22
I STOPPED AT THE EEGEE'S ON NORTH ORACLE ROAD, PARKED Priscilla and went in. I was in luck. Sherry Kibble, Emily Rose's sixteen-year-old daughter, was working. After ordering a lemon eegee's, only the best frosted drink in the entire world, I asked to use the phone, figuring the refrigerated restaurant was a much better choice than melting into the pavement outside using the pay phone.
After dialing my number and punching in the remote code, I accessed my answering machine. The first message was from Charley Bell, again asking how I was getting along with my new computer. A feeling of embarrassment washed over me since I really hadn't had time to get acquainted with the damned thing. The second message was from Peter Van Thiessen, who said that he'd be at the Brave Bull all afternoon and if I wanted to come up any time before eight this evening, he'd be there.
I grabbed my drink off the counter and headed out the door.
We sat in the great room sipping ginger ale and for the last few minutes had been making small talk, over the soft music that was playing. Peter was wearing a short-sleeved purple Brave Bull polo shirt and white shorts that set off his smooth, tanned legs. In fact they were so smooth that I wondered if he shaved them. I knew that swimmers did that, but did marathon runners do it too?
Outside the window I could see José Covarrubias brushing down the walls of the swimming pool with a long-handled metal pole.
“Looks like you've been getting some sun,” I said.
“I've been running like a madman. Taking advantage of the dry heat.” He smiled.
I wondered if he'd ever been running in the Baboquivaris. The lawyer and Clarice Martínez had both assured me that Peter was a very wealthy man in his own right. Plus he didn't stand to inherit any money from his half-sister. So why would he want to kill her? While I couldn't discount the possibility, I saw no need to bait him.
“I visited Lateef Wise this afternoon at the Church of Brotherly Love.”
“Church of Brotherly Rip-Off, you mean.” Van Thiessen snorted.
“He seems to have been genuinely fond of your sister.”
“Why not? She was his ATM machine.”
“It sounds like you suspect him.”
“It's certainly within the realm of possibility, don't you think?”
I nodded. “Do you have any other candidates for me?”
“You mean, I presume, other than the obvious?”
“The obvious?”
“Come on.” He was smiling, but it was a hard smile.
“I'm thinking.” I wasn't going to say it and I was right, I didn't have long to wait.
“J.B.”
“You think J.B. killed Abby?”
“Like Dr. Jesus, I think there's a distinct possibility.”
“You don't think much of him, then?”
“Think? Sure I think about him a lot. I see a down-and-out cowboy who charmed the socks off a woman who was thirty-two years his senior. That boy hit the mother lode.”
“But that doesn't make him a murderer.”
“Don't worry, I haven't forgotten who your client is.”
“It's no secret that J.B. has retained me, but that retainer doesn't preclude me from disclosing the truth, whatever that may be.”
“That preclusion would still be your choice.”
“Yes.”
“And if you found he was implicated?”
“As you said, my choice.” I smiled and drained my ginger ale. “But in order to move on, I've got to ask some hard questions first.” I hesitated a moment to let this sink in. “Like, did Abby do drugs?”
He laughed. “You didn't know my sister well, did you?”
He was right about that. I shook my head.
“She considered her body a temple, a violated one to be sure, all that business with the liposuction, the face lifts—three that I knew of—the tummy tucks and eyelid nips. The only drugs she took were vitamins. Fistsful.”
My mind flashed to the yummy cinnamon rolls that Gloria Covarrubias had been baking and to the lump of fat that Sanders had found in the campfire. Apparently J.B. hadn't shared his wife's diet.
“Your sister drank?”
“Sure she drank. But not excessively. She'd have one or two cocktails in an evening and she did like her Baileys before bed.”
“And J.B.?”
He cocked his head, listening to the music. I felt that maybe he was lost in it, instead of paying attention to our conversation.
“What?”
“And J.B.?”
“Moderately?”
“As far as I know.”
I returned to the drugs. “Did she ever take Prozac that you knew of?”
“The antidepressant?” He looked startled.
“I'm sure the police will be contacting you.” I was surprised that they hadn't already called. “But they found Prozac.”
While I was willing to give up the Prozac, I kept my mouth shut about the ketamine. Until the police approached him I couldn't volunteer it. Em had given me the ketamine information confidentially. If the police were truly interested in it, they'd have to find probable cause to get a search warrant and that could take time. In the meantime if I tipped their hand, Em could lose her job and I could lose my license and the case could lose its implicating drug.
“I don't get it.” He looked genuinely puzzled. “Why would Abby take Prozac? What was she depressed about?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“We didn't talk all that often, Trade. I think the last time was a couple of weeks before her … death. But she didn't mention anything being wrong and didn't seem upset at all. And she sure didn't mention anything about taking Prozac.”
“Do you mind if we take a look?”
“Not at all.”
As we got up I saw José walk away from the pool.
I followed Peter through a long series of hallways into the back of the house. We passed through Abby's sitting room, past her French provincial desk and into a cavernous marble bathroom. The top wall above her marbled vanity was all mirror with no sign of a medicine cabinet anywhere.
Peter was opening the vanity drawers when Ramona, the maid, came in.
“May …I… help …you …sir?” Her speech was very slow, deliberate and not quite right.
“Oh, Ramona. Abby's medicines, where are they?”
“Med …i…cines,” the girl repeated. It was obvious to me that she was slow. She thought about this for a long minute and then her face lit up. “Oh!”
She reached for a lacquered Japanese cabinet on top of the sink and opened the top like a wooden basket. Inside were nestled a horde of vitamin pills—E, C, selenium, B complex, calcium, D, zinc, ginkgo biloba, kelp lecithin, shark cartilage and one amber plastic bottle with a white label. Peter handed it to me.
There were two pills inside. The label identified the contents as Prozac and indicated that the prescription was available for a refill. The doctor's name was Samuel Mullon.
I copied the name and phone number on my pad.
We continued searching the bathroom, but other than a myriad amount of skin toners, tighteners, retin A, cosmetics, masks, lotions and oils we found no other drugs. Certainly nothing resembling the veterinary drug ketamine.
Back downstairs we settled back into our chairs. I noticed that our soda glasses had been refilled in our absence.
“I wonder what she was depressed about,” Peter mused. “It couldn't have been money.”
“Were your sister and J.B. getting along?”
“She didn't confide her marital issues in me.”
“But as far as you knew, there weren't any problems there?”
“Unfortunately not.” Peter made no bones about not liking the match his sister had made.
I didn't mention the bruising that had shown up in the autopsy report. He'd find out soon enough and if he wanted to jump to conclusions about J.B.'s relationship with his sister he could do so then.
“Yes. She was always on top of that.”
Money. Marriage. Health. The Big Three that usually drove people to depression, or worse. While Clarice had already told me about Abby's suspicions of J.B.'s fidelity, I wasn't going to share that with Abby's brother either. At least not yet.
On my way out of the house, I purposely went through the kitchen in the hope that I would find Gloria Covarrubias. I wasn't disappointed.
Her wedding ring and gloves sat on the sink as she buried her hands in a huge bowl of ground beef mixed with what looked like egg, cracker crumbs and spices. As her hands kneaded the mixture I was struck at how easily they blended in with the pink hamburger. I guessed meat loaf or meatballs for supper.
“Hello, Gloria,” I said as I placed my empty ginger ale glass on the counter.
“Afternoon.”
“Do you know where I can find José?”
She gave me a dark glance, thought a minute and then nodded her head in the direction of the back door.
“He's finished with the pool and is probably doing one of the cars.”
I thanked her and continued out, wondering if she knew everyone's schedule as precisely as she knew her husband's.
I found José Covarrubias on a paved patch of driveway near the adobe four-car garage, a chamois cloth in one hand, a jar of Simonize in the other. The object of his attention, a silver Lexus muddy from the wax application, sat between us.
“I'm sorry I missed you the other day.”
He offered nothing, gave no excuse for standing me up.
“I'm investigating Abigail Van Thiessen's death,” I said, after introducing myself. He continued buffing the car.
“Yes, my wife told me.”
“The police suspect that she may have been murdered.”
“I don't know nothing about that,” he said, his eyes cast downward as he rubbed the Lexus.
“I'm wondering if you noticed anything unusual about Abby recently, anything at all.”
“Unusual?”
“You know, did she seem depressed about anything, down in the dumps? Did her routine change?”
“No.” Where José's wife had accused me of putting words in her mouth, her husband seemed reluctant to put any in his own. Still, I had to wonder why he had disappeared before my last visit when we were supposed to meet. Had there been a reason?
“Maybe she had a health problem?” I prodded.
My inquiry was met with silence.
A shadow fell across the car and we both looked up to find the maid, Ramona Miller.
“Hello, José,” she said, her eyes glittering with excitement.
“Ramona.”
I waited but the maid said nothing, nor did the chauffeur, so I continued my questions.
“So there were no health problems that you know of?”
“No.”
“Drop … things.” Ramona said.
“What?”
“She …drop things,” she repeated.
José kept polishing, seemingly oblivious to the maid's revelation.
“Ramona, I don't understand. What do you mean she dropped things? Was she canceling appointments?”
She picked up the lid to the can of wax and dropped it onto the hot asphalt. “Drop things.”
“Abigail was dropping things?” I asked, not quite getting it. “What kind of things?”
“Glass …” She pointed to her empty earlobe. “Ear …ring.”
“So Abby was dropping glasses and earrings?”
The girl nodded enthusiastically.
“José, did you notice Abby dropping things?”
“No.”
He was a real chatterbox, this one.
“No glasses, earrings?”
“No.”
“And there wasn't anything different about her?”
“No.”
“She was happy as far as you knew?”
“Happy?” He looked puzzled. “I guess so.”
“Ramona?”
The girl nodded. “Happy.”
“And J.B. was happy?”
They looked at one another then and while Ramona nodded, José shrugged his shoulders.
“You don't think that J.B. was happy?” I asked Covarrubias.
He shrugged again. “It's not for me to say.”
“Was there a problem of some kind?” I zeroed in for the kill.
“She was an old woman, he was a young man.” Since I'd pegged Gloria to be about fifteen years younger than her husband, clearly José did not understand the attraction that J.B. had for Abby. Briefly, I wondered if the words two hundred million dollars meant anything to him.
I continued on in this vein, asking more pointed questions about J.B. and Abby, but got nowhere. Ramona, who had started out very chatty, leaned against the Lexus and twirled strands of her hair around her fingers. José reverted to his Silent Sam routine.
“Ramona, will you show me to the corrals?”
“Show corrals,” she repeated and trotted ahead of me.
When we got to the corral path she started to turn back to the house when I stopped her.
“I understand that you overheard an argument between J.B. and Abby, is that right?”
“That right.”
“What were they fighting about, can you tell me?” I was speaking very slowly, hoping that she would be able to understand my words.
Her hands went up chatting in pantomime motion as her lips moved silently. Then she took a fist and pounded her heart.
“One of them hit the other one?” I guessed.
She shook her head. “Hot …broken.”
I thought about this a minute.
“Abby said that J.B. was breaking her heart?”
She grinned and nodded.
“Ramona, this is important. Do you know why Abby thought he was breaking her heart?”
“Joe …Tee.”
With this confirmation I left her.
As I walked down to the corrals I found myself wondering why Abby was dropping things. Did it mean anything?