Witches' Bane (14 page)

“Yes,” I said. At least I hadn’t been the one who had told him first. “As a matter of fact, the two of them had dinner with Mike McQuaid and me last week. Why? Is Andrew involved in this?”

“Hard to say,” the sheriff said, and pocketed the card. He looked down at the seed packet in my hand. “Nasturtiums, huh? My wife plants a lot of ‘em, out by the garage. She’s always trying to get me to
eat
‘em—flowers, leaves, especially the seeds. She pickles the seeds in vinegar and throws ‘em in my salad.” He shook his head. “Crazy, huh?”

“Not really,” I said. “But a scientist just discovered that the seeds are full of oxalic acid. Tell your wife that a few won’t hurt, but you shouldn’t eat them by the pound.”

Blackie’s face lit up. “No kidding? Hey, I’ll get her to come by and talk to you.”

“Anytime.” I knelt down again. “Good luck with your witch hunt.”

“Yeah,” he said, and headed for the car.

By eleven thirty, I had finished planting the flower bed, transplanted a half dozen gray wooly pillows of lamb’s ears into various empty spaces, and broken apart several clumps of thyme, replanting them along the path with the creeping phlox and sweet allysum, where they could spill over onto the gravel. I was wondering if I had enough time to attack the tansy, when Leatha came across the street from the Magnolia Kitchen, carrying two take-out boxes.

“Lunchtime,” she warbled. “I’ve brought somethin’ simply
delightful
from that charmin’ little place across the street.”

I followed her into the house. She had brought a carton of thick tomato soup, Maggie’s broccoli salad (she makes it Greek style, with feta cheese and olives and gives you a separate container of olive-oil dressing), and two cinnamon-basil cupcakes studded with walnut pieces. While I washed my hands and dug most of the dirt from under my nails, Leatha spread lunch on the kitchen table, picnic style. I found two bottles of homemade root beer in the refrigerator, left over from a batch Brian and I had brewed, and we settled down.

“I heard somethin’ odd while I was waitin’ for the food,” Leatha said. “People were sayin’ there’s some sort of cult in town. They held a ceremony in the cemetery last night an’ sacrificed a lamb. Cut its heart right out.”

“Just what we need,” I said. “More spook stories. That should keep things stirred up.” I spooned dressing onto my salad. “Did you talk to Pam this morning?”

Leatha frowned just slightly. “Yes.” She dipped her spoon into her tomato soup, not looking up. “You didn’t tell me she was ... colored.”

“Does that make a difference?” I wondered how my mother had handled it, but I wouldn’t know unless she told me. The relationship between a therapist and a client is as privileged as the one between a lawyer and a client.

“I suppose it doesn’t,” Leatha said, slowly. “She seems to be every bit as intelligent as—” She paused. “What I mean to say is that she seems just as—” She stopped. “She’s not one to pussyfoot around, is she?” She put down her spoon with the look of a woman who has just made up her mind. “She gave me some good advice. She said I should just come right out and tell you.”

‘Tell me what?”

The phone rang. “Go on an’ answer that, honey,” she said. “I can tell you later.”

I reached for the phone and took it at the table. It was McQuaid. “I’m not interrupting anything important, am I?” he asked.

“Leatha and I are just having lunch. What’s up?”

His voice was flat, no inflection, cop like. “I’ve just come from the sheriff’s office. Blackie’s identified a thumbprint taken from the front door of the Rand house, and fingerprints from the doorjamb in the room where Sybil was killed. They belong to Andrew Drake.”

I spilled my root beer.

“I’ll take care of it,” Leatha said. “You go on chattin’ with your nice young man.” She jumped up and went for a towel.

“There’s more,” McQuaid said. “Blackie identified the prints by sending them to the feds. Drake’s in the FBI file. He was arrested in New Orleans three years ago for fraud.”

“Oh,
shit”
I said. “God, poor Ruby.”

Leatha came at me with the towel. “Lift your elbow, dear, and let me get this before it drips on the floor.”

“That’s not all,” McQuaid said. “Blackie located the security guard who was on duty at Lake Winds Saturday night. Floyd, his name is. Every couple of hours Floyd cruises around the area, checking. He was turning into the Rands’ street about midnight when he saw a car pulling away from the curb. Said he maybe wouldn’t have paid any attention, but it had one taillight out.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “A red Fiat.”

“Right. Floyd whipped out after it, thinking he’d let the driver know about the burned-out taillight. But he ran into a bunch of teenagers around the corner—at least, that’s what he thought they were. It was dark, and he couldn’t be sure. Most of them were wearing sheets and masks. They said they’d been to a Halloween party.”

“Did he question them?” Halloween costumes are the perfect cover for almost anything.

McQuaid gave a short laugh. “It was the end of his shift. He told them to go home. He was meeting a buddy for some night fishing under the I-35 bridge, and he didn’t want to keep the catfish waiting.”

“So we don’t know if they were teens or Santeros.”

“Or some other cult.” McQuaid’s chuckle was dry. “Wiccans, maybe. Blackie said he ran into a gang of them earlier in the evening. They had on white sheets too.”

I made an impolite noise.

“Don’t be vulgar,” McQuaid said. “Anyway, there’s something else.”

Leatha came back from the sink with a clean towel. “Lift your arms so I can dry the table, China.”

“Do you
mind?”
I snapped. ‘This is
important.”

“I’m sorry.” Leatha sat down, not looking at me.

“What?” McQuaid asked.

“That wasn’t for you.”

“Well, I hope it wasn’t for your mother,” McQuaid said. “I couldn’t snap at my mother that way. She’d box my ears.”

“I wasn’t snapping. What’s the something else?”

“Blackie sent a deputy around to Andrew’s apartment complex to ask questions. He turned up a woman who was walking her dog at eleven forty or thereabouts, when Andrew drove up. He went into his apartment, then, came right back out and left again, which she thought was odd, because it was so late. About twenty after twelve, after she’d gone to bed, she saw lights on her drapes. She looked out. It was Andrew, coming back.”

“Good thing Ruby said no to the phony alibi.”

“What phony alibi?”

I told him. “Looks pretty bad for Drake, doesn’t it?”

“Blackie sure thinks he’s onto something. Are you going to tell Ruby about this?”

“I have to,” I said. “None of this stuff is confidential, is it? Did Blackie know you were going to tell me?”

“He didn’t say it was off the record. Anyway, he was bringing Andrew in for questioning when I left, so he’s moving pretty fast.”

“Sounds like he’s got something to move on,” I said. “Keep me posted, McQuaid.”

“Yeah,” McQuaid said. He paused. “Hey, cut your mother a little slack, okay? She can’t be that bad.”

“How do you know?” I countered testily. “See you.” I hung up. “Okay,” I said to Leatha, pointedly raising my arms. “You can dry off the table now.”

“It’s just that root beer is so sticky,” Leatha said, getting up again. When she finished, she hung up the towel. “That was Mike, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. I was wondering whether it was going to be difficult to run Ruby down. I didn’t want her finding out from the grapevine about Andrew being taken in for questioning. And that’s just what would happen if I didn’t catch her quick. I reached for the phone.

“You know,” Leatha said thoughtfully, “I’ve always wondered why you don’t call him by his Christian name. Your young man, I mean. McQuaid sounds so ... well, so
cold.
As if you don’t care.”

“I’ve always called him McQuaid,” I said, trying not to snap. “I called him that when I met him. He was a cop. I was a lawyer. We were on the same case, opposite sides. It seemed natural.”

Leatha wrinkled her forehead. “Yes, but that was business. Now it’s personal. And you’re on the same side. Aren’t you?”

“Excuse me,” I said. “I have to make a phone call.”

CHAPTER 10

I tried Ruby’s house, I tried the Cave, and I tried Mane Attraction, where she sometimes goes on Monday afternoons. The answering machine at the house said nobody was there, the answering machine at the Cave said she’d be in tomorrow, and Roxanne Spivey at Mane Attraction said I’d just missed her.

“You won’t know her when you see her,” she added. “We got that extra curl ironed out.”

I left messages and gave up trying to track Ruby down. Leatha went back to the cottage to read a book, and I went out to the garden to cut the last of the Silver King artethisia for wreaths. The wind had gotten colder and it was spitting rain, and I didn’t want to lose what little was left standing, even if it did look a bit tattered. It would make good wreath filler. I was almost finished when Constance came bouncing up the walk. She had on a dumpling-yellow pants suit and a clear plastic rain scarf.

“I’ve just come from the sheriff’s office.” She stopped to breathe heavily. “Andrew Drake’s in trouble. Big trouble.”

“He is?” I finished tying the last bundle and stuck it into my basket. “How do you know?” If Constance knew I could stop trying to get to Ruby first.

“Maureen McKenny had her appendix out on Friday, so Arnold asked me to take her courthouse beat.” Constance dropped onto the bench at the end of me mint bed. “I was in the sheriff’s office talkin’ to Blossom Rheinlander. She’s the one who gives Maureen the news for the Sheriff’s Rap Sheet column. Thangs like the flag that got stolen from the high school and the kids that were jumpin’ off the highway bridge into the river, thangs like that. Blossom’s worked there since the Flood and knows just about—”

“Constance,” I said, “just tell me about Andrew.”

“He was in the back, in the jail, and he came in with all these papers and threw ‘em down on Blossom’s desk—”

“Andrew?”

She opened her yellow tote, pulled out a white hanky, and blew her nose. “The sheriff. He was really ticked off. He told Blossom to get to typin’, but the statement part would have to wait because Drake wasn’t goin’ to say anythang for the record until he got himself a lawyer. Then he left, the sheriff, I mean. Since Blossom had already given me the stuff for the Rap Sheet, I left too. That’s when I saw Andrew bein’ hustled down the hall by a couple of deputies.”

At that moment, Ruby’s red Honda pulled up out front, and Ruby came flying up the walk. “China! You’ve got to come with me,” she cried.

I picked up the basket of artethisia. “Where are we going?”

“The sheriff’s office. I ran into Blossom on the square. The sheriff wants to fingerprint me and get a statement.”

Constance’s eyes were as big as walnuts. “Is he goin’ to arrest you
too
?”

“What do you mean, me too?” Ruby looked at me. “What’s she talking about?”

“I called around to find you, Ruby,” I said. “The sheriff has taken Andrew in for questioning.” It was more than that, but I thought we’d start there.

Ruby’s face went white. She sank down on the bench beside Constance. “Andrew?
Why?”

“I don’t understand it, either,” Constance muttered, shaking her head. “He’s such a
nice
man. He’s a person you can trust. He’s paid three whole months ahead on his rent.”

Ruby’s voice was urgent. “What can the sheriff possibly have on him?”

I shot a glance at Constance. If I told Ruby what I knew in front of Constance, half the town would know it before Ruby was fingerprinted. “I’ll put this stuff in my kitchen and be right with you,” I said, hefting the basket of artemisia.

We said good-bye to Constance, left the basket in the shop, and climbed into Ruby’s Honda. “So tell me,” Ruby commanded between clenched teeth. “They can’t possibly have anything on him.” She started the car. It died. She started it again. “What do they
think
they’ve got?”

“Andrew’s neighbor was out walking her dog at eleven-forty on Saturday night. Andrew drove up, then left again. He came back at twelve-twenty.”

She pulled jerkily away from the curb. “That doesn’t prove anything. He could have gone out for beer.”

I tried to be gentle. “If he did, he got it on his way to Sybil’s. The Lake Winds security guard puts him there at midnight. That’s when he saw Andrew’s Fiat leaving the Rand house.”

That one was harder to explain, but she tried. “Maybe he just went there. Maybe he didn’t get out of the car. I
know
it wasn’t him, China.”

She already sounded so desperate; I hated to tell her the rest. But she’d better have it from me than the sheriff. “He got at least as far as the door to the room where Sybil was killed, I’m afraid. They found his fingerprints on the doorjamb. They also found a thumbprint on the front door.” I hesitated, feeling like a jury foreperson bringing in a guilty verdict. “According to McQuaid, Blackie identified the prints through the FBI. They’ve been on file since he was arrested on a fraud charge in New Orleans three years ago.” I put my hand on hers and squeezed. “I’m really sorry, Ruby.”

There was a long silence while we negotiated the backed-up stoplight at Guadalupe and MLK. When Ruby spoke, her voice was choked. “At least you didn’t say I told you so.”

“Just because somebody’s questioned, it doesn’t mean he’s guilty. Not even if he’s charged, Ruby. People get arrested all the time, but it doesn’t always stick.” On this count, I could speak with authority. I hoped it was comforting.

Apparently not. She was gnawing her lower lip. “It sounds pretty bad.”

“He needs a good lawyer. The sooner the better. His lawyer needs to get into the investigation before the D.A. brings an indictment to the grand jury. There’s always the possibility of digging up something the cops overlooked and getting the prosecutor to back off.” I was getting ahead of the game, but I wanted to put the best spin on it.

She shot me a glance, her meaning plain as day. I shook my head. “Nope. I’m out of the business. I don’t have a staff or an office. I don’t want to take a case to trial.”

“But you already know Andrew,” she said plaintively. “You know the sheriff. You saw the body. You’re perfect.”

I was firm. “I’ll go with you this afternoon, but Andrew has to get his own lawyer. He needs somebody who’s set up to go to court.”

“Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

“Sorry,” I said. “By the way, what’s happened to the tarot class? Is it still on?”

Ruby shook her head. “I called everybody else and postponed. I left a message on your machine.”

She pulled up at one of the one-hour meters in front of the sheriff’s office, which is in the old library building on one corner of the square. The meters were unpopular when they were installed a couple of years ago and got even more so when the hourly rent went from a dime to a quarter. “Why does the sheriff want my fingerprints?”

“He’s eliminating people. He’s interested in yours because it was your knife and you were there on Saturday. He’ll ask for mine too. He’s probably already got Judith’s and Angela’s and the husband’s.”

She fished in her purse for a quarter. “When he starts asking questions, what should I tell him?”

“The truth,” I said simply. We got out of the car. I looked at her. “I like your hair,” I said.

“Thanks.” she said. She tossed her head. “At least I’ll look good for the mug shot.”

Blossom Rheinlander is in her sixties, a friendly, capable woman with short-cropped gray hair, a leathery face that has seen plenty of Texas sun and needs no makeup. She was pleased when I remembered that her granddaughter Julie Ann was last year’s Quarter horse Queen at the Adams County rodeo and rode a mean barrel race. She showed us into a small cubicle, told us the sheriff would be along directly, and pointed out the hot plate and coffeepot. The walls of the room were painted green, the floor tile was also green, and a photograph of the governor hung by the window. I skipped coffee, having gone to the effort of flushing most of the caffeine out of my system a couple of years ago. Ruby helped herself.

Sheriff Blackwell came in and sat down, rubbing his square jaw. His eyes flicked to me, back to Ruby. “Afraid you might say something incriminating?” he asked her with what could have been a smile.

“I thought it was a good idea to ask her to come,” Ruby said. She drained her cup and set it aside. “What do you want to know?”

He took a white card out of his pocket, wrote Ruby’s name on it in a minuscule, cypherlike script, and jotted the number one in a corner. “Let’s start with Sybil Rand.” He had the voice of a tax auditor. “How long have you known her?”

“About a year. She comes—” She swallowed. “She came into the shop every once in a while. She bought books, crystals, incense, things like that. Mostly books, I guess. She asked me to order titles for her. Esoteric stuff.”

“Books on magic?”

“Magical herbalism, astrology, tarot. Some of what she wanted was out of print. I had to get it from a book search company.”

“Do you know her husband?”

“No.”

“Do you know her maid?”

“I’ve met Angela once or twice. I talked to her on Saturday.”

“Do you know she loaned twenty-five thousand dollars to Andrew Drake?” The question was asked in the same even, emotionless tone.

Ruby’s head snapped up. “No!”

“Do you know whether he paid any of the money back?”

I was proud of her. “How could I, if I didn’t know she loaned it to him in the first place? What was it for? The business?”

“How well did Drake know Sybil Rand?”

Ruby dropped her eyes. “As far as I know, they were just acquaintances.”

The sheriff made a note. He knew his stuff. “Just acquaintances? Not lovers?”

“Not as far as I know.” Her shoulders were hunched.

“Judith Cohen says they were sleeping together.”

Ruby’s lips thinned. A red stain seeped up from the neck of her open shirt. “Maybe Judith knows something I don’t.”

“How well do you know Drake?”

“It depends on what you mean,” Ruby said. The red crept swiftly from her neck to her lower jaw. “We’ve been ... going out together quite a bit, lately. The last few months, I mean. Since he’s been in Pecan Springs.”

He made another note. “Are you lovers?”

Ruby’s face matched her hair. “We’ve been to bed together, if that’s what you mean. What does that have to do with anything?”

“How much do you know about him?”

“About his past, not much. It wasn’t important.”

“Do you know about a fraud case in New Orleans he was mixed up in?”

Ruby shot a glance at me. “No,” she said. “I mean, well ...”

I leaned forward. “I gave Ruby the information you gave to McQuaid this morning.”

“Figures,” the sheriff said without surprise. “Let me rephrase the question. Before today, did you know that Drake was arrested for defrauding a wealthy New Orleans woman?”

“A wealthy ... ?” Ruby closed her eyes. “No. I didn’t know.”

The sheriff got up and left the room.

Ruby spoke in a whisper. “Why is he asking me about—”

I put my finger to my lips. Ruby got up and refilled her Styrofoam cup with coffee and sat down again, sipping it. She grimaced at the taste. The sheriff came back with a cardboard box. He put it on the table in front of Ruby and sat down.

“Understand you’re something of an expert in the occult,” he said. “I’d like your professional opinion about these two things.” He opened the box and took out a black leather-bound book bearing an embossed gold pentangle. Beside it, he spread out a deck of tarot cards. But the cards weren’t at all like the ones we used in Ruby’s class. The images on these cards were dark and ominous, almost frightening, filled with an angry energy.

Ruby opened the book and looked at the flyleaf, then flipped through the pages. She closed the book and pushed it away from her. “It’s exactly what it says it is,” she said.
“The Satanic Bible.
It was written by Anton LaVey. It’s the operating manual for his Church of Satan.” She glanced at the cards. “That’s a deck of tarot cards called the Thoth Tarot, designed by Aleister Crowley. Where did you get these things?”

“They aren’t yours?”

“Of course not,” Ruby flared, indignant. “I’ve never even had a copy of LaVey’s book in the store.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t go in for that stuff. It’s dangerous. Were these Sybil’s?”

I looked at the book. I didn’t remember seeing it on the shelf in the room where Sybil was killed, but that didn’t mean anything. It could have been anywhere in the house. I’d never seen the cards before, either. They certainly weren’t the ones Sybil was using when she died.

“Are the cards Satanic too?”

“Not exactly.” Ruby paused. “Crowley had a reputation as a Satanist, but his brand of magic was mostly renegade Masonry, decorated with a lot of Latin mumbo jumbo. But it’s the energy in the cards I don’t like. Some of the images are very harsh, violent. It’s not a deck I recommend to most people.”

The sheriff opened the book and pointed to something written on the flyleaf. “The Order of the Trapezoid—what’s that all about?”

“It has something to do with German mysticism and the Church of Satan.” She looked at him. “Where did you say you got this book?”

“Does it have anything to do with Nazism?”

The burning cross in Judith’s yard flared in my mind. Was it connected with Sybil’s death?

“Maybe,” Ruby said. “I really don’t know. It’s not my thing.” She grinned crookedly. “If you want to know, I have a book at the shop that has some stuff in it about LaVey. It’s quite respectable, really. Written by a professor of sociology”

The sheriff was not only sharp, but persistent. “Would you say that whoever owned this book was a Satanist?”

Ruby looked uncomfortable. “I guess they wouldn’t have had it if they weren’t interested in magic. But I own books I haven’t read. Having a book on a subject doesn’t make you a believer.”

The sheriff put the lid on the box. “Why do you say that Satanism is dangerous?”

“Because Satanists believe that just because they want to do something, it’s okay,” Ruby replied. “Satanists are on a perpetual power trip. They’re out to control other people. They manipulate.”

The sheriff made notes on the card. “Was Sybil Rand a Satanist?”