Not a Girl Detective

by Susan Kandel

  How could I say no? I really wanted to say no. I was going to say no. I said yes.

  “Oh, Cece, I knew I could count on you. It’s the Holly View on Orange Drive, 1337 Orange Drive.”

  I jotted down the address on the back of a Thai take-out menu. When I got back home, I’d be ordering mee krob for lunch. And unplugging the phone.

  ACCORDING TO THE RUSTED directory posted out front, Nancy Olsen lived in apartment 4B. I pushed the buzzer a couple of times but didn’t get an answer. And I’d spent twenty whole minutes finding parking. Such is life. I was ready to pack it in when a middle-aged woman loaded down with shopping bags approached. She fumbled in her purse for her keys.

  “Do you need a hand?”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  I held her things while she opened the gate.

  “I’m usually not much of a shopper, but they were having a special on recycled envelopes.”

  “I can never resist a special either,” I said, trying to be friendly.

  “The cashier didn’t know what they were made of, though.”

  “What what was made of?” I asked, following her in.

  “The recycled envelopes,” she said impatiently. “I’m going to be licking them, after all. With my tongue.”

  I had nothing whatsoever to add.

  The Holly View was a classic fifties courtyard building, two stories, bougainvillea-draped, the apartments all surrounding a classic kidney-shaped pool. I could imagine Marilyn Monroe before she was Marilyn Monroe holed up in a place like this, waiting for a call from the studio. A starlet living on cottage cheese and vodka.

  The woman grabbed her envelopes and took off. I followed the signs up to the second floor. Nancy’s apartment was tucked into a corner dominated by a massive clump of dead jasmine. Winter-flowering jasmine has a wonderful, elusive scent (unlike summer’s night-blooming jasmine, which, if you ask me, reeks like air freshener). But when it finishes flowering, the vines get choked with dry brown blossoms that don’t fall off on their own. You’ve got to whack ’em off with a pair of hedge shears. I learned that from Javier, my genius gardener.

  I knocked hopefully at Nancy’s door. No answer. I knocked again. Nothing. I tried to peek into the front window, but the miniblinds were shut tight. Clarissa was not going to be happy. But I’d done what I could do. I went back down the stairs, wondering if I should leave a note with the building manager.

  It was quiet by the pool. An older man in a white terry cloth robe was stretched out on a lounge chair, asleep with the morning paper at his feet. A young woman wearing a black tank top and tartan minikilt was seated opposite him, polishing her toenails green. A heartwarming domestic scene.

  “Excuse me?”

  She looked up.

  “Do you happen to be acquainted with Nancy Olsen?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m a friend of the family. Her mother is really worried about her. She hasn’t answered her phone in days.”

  “I haven’t heard it ringing.”

  “Why would you?”

  “I’m Nancy’s neighbor. Three B.”

  “Nice to meet you. So have you seen Nancy lately?”

  “I’m out a lot.” She turned to the other foot, bored.

  “Do you know what kind of car she drives? Maybe I could check the parking lot.”

  “What kind of car do you drive?”

  “Forget it.” I started to go.

  “That’s a very personal question.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I don’t think Nancy has a car.”

  “How does she get around, then?”

  “Maybe she takes the bus. Some of us actually do. Anyway, in answer to your question, I think I saw her yesterday. In fact, I’m sure of it. She was standing right over there, smoking a cigarette.” She pointed to an ashtray underneath the No Lifeguard on Duty sign.

  “Well, great. Her mom is going to be really happy to hear that.”

  “Well, great.”

  “Not about the cigarette, I mean. About her being here.”

  “Whatever.” The girl moved on to her bitten-up fingernails. The old guy turned onto his side and started to snore.

  “I’ll be leaving, then,” I said to no one in particular. Right after I checked out the parking lot.

  I’d taken a wild guess that the Holly View wasn’t too big on security. Maintenance either. I made a bit of a spectacle of myself on the way out, tripping over a chipped piece of slate tile. After that, I sneaked back around to the alley running along the side of the building, and down into the underground garage, whose electronic gates were—surprise—on the fritz.

  It was dark and musty down there. The trash cans were overflowing. A crumpled McDonald’s bag floated idly toward the laundry room. I looked up. There were three or four bulbs hanging from the ceiling, all of which needed changing, and in the corner, by the recycling bin, a single fluorescent light that flickered off and on, off and on.

  The parking spaces were marked by apartment. I looked around for 4B, my high heels clicking loudly on the oil-stained concrete. Most of the spaces were empty. It was a Thursday. Everybody was probably hard at work, like I should’ve been.

  Two A drove an old but very nicely maintained Toyota Celica. Maynard would’ve approved. Six A drove a beat-up yellow van with a bumper sticker that read “I Brake for Spayed and Neutered Pets.” Had to be the envelope lady. And what do you know? The girl in the tartan minikilt didn’t take the bus. She drove a black VW Bug so new it didn’t even have a license plate.

  I stopped short in front of a green Honda Prelude. It was parked next to the minikilt’s VW. Nancy’s car—it had to be. Was that good or bad? I stood there for a minute, bewildered. I think it was bad. But not necessarily. It didn’t mean her body was sprawled lifeless on her living-room floor. Or that her head was in the washing machine, clunking around on the spin cycle. It was too quiet for that. The only thing I could hear was the buzz of the broken fluorescent light.

  There were many possible explanations. Nancy could be out of town. Or in town and hiding from her mother. Maybe her car was in its parking place because Nancy enjoyed walking. The Holly View was conveniently located. Within a couple of blocks going east or west there were markets, movie theaters, bookstores, restaurants. And nightclubs. The girl was a singer. An artist who sings, rather. Those types are unpredictable.

  The driver’s-side door was unlocked. I looked to the right, then to the left. No one down here but me. I’d just take a tiny peek and see if anything out of the ordinary jumped out at me. That was it. Then I was going home. Getting back to work. Packing for the weekend. Calling Clarissa. Shit.

  I opened the door as quietly as I could and slid in. The car was a mess. There were half-drunk containers of milky coffee in both cup holders, and the floor was covered with supermarket tabloids, the movie section of last Sunday’s L.A. Times, an army blanket, candy wrappers. A rock-hard bagel down by the emergency brake. Nothing unusual. Except for the green leather Filofax under the blanket.

  People don’t just leave their Filofaxes in their cars. That was like leaving your baby at a 7-Eleven. Well, not exactly, but you wouldn’t do it unless you were in the middle of a nervous breakdown or something.

  I picked it up and immediately felt squeamish, as if I were violating this person-I-didn’t-even-know’s entire being. Which is worse, sins of commission or sins of omission? All those years of catechism and I couldn’t remember. Squeezing one eye shut so it didn’t really count, I flipped through the pages.

  On paper, at least, Nancy Olsen was having an uneventful week. Something with Jeff at nine in the morning on Monday. Something at three-twenty that afternoon. Hip-hop last night, Wednesday. An appointment at Lola’s in Silver Lake, also on Wednesday. I’d been to Lola’s for a consultation once. I’d wanted to straighten my hair. But the prices were outrageous, and I’d decided against such drastic measures anyway.

  What about Nancy? Had she been booked in for highlight
s? A trim? A mullet cut to spite her mother? Looked like it’d been something. Tucked into a side pocket of the Filofax, along with some receipts and scraps of paper that I’d inadvertently sent flying all over the place, was a parking ticket issued yesterday on Hillhurst Avenue, just around the corner from the salon. Thirty-five bucks for a meter violation. Well, at least that meant she was alive and well and breaking the law. All good things. I could tell Clarissa her daughter was okay. But first I had to stick everything back where it belonged.

  I reached between the two front seats to retrieve the stuff that had fallen in there, then bent down to pick up some tiny pieces of cardboard that had gotten stuck inside the movie section.

  But they weren’t tiny pieces of cardboard. They were slides. I stepped out of the car and held them up to the busted fluorescent light so I could see them more clearly.

  Odd.

  One was an image of a little girl sitting on a riverbank, lost in thought. It reminded me of Alice before her visit to Wonderland. Another was a photograph of a female nude, curled up into herself, like a seashell. The next was a Japanese print of a geisha girl holding a handful of cherry blossoms. Then a photograph of a headless mannequin draped in fur.

  There was one more slide. I leaned my head back and peered at the tiny piece of film. The image was hard to see. It was black-and-white and very grainy. A painting. I looked at it more closely. A painting of a naked woman. A naked woman with pale skin, light eyes, wavy hair, and a knowing look.

  And a killer smile.

  It was the painting of Grace Horton I had just seen in Edgar Edwards’s blue bedroom.

  So where was Edgar Edwards?

  And where was Nancy Olsen?

  And what was Nancy Olsen doing with Edgar Edwards’s dirty picture of Nancy Drew?

  5

  Things can go from bad to worse faster than you might think.

  It started when I pulled into my driveway and almost flattened Buster.

  Luckily I saw him in time. I slammed on the brakes, tore out of the Caddy, and threw myself upon my entirely unfazed poodle, who endured my ministrations, then squirmed away to perform the life-affirming act of peeing on the grass. I was so discombobulated that I neglected to ask myself why Buster wasn’t inside the house where I’d left him. He wasn’t the vagabond sort.

  It was then that I noticed my front door was wide open.

  Now you might think a person would proceed with caution. Especially a person whose father was a cop, whose two brothers are cops, a person who is dating a cop. But you know what they say. Doctors make the worst patients. Trust me, it relates. In any case, Lois, my neighbor from three doors down, carrying a can of cat food, stopped me before I could barrel inside.

  “Poor Buster. I saw the whole thing. And good afternoon to you, birthday girl!”

  Lois and her twin sister, Marlene, known professionally as Jasmine and Hibiscus, had been showgirls way back around the dawn of time. They amused themselves these days by tottering up and down the block in their scuffed pumps, tending to the neighborhood strays.

  “Buster is fine, but what do you mean, ‘birthday girl’? It’s not my birthday.”

  “Oh, Cece.” She tittered. “Getting old is a blessing.”

  “Lois,” I said, “my birthday is in October. What’s going on around here?”

  “Your friends came by at one.”

  “Lael and Bridget?”

  “No, no, your gentleman friends,” she said excitedly. “They were trying the back gate. They said they wanted to leave the lady of the house a surprise for her birthday. My hands were full”—she wagged a can of Friskies at me—“so I showed them the key you hide in the flowerpot.”

  “You what?”

  “Then Marlene called on my cell phone and I had to go. They promised they’d lock up.”

  I didn’t wait for the rest. I scrambled up the steps and straight into the living room. Then I heard Lois hyper-ventilating behind me.

  “Oh, dear. They looked like such nice fellows.”

  Bad was Buster. This was worse.

  The green velvet couch was overturned. The chairs were pushed up against the wall. Tapes and CDs littered the floor. My flokati rug was bunched up in a heap, like a dead polar bear. The dining room was a disaster, too. The armoire had been ransacked and my faded Indian tablecloths from Pioneer Boulevard in Artesia (you take the 10 to the 5 to the 91, and in forty-five minutes you’d swear you were in New Delhi) had been tossed unceremoniously to the ground. At least they’d spared my wedding china—not the pattern I would’ve chosen, but my ex-mother-in-law was not to be swayed.

  The kitchen looked pretty much like I’d left it, which was a total mess, except that the dishwasher door was open. I noted some eggy crust clinging to the frying pan I’d wedged onto the top rack. Damn. That thing still wasn’t working. Ilya the repairman had been over three times in the last three weeks.

  “This is awful!” Lois wailed.

  Then I remembered my computer. I was terrible about backing things up. Things like my nearly completed book on Carolyn Keene. My ex, an English professor and master neurotic, was always after me about that. Heart pounding, I raced out the kitchen door with Lois right behind me, and toward my office. It was still locked, thank god, which made sense since it couldn’t be opened with the front-door key. I peered through the French doors and my Bondi Blue iMac peered back at me.

  “The research is secure,” Lois declared solemnly.

  We went back inside and into my bedroom, where things were not as sanguine. My bed had been pulled out into the middle of the room and stripped of the sheets and pillows. My comforter had been tossed on top of the TV. My books had been tossed off the nightstand. But I really didn’t care about any of that stuff. Only my computer—and my clothes. I felt my stomach contract into a knot. My precious clothes that I’d been collecting for two decades. They were everywhere, like wrapping paper after you open your presents. But it wasn’t my birthday.

  “Do you have household insurance?” Lois was trying to be helpful, but I wanted to kill her. I knelt down to pick up my metallic knit cocktail dress; 1978 had been a good year for Missoni. And there was my silk chiffon skirt with the scalloped sunburst, one of my first purchases. I had so wanted to be Stevie Nicks when I was fifteen. I plucked my Pucci for Formfit Rogers dressing gown out of the heating vent and clutched it to my chest. You just can’t get those anymore, much less for seventeen bucks. Oh, and my Halston silver sequined beret.

  “This stuff must be worth a pretty penny,” Lois said, fingering a faux leopard bolero.

  “Not really. Only to me,” I said. But her inane comment got me thinking. I leapt up and yanked open the top drawer of my bureau. My black velvet Lanvin cape from the twenties, with its wide fur collar. At one thousand smackeroos, the single most expensive piece of clothing I’d ever purchased. It was there, safe and sound in its pink tissue paper nest. And that confirmed it.

  I’d been robbed and nothing was missing.

  My Lanvin cape, inviolate; my TV, still there; my CD player, the microwave in the kitchen, my computer, the god-awful china, all untouched. What was going on here? Had the robbers found religion halfway through the job? I probably needed better stuff. Or maybe my new best friend Mitchell Honey was behind this. Maybe he wanted to make sure I hadn’t tied Edgar Edwards up and hidden him in my closet.

  “Are you going to call the police, Cece?” Lois was looking up at me with those hazel eyes, which were still beautiful and clear, unlike her mind.

  “Well, I think I have to,” I said, exasperated now. “Two strange men broke into my house and are out there wandering around with my key.”

  “But if nothing is gone, what’s the point?”

  “What’s the point? Lois, a crime has been committed. This is what people do when a crime is committed. They contact the authorities.” I started looking for the cordless phone. Hadn’t she ever read number 33, The Witch Tree Symbol? Never, under any circumstances, let a stranger lock up after y
ou.

  Lois sat down on my bare mattress and burst into tears.

  I sat down next to her and patted her hand. “Are you worried I’m going to be angry at you? It wasn’t entirely your fault.”

  “I know that. It was your fault for leaving the key in such an obvious place. No, it’s the police. They don’t like me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What part do you not understand? The police don’t like me. They don’t like my sister, they don’t like our dogs, they hate our landscaping—oh, I could go on and on.”

  And you will, I thought to myself.

  “They’ve been over here four or five times now,” she continued, “trying to get us to chop down that beautiful old tree in our front yard, but I have discovered they can’t make us because we simply don’t have the money to pay for it. We’re penniless. Let them pay for it, I say.”

  “Lois. You do realize that tree is a hazard to the community.” After a particularly windy day, the sidewalk in front of Lois and Marlene’s house would be littered with its enormous black pineapplelike pods. Once, when I was walking back from the market, I watched one smash into the roof of an inauspiciously parked sports car with the force of a missile.

  “Like I was saying, between the tree and the visits from animal control”—now she was crying again—“they don’t need to hear I was involved in something like this. They’ll target me for brutality, I just know it. Or they’ll take away our parking spot.” Lois and her sister had somehow bamboozled the city into giving them their own handicapped spot, though neither seemed to have any problem visible to the naked eye.

  “Please, Cece, I don’t want to talk to them. Just let me help you get the locks changed, and that’ll be the end of it. Marlene’s ex-brother-in-law is a locksmith. He can be here in a twinkling.”

  As it turned out, Marlene’s ex-brother-in-law was the best I could do. My unburglary excited little to no emotion in the guy manning the phones at the West Hollywood Sheriff’s station. He suggested I come in at my earliest convenience to fill out a report, which I interpreted as a polite way of saying, “You must be kidding, lady.” I tried not to take it personally. After Lois left, I gave Lael a quick call and talked her into spending the night. Her kids were already gone, so she agreed. But I should have known the first thing out of her mouth would be something sensible.