Death in a desert garden, p.8
Death in a Desert Garden, page 8
“Don’t worry, you two. Nobody’s after me. If anybody bugs you about it, please let your teacher or the camp director know.” Jessie ran into her arms, and Bea collected Andy into the hug.
She tried to put on a good show of calm and good cheer as she packed their lunches and got them to the camp bus. She pulled into the Shandley parking lot with dread, which increased when she saw the Channel 2 News truck they used for live broadcasts. A big-haired reporter in a very short dress was trying to shove a microphone in Marcia’s face. A cameraman was moving in on her, as well. Marcia backed up a couple of steps and said she was unable to comment on an ongoing investigation. Ethan was standing next to Marcia. When the microphone and camera homed in on him, he was calm and official. “Liz Shandley’s death is a terrible tragedy. The police are doing their best to discover what happened. I have no information for you. We at Shandley will do everything we can to help the police with their investigation.”
The reporter pressed her lips together into a thin line, but then she turned her head towards Bea, who was heading for the front door. She feared the reporter would figure out she must have some official capacity at Shandley, since the place wasn’t yet open to the public. Bea looked over her shoulder. As the reporter was advancing on her, she broke into an almost-run, got to her office in record time, and locked the door. The reporter had apparently stayed outside, trying to get more out of Ethan and Marcia.
She stared out her window at a couple of clouds low on the horizon. Maybe they would turn into something good and wash down this whole sordid mess. The third front-page story that morning said that Tucson had already broken some June temperature records.
There was, of course, a downside to not having volunteers at the Gardens that day. She’d had to cancel the meeting about the patio garden tour, which was only a week away. Ethan wanted it done well. When she turned on her computer, she found that a key tour volunteer was quitting until the murder was solved, because she “didn’t feel safe” being involved with Shandley until then. Two of the prime patio garden owners asked if the tour couldn’t be put off. It probably could, despite the advance publicity and all the arrangements. But an email from her boss dispelled that notion. “WE WILL NOT PUT OFF THE TOUR,” it announced on the subject line. He said that they couldn’t afford to break their contracts with the caterers and the transportation company. “We need the money, Bea. Do what you can to calm everybody down,” he wrote.
But would the public show up for this fundraiser with the Gardens under such a cloud?
Scrolling further through her emails provided an answer for that question. They were now overbooked. Curiosity had probably trumped any fears the customers had. Now Bea just had to make sure they had an event to come to.
Angus stopped by her office. “How’s the party planning business going?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’ll happen.”
“I have visions of us turning into a sort of wedding Disneyland. Not what I got a horticulture degree for. There are other gardens who don’t prostitute themselves this way.”
“Yes, and they have big endowments. Liz didn’t leave us one. Unless there’s one in her will.”
“Don’t count on that. I have to say, I don’t agree with Armando Ramos about much, but I agree with him that Liz should have endowed this place when she turned it public. He seems to hold out hope that this elusive endowment is in her will. I think Ethan has the same hope, but he’s quieter about it.”
“I think you should keep quiet about anything you didn’t like about Liz, Angus.”
He rolled his eyes and left.
Bea sighed. Did Marcia need to know that some people were angry with Liz about not providing an endowment? She could mention it. For all she knew, the whole board felt that way. Although she doubted anybody but the real plant guys, like Ramos and Angus, thought that making money from parties was “prostituting” the place.
But there was no hope of concentrating on work. Someone was shrieking outside Ethan’s office. A woman was yelling, “Look at this, Ethan! In my own courtyard!” Bea opened her door a crack. It was Buffy. With another mosaic, it looked like. Bea opened the door a little wider. Ethan was saying, “It’s all right, Buffy, just put it down, we’ll call the police.” She dropped the thing on the floor, and Ethan pulled her inside his office gently and closed the door. Bea didn’t move until she was sure that Buffy wasn’t going to rush back out. She could hear Ethan’s reassuring tone, if not his words, and Buffy’s gasping breaths were becoming quieter.
Bea walked over to look at the mosaic. Buffy had left it face up, so Bea didn’t have to touch the thing. It was a young Liz again, her face framed by white trumpet-shaped flowers. The kind favored by Georgia O’Keefe, but this was no O’Keefe masterpiece. The flowers looked like they were supposed to be datura, a common plant around Tucson. And a highly toxic one. It had to be the same “artist” who’d made the first mosaic: same one-color Mexican mosaic tile pieces, same plywood backing.
After a few minutes, her phone rang. It was Ethan. He probably didn’t want to leave Buffy for a minute. “Bea, I’m sure you heard Buffy. Would you mind bringing her a cup of tea while we wait for the police?” Marcia must have gone back to the station after that press conference.
“I’d be glad to, Ethan.” Bea would like to do something useful since she clearly wasn’t going to get much done on the fundraiser. She went out to the staff kitchenette and made some Earl Grey in a flowered mug. Buffy must have been really traumatized to bring the mosaic to Ethan instead of calling the cops herself, she thought.
By the time the tea was ready, there was no mosaic in the hallway.
Bea knocked on the cop room door. A faint voice barely recognizable as Buffy’s told her to come in.
“Thank you, Bea, dear,” she said. Her hands shook as she took the mug. She gestured over to the datura mosaic, which was leaning against the wall. “Who do you suppose created this monstrous thing?”
“I wish I could tell you that.”
“Yes,” was all Buffy said, and she looked down at her tea. Bea knew she was being dismissed.
Bea kept her office door open, and she saw Marcia in the hallway. She stuck her head in Bea’s door and said, “Don’t go anywhere. I want to talk to you about this.”
What did that mean?
Marcia knocked on the cop room door and entered. After twenty minutes or so, Buffy emerged. Bea still had her door ajar. “Thanks for the tea, Bea,” she said. She had a little more color in her cheeks, but she still looked terrible. Ethan’s door must have been open, too, because Buffy said, “Ethan, I appreciate the moral support.”
He responded, “Of course,” but she was already headed for the front door off the boardroom. Bea wondered if Buffy was in any shape to drive and if she should follow her, when Marcia pushed into her office without knocking. She looked decidedly annoyed.
“Okay, come talk to me about datura.”
Bea followed her without a word. Marcia shut the cop room door with a bang.
“I think you plant people need to get a life. Roses between the teeth, rose pins, tulip pins, now huge daturas. What’s the deal? I know datura’s poisonous. Everybody around here knows that. We pick up teenagers who experiment with it every year. Usually they come out all right, but a couple of times it’s been fatal. Not only that, Bea; a kid just last week lost his vision for three days after eating the stuff in a salad. So damn it, Bea, what’s the deal with datura in this picture?”
“Well, this isn’t a high-water-use plant. Maybe it’s not about the fight over getting rid of the roses and tulips.” That would be good. It’d get Angus off the hook.
Marcia just looked at her. “So… tell me about datura.”
“Well, obviously, you know it’s a common native plant and it’s very toxic. Different plants have different levels of toxicity, so that makes it especially dangerous to experiment with. It’s also called Devils’ Trumpet and Jimsonweed, which apparently is short for ‘Jamestown weed.’ The Jamestown settlers got high on it. Also, I guess witches used it. And Indian mystics.”
“Great. So, what does it have to do with Liz?”
“Maybe somebody thought she was witchy?”
“Somebody is leading us around by the nose, and I do not like it at all. Whoever it is has done an excellent job of keeping their fingerprints off of everything, too. This thing seems to be made of broken Mexican tiles, like the last one. You said that Maria makes things with tiles?”
“Yes, but she’s in Mexico.”
“We know that. We’ve confirmed it. But we’re going to get a warrant to search Javier’s house.”
“Oh, no!”
“He’s not accused of anything at the moment. But we did find out something interesting when we did some digging about the Shandley property. Did you know that Javier’s family owned the original rancho here? They were homesteaders in the mid-nineteenth century.”
“No, he never mentioned it.”
“Well, you might ask him about it. Like a lot of small farmers, they couldn’t make it when the big Anglo land and cattle companies bought up huge tracts of land. They had to sell out and move to town.”
“You don’t mean Alan Shandley bought out Javier’s family!”
“No, no. There was a huge ranch here in between, from about nineteen-twenty until the place was broken up and sold. Alan bought his forty acres in the fifties. This parcel was where the big landowners had a dude ranch, bringing in Easterners wanting a comfortable Wild West experience.”
“We should have some signage about all this here. People would be interested in the history.”
“Let’s concentrate on this murder, Bea. I just wondered if you’d heard anything about this background story—it’s something board members might want to cover up. Lots of Mexican ranchers weren’t rousted out by simple economics; violence and trickery were sometimes involved.”
“It looks like you’re trying to get me to find more of a motive for Javier to have killed Liz.”
“We’re all just gathering information right now, Bea. Thanks for your help with that. I need to get back to the station with this lovely mosaic.”
This time, Marcia’s thanks didn’t make her feel any better.
She managed to calm down one of the two patio garden homeowners who’d wanted out. She’d work on the other one, a fidgety older woman, the next day. Except she couldn’t. She had to go to Phoenix for a botanical garden meeting. Damn.
Bea had a very bad rest of her day. The day camp had a lice epidemic, and some were found in Jessie’s hair. Bea was instructed to buy lice shampoo, shampoo both kids with it, wash anything that had touched Jessie’s head, and ABSOLUTELY NOT send the kids back unless she was sure they were clean. She spent the evening combing dead lice and nits out of Jessie’s hair.
When the kids were finally in bed, Frank called, and she told him not to come over.
“Bea, did you read the obit in the morning paper?” he asked.
“No, but I heard about it. Liz was quite the charity queen, I guess. Ethan was surprised at all the groups she belonged to. He’s probably worried that she’s going to give to the symphony or the arts council instead of to us. In her will, I mean.”
“Yeah. But she went to Davenport School!”
“What on earth difference does that make? That’s her prep school, right? Some horsey place?” Frank was the last person Bea had expected to be impressed by prep-school lineage. They hadn’t gotten to the high-school stories part of their courtship yet. If it was a courtship.
But it turned out he had a good reason for mentioning the prep school. “Bea, my mother went to Davenport!”
“Your point is?”
“She’s about Liz’s age, I think. Mom graduated from high school in the early fifties. She had me pretty late in life.”
“Well, that’s about right, probably. Ethan told me that the obit said Liz was eighty years old. And Angus told me that earlier. She sure didn’t look it.” Then Bea realized Frank’s enthusiasm could get out of hand. “If you talk to your mother, just tell her that Liz died, okay? Not that somebody killed her.”
“Bea, did you forget? I’m going back to Virginia for a few days. Leaving Friday. It’s my mom’s seventy-seventh birthday.”
“Oh. Yes, I guess I forgot.” Bea felt oddly crestfallen about this. She’d just proved to herself how little she knew him, after all. He’d told her a little more of his biography than she’d gotten from her friend the study partner: he was getting by on freelance journalism and grant writing while he was working on a novel. He was close to his mother; and his father, who’d been prominent in Virginia politics, had died young… at sixty. Frank had sounded sheepish when he said that he’d gone to medical school to honor his father, but that had been a “wrong turn.” She loved the fact that even though the desert was new to Frank, he was enchanted by it. He wasn’t even complaining about the June heat as much as some natives did. All that was a plus. But she had to admit that what she most appreciated was his comforting presence in the middle of all this craziness. She imagined him in her mind’s eye. His curly black hair was already growing a bit gray around the ears. He wasn’t tall, really just a few inches taller than she was. Okay, they were both short. But he was solid, and muscular. He was religious about going to the gym, she knew, and it showed. His long-lashed brown eyes looked at her with sympathy. He was reassuring, that’s what Frank was.
And so she asked him for reassurance. “Frank, please don’t tell your mom that this is about a murder.”
“Sure. I’ll say a good friend’s board president died, and I thought Mom might know her.”
“Okay.” A good friend, huh. Interesting. I wouldn’t have gone that far in describing our relationship, but I like it. I do like it that he said that.
“By the way, Bea, I think I ran into Myron Shandley today. I was at that all-you-can-eat diner on South Campbell. There was a guy at the next table with a receding hairline, sixtyish, tall, kind of pale and flabby.”
“That could be Myron.”
The restaurant owner came running up to apologize that it had taken so long for this guy to get his bill. He came in when I did, and I hadn’t gotten mine either, by the way. The owner kept saying, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Shandley, I’m happy to comp you.” Mr. Shandley hesitated, but just then the waiter showed up with the bill, and the guy paid it, with a flourish. The owner was all over himself with thanks.”
“Yeah, it sounds like Myron. In more ways than one.”
“He does seem to think a lot is due him.” He hesitated a moment. “Listen, Bea, I know you’re tired, but I did find out something else.”
“What now?”
“I found an article about the Vargases from a few years ago, when they won a Chamber of Commerce award. Alicia’s family has been here for a long time, since the late eighteen-hundreds. They were one of the most successful middle-class business families of their day. Do you remember a furniture store called Escalante’s?”
“Yeah, it didn’t go out of business that long ago.”
“Exactly. So, Alicia’s family ‘made it’ in the greater community long ago. Raoul Vargas’s family members were successful restaurateurs, but only in South Tucson. They didn’t break into the circle of big time Tucson businesses. But Alicia and Raoul created restaurants that are putting Tucson on the national gastronomic map, as you know.”
“Frank, as you mentioned, I’m exhausted. What is the point of this bit of history?”
“Well, the article mentioned that they had successfully sued to allow Hispanics into the Cactus Club. Even if Alicia’s family’s businesses were patronized by Tucson’s elite, they didn’t want to integrate the Cactus Club until she and Raoul pushed it.”
“I still don’t see why you’re telling me all of this.”
“Because I looked up that lawsuit, just for the hell of it. The primary Cactus Club antagonists to this lawsuit were Alan and Liz Shandley.”
Bea’s head was starting to hurt. “So, you think Alicia could have killed her as payback for that now?”
“Bea, I have no idea. It was interesting. Use it or not as you see fit.”
“I do not see fit. And I need to go to sleep, Frank. I need to get off the phone. I have to drive to Phoenix tomorrow.”
“Sorry to hear that, Bea. Whatever for?”
“There’s a meeting of botanical garden educators up there. I just hope we don’t get big winds again.”
“Take care of yourself, Bea.”
She said she would, but she was a little curt in her goodbye. Maybe that wasn’t fair; he seemed to be trying to help. But now she knew that the Vargases had sued the Shandleys twice; once over the eviction, and once over the Cactus Club policies.
Maybe it wasn’t such a good deal that she and Marcia had been childhood friends. She didn’t like a lot of the information she was accumulating.
CHAPTER NINE
It was already eighty-five and pre-monsoon muggy when Bea shoveled the kids into the car to go to the bus stop. They’d gotten up extra early so Bea could check their hair again for lice. Andy was clean, and after a few minutes of combing Bea sincerely hoped that her little girl was completely nit-free.
Anvil-shaped thunderheads were already forming on the horizon. This would be encouraging, except that there was only a twenty percent chance of rain. Usually they’d have to go through days of this, with the humidity rising every day before it poured. And even people not involved in a murder investigation were on edge at this time of year.
Couldn’t this horrible investigation have happened in the winter, when Tucson’s weather couldn’t be beat, and people walked around smiling, smugly mentioning emails from relatives struggling with shoveling snow on dark northern afternoons? No, it would be worse in winter. There would be even more people interested in Shandley’s crisis.
