Free Lavender Lies by Susan Wittig Albert

off he marched.
    “So it’s all over town,” I said. “Poor Pauline. She’ll never live this down.”
    “Poor Pauline, my foot.” McQuaid was scowling. “How come she didn’t tell me that Darryl’s already filed for divorce?”
    “Because it might not be true,” I said, stirring my iced tea. “Or maybe she doesn’t know.” If Bill Gates wants to improve the speed of his computer network, he should come and study our grapevine. It works so fast that half of Pecan Springs can know something before the people who are immediately involved have the slightest inkling of what has happened. “You haven’t talked to Darryl yet?”
    “He’s in Fredericksburg, delivering a car. I’ve left a message for him to come in.” He frowned. “But Darryl’s pretty meek. Somehow, I can’t picture him shooting somebody, even in a fit of temper.”
    “Not even in a fit of jealous temper? You don’t remember the time he took out after that old boyfriend of Pauline’s and all but chased him out of town?”
    “Well, maybe.” McQuaid dipped a nacho into a bowl of salsa, tasted it, and picked up a bottle of hot sauce that was sitting on the table. He likes his salsa so hot that it sears all the way down. “So. What do you know that I don’t know?” He shook hot sauce into the salsa. “How come you think I have to interview all the other members of the Council?”
    “Not all,” I said. “Just some.”
    “Why not all?”
    “Because two of the seven Council members voted for Coleman on the first reading of the annexation proposal. Right?”
    “I guess so. I wasn’t keeping score.”
    I wasn’t either, but I’d called City Hall and gotten a secretary to tell me who had voted for and against. “Take my word for it,” I said. “In order to get the development annexed, Coleman had to get a majority—four votes. He already had two in his pocket, so he needed two more, three to be on the safe side. If he got Pauline’s vote, he was down to two. If he got Phyllis Garza, he’d need—”
    McQuaid scowled. “What makes you think he went after Phyllis Garza?”
    I opened my shoulder bag and took out the plastic folder containing the letter and envelope. “Phyllis brought this to me this morning. I had a tough time persuading her to turn loose of it, but I knew you’d need it—and if she took it back to Jorge, it might disappear.” I laid it on the table. “It’s been handled by both Phyllis and Jorge, so I doubt that you’ll find any usable prints. But you might want to give it a try.”
    He grasped the significance of the letter on the first reading. “You think Coleman wrote this?”
    “Last night, Pauline said that Coleman wanted ‘teamwork’ —the same word this writer uses. It seems like a pretty substantial coincidence.” I paused. “Phyllis said at first that Jorge hadn’t heard anything more from the blackmailer, but when I questioned her, she admitted she wasn’t sure whether he had or not.”
    “I see,” McQuaid said slowly. He looked at me sideways. “You know the Garzas pretty well, don’t you?”
    “I helped them get a few legal issues straightened out when they first started their alien assistance program. I know Phyllis better than Jorge.”
    “Does either of them have what it takes to kill somebody?”
    “That’s an unanswerable question,” I said bleakly. “How can you know how far a person will go to protect somebody or something he—or she—loves?” There are human imponderables here that no forensic psychologist can unravel. People do things when their livelihoods or their loved ones are threatened that they couldn’t imagine doing under other circumstances. “But if I’d killed Coleman, I sure as heck wouldn’t volunteer this letter.” I paused, thinking. “Of course, it was Phyllis who brought it in, not Jorge. I told her about Coleman’s murder, and I swear it was a surprise to her.”
    McQuaid got my point. “What about Jorge? Could he have done something like