This time Tessa’s eyes looked really troubled. But more as if she was worried about my sanity than anything else.
“No, Kate,” she answered evenly. I recognized the tone. It was the same one I’d used on violent patients when I worked in a mental hospital. “Did someone really put a trocar on your front door?”
I nodded emphatically.
“With catsup,” Wayne added. I gave his warm hand a squeeze. I was glad he was there to back me up.
“But why would anyone do such a thing?” Tessa demanded, her usually serene eyes squinting with what looked like outrage.
I really wanted to answer her. Actually, I really wanted to get out of the embalming room. I got my second wish when one of her assistants came and whispered in her ear.
“Oh, dear,” Tessa murmured, looking down at her watch. “John is absolutely right. I’m afraid it’s time to prepare for the next service.”
Then she graciously hustled us out and down the hall, taking the time to tell us about E-mail funeral options on the way.
“What do you do then?” I asked as we got to the front door. “Fax the body?”
She threw me that subtle intimate smile one last time before showing us out of the Olcott Johnson Funeral Home.
It wasn’t until we were in the car that Wayne and I noticed that neither of us had ever managed to turn the subject back to Sam Skyler. Not to mention interrogating Tessa as to what she might or might not have been telling us.
It took me two and a half minutes to get home. On the dot.
“Well, does she know something?” I asked Wayne as I opened our front door.
“Probably,” he replied slowly.
“But what?” we both said together.
Unfortunately that left no one to answer the question.
Not that we didn’t chew on it awhile, anyway. A long while. Along with all the other questions.
“Publishing rights,” I blurted out after a moment, my brain synapses speeding up. “Do you think Sam Skyler was publishing another memoir?”
“Interesting possibility,” Wayne answered.
“Maybe I could call his publisher,” I suggested.
Wayne shook his head. “They’re not going to tell you anything,” he told me. “Even if we knew who they were.”
My synapses were slowing back down to their usual “duh” state when the doorbell rang.
To answer or not to answer, that was the question.
I looked at Wayne. He looked back and shrugged his shoulders. When the bell rang a second time, he got up and answered it.
Wrong choice. Even C.C. was suddenly in the room scolding when the massive man in the blue suit from Growth Imperatives, Unlimited barged in. I was wondering why Wayne didn’t just push him back out, when I saw the bulge in the man’s pocket, my eyes drawn there as he stuck his hand in that pocket. A gun? It had to be.
“Okay, you guys,” the big man hissed. “Someone told me you two know more than you’re telling—”
Great, I thought and started back-stepping in the direction of the phone. It seemed like a good time to try out the 911 button.
But before I even got to the phone, I heard Police Chief Woolsey’s booming voice “…ecological disaster, but does anyone care?” and the sound of footsteps up our front stairs. That was fast.
I stepped back to the front door just in time to see the man from Growth Imperatives, Unlimited turn and slither away. Quickly. Very quickly for a man of his size.
“Did you see the guy going down the stairs?” I demanded of the chief excitedly when he made it up to the front door.
“The man in the blue suit?” he asked back.
“Yeah, I think he had a gun—”
I stopped when I saw Chief Woolsey roll his eyes in his companion’s direction.
“Maybe the guy was an overzealous solicitor,” Officer Fox suggested, and they both had a good laugh.
“But—” I began.
I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder.
I looked up to see Wayne shaking his head ever so slightly. He was right. These guys would probably think the bit about the gun was just a ruse to make us look less guilty. In fact, they probably thought we put the trocar on our own door in the first place.
“So, Ms. Jasper,” Woolsey said, no smile on his lean face as he thrust it forward, “I understand you and Mr. Caruso are asking a lot of questions.”
I just nodded. I wasn’t letting these guys in my house this time. Much less offering them any tea. Woolsey had already asked enough questions to last me a lifetime or two on their previous visit.
I was thinking about telling him so when I heard the clatter of someone else’s boots coming up my stairs. I peered around Wayne and the police officers and saw Park Ranger Yasuda approaching.
Woolsey turned to follow my gaze. Yasuda stopped for a moment, then took a deep breath and another step.
“I thought you got the message, Yasuda,” Woolsey snarled, spewing hostility and the fragrance of mint tea. “You’re not a part of this investigation.”
“I’m not here officially,” Yasuda muttered, clasping his hands behind his back.
“Then what are you doing here?” Woolsey demanded, throwing his arms out in apparent exasperation.
“Yeah, what are you doing here?” Fox parroted, as he dodged the chief’s arms.
It was then that I heard the sound of the chants.
“Anger into achievement!”
“Grief into growth!”
The voices were coming nearer.
“Oh, Christ,” Woolsey snapped. “Not the Merry Musketeers again. I told them we didn’t know who did it.”
I turned to Wayne. Were the students of the Skyler Institute for Essential Manifestation bugging the police now? I worked hard to keep the smile off my face as Woolsey, Fox, and Yasuda all retraced their steps to their respective cars and took off. A couple of the puppeteers gave Wayne and me little knitted waves over their shoulders and then got in their own cars and followed the representatives of authority. I wondered how they gripped their steering wheels with their puppets on. And then I let myself smile. If there was any truth to be had from Woolsey, I felt sure the advanced students of Sam Skyler’s Institute were just the puppeteers to squeeze it out of him.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Wayne.
“Feel like some vegan asparagus mousse?” he asked. “White bean pate, roasted eggplant with pine nuts…”
My mouth was too busy salivating to answer. But I could still nod. It was early, five o’clock, but I was ready if he was.
“Get dressed,” he whispered suggestively. “We’ll go to the restaurant.”
Since “the” restaurant was his restaurant, La Fête à L’Oie, I understood why he didn’t consider me “dressed” already.
Silk and jewels were more common there than Chi-Pants and sweatshirts. I packed my body into my one and only velvet jumpsuit while Wayne dressed in his own suit, and we were on our way to San Francisco within minutes. There’s a rainbow painted on the tunnel leading into Marin from the Golden Gate Bridge. For once, I was glad to see it disappear behind us. The only person who hadn’t shown up on our doorstep in the last half hour was Felix. Well, actually Diana and Sky-Guy hadn’t either. I sank deeper into the passenger’s seat of Wayne’s Jaguar with a moan of pure pleasure.
Wayne and I were still chortling over the thought of the puppeteers pumping Woolsey when we arrived on the doorstep of La Fête à L’Oie.
A giant plaster cockroach was pinned to the restaurant’s front door where the Open sign usually was.
And this time there was a note attached to the red bow.
It said, “Yum, yum. I’ll investigate you if you keep investigating us.”
- Thirteen -
I heard a sound next to me, a low rumbling like the first warning growl of an earthquake. It took me a minute to realize it was coming from Wayne. Then the rumble took the form of words.
“No,” he declared, his voice deep and vibra
ting. “Not here.”
He stood, staring at the thing on the door, his whole body trembling. But why was he so upset by a plaster cockroach? And then instantly, I knew, and I was trembling too. Wayne had inherited La Fête à L’Oie from the man for whom he had acted as bodyguard for years. The man whose murder he had failed to prevent. At least, that’s how Wayne saw it. For Wayne, this restaurant/gallery and the others he had inherited were a sacred trust. And that sanctity had been violated.
I took his hand in mine. It was cold with shock. I rubbed it between my own hands, not knowing what else to do.
“It’s all right,” I whispered. “We’re alive. We have each other.”
He swiveled around to face me so quickly that I stopped breathing for a moment. There was real anger on his homely face. The face that had given him a job as a bodyguard. A frightening face, a frightener. And then, just as quickly, his anger dissolved. And he took me in his arms, so gently I might have been a pile of fallen leaves and not one leaf would have moved. Too gently, I thought. How much was he holding back? What was he holding back?
“Thank you,” he whispered gruffly.
And that was all. He released me from his arms as gently as he had embraced me and turned back to the door to remove the plaster cockroach.
“The police?” I asked once he was done.
He shook his head, his eyes on the cockroach in his hands. He was still angry, no matter what he wasn’t saying or doing. I could smell it on him. Just a scent, but I had lived long enough with this man to identify it.
We opened the door and entered the foyer-cum-gallery of La Fête à L’Oie to the muted orchestration of Vivaldi and the not-so-muted aroma of sautéed garlic. But the art that met the eye overshadowed sound and smell. La Fête à L’Oie was as much about art as it was about food. That was one reason Gary Atherton was so useful to Wayne. Wayne knew how to cook, but he was probably no more attuned to the contemporary visual arts than I was. Not that either of us was disinterested, but neither of us were art experts. Or enthusiasts. Wayne had inherited another man’s passion, and he kept it alive. Vigilantly. But he never really felt it, much to his constant guilt and shame.
Gary Atherton, on the other hand, was the real thing. A real artist. He’d met Wayne while trying to place his paintings in La Fête à L’Oie’s gallery. They were strange disturbing paintings in layers, the top layers like gorgeous sunsets complete with pastel luminosity, but beneath that luminosity always a glimpse of hard, backlit objects in stark primary colors. The paintings sold fairly well for all their strangeness, but Gary was still a starving artist, at least until he became the manager of La Fête à L’Oie.
The art gallery today displayed the work of three almost major artists. One was a sculptor whose headless torsos had hearts that you could peek into, like the sugar Easter eggs I’d received as a child. Except that the scenes in the torsos’ hearts were much less sweet. The other was a “composite” artist, or maybe a compost artist, whose works used bits of city artifacts like discarded beer cans, bus transfers, shoelaces, and smashed Styrofoam. The third was a black-and-white photographer whose subject matter seemed secondary to her extraordinary sense of light and dark. And then there were two of Gary’s paintings. That was in the contract.
Wayne and I were early enough that only two couples were viewing the works. Well-dressed and quiet, they stood and peered, occasionally exchanging hushed comments. These four must have been real supporters of the arts, six o’clock being far too unfashionable an hour for a San Francisco dinner.
Wayne glided silently through the gallery, through the dining room, and into the kitchen with me gliding a little less silently behind him.
“Gary,” Wayne said softly, and Gary Atherton turned from supervising a woman and a man in tall chefs’ hats as well as a troupe of lesser players, chopping, slicing, and pulling foodstuffs from giant refrigerators.
“Wayne,” greeted Gary, his handsome face registering surprise at his boss’s presence.
Wayne pulled the plaster cockroach from beneath his arm and held it out in front of him. Did he suspect Gary of putting it on the front door?
Gary’s head reared back and then came forward again to scrutinize the thing.
“What’s that?” he asked. “Someone’s idea of art?”
Not Gary, I decided. Wayne seemed to come to the same conclusion.
“No,” Wayne answered quietly. “Probably someone’s idea of a joke.”
Then he threw the plaster cockroach in the garbage.
“Kate and I thought we’d eat here tonight,” Wayne announced, his voice a little less strained. Everyone else’s shoulders in the kitchen seemed to stiffen though. A challenge.
This was the reason I didn’t eat very often at La Fête à L’Oie. I knew as a vegetarian that I was a royal pain to these people who had their hands full keeping the restaurant’s four-star reputation alive and well without having to cater to a woman who didn’t eat animal products. True, there were a few items on the regular menu that were vegetarian, but they were mostly salads and appetizers. However, when Wayne brought me, here he expected the best. My sweetie became a tyrant. And I knew better than to argue. I inhaled garlic to keep the vampire of guilt at bay and decided to enjoy my meal.
The food was a gustatorial delight, complete with the silken asparagus mousse as promised, white bean pàte with the flavor of basil, thyme, and something that might have been brandy, on crisp rounds of toasted French bread, as well as roasted eggplant. Yum. And more.
But conversation left something to be desired. I’m quite capable of handling both sides of a conversation by myself under normal circumstances. But these weren’t normal circumstances.
Wayne picked at the vegetarian food he shared with me and ignored my oohs and ahs of pleasure.
“All right, Wayne,” I hissed finally. “Spit it out.”
My timing might have been less than perfect, since his mouth was full of blueberry sorbet right then, but he did at least answer me. Or try to.
“Can’t do anything right,” he mumbled through the blueberries.
That’s what I’d thought. In a crisis, Wayne always blamed himself. For everything. He was probably busy blaming himself for not solving Sam Skyler’s murder, for the appearance of the cockroach, for our not being married. Not to mention the depletion of the ozone layer.
I jumped up from the table, scattering linen and silverware.
“God damn it, Wayne!” I threatened. “I won’t let you start this, this…stuff again.”
At least I got his attention. Not only was I threatening him in a public place, it was his public place.
He made frantic sit back down motions with his napkin, turning his head to see if any patrons or waitpersons had heard me.
“Not till you promise,” I told him, my voice back into normal but easy to hear range.
“Promise what?” he whispered, an entreaty for mercy in his vulnerable brown eyes.
“That you’ll stop beating yourself up,” I told him, lowering my voice so only he could hear me now. “If you want someone to beat you up, I will. But nobody else.”
“Okay,” he muttered, his eyes on his plate.
“What was that?” I demanded, drill-sergeant style.
“Okay,” he enunciated, quietly but clearly. “I will not beat myself up. I am a good and worthy person. I know so because you’ve told me.” His voice went almost subvocal again as he added, “about a million times.”
We were halfway back to Marin under the orange spires of the Golden Gate Bridge when he asked, in his slinkiest growl, “Would you really beat me up?”
“You betcha,” I growled back and in a few minutes we were discussing the possibilities of a primal scream wedding. Progress. Real progress.
However, by the time we drove through the rainbow tunnel, Wayne was serious again.
“Should talk to Sam Skyler’s ex-wife, Helen,” he reminded me.
I looked at my watch. It was a little before eight.
Helen Skyler was in. And she was perfectly willing to talk. She told us Nathan had called to let her know we might be visiting. Her deep, musical voice was welcoming over the phone, a voice that sounded as if it had laughed a lot.
“I already like her and I haven’t even met her,” I told Wayne as I slid back into the snug decadence of the Jaguar.
“At least she isn’t a suspect,” he pointed out. “You can let yourself like her.”
But I couldn’t allow myself to like any of the people who might have murdered Sam Skyler, I reminded myself, wiggling my aching shoulders, not so comfortable anymore despite the snug seat. No wonder I felt so cranky. It was hard to talk to people you couldn’t allow yourself to like. And we’d had a day of it. It would be a good antidote to visit Helen Skyler, I assured myself. At least I hoped so.
We heard Helen’s house as much as saw it, a small architectural gem on a hill in Tiburon. Somewhere inside, a cello was being played and a dog was howling. The dog was winning.
The woman who answered the door still had her cello bow in hand. Her brown hair was pulled back in a severe knot at the nape of her neck. The eyes that peered out at us from beneath thick glasses were her son Nathan’s eyes. But now I could see what all his fur probably covered—if he’d inherited his mother’s lovely, perfectly oval face with clear, radiant white skin.
“Come in, come in,” she ordered, tossing her head theatrically toward the room behind her.
Within minutes, Wayne and I were seated on a too-plush red velvet couch, while Helen Skyler and her Great Dane, Huzza, perched across from us, their respective hands and paws crossed in an amazingly similar manner, on what appeared to be a former park bench sprayed in gold paint. Whimsy was the theme of Helen’s decor. Upside-down romance novel covers, pop star posters, jeweled scepters, and Van Gogh reproductions all shared space on the lavender-tinted wall across from us.
“If you want the story on Sam,” she told us, “you’ve come to the right place.” She shook her head for a moment, sadness in the gesture, but then threw her head back again. All her gestures seemed limited to her head and neck. Maybe everything below was saved for the cello.
A Cry for Self-Help (A Kate Jasper Mystery) Page 14
