When Robert Hanover died at the hands of his mistress, everyone grieved, but no one worried.
Jack Mercer, a former Texas Ranger turned private investigator, wasn’t satisfied that the woman charged with the crime was the murderer.
The case brought him up against the past, not only Hanover’s, but his own, as he was forced to consider a variety of suspects, one of them the woman he hadn’t seen for nine years. A woman who still fascinated him, despite his suspicions.
The last person Hope Smith wanted to see was Jack Mercer, especially since she still felt guilty about their relationship. Plus, he’d brought murder into her life and her quiet subdivision.
Was one of her friends a murderer?
Kindle
Nook
Paperback
Jack Mercer, a former Texas Ranger turned private investigator, wasn’t satisfied that the woman charged with the crime was the murderer.
The case brought him up against the past, not only Hanover’s, but his own, as he was forced to consider a variety of suspects, one of them the woman he hadn’t seen for nine years. A woman who still fascinated him, despite his suspicions.
The last person Hope Smith wanted to see was Jack Mercer, especially since she still felt guilty about their relationship. Plus, he’d brought murder into her life and her quiet subdivision.
Was one of her friends a murderer?
Kindle
Nook
Paperback
CHAPTER 1
Texas was a woman. Her neck was straight at the panhandle, her stomach taut at Houston. Her bosom was Dallas, her navel Austin, and her feet firmly planted in the boot at Brownsville, but her nether regions belonged to San Antonio.
The city was ranked seventh in the country in population, and number one for a lot of reasons the Chamber of Commerce didn’t boast about: the amount of drugs traveling on her elevated highways from Mexico to points north, and cockroaches big enough to name, leash, and keep as pets.
On the North side, they were called water bugs. In the ritzy Dominion, they called them Palmetto Bugs, capitalized as if they were as special as the inhabitants. Here, on the South side, they were just cockroaches, and one skittered across the porch and over Jack Mercer’s shoe as he waited for his knock to be answered. He shook it off his foot, then did a quick two step when the damn thing circled back around and aimed for him again.
The woman who opened the door looked too innocent to be going on trial for murder in a few weeks. She had the fresh face of a sixteen year old and the clear eyes of someone who’d only imagined sin. Her glossy brown hair was pulled back in a pony tail, further emphasizing the schoolgirl appearance. Her top, however, was snug, advertising a popular local Tejano band, and her blue jeans were tight, both garments revealing a shapely figure.
An Hispanic Lolita - except she wasn’t. He knew, from her file, that she was twenty-seven.
“Miss Gutierrez? Yolanda Gutierrez?”
She nodded, putting the ponytail into bounce mode.
“I’m Jack Mercer,” he said, handing her his card. “Thank you for agreeing to meet me.”
She took his card reluctantly, holding it by the edges as if it were a photograph and she was afraid to smudge it.
“My lawyer said I had to.”
He’d been told he had a charming smile, and he used it now. Yolanda Gutierrez wasn’t charmed.
“I’m here to help you, Ms. Gutierrez.” A warm, conciliatory tone, the same one he’d used when talking to domestic abuse victims in the past.
After a moment, she stepped back, allowing him into the house. He stepped over the threshold, making sure the cockroach was still on the porch and hadn't caught a ride on the bottom of his pants.
The living room was small, furnished in pieces that were clean but worn, as if she’d inherited them from her parents. The couch was a pale green chenille kind of material, brightened by small red sequined pillows reminding him of Native American patterns. The coffee table was bare except for a box of tissue, and a small green chair near the window was partnered with a rectangular table and lamp. On the other side of the room was a massive flat screen TV, so glaringly out of place he wondered if it had been a present from the victim.
Carne guisada perfumed the air; the spicy odor inciting eagerness in his taste buds. His breakfast had been toast and coffee in penance for tacos the night before.
He smiled again, the smile of an understanding cop. It’s okay, ma’am, you’re not in any trouble. Just tell me what you know and it’ll be fine. Drug dealers weren’t all that intelligent and most of them had believed him.
This time, Yolanda returned the smile weakly. He sat when she waved him into the green chair and waited for her to join him. Finally, she perched on the arm of the couch, poised there as if she’d fly off any moment.
“Have you lived here long?” he asked.
“It’s my sister’s house,” she said. “I couldn’t afford the apartment Bobby got me."
If the jury found her guilty, she wouldn’t be needing a job for quite some time.
“Is your sister here?”
She shook her head. “She’s at work. She’s always at work,” she said, sliding his card back and forth between her hands, curling the edges.
When she didn’t say anything else, he went into his public defender spiel. “I’ve been retained by your attorney to provide background information about Mr. Hanover’s death.”
In other words, furnish Carol something she might be able to use to defend her. Right now, it looked like Yolanda was going to jail, innocent looking or not.
She shook her head, eyes on the floor. “I didn’t kill Bobby,” she said, looking over at him, her large brown eyes filled with misery.
He’d been in law enforcement long enough not to believe tears, especially those shed so long after the fact. Robert Hanover had been murdered last year, but the court system was overcrowded, resulting in Yolanda's trial date being reset at least four times.
“How did you meet Mr. Hanover?”
“My sister,” she said. “I picked her up from work and he was there.”
Jack sat back in the chair, patient.
“He asked for my number and I gave it to him. He kept calling. For weeks. Then, one day he asked me to lunch.”
“Did you know he was married?”
While she hesitated, he took his notebook from his inside breast pocket but kept it closed.
“He told me right away. His wife is sick,” she said. “With the Alzheimer’s.”
He waited.
“He didn’t try anything. Not like the other guys I dated who were all grabby hands.” She made a closing and opening gesture with her left hand.
“He was lonely,” she said. She sighed again, deep enough to make her melon-sized breasts shimmy. Jack looked, admired, then glanced down at his notebook.
“For the first two or three months, all we did was talk.”
“When did it change?”
At her blank look, he expanded. “When did your relationship change?”
“He was pissed I had to work late a few times.” She shrugged. “I worked at the SavRite on O’Connor. He wanted me to quit.” She shrugged again, giving Jack the impression that the finer details of being a mistress had been smoothed over by Robert Hanover, a man thirty years older and wiser in the ways of the world.
“How long did you date him?”
“For about six months,” she said, smoothing her hands down on her jeans. “Then he got me my apartment. I lived there for a year.”
“Did you see him every day?”
“We talked every day. He only came over on Monday and Thursday.”
She could have had another life, one beyond Hanover’s knowledge. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Jack opened his notebook and jotted the information down, closing the notebook as soon as he finished. Interview subjects often fixated on what he was writing rather than what they were telling him, so he minimized the time spent taking notes.
“Did you ever give him an ultimatum? Tell him it was marriage or nothing?”
She stared hard at his card as if to memorize it. “I loved him. I didn’t want him to go away.”
“So you thought if you gave him an ultimatum he would? Go away?”
“He loved his wife. He wouldn’t divorce her.”
“How do you know?” he asked. “Did you ever talk about divorce with him?”
She shook her head. “He loved his wife.”
A few moments were spent in silent tribute to the sterling character of the deceased.
“The toxicology report indicates he was poisoned,” Jack finally said. “Oleander poisoning.”
She nodded again.
He let the moments tick by but she remained mute.
“The report says the poison was in capsules he ingested prior to his death. Pills he swallowed.”
She nodded once more, but didn’t offer any additional information.
“Can you tell me about that night? The night he died.”
He offered up a compassionate smile, but she was staring at the TV, tuned to some game show where people were jumping up and down after winning some pots and pans. He wondered if they knew they’d have to pay taxes on all the loot they hauled home.
“He had some new pills, he said. Something like Viagra.” She looked over at him. “The doctor wouldn’t give him Viagra because his heart stuttered.”
“Stuttered?”
“That’s what Bobby called it. Sometimes, it would skip a beat.”
“Tell me about the pills.”
“He said they would help him.” She looked at her shoes, high top sneakers. High School Lolita. “He had a little trouble getting it up.”
He hoped she didn’t go into Robert Hanover’s erection issues, but he remained silent.
“I told him he didn’t need them,” she said, glancing at him. “I didn’t need the sex. I told him that. I just liked to cuddle.”
“But he took them anyway.”
She nodded.
“How do you know they weren’t a prescription?”
She shrugged. “They looked like the ones in vitamins and stuff. You know, the ones you buy at the drugstore. Viagra’s blue, isn’t it?”
“Did you ever sell any of those pills? When you worked at the drugstore?”
The question seemed to take her aback. She stared at him a few moments, then shrugged again. “I might have. I was a cashier. I didn’t care what people bought.”
“About what time did he take the pills?”
She clasped her hands together, moving from the arm of the couch to the middle cushion.
“He came over about eight,” she said.
He was beginning to understand why Carol was a little frustrated with her client. Yolanda might be a well of information, but she doled it out a drop at a time. He clamped a lid on his impatience and smiled the good cop smile again.
“Was that usual for him?”
She nodded. “Sometimes. If he had a lot of work, it would be later, like an hour or so. He had some car dealerships, you know.”
Robert Hanover had sixteen dealerships throughout Texas. He wasn’t hurting for money.
“Did he take the pills right away?”
She stared at the TV again as if remembering that night. “I made him nachos. He liked my nachos.” Her eyes grew a little teary, and he fervently hoped she didn’t start to cry.
“He had a beer,” she said, naming a brand Hanover liked, “and we went into the bedroom, and he told me about the pills.”
“Did he take the pills then?”
She shook her head. “I tried to talk him out of taking them. I really did. I didn’t need sex with Bobby.” She jiggled again.
Robert Hanover wasn’t made of stone. Good to know.
“About what time was this?”
She blinked several times. “Nine? Nine thirty? No, it was about ten, because the news had started. Bobby didn’t like to watch the local news. He liked the cable shows.”
“So he took the pills around ten?”
She nodded.
“How many?”
“Two, I think.”
“What happened next?”
She remained silent for several minutes, then took up the story again. “Then we started to kiss and stuff,” she said, one tear spilling over and falling down her cheek. “Then he just started to shake.”
He reached over and handed her the box of tissues from the coffee table. She stared at him with wide eyes but didn’t take it. He set it down in front of her.
“I loved him,” she said. “I didn’t kill him, but the police think I did. Do you?”
He smiled, the empathetic notification of next of kin smile. “It’s not important what I think,” he said. “I’m just here to gather facts for your attorney.”
Yolanda leaned forward, pulled a tissue free, blotting at the corners of both eyes. “He got really pale, and then he started throwing up, and he just fell on the floor and wouldn’t move. I called 911, and when they came, they told me he probably had a heart attack.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said. He didn’t smile this time, and his words were genuine.
“They didn’t even cover him up all the way. Bobby would’ve hated people knowing he was naked.”
After blotting her face, she blew her nose, balling up the tissues and dropping them on the coffee table.
“I went to the hospital, but then I realized they might have called Bobby’s daughter. I didn’t want to embarrass him, so I left. I didn’t even get a chance to give his family his wallet.”
“His wallet?”
She nodded. “I gave the police his clothes and things. He was naked when EMS took him.”
“Why didn’t you turn the wallet over to the police?”
She blinked at him several times. “Bobby always put it in the end table by the bed. I didn’t even find it. My sister did.” She began to tear up again. “They only wanted to know if I gave Bobby the pills. I kept telling them that I didn’t, but they didn’t believe me.”
“Where’s the wallet now?” Jack asked.
“In storage, along with my stuff. My sister boxed it up. I couldn’t stop crying long enough to do anything.” She looked at him, her eyes huge and round with tears. “I didn’t even know Bobby died until the next morning. Nobody told me.” Another sob, another round of blowing her nose. “When they came to my apartment, I just kept crying.”
When the toxicology report came through, the police had showed up on Yolanda’s doorstep. He knew that much from her file.
She stared down at the discarded tissues sitting like so many snowballs on the scarred wood surface of the coffee table.
“Who kills someone with a plant?” she asked, turning red eyes to him.
He didn’t have an answer for that.
“I don’t want to go to jail again,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve never been to jail before, and none of my family’s ever been to jail. I don’t want to go back.”
“You have a good attorney,” he said. “Carol Thompson is a well-respected public defender.”
She only nodded.
He could understand why Hanover had picked Yolanda. She was big bosomed and slim hipped, her face slightly exotic, her brown eyes so dark they appeared black. She had a gentleness about her, a fragility that made Jack want to comfort her before his mind kicked in.
“My sister gave the bail bondsman this house,” she said.
“She won’t lose it unless you don’t show up for trial.”
She nodded again.
“Is there anyone you can think of who’d want to harm Mr. Hanover?”
Tears looked imminent again, so he pushed the box of tissue closer with one finger.
“No,” she said. “He was the sweetest, kindest man.”
“Was anything bothering him?” Jack asked. “Anything troubling him he might have confided in to you?”
“Just his wife,” she said. “She was really sick.”
“Was he in the habit of discussing his wife’s illness with you?”
“Sometimes. It was hard on him. Bobby said she didn’t even know what day it was. How’s a man supposed to feel when his wife didn’t even know him?”
He didn’t want to go into how Hanover treated his wife, so he pushed the conversation in another direction.
“How about you, Yolanda? How’ve you been since he died?”
She looked surprised at the question. “Fine,” she said.
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“Like Bobby?”
“Yes,” he said, “like Bobby.”
She shook her head.
“Is there anything else you think I should know?”
She shook her head again.
“Anything you didn’t tell the police?”
“No.”
He pulled out another card as he stood, handing it to her.
“Could I take a look at Robert’s belongings?” he asked. “If you’d like, I can get them back to his family.”
He expected to have to convince her, but Yolanda didn’t have any objection to him going to where her belongings were stored. She even gave him the combination to the lock on the unit, leaving him feeling that she definitely needed an older and wiser mentor.
“What happens now?” she asked, following him to the door.
He went into his public defender spiel again. “Your attorney will be contacting you about any further developments.”
“I didn’t kill him,” she said, beginning to cry again. “I miss him all the time.”
He patted her awkwardly on the upper arm and said goodbye at the door, relieved the interview was over.
On the way to his truck, he called Carol.
“What do you think?” she asked, sounding hurried and harassed as usual. Public Defenders lived in a perpetual whirlwind until burnout had them changing career paths or sometimes leaving the law entirely. Carol had stuck it out for a decade.
“I’m sure the prosecution is going to say she was capable of doing it. Means, opportunity, but I don't have motive,” he said, opening the door of his truck.
Carol sighed. “What do you think?”
“I don’t think she did it,” he said. “But that’s just an educated guess without proof. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
He didn’t even bother to ask her if she could afford him. He knew her budget wouldn’t cover more than a day or two of work billed by his office. This was a favor for his mother and they both knew it.
“I’ll pull all the loose threads. Do you want a daily report? Or when I’ve finished my investigation?”
“I’ll leave that up to you,” she said. “Just remember, Yolanda’s trial is coming up pretty damn fast. And right now I have nothing, absolutely nothing. She had the opportunity.”
“And the means,” he said. “Have you seen how many oleander plants are growing around here? All she needs to do is to take a couple of the flowers and leaves and let them dry naturally. Dried oleander doesn’t lose any of its toxic properties.”
“Geez, thanks, now I feel all better.”
“Say hi to Mom,” he said.
“Say hi yourself. Call your mother, Jack.”
“Whenever I talk to her, she gives me another case. At this rate, I’ll be bankrupt by the end of the year.”
“That’s not what I hear,” she said, laughing. “Think of it this way, a little pro bono is good for the soul.”
Fifteen minutes later, he pulled into the Ready Storage on Fredericksburg Road, and located Yolanda’s storage unit, one with an entrance like a garage door.
The place had a ripe musty smell, as if a mouse had sought a respite from the heat in the summer months and found death, instead. He searched for a light switch, found it mounted on the cinder block on the right side and switched it on. A single bulb illuminated an area the size of his current bedroom.
Furniture was draped with sheets; the mattress was covered with a zippered plastic envelope. Bankers boxes filled with Yolanda’s possessions were stacked up against the far end of the storage unit, each box labeled with both the contents and a number. Evidently, Yolanda’s sister was on the anal retentive side, an advantage for him.
Pulling on a pair of plastic gloves, the kind that made his hands wet in little more than a minute, he began to search. Ignoring the boxes labeled clothing, he set aside three boxes to examine a little further. The first two held the contents of the dresser and the bottom of the closet. The third box intrigued him. All Yolanda’s sister had written was: Personal.
After cutting through the tape with his penknife, he slowly begin to remove the contents, placing them on the top of three boxes he’d stacked together to form a table. Personal turned out to be a collection of dildos and video porn.
A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.
The bottom of the closet box held three pairs of shoes, a modest selection of purses, and ten empty skirt hangers. However, he began to reassess Yolanda Gutierrez when he opened the third box, the one labeled contents of the dresser. Inside a plastic bag were a man’s wallet. The most surprising fact wasn’t that the man’s wallet belonged to Robert Hanover, but that it contained seven hundred twenty-two dollars in cash.
Either Yolanda hadn’t opened it or she hadn’t taken the money because she realized it would’ve been stealing. Not the actions of a woman who would deliberately poison another human being.
The wallet was filled with pictures of Hanover with a woman roughly the same age. His wife? The formal poses managed to convey contentment. Behind the driver’s license, he found one of Hanover’s business cards, with a notation on the back: talk to LB about Alice.
Shaking out a plastic evidence bag he’d carried into the storage room, he put Hanover’s wallet into it. The card he stuck into his own wallet.
A car desperately in need of an engine overhaul lingered in front of the opposite storage unit, sending a cloud of white noxious exhaust in his direction. He lowered the door, wondering if this was how the mouse died. By pollution, not starvation.
Before he left the storage room, he went through the other boxes, just in case. He even examined the one labeled pots and pans. Her sister had boxed up Yolanda’s spices, and he opened each bottle. None was dried oleander.
In the end, he didn’t find a bottle of herbal Viagra. Maybe the sister, who’d been so embarrassed about the sex toys, had thrown out the bottle. However, if she’d done that, she would probably have thrown out the dildos and tapes.
Yolanda said that Robert brought the pills with him, and after the discovery of the cash in Hanover’s wallet, Jack was inclined to believe in her honesty. Where was the bottle?
Just one of the questions yet to be answered.
He opened the door, locked it again, and climbed into his truck. He scanned his laptop for Yolanda’s number and called her.
“What happened to Hanover’s car?” he asked, jiggling the keys on one finger. “You said you didn’t see any members of the family, right?”
“It was gone the next day,” she said. “I just thought they came and got it.”
Someone not only knew Hanover was having an affair, but where his mistress lived.
“And the bottle of pills? Did you give those to EMS?”
“I never saw a bottle.”
He frowned at the dash. “But you saw the pills.”
“Bobby had them in his pocket, wrapped in a tissue.”
He hung up, sat back, then scanned the witness statements in the case file, annoyed when he didn’t find all that many. Sometimes, a simple canvas of the victim’s neighborhood could turn up other clues. Evidently, it hadn’t been done.
The San Antonio Police Department was overworked, but their homicide clearance rate was pretty damn good. Had Yolanda been the perfect suspect?
Or just the easiest?
Texas was a woman. Her neck was straight at the panhandle, her stomach taut at Houston. Her bosom was Dallas, her navel Austin, and her feet firmly planted in the boot at Brownsville, but her nether regions belonged to San Antonio.
The city was ranked seventh in the country in population, and number one for a lot of reasons the Chamber of Commerce didn’t boast about: the amount of drugs traveling on her elevated highways from Mexico to points north, and cockroaches big enough to name, leash, and keep as pets.
On the North side, they were called water bugs. In the ritzy Dominion, they called them Palmetto Bugs, capitalized as if they were as special as the inhabitants. Here, on the South side, they were just cockroaches, and one skittered across the porch and over Jack Mercer’s shoe as he waited for his knock to be answered. He shook it off his foot, then did a quick two step when the damn thing circled back around and aimed for him again.
The woman who opened the door looked too innocent to be going on trial for murder in a few weeks. She had the fresh face of a sixteen year old and the clear eyes of someone who’d only imagined sin. Her glossy brown hair was pulled back in a pony tail, further emphasizing the schoolgirl appearance. Her top, however, was snug, advertising a popular local Tejano band, and her blue jeans were tight, both garments revealing a shapely figure.
An Hispanic Lolita - except she wasn’t. He knew, from her file, that she was twenty-seven.
“Miss Gutierrez? Yolanda Gutierrez?”
She nodded, putting the ponytail into bounce mode.
“I’m Jack Mercer,” he said, handing her his card. “Thank you for agreeing to meet me.”
She took his card reluctantly, holding it by the edges as if it were a photograph and she was afraid to smudge it.
“My lawyer said I had to.”
He’d been told he had a charming smile, and he used it now. Yolanda Gutierrez wasn’t charmed.
“I’m here to help you, Ms. Gutierrez.” A warm, conciliatory tone, the same one he’d used when talking to domestic abuse victims in the past.
After a moment, she stepped back, allowing him into the house. He stepped over the threshold, making sure the cockroach was still on the porch and hadn't caught a ride on the bottom of his pants.
The living room was small, furnished in pieces that were clean but worn, as if she’d inherited them from her parents. The couch was a pale green chenille kind of material, brightened by small red sequined pillows reminding him of Native American patterns. The coffee table was bare except for a box of tissue, and a small green chair near the window was partnered with a rectangular table and lamp. On the other side of the room was a massive flat screen TV, so glaringly out of place he wondered if it had been a present from the victim.
Carne guisada perfumed the air; the spicy odor inciting eagerness in his taste buds. His breakfast had been toast and coffee in penance for tacos the night before.
He smiled again, the smile of an understanding cop. It’s okay, ma’am, you’re not in any trouble. Just tell me what you know and it’ll be fine. Drug dealers weren’t all that intelligent and most of them had believed him.
This time, Yolanda returned the smile weakly. He sat when she waved him into the green chair and waited for her to join him. Finally, she perched on the arm of the couch, poised there as if she’d fly off any moment.
“Have you lived here long?” he asked.
“It’s my sister’s house,” she said. “I couldn’t afford the apartment Bobby got me."
If the jury found her guilty, she wouldn’t be needing a job for quite some time.
“Is your sister here?”
She shook her head. “She’s at work. She’s always at work,” she said, sliding his card back and forth between her hands, curling the edges.
When she didn’t say anything else, he went into his public defender spiel. “I’ve been retained by your attorney to provide background information about Mr. Hanover’s death.”
In other words, furnish Carol something she might be able to use to defend her. Right now, it looked like Yolanda was going to jail, innocent looking or not.
She shook her head, eyes on the floor. “I didn’t kill Bobby,” she said, looking over at him, her large brown eyes filled with misery.
He’d been in law enforcement long enough not to believe tears, especially those shed so long after the fact. Robert Hanover had been murdered last year, but the court system was overcrowded, resulting in Yolanda's trial date being reset at least four times.
“How did you meet Mr. Hanover?”
“My sister,” she said. “I picked her up from work and he was there.”
Jack sat back in the chair, patient.
“He asked for my number and I gave it to him. He kept calling. For weeks. Then, one day he asked me to lunch.”
“Did you know he was married?”
While she hesitated, he took his notebook from his inside breast pocket but kept it closed.
“He told me right away. His wife is sick,” she said. “With the Alzheimer’s.”
He waited.
“He didn’t try anything. Not like the other guys I dated who were all grabby hands.” She made a closing and opening gesture with her left hand.
“He was lonely,” she said. She sighed again, deep enough to make her melon-sized breasts shimmy. Jack looked, admired, then glanced down at his notebook.
“For the first two or three months, all we did was talk.”
“When did it change?”
At her blank look, he expanded. “When did your relationship change?”
“He was pissed I had to work late a few times.” She shrugged. “I worked at the SavRite on O’Connor. He wanted me to quit.” She shrugged again, giving Jack the impression that the finer details of being a mistress had been smoothed over by Robert Hanover, a man thirty years older and wiser in the ways of the world.
“How long did you date him?”
“For about six months,” she said, smoothing her hands down on her jeans. “Then he got me my apartment. I lived there for a year.”
“Did you see him every day?”
“We talked every day. He only came over on Monday and Thursday.”
She could have had another life, one beyond Hanover’s knowledge. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Jack opened his notebook and jotted the information down, closing the notebook as soon as he finished. Interview subjects often fixated on what he was writing rather than what they were telling him, so he minimized the time spent taking notes.
“Did you ever give him an ultimatum? Tell him it was marriage or nothing?”
She stared hard at his card as if to memorize it. “I loved him. I didn’t want him to go away.”
“So you thought if you gave him an ultimatum he would? Go away?”
“He loved his wife. He wouldn’t divorce her.”
“How do you know?” he asked. “Did you ever talk about divorce with him?”
She shook her head. “He loved his wife.”
A few moments were spent in silent tribute to the sterling character of the deceased.
“The toxicology report indicates he was poisoned,” Jack finally said. “Oleander poisoning.”
She nodded again.
He let the moments tick by but she remained mute.
“The report says the poison was in capsules he ingested prior to his death. Pills he swallowed.”
She nodded once more, but didn’t offer any additional information.
“Can you tell me about that night? The night he died.”
He offered up a compassionate smile, but she was staring at the TV, tuned to some game show where people were jumping up and down after winning some pots and pans. He wondered if they knew they’d have to pay taxes on all the loot they hauled home.
“He had some new pills, he said. Something like Viagra.” She looked over at him. “The doctor wouldn’t give him Viagra because his heart stuttered.”
“Stuttered?”
“That’s what Bobby called it. Sometimes, it would skip a beat.”
“Tell me about the pills.”
“He said they would help him.” She looked at her shoes, high top sneakers. High School Lolita. “He had a little trouble getting it up.”
He hoped she didn’t go into Robert Hanover’s erection issues, but he remained silent.
“I told him he didn’t need them,” she said, glancing at him. “I didn’t need the sex. I told him that. I just liked to cuddle.”
“But he took them anyway.”
She nodded.
“How do you know they weren’t a prescription?”
She shrugged. “They looked like the ones in vitamins and stuff. You know, the ones you buy at the drugstore. Viagra’s blue, isn’t it?”
“Did you ever sell any of those pills? When you worked at the drugstore?”
The question seemed to take her aback. She stared at him a few moments, then shrugged again. “I might have. I was a cashier. I didn’t care what people bought.”
“About what time did he take the pills?”
She clasped her hands together, moving from the arm of the couch to the middle cushion.
“He came over about eight,” she said.
He was beginning to understand why Carol was a little frustrated with her client. Yolanda might be a well of information, but she doled it out a drop at a time. He clamped a lid on his impatience and smiled the good cop smile again.
“Was that usual for him?”
She nodded. “Sometimes. If he had a lot of work, it would be later, like an hour or so. He had some car dealerships, you know.”
Robert Hanover had sixteen dealerships throughout Texas. He wasn’t hurting for money.
“Did he take the pills right away?”
She stared at the TV again as if remembering that night. “I made him nachos. He liked my nachos.” Her eyes grew a little teary, and he fervently hoped she didn’t start to cry.
“He had a beer,” she said, naming a brand Hanover liked, “and we went into the bedroom, and he told me about the pills.”
“Did he take the pills then?”
She shook her head. “I tried to talk him out of taking them. I really did. I didn’t need sex with Bobby.” She jiggled again.
Robert Hanover wasn’t made of stone. Good to know.
“About what time was this?”
She blinked several times. “Nine? Nine thirty? No, it was about ten, because the news had started. Bobby didn’t like to watch the local news. He liked the cable shows.”
“So he took the pills around ten?”
She nodded.
“How many?”
“Two, I think.”
“What happened next?”
She remained silent for several minutes, then took up the story again. “Then we started to kiss and stuff,” she said, one tear spilling over and falling down her cheek. “Then he just started to shake.”
He reached over and handed her the box of tissues from the coffee table. She stared at him with wide eyes but didn’t take it. He set it down in front of her.
“I loved him,” she said. “I didn’t kill him, but the police think I did. Do you?”
He smiled, the empathetic notification of next of kin smile. “It’s not important what I think,” he said. “I’m just here to gather facts for your attorney.”
Yolanda leaned forward, pulled a tissue free, blotting at the corners of both eyes. “He got really pale, and then he started throwing up, and he just fell on the floor and wouldn’t move. I called 911, and when they came, they told me he probably had a heart attack.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said. He didn’t smile this time, and his words were genuine.
“They didn’t even cover him up all the way. Bobby would’ve hated people knowing he was naked.”
After blotting her face, she blew her nose, balling up the tissues and dropping them on the coffee table.
“I went to the hospital, but then I realized they might have called Bobby’s daughter. I didn’t want to embarrass him, so I left. I didn’t even get a chance to give his family his wallet.”
“His wallet?”
She nodded. “I gave the police his clothes and things. He was naked when EMS took him.”
“Why didn’t you turn the wallet over to the police?”
She blinked at him several times. “Bobby always put it in the end table by the bed. I didn’t even find it. My sister did.” She began to tear up again. “They only wanted to know if I gave Bobby the pills. I kept telling them that I didn’t, but they didn’t believe me.”
“Where’s the wallet now?” Jack asked.
“In storage, along with my stuff. My sister boxed it up. I couldn’t stop crying long enough to do anything.” She looked at him, her eyes huge and round with tears. “I didn’t even know Bobby died until the next morning. Nobody told me.” Another sob, another round of blowing her nose. “When they came to my apartment, I just kept crying.”
When the toxicology report came through, the police had showed up on Yolanda’s doorstep. He knew that much from her file.
She stared down at the discarded tissues sitting like so many snowballs on the scarred wood surface of the coffee table.
“Who kills someone with a plant?” she asked, turning red eyes to him.
He didn’t have an answer for that.
“I don’t want to go to jail again,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve never been to jail before, and none of my family’s ever been to jail. I don’t want to go back.”
“You have a good attorney,” he said. “Carol Thompson is a well-respected public defender.”
She only nodded.
He could understand why Hanover had picked Yolanda. She was big bosomed and slim hipped, her face slightly exotic, her brown eyes so dark they appeared black. She had a gentleness about her, a fragility that made Jack want to comfort her before his mind kicked in.
“My sister gave the bail bondsman this house,” she said.
“She won’t lose it unless you don’t show up for trial.”
She nodded again.
“Is there anyone you can think of who’d want to harm Mr. Hanover?”
Tears looked imminent again, so he pushed the box of tissue closer with one finger.
“No,” she said. “He was the sweetest, kindest man.”
“Was anything bothering him?” Jack asked. “Anything troubling him he might have confided in to you?”
“Just his wife,” she said. “She was really sick.”
“Was he in the habit of discussing his wife’s illness with you?”
“Sometimes. It was hard on him. Bobby said she didn’t even know what day it was. How’s a man supposed to feel when his wife didn’t even know him?”
He didn’t want to go into how Hanover treated his wife, so he pushed the conversation in another direction.
“How about you, Yolanda? How’ve you been since he died?”
She looked surprised at the question. “Fine,” she said.
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“Like Bobby?”
“Yes,” he said, “like Bobby.”
She shook her head.
“Is there anything else you think I should know?”
She shook her head again.
“Anything you didn’t tell the police?”
“No.”
He pulled out another card as he stood, handing it to her.
“Could I take a look at Robert’s belongings?” he asked. “If you’d like, I can get them back to his family.”
He expected to have to convince her, but Yolanda didn’t have any objection to him going to where her belongings were stored. She even gave him the combination to the lock on the unit, leaving him feeling that she definitely needed an older and wiser mentor.
“What happens now?” she asked, following him to the door.
He went into his public defender spiel again. “Your attorney will be contacting you about any further developments.”
“I didn’t kill him,” she said, beginning to cry again. “I miss him all the time.”
He patted her awkwardly on the upper arm and said goodbye at the door, relieved the interview was over.
On the way to his truck, he called Carol.
“What do you think?” she asked, sounding hurried and harassed as usual. Public Defenders lived in a perpetual whirlwind until burnout had them changing career paths or sometimes leaving the law entirely. Carol had stuck it out for a decade.
“I’m sure the prosecution is going to say she was capable of doing it. Means, opportunity, but I don't have motive,” he said, opening the door of his truck.
Carol sighed. “What do you think?”
“I don’t think she did it,” he said. “But that’s just an educated guess without proof. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
He didn’t even bother to ask her if she could afford him. He knew her budget wouldn’t cover more than a day or two of work billed by his office. This was a favor for his mother and they both knew it.
“I’ll pull all the loose threads. Do you want a daily report? Or when I’ve finished my investigation?”
“I’ll leave that up to you,” she said. “Just remember, Yolanda’s trial is coming up pretty damn fast. And right now I have nothing, absolutely nothing. She had the opportunity.”
“And the means,” he said. “Have you seen how many oleander plants are growing around here? All she needs to do is to take a couple of the flowers and leaves and let them dry naturally. Dried oleander doesn’t lose any of its toxic properties.”
“Geez, thanks, now I feel all better.”
“Say hi to Mom,” he said.
“Say hi yourself. Call your mother, Jack.”
“Whenever I talk to her, she gives me another case. At this rate, I’ll be bankrupt by the end of the year.”
“That’s not what I hear,” she said, laughing. “Think of it this way, a little pro bono is good for the soul.”
Fifteen minutes later, he pulled into the Ready Storage on Fredericksburg Road, and located Yolanda’s storage unit, one with an entrance like a garage door.
The place had a ripe musty smell, as if a mouse had sought a respite from the heat in the summer months and found death, instead. He searched for a light switch, found it mounted on the cinder block on the right side and switched it on. A single bulb illuminated an area the size of his current bedroom.
Furniture was draped with sheets; the mattress was covered with a zippered plastic envelope. Bankers boxes filled with Yolanda’s possessions were stacked up against the far end of the storage unit, each box labeled with both the contents and a number. Evidently, Yolanda’s sister was on the anal retentive side, an advantage for him.
Pulling on a pair of plastic gloves, the kind that made his hands wet in little more than a minute, he began to search. Ignoring the boxes labeled clothing, he set aside three boxes to examine a little further. The first two held the contents of the dresser and the bottom of the closet. The third box intrigued him. All Yolanda’s sister had written was: Personal.
After cutting through the tape with his penknife, he slowly begin to remove the contents, placing them on the top of three boxes he’d stacked together to form a table. Personal turned out to be a collection of dildos and video porn.
A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.
The bottom of the closet box held three pairs of shoes, a modest selection of purses, and ten empty skirt hangers. However, he began to reassess Yolanda Gutierrez when he opened the third box, the one labeled contents of the dresser. Inside a plastic bag were a man’s wallet. The most surprising fact wasn’t that the man’s wallet belonged to Robert Hanover, but that it contained seven hundred twenty-two dollars in cash.
Either Yolanda hadn’t opened it or she hadn’t taken the money because she realized it would’ve been stealing. Not the actions of a woman who would deliberately poison another human being.
The wallet was filled with pictures of Hanover with a woman roughly the same age. His wife? The formal poses managed to convey contentment. Behind the driver’s license, he found one of Hanover’s business cards, with a notation on the back: talk to LB about Alice.
Shaking out a plastic evidence bag he’d carried into the storage room, he put Hanover’s wallet into it. The card he stuck into his own wallet.
A car desperately in need of an engine overhaul lingered in front of the opposite storage unit, sending a cloud of white noxious exhaust in his direction. He lowered the door, wondering if this was how the mouse died. By pollution, not starvation.
Before he left the storage room, he went through the other boxes, just in case. He even examined the one labeled pots and pans. Her sister had boxed up Yolanda’s spices, and he opened each bottle. None was dried oleander.
In the end, he didn’t find a bottle of herbal Viagra. Maybe the sister, who’d been so embarrassed about the sex toys, had thrown out the bottle. However, if she’d done that, she would probably have thrown out the dildos and tapes.
Yolanda said that Robert brought the pills with him, and after the discovery of the cash in Hanover’s wallet, Jack was inclined to believe in her honesty. Where was the bottle?
Just one of the questions yet to be answered.
He opened the door, locked it again, and climbed into his truck. He scanned his laptop for Yolanda’s number and called her.
“What happened to Hanover’s car?” he asked, jiggling the keys on one finger. “You said you didn’t see any members of the family, right?”
“It was gone the next day,” she said. “I just thought they came and got it.”
Someone not only knew Hanover was having an affair, but where his mistress lived.
“And the bottle of pills? Did you give those to EMS?”
“I never saw a bottle.”
He frowned at the dash. “But you saw the pills.”
“Bobby had them in his pocket, wrapped in a tissue.”
He hung up, sat back, then scanned the witness statements in the case file, annoyed when he didn’t find all that many. Sometimes, a simple canvas of the victim’s neighborhood could turn up other clues. Evidently, it hadn’t been done.
The San Antonio Police Department was overworked, but their homicide clearance rate was pretty damn good. Had Yolanda been the perfect suspect?
Or just the easiest?
