A Plain Vanilla Murder, page 7
An observant lady, this one, Sheila thinks, remembering that departmental secretaries often know more about what’s going on than anybody else. “‘Some people were upset,’” she repeats slowly. “Do you have a particular person in mind?”
Charlaine looks away. “Oh, you know faculty,” she says, with a vague wave of her hand. “They’re like brothers and sisters. They get along most of the time, but there are egos.” Another dab at her eyes. In a different voice, she adds, “Far be it from me to criticize, but there’s always more competition than you might think, both professional and . . . well, personal.”
Sheila hears the subtle emphasis on the last word and is about to ask what it means, but Charlaine is holding up one finger. Her attention has been drawn to the phone on her desk, where the light has stopped blinking.
“Dr. Selms and the dean are finished now, Chief. You can go in.”
“Thanks,” Sheila says, and stands. “I would appreciate it if you could give me Dr. Fairlee’s home address.”
Charlaine reaches for a pink phone message pad and jots it down quickly. She tears off the page and hands it to Sheila. “Here you go.”
Sheila thinks it’s a bit odd that Charlaine has a professor’s home address at the top of her mind, but she only says, “Thanks. Will you be around tomorrow? We may have a few more questions for you.”
“Of course.” Charlaine lifts her head. “Eight to five, off for an hour at noon—although I usually eat at my desk.”
She hesitates, sighs, and adds, “This is my life, you know. I’m always here.”
It doesn’t take much imagination for Sheila to hear the self-pity in her voice.
DAN SELMS IS LEANING BACK in his chair, staring fixedly out the window. On the sill are several blooming orchids.
“Dr. Selms,” Sheila says, and his head jerks around.
“Oh, yes, Chief Dawson.” He pushes himself out of his chair. “Won’t you come in and sit down?” He gives her a solicitous smile. “You must be tired, being on your feet all afternoon.” He doesn’t add because you’re pregnant, but she knows he’s thinking it.
“Thank you,” she says. Her ankles feel stiff and her feet hurt. She wishes she could put them up. But she sits, as he does. “I need to tell you that Director Maxwell has asked the Pecan Springs Police Department to take an active role in the investigation of Dr. Fairlee’s death. She will clear that formally with the dean, and there will be an interagency MOU.”
Selms’ mouth drops open. “I don’t understand,” he protests. “Carl killed himself, didn’t he? Why—”
She holds up her hand. “Dr. Fairlee’s body has been removed for autopsy. The stairs to the roof have been sealed, as well as the professor’s office, and Ms. Maxwell is posting an officer on the third floor. We’ll have an investigative team in the greenhouse this evening.” She pauses. “Perhaps you can tell me whether Dr. Fairlee used a departmental computer—in addition to the laptop in his office.”
Selms looks startled, then dubious. “A departmental computer? No, not that I know of, but my secretary can probably tell you. And what’s this about an autopsy? I thought—” He pulls his thin brows together. “Isn’t it a little unusual? In the case of a suicide, I mean. And if you don’t mind my asking, why are the police involved? Surely our campus security people can handle this matter without—”
“Ms. Maxwell has several reasons for feeling it would be better if we collaborated,” Sheila says firmly. She nods toward the plants on the windowsill. “They’re beautiful. So you’re interested in orchids, too?”
“Yes.” Selms’ voice is stiff. “In fact, my interest predates Dr. Fairlee’s.” He gestures toward a wall that is hung with a dozen or more large color photographs of orchid blooms. “I have published several important papers on orchid biology, including the status of genomics, transformation technology, and the molecular regulatory mechanisms of floral development. My most recent research was published in the journal Plant and Cell Physiology. It is true that I have been somewhat hampered by a lack of laboratory space, but perhaps that will now be mitigated by—” He stops.
Sheila is watching him. “Mitigated by . . .” she prompts.
“That’s of no importance.” He leans forward on his folded arms, adjusting his tone. “Carl’s research has hit a few snags lately. I understand that he was quite disappointed in the rejection of a paper a few weeks ago. Perhaps that was one of the reasons for his suicide.” He shakes his head sadly. “I simply cannot understand a man who takes his life. Surely he had a few productive years left.”
Sheila doesn’t react. “Have you been able to reach Dr. Fairlee’s former wife?”
“I’ve reached my wife.” Selms takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. “Quite coincidentally, Beverly had planned to go out to Sonoma Garden Center this afternoon. Maggie Walker—that’s Carl’s ex-wife—owns the place. I have prevailed on Beverly to tell Maggie what happened.” He puts his glasses back on. “Carl’s parents are both dead, I’m afraid. There’s nobody else. Except the children, of course. A boy in college, a girl in high school. They will be devastated.”
“I’m sure,” Sheila says sympathetically. She glances at the clock on the shelf. “It’s late, and I’m sure you’d like to leave. What time will it be convenient to talk tomorrow?”
“I’m teaching until ten,” he says. “After that, I keep office hours for my students.” He frowns. “But I don’t understand, Chief Dawson. The man killed himself. Why do you need to go to all of this—”
“Just routine,” she says, rising. “Tomorrow morning at ten, then. And thanks again.”
Now she really has to find that bathroom again.
Chapter Four
Some herbs—sage, for example, or rosemary or thyme—are content to grow peaceably in our backyard gardens, lending comfort and pleasure to our everyday lives. Other herbs and spices, like chiles, cumin, garlic, and cilantro, are deeply identified with a particular cuisine. And still others are found simply everywhere, in everything, often integrated so subtly that we don’t even notice them.
Vanilla, for instance.
China Bayles
“Vanilla: The Ice Cream Orchid”
Pecan Springs Enterprise
Vanilla is a member of the orchid family, one of the oldest families of plants in the world, a family that probably evolved more than 90 million years ago. Orchids are the largest family of flowering plants, with over 25,000 species in the wild and more than 100,000 hybrids created in laboratories and hothouses. . . . Vanilla produces the only edible fruit in the entire orchid family. . . . [It] is the most labor-intensive agricultural product in the world.
Vanilla: The Cultural History of the World’s Most Popular Flavor and Fragrance
Patricia Rain
Pecan Springs is still a small town, but in the late afternoon traffic, it was almost five o’clock by the time I got to Sonora Garden Center, out on King Road, a couple of miles east of the interstate. When I first moved here, the place was owned by Wanda Rathbottom. Called Wanda’s Wonderful Acres, it was a three-acre plant paradise hedged in by acres of green pastureland and small truck farms.
But Wanda got into financial trouble and had to sell out. Allan and Betty Conrad bought it, tripled its size, and gave it a new name, Sonora Garden Center, reflecting their interest in plants of the arid Southwest. Their business did very well until it turned out that Allan Conrad was involved in an across-the-border drug smuggling operation with roots that reached south to Matamoros. He went to prison and his wife lost the garden center in an asset forfeiture, prima facie evidence for the old adage that crime doesn’t pay.
Maggie Walker, Sonora’s third owner, was one of the first people I met when I moved to Pecan Springs. An experienced plantswoman, she helped me put in the herb gardens that surround Thyme and Seasons. Now, most of the herbs and other plants I retail at the shop come from Sonora. Maggie doesn’t have the best bedside manner—she is short-tempered and blunt-spoken. But she is always ready to suggest an interesting alternative to potted geraniums or tell you that you absolutely do not want that invasive Japanese honeysuckle Walmart has on sale. And she has maintained and enlarged Sonora’s display gardens, which are an important part of the garden center.
During the Conrads’ tenure, they specialized in xeriscape plants suited to our hot, dry Central Texas summers, and Maggie has kept that emphasis. When you come through Sonora’s front gate, the first thing you see is the large circular garden, some thirty or forty feet in diameter. In the center is an eight-foot waterfall that plunges down a wall of rough limestone and into a large pool surrounded by several mature Mexican bamboo palms, showy clumps of exotic grasses, a statuesque Argentine saguaro cactus, and an acacia tree that looks like it might offer welcome shade to a pride of Serengeti lions. Scattered around are a dozen smaller gardens featuring agaves and yuccas, prickly pear bearing garnet-colored ripe tunas, and other species of cacti, all with an attractive gravel mulch.
But Maggie has broadened the garden center’s focus with her own interests. In fact, what first attracted me was her amazing passion for orchids, which is as deep and constant as mine for parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. She has a master’s degree in horticulture and has been in love with orchids since her student days. In fact, she married her botany professor, Carl Fairlee (whose graduate seminar on vanilla orchids I audited), at least partly because he collected orchids—which turned into a huge problem when they got a divorce. Believe me, there is nothing more fiercely acrimonious than a pair of orchid fanciers divvying up their collection. Just one example: she had to give her ex a prized Dendrobium in order to keep her favorite harlequin Phalaenopsis hybrid, which she had bred herself.
Maggie’s orchid greenhouses are her major addition to Sonora. The larger one is a retail house, where she displays blooming orchids for sale. If you’re looking to grow your orchid collection, that’s where you’re likely to spend a lot of time and a fair amount of money. When you go in, you’ll be struck by the sight and scents of hundreds and hundreds of orchids. Orchids in large pots sitting on the damp gravel floor, lined up in neat rows on benches, hanging overhead. Huge white orchids as big as a lady’s garden hat and tiny white orchids the size of a snowdrop. Red frilly flowers and sleek, shiny yellow flowers and some that are striped, spotted, or mottled. One resembles Darth Vader, another an iridescent sea anemone, a third an exotic lavender parrot with a bright red head and a yellow beak. Some—those with monkey faces, weird wings, corkscrew spurs, bristly whiskers, and other bizarre accessories—might not even be recognizable as flowers, if you weren’t looking at them in an orchid house.
And do be careful. Orchid addiction is a serious and highly contagious disease. Once you get infected, you’re dead. Start with a simple little moth orchid from the supermarket, and before you know it, you’re a raving orchiholic who is dying to get her greedy little hands on a Holy Ghost or a Spotted Tiger. (Did I say that orchids have quirky common names?)
The second, smaller greenhouse is where Maggie boards other people’s orchids and where my Vanilla planifolia lives when it’s not strutting its stuff in one of our vanilla workshops. “The boarding greenhouse is like a combination summer camp and spa for orchids,” Maggie tells potential clients. “For two dollars a month, we will pesticize your plant, fertilize it, and otherwise coddle it in a climatecontrolled environment just like the misty tropical jungles of home.”
And that’s where I was headed when I turned a corner and ran into Ruben, one of Maggie’s half-dozen garden center staff. After several years of toting and hauling pots and plants, Ruben and I have become good buddies.
“Hey, Ruben, where’ll I find the boss?” I asked.
“In the boarding greenhouse.” Ruben, a gangly, gossipy young man with a bad case of acne, hooked a thumb over his shoulder. In a lower voice, he added, “Just a heads-up, Ms. Bayles. Our Maggie has been on the warpath since early this morning. Something to do with her ex, I gather.” I’m not saying that Ruben stoops to listening at keyholes, but he can usually be counted on to know what’s happening—and he likes to share what he knows.
“Wouldn’t be unusual.” I chuckled, knowing Maggie’s short fuse. “Is she flinging things?” I had once seen her throw a pot against a wall so hard it shattered.
“Not yet,” he replied with an answering grin. “But I definitely wouldn’t rule it out.” Ruben has seen her bad temper, too. In fact, he’s been a recipient of it, on occasions when he hasn’t done his job and plants have suffered or customers have gone away unhappy. Maggie’s employees have learned to be wary of her outbursts.
A moment later, I was entering the boarding greenhouse. When my Vanilla is at home there, it lives in a corner just inside the door, next to a tall, vining scorpion orchid with a menacing bloom that resembles an orange-and-yellow five-legged spider about to leap into your face—exactly what you would expect from an orchid in the genus Arachnis. The warm, humid air was full of the plaintive melody of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” playing through a speaker high in a corner. The idea came from an Illinois botanist who claimed that exposing his greenhouse plants to Gershwin for twenty-four hours a day made them grow taller and heavier than music-deprived plants. Maggie varies the selections in her sound system, but she usually stays with gently soothing semiclassical music. Whether the orchids appreciate being entertained is still an open question, but visitors and the staff certainly do.
I was settling the vanilla’s pot into its usual corner when “Rhapsody” ended and I heard Maggie’s voice. I straightened up, about to call to her, then prudently decided not to interrupt. She was several aisles away and talking to someone about her usual subject—orchids—in a strident voice. Maggie is like a puffer fish, which is highly toxic unless you know exactly how to handle it. If you do, it’s a much-loved delicacy. If you don’t, well, you’re dead. Today sounded like a toxic day.
“If you want to sell me any imported orchids,” Maggie was saying, “I need to see your CITES certificate.” (She pronounced the word site-eez.) “You know what that is?”
A woman answered, doubtfully, “I’m not sure I—”
“If you don’t know what CITES is, you don’t have their certificate,” Maggie cut in. “I won’t take any imported plants without it. I’ve got enough problems to deal with in this business. I don’t need the orchid police on my tail.”
I’ve heard Maggie talk about CITES often enough, so I know what it is. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, an international treaty designed to ensure that commerce in wild animals and plants doesn’t threaten their survival through overharvesting and illegal trade. It protects some fifty-eight hundred species of animals (think giant pandas, elephant tusks, and rhino horns) and thirty thousand species of plants, including many medicinal herbs. CITES also includes orchids. All orchids. Which means that if you want to tuck a wild Madagascar orchid or a Mexican spiny jewel orchid into your luggage before you fly home, you need CITES’ blessing. Like it or not.
As the sound system slid into Pachelbel’s “Canon,” the woman said something I couldn’t hear. But Maggie, obviously impatient, cut her off again.
“I understand what you’re saying. Most orchid collectors agree that CITES helps to save tigers and gorillas, and in principle, we’re all against illegal trafficking. We know that people can love a plant to death and that collecting in the wild has to be done carefully, to preserve the species. But if the CITES folks really wanted to protect endangered orchids, they would do something to stop habitat destruction.” Maggie’s voice was climbing as she got wound up. “Where orchids are concerned, CITES is a joke. But it’s no laughing matter. I do not intend to end up like poor George Nathan.”
“George Nathan,” the woman said. “Who’s he?”
“One of the most reputable orchid importers in this business, that’s who.” Maggie’s words were clipped. “His house and his greenhouse were raided by the orchid police on an anonymous tip which proved to be wrong. But that didn’t matter, because they conveniently found a few other little things to pick on. His plants were seized, he and his wife lost their house and their savings, and the poor guy ended up in prison for almost a year. I’m not taking a risk like that, and nobody else with half a brain will, either. Believe you me, lady, it ain’t worth it.”
I believed her. I also believed that if George Nathan had had a lawyer who knew his way around a courthouse without a tour guide, he wouldn’t have gone to jail. CITES ought to have its feathers clipped, legally speaking.
Maggie wasn’t finished yet. “So if you want to sell me orchids that you’ve brought back from South America or the Philippines or wherever, you make sure to bring me your CITES certificates and all the other paperwork that country requires.”
“Thank you,” the woman said humbly. “I will.”
A moment later, I heard the greenhouse door close behind her.I somehow doubted that she would be back, which was probably Maggie’s intention. It sounded like breeding orchids was a whole lot safer than collecting or buying from collectors. Maggie was protecting herself from other people’s mistakes and errors in judgment.
In another moment, she was standing beside me. Her work uniform—jeans and a brown T-shirt that said “Sometimes I wet my plants”—wasn’t much different from mine. But her dark hair was cut short and spiked in a punky hairstyle which is as in-your-face as Maggie herself. Its tip-ends were dyed bright green to match her green canvas half-apron, the pockets of which were filled with tools of the horticultural trade: pruning shears, plant ties and labels, soil temperature thermometer, soil moisture meter, and gloves. Her feet were bare in bright green garden clogs. She was scowling.
“I thought that was you.” She wrinkled her nose. “You’re probably thinking I was too hard on that lady.”
