Rosemary Remembered (16 page)

trading fishing stories with an easy macho camaraderie, and I could see why men thought he was a regular guy. But beneath the smile and the dark good looks, there was a suppressed nervous energy that made his movements almost jerky, as if he were holding himself in check. I watched closely, looking for signs of the domestic bully. Was this the kind of man who could beat up his wife, stalk her, and end by murdering her?

My turn. "Mornin', ma'am," he said softly. He flashed a smile, and I wondered how many women dropped into the sporting goods store just to see that smile, receive that soft greeting. "What can I get for you?"

"I want to talk to you about your wife's murder," I said. His jaw hardened, and I held his gaze, not letting it slide away. "I was the one who found her body."

He looked at me for a long moment, his jaw working. Then he jerked his head toward a half-open door in the wall behind the counter. "Let's go in there." Eyes still on me, he raised his voice to a curly-haired teenage girl in an off-the-shoulder white blouse and flounced denim skirt who was rearranging a shelf of sweats.

"I'm takin' fifteen, Julie. Cover the register. Gimme a holler if you get backed up."

The office was windowless and hot and smelled of stale cigarette smoke, but Robbins shut the door anyway. He punched a button on a floor fan, which began to churn the warm air sluggishly around my ankles, not cooling it appreciably. He motioned me to a Naugahyde upholstered chair against the wall, under a girlie calendar that displayed the substantial endowments of auburn-haired Miss July, who was wearing a red, white, and blue top hat and very little else. Robbins dropped into an ancient wooden desk chair and tilted it back. The office was hot enough to make me want to take off my linen jacket, but

I decided against it. Robbins might take it wrong.

"Rosie was my
6x
>wife," he said tonelessly. "We got divorced in March." He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a pack of Camels. "So you found her body? What do you want?"

"My name is China Bayles," I said. "I'm a lawyer. My partner, Mike McQuaid, is working for Matt Monroe. Mr. Monroe is concerned about allegations of his partner's involvement in your ex-wife's death. We are cooperating with the police in this matter." Having already dished up a couple of outright lies this morning, this equivocation came easily. I am a lawyer, having kept my Bar Association membership current. McQuaid is my partner, so to speak, and he's definitely cooperating with the police. Matt Monroe is McQuaid's client, and he's worried about his partner, Jeff Clark.

He lit his Camel with a cheap plastic lighter, puffing on it as if it were a cigar. "Yeah, I know McQuaid. Ex-cop, isn't he? He special orders reloading supplies here." He sat back and thought for a moment, obviously working it out. Then he said, with an attempt at carelessness, "So Matt doesn't think Clark did it, huh? He's hired you and McQuaid to hunt up another suspect, and you've landed on me."

"The police questioned you about your alibi, I understand."

"Sure, but it didn't get them anywhere. That ol' dog just ain't gonna hunt, Ms. Bayles." Still leaning back, he gave me an aggressively confident look. "I loved Rosie, in spite of her. I didn't kill her. You're wasting your time trying to pin it on me."

"How long were you and your wife married?"

He blew out a cloud of foul-smelling smoke. The tiny office was filling up with a blue haze, the upper layer

filtering the light, the lower layer slightly stirred by the fan. "Five years, all told, including about six months when we were separated." "Children?"

He shook his head. "I would've, but Rosie was against it. She even got an abortion a couple of years ago, without saying a word to me." His laugh was off-key. "The way the law is now, a woman can murder a man's baby and there's not a damn thing he can do about it."

I stared at him, feeling his hurt. Three weeks before she died, she was pregnant. At the time of her death, she wasn't. Maybe Ruby was right. Maybe abortion had been a motive for murder.

"Why didn't she want a child?" I asked, more gently.

He turned his lighter in his fingers. "Too busy to be bothered, I guess. She' was never happy unless she was working. Used to drive me nuts. Not that I don't like my job, but I sure as hell don't live it fourteen, sixteen hours a day the way she did, twenty during tax season. She had something to prove, and babies would only get in the way." His hands twitched. They were big hands, the backs matted with heavy, dark hair. "At least that's how it was when she was married to me. But apparently she changed." His tone was matter-of-fact, but beneath it there was a deep hurt, and a deeper anger.

"What makes you say that?"

The words sounded as if they were wrenched out of him. "Because she was pregnant and she aimed to keep it."

"She told you that?"

"Hell, she threw it up to me. Said I'd never treated her like a woman, so she'd refused to give me the one thing that would make me feel like a man. So now she's got some other poor bastard in love with her, and she's telling me she's dying to have his kid." Each word lay the wound open wider so I could see into his heart. I could understand his bitterness, his anguish,' but I wasn't sure that his picture of Rosemary was an accurate picture. Perhaps it had been his violence that had made her refuse to have his child, and she had poured herself into work to escape him. Perhaps her refusal, and her escape, had fueled his violence.

I
gave him a straight-on look. "That sounds like a motive for murder."

"You bet it does." He leaned forward intently. His eyes were the eyes of a man who had carried a heavy burden for a very long time and knew he could never put it down. "I hated her enough to kill her. Came near to it. Why I didn't, lord only knows. But I didn't. Somebody else did."

"Who, then?"

He shrugged. "The police figure it was Clark. That's how come they laid off me. She was carryin' his kid, or so she said. She was killed with his daddy's gun. And now he's in Mexico. A man doesn't run if he doesn't have something to hide."

I tried a different tack. "Suppose Jeff Clark didn't kill her, Mr. Robbins. Suppose you were asked to name others— clients, acquaintances, neighbors—who might have had a grudge against her. What would you say? Where would you tell me to look, if I were looking for her killer?"

I thought for a moment he would blow off the question. He pulled on his cigarette, then stubbed it out in an overflowing ashtray. When he looked up, he'd decided to give me an answer. It was hard to tell whether he was being straight or trying to throw me off the track.

"Well, first off, you maybe ought to dig around some up at the hotel. The bookkeeper there had the hots for

Clark. She was pretty pissed when Rosemary snatched him away from her. A regular Peyton Place, that hotel." "The bookkeeper's name?"

"Carol something. Ask Julie, out front. She's the one who told me." His mouth twisted into a bitter smile. "Ro-sie sure could pick 'em."

"Anybody else?"

"Yeah, now that you mention it. Look up Howie Rhodes, over in San Marcos. Real estate broker—deals in commercial land, mostly, some residential. Rosie did his books for a couple of years. The business seemed straight enough in the beginning, but when she got into it, she said things didn't look right. There was a lot of unexplained cash, and some pretty slick laundering going on. She began to think Rhodes was dealing." He paused and flicked the cigarette lighter, staring at the flame, then flicked it again.

"So? What happened?"

He pocketed the lighter. "Rosie told him she was going to quit unless he documented what was bothering her. She wanted more money, too. She felt like she was taking a big risk if she stayed on the account. She thought the IRS might be looking at him, you see. If they tagged him, they'd come after her, too, and her other clients. That's how they keep tax accountants in line." He shook his head. "You've got to give it to Rosie. She would never let herself be blindsided. Not even by somebody she was sleeping with."

I picked up on it, as he expected. "Did she often sleep with her clients?"

He flexed his fingers, opening and closing his fist. "Far as I was concerned, what she did on the side was her business. She didn't tell me. She never told me anything. She was a very private person."

I looked at Robbins, speculating about how much it would take to make this particular man turn violent. One lover, two, three? Another man's baby, when his wife had refused to have his?

"How long ago was this business with Rhodes?" I asked.

"Three years, maybe. She dropped the account when he wouldn't come clean. Sure enough, not two months later the Feds busted the guy. He pleaded, and got two years at the federal prison over by Bastrop. It made Rosie nervous. She was afraid Rhodes thought she'd turned him in. Whistle blowers get a cut, you know."

"Did she turn him in?"

"She may have. Who knows? I never checked her bank balance." He sat forward in his chair, earnest, candid. "Look. Rosie and I didn't get along, and I probably got mad and pushed her around a little too hard. But I didn't have anything to do with her death, and that's God's truth. You want to dig up some real dirt, go poke around that hotel, talk to the bookkeeper. Or flush Rhodes — he's probably out of prison by now. Either of them had more reason to want her dead than I did." The muscle in his jaw was knotted, and I had a sense of the control he was exerting over his feelings. Grief, was it, or anger, that he was trying to keep a lid on?

"One more question," I said. "How well do you know Jeff Clark?"

His lips thinned. "Clark? I don't know the man. Oh, I've seen him at Chamber meetings, and we worked the beer booth at the Pecan Festival last year. But that's the extent of it. I should buddy up to a guy who's screwing my ex-wife?"

"You haven't visited him in his office?"

He shook his head, then chuckled dryly. "I have been

up at that hotel, though. Maybe that's what you're thinking of. I took the final papers to Rosie the day the divorce went through." That sour mouth again. "She couldn't be bothered to go to the hearing."

And that was it. I thanked him, and we stepped out of the smoky office. From Julie, the girl in the off-the-shoulder white blouse, I learned that the bookkeeper who had the hots for Jeff Clark was named Carol Conn ally, and that she rented the apartment next door to Julie's mother. Julie had walked in on a conversation one evening between Connally and her mother. Connally was hysterical because Clark had thrown her over for Rosemary.

"Really. You'd think somebody her age would be too old for things like that," Julie said, disapproving. She touched a zit on her pretty, dimpled chin.

"Things like what?"

"Oh, you know. Falling in love with the boss."

"How old is Miss Connally?" I asked.

Julie rearranged the ruffles on her blouse to expose a half inch more of tanned shoulder, seductively sliced by the pale shadow of a swimsuit strap. She slid a moony glance in the direction of Curtis Robbins, who was demonstrating the merit of a particular tennis racket to a pretty blond woman in the middle of the store.

"Oh, all of thirty-five," she said.

It was time I was going.

Chapter Twelve

To learn humility, one must weed the Thymes.

Folk saying

Now I had two reasons to make the half-hour trip to San Marcos: to check out Robbins's alibi and to look up a real estate broker named Howie Rhodes. I accomplished the first in less than thirty minutes by the simple expedient of knocking at 1413 Pecan, across the street from Robbins's sister's house. The door was opened by a tall woman wearing three-inch heels and a black and white vertically striped jumpsuit that drew the eye up and up and up—to the Biggest Hair I'd ever seen.

To appreciate Big Hair, you have to live in Texas, which is indisputably the Big Hair capital of the civilized world. This fact was documented not long ago by the
Wall Street Journal,
which reported that something like sixty percent of Dallas women over twenty-five refuse to have any truck with stylists who won't replicate the "Dallas-do." According to legend, this towering scaffold of hair was created when one strike-it-rich Dallas socialite wanted a special hairdo in honor of the oil rig on her ranch. There's also Lubbocks's Dairy-Queen-do—outrageously loose, poufy hair twisted around and around like the swirl of a custard cone; San Antonio's derring-do, hair that's been teased and tousled and moussed until it's reck
less and rash and ready to rare up on its hind legs; and of course, the dazzling let's-all-do-it bouffant of our white-haired once and former Governor Ann Richards.

Big Hair may trace its illustrious roots to Madame de Pompadour, or in more recent eras, to the smoothly backcombed pouf of the young Jacqueline Kennedy or the crowning glory of born-Texan Farrah Fawcett. But if you ask me, the greatest Big Hair of all is found on top of the women of rural Texas, who do it in garage and dining room beauty parlors with names like Hilda's Hair Hut or Rae Lee's Beauty Boudoir.
They don't get their hair pou
fed and pedestaled to please their men. They do it to flip a ladylike bird to Vidal's latest Sassoon bobbsies and Diane Sawyer look-alikes, to assert with pride that they are who they are and that's that, thank you very much.

The woman who answered the door had that look. She was already tall, maybe five Toot ten or eleven in her heels, and her height was further exaggerated by the vertical black stripes on her white jumpsuit — and her hennaed hair, which towered a foot and a half above her forehead like a Valkyrie's helmet. The total came to something more than seven feet, which for me amounts to a severe crick in the neck.
1
lowered my gaze to her brown eves, which were amused.

She leaned against the door jamb. "Yeah? Whaddya want?"

"I
wonder,"
I
said, and stopped.
I
tried again, but couldn't seem to find my voice.

"Look, honey," she said in a kindly tone,
"I
know my hair is bigger'n a tumbleweed, that
I
'm a walkin', talkin' beehive, an' when anybody loses anything, the first place they're gonna look is in my hair." She straightened. "Does that about cover it?"

I
gave her do one more appreciative glance. "Actually,"

I said, "I was thinking more along the lines of the Towering Inferno. With that color, I mean: red gold, copper highlights. Awesome."

"I like that," she said, approving. "The Towering Inferno. I really,
really
like that." She stepped back, held the door open. "You wanna come in? I gotta go to work in a half hour, but you can tell DeAnne what you said. DeAnne's my cousin. She does it up for me." She glanced at my hair, which was straight as a string and damp with sweat, and compassion softened her mouth. "She'll be glad to do yours, too, honey. She ain't proud."

DeAnne was substantial. She balanced the weight of her buttocks and breasts with a head of golden Big Hair that looked suspiciously like a Dolly Parton wig. In fact, looking closer, I could see a wisp of black hair escaping just forward of her ears, and her bleached eyebrows were dark at the roots. But fake hair or not, DeAnne's sense of humor was every bit as generous as her cousin's, whose name turned out to be Jonelle. I introduced myself, and we adjourned to the kitchen, where Jonelle turned off the sound on a small television that was tuned to a game show, and offered me a doughnut and Folger's instant in a mug that said "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff' on one side and "It's All Small Stuff' on the other.

DeAnne took a refill on her coffee and gave my hair a long, pitying look. "You really
oughta
do something," she said, shaking her head. "That gray streak down the side don't look too bad now, but you're gonna get gray all over, and then where'11 you be? Old before your time, that's where." A chuckle bubbled up like champagne out of her ample chest. "Pretty thing like you, honey, you don't wanna get old."

Jonelle gave my hair a critical look. "What color would you say it oughtta be, DeAnne?"