Hangman's Root (12 page)

At five minutes to closing time, there were still two women, elderly sisters, left in the shop. One of them—the one with Lady Clairol blue hair rolled in little blue sausages all over her head— wanted an herbal remedy for the ailment suffered by their cocker spaniel. Pretty Baby. When I asked her to describe the problem. Lady Clairol was delicately evasive.

"It's . . . you know," she said, gesturing vaguely. "In Pretty Baby's intestines."

"The vet gave her something," the other sister offered, "but it made her. ..." Her prim little mouth drew tighter. "Well, you know, all over the carpet. She was so humiliated, and we feel we can't subject her to such torture ever again. But we do have to get rid of the ..." The mouth got tighter and more prim.

Some people are squeamish. "Have you tried garlic?" I asked. I was describing its traditional uses as a treatment for internal

parasites when the door opened and Dottie Riddle came in. Her brown hair was loose and untidy, and there were lines around her mouth and navy smudges under her eyes.

"I don't think Pretty Baby would like the taste of garlic," Lady Clairol objected, shaking her head. "She's really quite finicky about what she eats."

"Then you might try making up some pellets." I opened the top drawer of the file cabinet behind the counter and found a copy of my recipe for garlic and rosemary worming pills. "This is something people have used for a long time." The law forbids me to prescribe herbal preparations, but it doesn't keep me from offering information about traditional herbal practices.

A few minutes later, the sisters had what they needed and were on their way to aleviate Pretty Baby's suffering. With a sigh of relief, I hung up the "Closed" sign, locked the door, and turned to Dottie.

"What's up?" I asked.

"I need to talk to you," she said. She took a cigarette out of her purse. "I need some advice. Legal advice."

"If you want to smoke," I said quickly, "let's go outside." A lot of the people who come into my shop are concerned about health. They don't want to smell cigarettes.

"If you don't mind," she said. She followed me out to the fountain, where we sat down on the stone bench. She lit her cigarette and I surveyed the area around the fountain, making a mental note to loosen up the soil around the bronze fennel and dig in a little compost. I glanced around, thinking that there was more work here than I could handle myself. Maybe it was time to break down and admit that I needed a gardener. Not full time, I couldn't afford that. But ten hours a week would help a lot.

Dottie pulled in a lungful of smoke and pushed it out again. Her forehead was shirred, her voice gritty. "Chief Harris came to my house this morning and questioned me. He brought the new

head of Campus Security with him. A woman named Dawson. But Harris asked all the questions. The woman just listened."

I abandoned my mental list of possible gardeners. "They were there to talk about Miles Harwick?"

"Yes. How long I had known him, how well I knew him, what kind of person he was, who his enemies were. That sort of thing."

I frowned. "They seem like pretty ordinary questions to me. You worked with Harwick. You were his next-door neighbor. You're the logical person to ask." But Bubba is a busy man. If he was convinced that Harwick's death was a suicide, he wouldn't bother to interrogate the neighbors. I thought about the pipe that was out of Harwick's reach and the coffee that might have been doped. "What else did he ask?"

"Where I was on Wednesday night from seven until eleven."

"And you said—"

"That I was trucking around the campus, feeding stray cats, from seven to nine. I do it every night. After that, I was home. By myself. I went to bed about eleven."

Seven to eleven. A pretty big slot. That must have been when Harwick died. "What else?"

Dottie pulled one ankle over the other knee and nervously fiddled with the tassel on a black loafer. Her navy slacks were shaggy with cat hair. "He asked about Harwick and me. How we got along. He wanted specifics. He said he already had the general picture."

I raised my eyebrows. "Who gave him that?"

"Castle, probably." She pulled hard on her cigarette, peevish. "And Cynthia Leeds."

"Did he ask about—" I paused and let her finish it for me.

Her eyes flickered. "The letter? Yes." Wary, she ran her teeth over her lower lip. "He seemed to know what it said. I guess Cynthia told him." She flashed me a look. "Unless you did."

I shook my head. We were getting closer to the truth. But first

there was something else. "Dottie," I said, "let's make a deal. Before you say anything else, I want you to give me some money. A couple of bucks'll do it."

She frowned. "Why?"

"So I can't be compelled to discuss our conversation." Things looked serious. If I was going to help Dottie, I had to know whether she had done anything that could result in criminal charges. In return for letting me in on the extent of her culpability, she would get the assurance of my silence. She would also get my advice about when, and under what conditions, she should tell the truth.

Dottie looked at me, half understanding. "Oh," she said. "You'll be my lawyer?"

For the last four years, I've said "no" to that question every time it came up. For Dottie, I was willing to say "yes, but." "In a limited way," I said. "I won't represent you in court. But if you're in trouble, I'll give you the best advice I can."

"Oh," she said again, and fumbled for her wallet. She found it and fumbled with bills before she sorted out a five. "This is the smallest I've got."

I took the five. "Tell me more about Chief Harris's questions. Did he ask you for the letter that turned up on Thursday, or for the other threatening letters you received?"

She looked down. Her "yes" was rough, reluctant.

"What did you tell him?" It's not easy to dig information out of somebody who is either ashamed or afraid to tell the truth. I was guessing that Dottie was both, which made it harder.

She began talking, too fast. "I told him I threw all three letters away after Miles' body was found. I said that making a fuss about the threats at that point would have been ... " She raised her eyes to mine, didn't quite make it, and dropped them again. "There wasn't any point. He couldn't harm me or the cats. I'd only be blackening his reputation, for no purpose."

"I see. What did the chief say to that?"

"Nothing." She got up and began to pace back and forth in front of the fountain, gesturing with her cigarette. "He just sat there, making notes in a Httle blue book, giving me this look like he didn't believe me." I'd bet. I was sure that Bubba wanted Dot-tie to notice his skepticism, aiming to make her more nervous. "He knew about Miles trapping Ariella," she added, "and the hammer. I guess the sheriff told him."

That would be my guess, too. Blackie and Bubba regularly cooperate on cases. The interesting—and thought-provoking— question was how they had gotten together so quickly on this one. Had Bubba gone fishing for information? Or had Blackie heard about Harwick's death, recalled his Monday morning trip out to Falls Creek, and decided that Bubba needed to know about the catnapping, hammer-slinging episode? The latter was more likely. In law enforcement circles, a hammer attack on somebody who turns up dead soon after is considered interesting, especially when the death is not a natural one.

"I see," I said again. I waited, watching her, not letting her off the hook.

Dottie dropped her cigarette in the fountain, then caught my eye. Sheepish, she fished it out, holding it as if she didn't know what to do with it. "The truth is," she said nervously, "I kind of . . . well, came unglued." She sat back down, wrapped the wet cigarette in a tissue, and dropped it into her purse. "The chief was being pushy. He wanted to know why I threw the hammer. He kept asking me what I'd done with the letters. I didn't want to say anything, but he just sat there, like a stupid fat toad w^aiting for a fly. Finally I told him."

"I see," I said for the third time. As a technique of interrogation, waiting somebody out works more often than you might think. People get nervous. They think you know more than you actually know, and they tell you so they won't look like they're hiding anything. Bubba does a pretty good fat toad.

She began to worry her lower Hp again, with more energy. "I threw the letters in my office wastebasket. On Friday." She shook her head. "Stupid," she muttered. "Why didn't I burn them?"

I agreed with her, because I knew Dottie well enough to believe that those letters—more specifically, the third letter—were irrelevant to Harwick's death. But Bubba didn't know Dottie from Eve. It was my guess that he'd already formulated a theory of the case, and he needed the letters in order to test it. I calculated. If the custodian had picked up Dottie's wastebasket last night, the letters were probably still in plastic bags in the dumpster behind Noah's Ark, waiting for pickup. Or, more likely, Bubba either already had them or was on his way to get them. In which case, he might consider his theory supported, which might lead him to frame his facts into an allegation.

"Do you think ..." She cleared her throat and tried again. "Do you think I should go look for them? I mean, they might still be there, in the dumpster."

"I doubt it," I said. "Chief Harris probably has them already—or soon will. Anyway, it wouldn't be a good idea for you to be seen rooting around in the dumpster. It would look like you had something to hide."

Dottie shifted uncomfortably. "I didn't mean ..." Her voice trailed off and she dropped her eyes.

I phrased my next question carefully, not wanting to lead her. I wanted her to tell me, as accurately as she could remember, the tack Bubba had taken in his questioning. "Did Chief Harris mention anything related to the conditions surrounding Harwick's death?"

"The conditions surrounding—" She fiddled with her purse, trying to decide whether she'd look like a nicotine fiend if she smoked another cigarette. "Well, yes. He asked if I knew of any good reason why Miles would hang himself. Is that what you

Close enough. "What did you say?"

"That I thought Miles did it out of spite." She stopped worrying about appearances and dug out another cigarette. "He was that kind of man, you know. Petty, mean, vindictive, like a little kid. He was always trying to make himself look good by getting other people in trouble." It took two matches to get her cigarette going. "I can certainly imagine somebody killing him—plenty of people had it in for him. But if he wanted to kill himself, it would be just like him to rig it so somebody else got blamed."

That wasn't as bizarre as it sounded. A friend of mine once conducted the defense in a similar case. A man set up his own successful suicide—a barbiturate poisoning—so it looked as if his ex-wife had done it. He gave her everything the cops needed for a murder charge: motive, means, and opportunity. He even left a few helpful clues, all pointing to her, of course. The case was so persuasive that the dead man almost got away with it. It took an appeal to overturn the first guilty verdict.

Dottie laughed harshly. "If Harwick wanted to do it that way, he wouldn't have to try very hard to create a motive. Anybody who served on a committee with the sonofabitch probably wanted to do him in—not to mention the animal rights people." She frowned. "Or maybe one of them actually did it. The animal rights people, I mean. It seems kind of farfetched, but I suppose it isn't out of the realm of possibility."

Dottie didn't seem to have a clear sense of her own danger. "Did the chief want to know anything else?" I asked.

"Just to see my cattery, so I gave him the grand tour. Then he left." She ran a hand over her hair. "He asked me not to leave town without letting him know. Does that mean anything?"

"Not necessarily." The cattery? That was odd. I couldn't imagine Bubba being overly fond of stray cats.

She was going to gnaw that lip raw if she didn't stop. "It's that letter I'm worried about, China. The last one." She hesitated. "To tell the truth, I wrote it."

"I figured that out," I said. Bubba would, too, but not right away. In the meantime, the death threat gave Dottie a convincing motive for murder. It looked as if she had decided to kill Harwick before Harwick killed hen

"You already had the other two threats, which were genuine," I said. "Why did you need a death threat?" I was asking for the record. I already knew that, too.

Dottie looked sheepish. "Actually, I got the idea from you. If I wanted to take legal action against Miles to keep him from harassing me about the cattery, you said I needed more ammunition than the first two letters." She kicked her foot back and forth, back and forth. "I guess I was being pretty childish, huh?"

"Yes," I said, not cutting her any slack. "You were. You know I didn't mean that you should manufacture evidence." I let that soak in for a minute. "But it's already done, and we have to assume that Chief Harris got what he went looking for."

"What should I do?"

I hestitated, considering. Should Dottie tell Bubba what she had done, or wait until he asked? I usually subscribe to the view that it's a bad idea to volunteer incriminating information. But this was different. If Bubba knew that Dottie had written the letter, he'd probably scratch her off as a suspect. Not even a total nincompoop would forge a death threat from a man she was about to murder On the other hand, I couldn't be sure that Bubba had the letters, or even that he suspected Dottie. I came down on the side of waiting. It couldn't hurt.

"For right now, my advice is to sit tight," I said. "Go home, pour yourself a stiff drink, climb in a hot bath, and relax. Sooner or later, you'll have to tell Chief Harris what you did. But let him ask first."

She ran her fingers through her hair, looking frazzled. "I can't go home. I borrowed a friend's truck and I'm on my way to the animal holding facility."

"A truck?" I stared at her. "What/or?"

"I have to pick up the guinea pigs." At my look, she added defensively, "I can't just leave them there to suffer, can I? I dragged Castle down to the basement and made him look at the situation. He admits it's pretty awful. Something has to be done."