No Harm (The Kate Teague Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  “Lieutenant Tejeda.” Carl extended his big hand. “Visiting the scene of the crime?”

  “Always poking around.” Tejeda sounded at ease as they walked back toward the stairway. “I hear you left the D.A.”

  “Time for a career change. Nice to be on the other side for a while.”

  “What does it have to do with football?” Tejeda asked.

  “Nothing.” Carl looked at Kate and shrugged.

  “Cole Wexworth,” Kate said.

  “Cole Wexworth?” Tejeda’s interest piqued. “I played against Wexworth at UCLA. Is he involved in the Hopner case?”

  “No,” Carl said. “It was just a story I told Kate to explain why I was changing jobs.”

  “Teague. Carl Teague.” Tejeda rolled the name over a few more times. He retrieved his shoes and wilted jacket and started up the stairs ahead of Kate and Carl. Abruptly he stopped, almost tripping Carl. “Defensive tackle at Stanford?”

  “Guilty.”

  “I started this?” Kate groaned.

  Tejeda was walking up the stairs backward so he could talk to Carl. “You’re the guy who clipped Wexworth and put him out of contention for the Heisman.”

  “Hey,” Carl protested. “There was no clipping.”

  “What happened?” Tejeda asked.

  “I was in a stance, waiting for the play.” Carl was warming to the story. “I looked up and diagonally in front of me was Cole Wexworth, eyeing the ball like his life depended on it.”

  “In a way,” Tejeda interjected, “it did.”

  “Yeah,” Carl agreed. “He had a lot on the line: last game of his college career, looking ahead to the pro draft, Heisman and a Rose Bowl bid hanging on the outcome of the game. Problem was, he had bad knees. Remember?”

  Tejeda shook his head. “No.”

  Bringing up the rear, Kate listened to the story for the nth time, noting how the fine points changed a little with each telling. This is football allegory, she thought; the facts weren’t all that important.

  “Wex was going to have the knees worked on as soon as the season was over. He shouldn’t have been in there, but his coach wanted the game and Wex was his best bet. So, I was standing there with my rump in the air, looking up at an end who was out of position. The whistle blew. I saw my play, came up under on a diagonal, and knocked Wex before he could make his move. They carried him off the field, expensive knees gone. No Heisman. No Rose Bowl. No pro draft.”

  Tejeda looked doubtful. “What does Wex have to do with you moving off the baby food case?”

  “You see,” Carl took a deep breath, “sometimes I thought about Cole Wexworth and I’d break out in a cold sweat because I knew I was going to be in his position someday and someone with nothing to lose would cut me down.”

  “The Hopner case?” Tejeda asked.

  “Yes. Wex was playing high-stakes ball and I wasn’t. I had nothing to lose. I had another year to play. I was no All-American; just good enough to get my tuition paid. I could have held back and let him be a hero, but why should I? The outcome either way was the same to me. The point is, on Hopner I was the guy playing high-stakes ball, and they weren’t.”

  “The Hopner Company is accused of negligently selling tainted baby formula, right? There are, what, six or seven dead babies on the complaint. What did you have to lose?”

  “Two or three of my most productive years. Working night and day and weekends, and pulling out of everything else. In the end their insurance company would settle with everyone. Some judge would fine the company a million bucks, give the board of directors a little lecture, and meet them at the club for lunch.”

  “So you’re switching teams.”

  “Yep. I’ve always preferred the defense.”

  They reached the lawn and there was a regrouping, with Carl now firmly between Kate and Tejeda.

  Tejeda spent a lot of time rolling his shirt, tie, jacket, and shoes together in a sandy ball, stalling, Kate thought, while he rolled his thoughts together as well. “There were no threats from Hopner, were there?”

  “Lieutenant Tejeda.” Carl gave him a hard, courtroom glare. “If there were, I would still be with the D.A. There’s no mystery about my leaving the D.A. Dolph and I have wanted to work together for a long time. It just wasn’t practical while Kate’s mother was around.”

  “Why?” Kate grabbed his elbow, forcing him to turn toward her. She felt a lump of hot bile descend to her stomach. “Why would Mother even care?”

  “You know.” Carl flushed blotches of red over his even tan. When he spoke, his voice was low, secretive. “Because of Nugie.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Kate protested. “Mother didn’t even know about you and Nugie.”

  “Wait a minute,” Tejeda jumped into the fray. “Who’s Nugie?”

  “Nugent Kennedy,” Kate snapped. “You met Reece? She was his sister. Everything that happened with Nugie is ancient history.”

  “I like history,” Tejeda shrugged. “It’s a lot like detective work.”

  Carl didn’t seem to hear him. His eyes were fixed on Kate. “Your mother didn’t know?”

  “No,” Kate said, remembering the awful death-bed promise Nugie had forced her to make. “No one knows.”

  “But all these years,” he seemed incredulous, “why did she treat me so … treat me the way she did?”

  “It wasn’t just you. Mother treated everyone like dung, unless they had something she needed.” Kate turned back to Tejeda, a little embarrassed by his scrutiny of family skeletons as they tumbled out of closets. “I don’t think this is getting us anywhere. Nugie died fourteen years ago next month. Now, that’s sadder than hell, but it can’t have had any relevance to my mother’s death, or what happened to me last night.” She turned and started walking toward the house. “If you’ll excuse me, I need a shower.”

  “My mom’s waiting for us,” Carl said sharply. “Thought I’d take you both to lunch.”

  Kate stopped and looked down at the knit shirt clinging damply to her skin. “I’m a wreck.”

  “We’ll wait ‘til you clean up.”

  “Another time, okay?” She touched her black eye. “Besides, you don’t want people to think you beat me.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Carl protested faintly. “If you don’t want to go, just say so.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Okay.” He offered his hand to Tejeda, scanning the detective’s sandy feet and ruined slacks. “Keep us posted.”

  “Of course.” He let Carl retreat out of earshot before he turned back to Kate. “Seems a little tense.”

  “He calls it creative energy.” She brushed at the sand on her legs. “Come in for a drink?”

  “Thanks, but.” He checked his watch. “It’s late. I have an appointment.”

  “I enjoyed our run.” She held out her hand.

  “Wait a minute.” He took hold of her hand and impelled her with him in the direction of his car. “You’re coming with me.”

  “I am? Why?”

  “Someone’s trying to kill you, remember?”

  SIX

  “I’LL STAY and take my chances with a killer,” Kate said, picking at the bottom of her sweaty shirt. “I’m not going anywhere like this.”

  “Won’t take long.” Tejeda said. “And no one will see you. I’ve made some arrangements for your protection, but it’ll be about half an hour before they’re set up. Until they are, I want to keep an eye on you.”

  Kate held back for a minute, weighing what he said. Then she remembered it was Esperanza’s day to clean at Uncle Miles’s house, and Carl and Helga would be gone to lunch, leaving her all alone. “All right, I’ll come. But the condition this shirt is in, you might regret it.”

  Helga, dressed in a billowy pastel-pink dress, came out of the front door as Kate and Tejeda came around the corner of the house. Kate waved to her, then hurried to catch up with Tejeda.

  “Who’s Brunnhilde?” he asked, nodding toward Helga.


  “My mother-in-law, Helga Adams.”

  “Adams?”

  “Helga something Teague something Adams. Couple of marriages involved.”

  Tejeda pursed his lips and studied Helga from the distance. “I see where your husband got his height. But he’s prettier.”

  Kate laughed. “You’re right.”

  “You teach, don’t you?” A statement more than a question. “Aren’t you missing your first day of school?”

  “The college starts next week.” She took a look at his nondescript city-issue car. “That thing air-conditioned?”

  “Mas o menos,” he said, opening the car door for her. Her bare legs were already sticking to the gray vinyl seat in the few seconds it took him to get in and turn the key in the ignition. The engine sputtered to a start, then almost died when he switched on the air conditioner.

  “Takes a minute to cool off,” he said, draping his shirt over the seat behind him. Skillfully, he infused the car into the noon-hour traffic. Although traffic was heavy on the boulevard, the beach front was strangely quiet. Only a few toddlers and their mothers walked along the sidewalk past the ice cream store. The older children were back in school.

  “Tell me something,” Tejeda said, his eyes focused on the rearview mirror as they drove inland. “Where were you the night your mother died?”

  “On a date. Why? Am I a suspect?”

  “No. Sometimes women kill their husbands. Sometimes they kill their children. But unless they’re seriously crazy, they don’t kill their mothers.” He gave her a sideways glance. “And I don’t think you’re seriously crazy.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  “What do you think your mother was doing downtown?”

  “Wish I knew.” Kate settled down in the seat, closer to the meager draft from the air vent, and fanned her hair up off her neck. “Mother didn’t like to go downtown. She had some friends in the old ‘nice’ part of town, but she didn’t like driving through the ghetto to get there. And she did some volunteer work for the battered women’s shelter over on First Street. Mostly she worked on fund raising, but sometimes they called her to pick up a woman in trouble and deliver her to the shelter.”

  “Did she go alone?”

  “Uncle Miles usually rode along with her. It was one of the few things that would get him out of the house, especially at night.”

  He thought for a minute. “That’s pretty tough work for a nice lady of means.”

  “Mother was no cream puff. You know who my grandfather was?”

  “Sure. Every cop knew Archie Byrd.”

  “Well, he and Mother had a lot in common.”

  He laughed. “That tells me a lot. The first time I saw him in action he was pretty old and frail. I was a rookie on the force, just out of college, sure that in our system of justice the good guys always won. One of my first court appearances I testified against one of Mr. Byrd’s less wholesome clients. He taught me more about the real world that day than I learned in six months patrolling the streets. I felt… disembowled. A person like Archie could collect some powerful enemies during a lifetime.”

  “Powerful enough to murder?” she asked.

  “What’s going on here is strictly amateur hour,” he said. “In Archie’s league folks weren’t so sloppy.”

  “Sloppy, huh?” She rubbed her sore shoulder gently. “I’m glad Mother never made the big league, then.”

  Tejeda turned off the main street into a tract of neat, postwar stucco houses. He followed what seemed, to Kate, to be an impossible maze of nearly identical tree-shaded streets. It was a quiet, well-cared-for neighborhood, the sort of area where children could go outside to play or trick-or-treat on Halloween without their parents worrying much. Kate imagined mothers swapping offspring with each other for quick trips to the market or P.T.A. meetings. It gave her a nice feeling, a sense of safety, and she didn’t know if there was something about the set of the houses and the big old trees that made her feel that way, or if it was just being with Tejeda.

  Tejeda pulled to the curb and stopped in front of a beige house. She noticed the lawn was browner around the edges than any of its neighbors, and needed a good trimming.

  He opened his car door. “I’ll only be a second. Come on in.”

  “You live here?”

  “Yes.”

  She glanced down at her sandy feet and baggy shirt. “You promised no one would see me.”

  “It’s okay. No one’s home.” He collected his wad of clothes and waited for her. She followed him into the house, her natural reticence giving way to curiosity about Tejeda’s private life.

  Tejeda dumped his clothes in a heap in an overstuffed armchair and scooped the morning paper off its twin. “Have a seat. Back in a sec.”

  He left the room through an adjoining dining room. She could hear him walking through another room, pausing, then coming back.

  “Heads up,” he said as he tossed her a cold can of Diet 7-Up.

  “Diet, huh? You trying to tell me something?” She moved away from the furniture to open the can, holding it at arm’s length to avoid the explosion of spray after the can’s flight across the room.

  “Relax, put your feet up,” he said, heading toward a hall door. “I need to change.”

  Careful not to brush her sandy legs against anything, Kate sat on the edge of a chair and looked around the room. The furniture, in tones of blue and beige, looked as if it had been lifted intact from a department store display and reassembled here to fill the space. She wondered if Tejeda had called Bullock’s and said he had a fourteen-by-fourteen-foot room, please send something over. Everything was so carefully coordinated that the room would have had a shrinelike quality, she thought, if it weren’t for the shoe polish kit and three shoes on the coffee table, the pyramid of diet-soda cans on the hearth, and the liberal salting of dust everywhere.

  On the end table beside her, eight fat bullets filled a small brass ashtray. At first, they bothered her. She knew policemen carried guns, but the reality the bullets represented was unsettling. Being with Tejeda didn’t seem as safe anymore.

  Oddly fascinated, she picked up a bullet and weighed its cold heaviness in her palm. She remembered the neat, red hole the shell from Uncle Miles’s hunting rifle had made between the eyes of a tall-antlered Colorado elk. The bullet in her hand was much smaller than the long rifle shells, but it seemed more dangerous, designed as it was for human prey. Using only thumb and index finger, like tweezers, she picked up the bullets one at a time and set them down on the table on their flat ends, until they were in a straight row aimed at the ceiling like a battery of missiles. Then she tapped the end one and they toppled like dominoes, pinwheeling as they rolled around on the tabletop.

  Kate settled back in the chair and drank the rest of her soda. When the can was empty she got up and added it to the top of the pyramid on the hearth.

  The telephone on a little table by the hall door jingled a few times, someone dialing on an extension. She could hear water running, cupboard doors slamming, but no conversation. If Tejeda was talking to someone, he was keeping his voice low.

  Kate felt drawn toward the telephone, knowing that the conversation somehow concerned her. She was trying to resist the compulsion to pick up the receiver, when it rang. Once. Feeling like a burglar caught in the act, she sprinted back to her chair and sat there in guilty silence.

  Tejeda must have been waiting for the call, she thought, he answered it so quickly. Whatever, it was a short conversation; in moments, he was back in the room with her.

  The change in him made her sit up. She felt again the impact of his attractiveness, but the slightly cocky, flirty cant to his posture was gone. He seemed stern, a bit angry even.

  She smiled at him. “You’re fast.”

  “When I have to be.” His freshly washed hair was combed up away from his face, sharpening the angles of his high cheekbones and lending him a certain air of Indian dignity. As he straightened the lapels of his well-tailored, summer-we
ight gray suit, she looked for some reminder of the man who had rolled up his trousers to run with her on the beach. She thought she had lost him, until she noticed that damp tendrils of hair on his neck darkened the crisp edge of his pale blue shirt collar, spoiling its perfection.

  “You look nice,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  She tried again to find her way through his stern facade. “I suppose that means we aren’t going running.”

  He didn’t return her smile. He watched her as he straightened his tie, his eyes narrowed. “I just can’t figure you out. Sometimes you’re so, well, accessible. But I think you’re stonewalling. What I need to know about the people around you and your mother I think only you can tell me. But you hold back.” His voice was soft, but she felt its cutting edge. “You tried to deflect me earlier, to send me off after an alleged bastard and after old Sy Ratcher. I know, the whole town knows, your mother was trying to have your Uncle Miles put away. A lot of people were madder than hell about it. Isn’t that a more likely territory to explore?”

  “Maybe.” She looked down at her hand on the arm of the chair, noting how her tan almost matched the center of one of the flowers in the upolstery pattern. She traced the outline of the flower with her fingernail, a diversion to keep from meeting his eyes.

  He sat down on the arm of the chair close to her hand, his leg interrupting her tracing. “Maybe?”

  “Maybe it’s something I’m not ready to face,” she said, feeling angry at him for no good reason she could identify. “Anyone who might kill Mother to protect Miles has to be someone pretty close. I’m not sure I want to know who.”

  “Could be Miles himself.”

  “No way.” She cocked her head to look up at him.

  “Your mother was a big threat to his freedom.”

  “But I’m not.”

  “Were you helping her get conservatorship?”

  “You mean does he need to kill me, too? No. I thought what Mother was doing stank, and he knows it. She tried to use me at first, said she was only acting to protect my inheritance. But I defused her by entrusting all my interests to Dolph, as, in practice, Miles had.”