. "So we'd get some respect."

A grin cracked
Blackie's face. "Hail," he said, "I thought we done it to harass
the local JayPees. You got all the photos you want, Pete?"

"I'll
get a couple more long shots," the deputy said.

Blackie glanced from McQuaid to me. "Want to
take a look at the body?"

The ditch was full of
chunks of limestone rock. Swenson was face down, arms flung out, legs at odd
angles. His blond hair was rain-slicked, his denim jacket and jeans soaked
through. One boot was missing, one leg clearly broken, and there was a puddle
of blood under his mouth. In life, he hadn't been much to look at, but death
had brutally altered him, twisting his face in a mask of anguish and pain and
rendering him vulnerable, helpless. I thought of the ugliness of violent death,
and the sadness of dying alone, and swallowed hard.

"Looks like he
died of a skull fracture," Blackie remarked matter-of-factly. "Left
side's caved in." He sighed. "But I don't think he died fast."

I didn't think so
either. In his last agonized moments, Swenson had clawed at the dirt, trying to
pull himself out of the ditch. He had died clutching fistfuls of dry, dead
grass.

"Any sign of paint flecks on the
clothing?" McQuaid asked.

"Didn't see any," Blackie replied,
signaling to the EMS team. "But we've located some glass—headlight glass,
probably—at the point of impact. Everything will go to Travis for
analysis." Adams County is too small to have its own crime lab, so anything
that might turn out to be evidence in a criminal case is sent to either the
Travis or Bexar County labs.

"Where's
the glass?" I asked.

We left Swenson to
the tender mercies of the EMS crew and Blackie led us up the road about five
yards, past a leather cowboy boot, its location marked with a flag of yellow
tape. We stopped beside a scattering of glass shards along the gravel shoulder,
also nagged. Nearby, a portable metal frame had been set up—around a tire
print, I assumed—and a plaster cast was hardening, shielded from the rain by a
square of plastic.

"Is
the print a clear one?" I asked.

Blackie tilted his hand
to show that it was maybe good, maybe not so good. "It won't help us
locate the vehicle, but it might help identify it."

McQuaid knelt down to
peer at the glass. After a minute he looked up. "Got a collecting kit?
There are a few paint flecks here too. Red, looks like."

"No kidding?" Blackie looked pleased.
"Yeah. I'll get you a kit."

I turned to look
along the fence line. A few yards away was the ladder. On the ground next to it
was a five-gallon plastic bucket. I went over to look. The bucket was half full
of mistletoe. A pair of loppers lay beside it.

"Well, we know
what he was doing when he was killed," I said.

"Clearing that
stuff out of the trees?" Blackie asked, coming up beside me. "But
hackberries are just trash trees, and these aren't even on his property. So why
was he bothering?"

"Because he was
getting paid for it," I said. "That bucket of mistletoe, full, would
be worth twenty dollars wholesale. He supplied my shop, and he had quite a few
other customers." I looked twenty yards further up the road, where a new
green Dodge pickup, was parked near a mailbox. In it, I spotted a half-dozen or
more filled garbage bags. The rest of the harvest, waiting for Swenson to truck
it off to market.

Blackie put his hand
on my shoulder. "How about it, China? You ready to go see the Fletcher
sisters?"

"I guess,"
I said. "But I don't see the point. Their van's out of commission. They
couldn't have—"

"Fine,"
Blackie said. "It'll be just a friendly visit. Come on. We'll take my
car."

I shook my head.
"Let's take McQuaid's truck," I said. "As long as this is just a
friendly visit." I paused. "But before we leave, there's something
you can do for me."

"Yeah?
What?"

"Let me pull
those bags of mistletoe out of Swenson's truck. It's already cut and there's no
sense in letting it go to waste." Whatever else the man might have been,
he was certainly industrious. And he must have had some other source of income,
besides mistletoe. You don't make the payments on a twenty-thousand-dollar
truck out of pocket change.

"Let's take a
look," Blackie said. We walked to the truck, where he peered into each of
the bags. "Well, that clears up one mystery," he said.

I grinned. "So
what did you think it was, Sheriff Black-well? Marijuana?"

He returned my grin.
"I never saw marijuana with little white berries on it. Take what you want
and let's go."

The rain had slowed
to a chill drizzle when I drove up in front of the Fletcher house and leaned on
the horn. The
racket brought a
still-bandaged Max bouncing out of the barn and Donna, more slowly, out of the
greenhouse. Terry was nowhere in sight. I took a quick look and saw, to my
surprise and dismay, that the brown panel truck was gone from its parking place
beside the barn.

"Hi," Donna
said, coming up to greet us. She pushed her taffy-colored hair out of her eyes
with a nervous gesture. "Didn't expect to see you again so soon,
China." Her eyes flicked to Blackie. She took in his uniform with barely
disguised dismay, then focused on me again. "Did you want more wreaths? If
you do, I'm afraid we'll need a little more time. Everything's piling up, what
with the work of repairing the greenhouse and the van and all. We're pretty
swamped just now and—"

I raised my hand to stem the babble, not liking
the apprehension and anxiety I heard in Donna's voice. Did she know about
Swenson? "We'll probably need some more wreaths before Christmas," I
said, "but not right away." I turned. "Donna, this is Sheriff
Blackwell. There's been an accident up the road and—"

"An accident?" Donna asked, her eyes
widening. She thrust her hands into the pockets of her green down vest.
"Oh, gosh, I hope nobody was hurt."

"Somebody was
killed, Ms. Fletcher," Blackie said soberly. "A neighbor of yours.
Carl Swenson."

Donna's hand flew out
of her pocket and went to her mouth in a gesture of surprise and dismay so
faked that it wouldn't have fooled a five-year-old. "Oh, dear!" she
cried shrilly. "Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that! When did it happen? This
morning?"

"We're not quite sure yet," Blackie said.
"Why don't we go inside? I have a few questions I'd like to ask you, and
it's pretty wet out here."

"But I don't
know anything about the accident," Donna protested, shaking her head
emphatically. "We're at the end of the road, and I didn't see or hear a
thing. Not a single thing." She stopped talking but kept on shaking her
head.

"Donna," I
said quietly, "let's go inside. The sheriff has been out in the rain for
the last hour, and a hot cup of coffee would help take the chill off."

Donna drew in her breath as if to protest again,
but changed her mind. "Oh, of course," she said in a tinny voice.
"By all means, do come in and get warm, both of you."

On the way up the walk, she turned to me and said,
"I would have asked you in right away, but I didn't want to bother Aunt
Velda. Today isn't one of her better days, and strangers really set her off.
She always thinks they're from—well, you know." She glanced at the sheriff
and added, "Our elderly aunt lives with us. She isn't
...
well, she's not exactly right,
mentally. Alzheimer's, they think. The social worker says we ought to put her
in a nursing home, but we want to keep her with us as long as possible."

I was a little
surprised to hear this. Aunt Velda had some strange ideas, but I hadn't heard
that she might be suffering from Alzheimer's.

"We won't
disturb your aunt," Blackie said in a kindly voice, and Donna seemed to
relax a little.

The kitchen was warm
and the coffee was hot, but neither helped to get the conversation off to a
comfortable start. Blackie took off his gray felt Stetson and put it on the
table, while Donna fidgeted with coffee cups. In a moment, she had poured the
coffee and was sitting down across from us.

"Mr. Swenson was struck by a vehicle
and killed," Blackie said, "near his home. The driver didn't stop.
Since you're his neighbor, I wondered whether you or your sister might have
seen anything out of the ordinary." He looked straight at her.
"Something you'd like to tell me about."

"No," Donna said quickly. "As I
told you, I don't know anything about it. I didn't go out at all
yesterday." She laughed shakily. "Well, of course I was
outside.
In
the barn and the greenhouse, I mean. But not on the road. I didn't go out on
the road at all. So I can't help you, I'm afraid."

"What about your sister?" Blackie asked.
He looked around. "Is she here?"

Again that emphatic
shake of the head. "She's in San Antonio. She left early this morning.
Really early, when it was still dark. A friend has loaned us a car to use until
our car is fixed. That's what she drove. She—"

"Thank
you." Blackie took out a pen and a small notebook and flipped it open.
"What vehicles do you own?"

"Vehicles?" The color came and went in
Donna's face. "Our van, of course. But it's out of commission. Somebody
put sugar in the—" She stopped. "We've been having a lot of trouble
with it lately."

"Where
is the van?" I asked.

"It's in the
barn," Donna said. "Terry didn't want to work on it in the
rain."

"It was parked
beside the shed when I saw it on Saturday," I said. "Did Terry get
it running enough to drive it into the barn?"

Donna shook her head.
"We towed it in with the tractor." I relaxed a little, but Donna
didn't. "What are all these questions about?" she asked, her voice
rising. Her eyes went from me to Blackie. "You can't possibly think that
we had something to do with—" She stopped. "You can't possibly,
that's all."

"It's just
routine," Blackie said. "We'll be talking with all the
neighbors." He didn't look at me. "However, China told me you've been
having some trouble out here, and that you suspected Swenson might have
something to do with it. Is that true?"

Donna threw me a
glance that was at once angry and pleading, but she didn't have a chance to speak.

"Damn right we
been havin' trouble," said a shrill, parrotlike voice. "But if
you're here to settle ol' Carlos Swen-bug's hash, you're a day late and a
dollar short. That boy got took yestiddy. Them folks up there don't mess
around."

I
pulled in my breath sharply.
Got
took?

Donna stood. "I thought Terry told you to
stay in your room," she said tightly. She took the old woman's arm and
began to tug. "Come on, Auntie. You're not well."

Blackie had risen too. He smiled invitingly and
pulled out the chair beside his. "From all I hear," he said to Aunt
Velda, "Mr. Swenson was a hard man to deal with. He gave you a bad time,
did he, ma'am?"

"A bad
time?" Aunt Velda hooted. She shook off Donna's restraining hand and
sidled, crabwise, toward the table. She seemed to be limping badly, and I saw
that she was wearing one black sneaker and one crocheted bootie. "Hear
that, Donna? This good-lookin' young feller wants to know did Carlos Swinster
give us a bad time?" With a sarcastic cackle, she sat down in the chair
and wrapped her red, white, and blue shawl (this one was knitted in the design
of the American flag) around the shoulders of her field jacket. "You wanna
know the truth, sonny, he screwed us six ways from Sunday. He deserves to be
cleanin' latrines fer as long as them Klingons'll have him."