Wycliff wanted a drink badly now, but he had to stay strong. His survival depended on that.
‘Billy never said a word about you,’ he told her. ‘Not once.’
‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ Charlotte said. ‘He was shutting me out. He might have thought that if you knew I existed you might have reached out to me. He wanted to make sure that never happened.’
Wycliff nodded. That made sense, in a weird, twisted way. ‘So what happened after that?’ he asked.
Charlotte composed herself. ‘He got an injunction against me. I couldn’t get within five hundred feet of him. Stay away from Billy or you’ll be arrested, his lawyer warned me. He wasn’t whistling Dixie, he meant it.’
Damn, Wycliff thought. ‘So what did you do?’
‘What could I do? Defy the injunction and go to jail? This was my last chance to score, and it was gone, over, done.’ She smiled. ‘And then, like a miracle, you showed up. Heaven dropped you right into my lap.’
Wycliff felt like she had kicked him in the balls. But only for a second, because he realized she was fucking with his head, yet again. ‘You and I met only a couple hours after I first got here, when you picked me up in that bar. There’s no way in hell you could have known I had come to LA’
‘But I did,’ she replied, her voice juicy. ‘A little bird whispered into my ear. Actually, it was a good fairy. His name was Stanley.’
Wycliff was dumbstruck. ‘That faggot who was living in Billy’s house?’
‘Yes,’ she told him triumphantly. ‘That faggot, as you so crudely put it. Like the faggot who left you this house and all his worldly possessions. The faggot who, in the end, embraced you.’ Bitterly: ‘As he never would me.’
Wycliff winced. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Who cares what you meant?’ she said derisively. ‘What you care about doesn’t matter. What matters is I was thrown a lifeline. You.’
She wasn’t going to give up. She couldn’t, she had no plan B. If she didn’t make this score she would be scuffling for the rest of her life, a prospect that at her age terrified her. She went to Billy’s house, met Stanley, and industriously cultivated him. She didn’t tell him she was Billy’s mother. Billy would have warned Stanley about her and he would have called the cops. Instead, she masqueraded as a former client who wanted to do whatever she could to help Billy. She flattered Stanley, telling him how much he meant to Billy, how appreciative of him Billy was, she spread a line of bullshit ten miles long and twice as thick. And Stanley, the poor gullible doofus, swallowed her story completely. He told her everything there was to know about Billy.
‘So when you showed up, Stanley, being the protective mother hen, called me in a panic. He was afraid you would harm Billy. He couldn’t stop you himself, your very presence scared the poor man to death, but he hoped I could.’
She drove to Billy’s house and there was Wycliff, shirt off, mowing the lawn. ‘You were an Adonis, darling. Like your brother must have been, before his illness ravaged him.’
She tailed him to the Chateau Marmont. ‘I was winging it. You might have rejected me. Not all younger men go for older women, even when they’re served up to them on a platter. Fortunately, you weren’t one of them.
‘I couldn’t know how it would play out,’ she continued. ‘Billy could have turned his back on you, like he did me. It wasn’t until you told me the two of you had buried the hatchet that I came up with my plan.’ She smiled. ‘My masterpiece.’
She reached into the purse at her feet and pulled out a slim document. ‘Read this,’ she instructed him.
‘What is it?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘Read it. It’s not hard to understand.’
He took the papers from her. When he finished reading, he looked at her in disbelief. ‘This says I transferred the deed for the house over to you. That’s bullshit! I’ve never seen this.’
‘Yes, you have,’ she corrected him. ‘You saw it, and signed it.’ She pointed at the document. ‘This is a copy, in case you get some clever idea that you can tear it up and everything will all go away. The original was filed with the county last week. Officially signed, sealed, and delivered.’
Wycliff was stunned. ‘This is what Cummings had me sign? That investment account that never existed?’ The pages slipped from his fingers to the floor. ‘Where is that cocksucker, anyway?’ he asked, enraged.
‘Where you’ll never find him,’ she answered blithely. ‘With his share of your money he can live nicely for a long time.’
He collapsed into himself. ‘You stole everything! The house, the money. Everything!’
‘No, darling,’ she purred. ‘I didn’t steal anything. You gave it all to me. It was a straightforward business transaction.
He was shaking now, both from rage and despair. ‘I knew from the beginning you were a scam artist! Why in God’s name did I ever trust you?’
‘Because you wanted to be a player, Wycliff,’ she answered with ruthless brutality. ‘You had dreams. For a low-rent shit-kicker like you, that’s fatal.’
She went on with her story. After swallowing the bitter pill that she was too old to snare wealthy benefactors, she had to reinvent herself. She took up with male partners, preferably gay. She wasn’t a fag hag, but it was less complicated to do business with men who didn’t want to sleep with her.
She and John Cummings met a few days after she arrived in LA. It takes one to know one, as the saying goes, and they honed in on each other right off the bat, kindred spirits. John needed a partner who would lend an aura of legitimacy to his scams, and who could fill the role better than an attractive, worldly older woman?
‘We chose marks who wouldn’t come after us when they found out they had been cheated. Suckers who couldn’t afford to have their stupidity exposed to their businesses or relatives, or would rather take a financial hit than suffer public humiliation. We weren’t greedy. We kept the scams small, usually under a few hundred thousand dollars. We left our victims with some money and some dignity. It’s not smart to rob people of all their dignity. I know that, all too well.’ She smiled. ‘We had never gone for a really big score, until now. You were our first whale.’
He groaned. ‘You fucking bitch.’
‘Sticks and stones. I’m just like you, Wycliff. Vultures of a feather. Except I pulled my scam off, and you fucked yours up.’
‘I didn’t have a scam.’
‘Of course you did. You wanted your brother’s fortune. It’s why you came here, it’s why you took care of him. For this.’
She picked up the papers and put them back in her purse. ‘You have an hour to pack up and leave. If you’re not gone by then, I’m calling the police.’
His jaw dropped. ‘You’ll call the police? Are you shitting me? Someone with your record? They’ll throw you in a cell and swallow the key.’
‘I don’t have a record,’ she answered with infuriating calmness. She reached over and picked up the gun. ‘Even this is clean,’ she said, hefting it. ‘I bought it from a licensed dealer in Vegas. Federal gun check, everything on the up and up. You can’t register a gun if you have a criminal record,’ she said. ‘For instance, I’m sure you couldn’t buy one. Not legally.’ She stroked the trigger with her forefinger. ‘Although if you needed a gun you could easily get hold of one, couldn’t you?’
He stared at the gun in her hand. ‘Be careful with that,’ he cautioned her. ‘Those things sometimes go off when you don’t want them to.’
She rotated the gun back and forth, as if measuring its weight and solidness. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m very careful with this. I would never fire at anyone I didn’t want to hit. Would you?’
He flinched. ‘Put the gun away, Charlotte.’
‘I always make sure it’s handy, in case I ever need it. Until now, I’ve never had to, fortunately. So you can imagine my surprise that when I looked for it recently, it was missing. Do you have any idea how that could have happened?’
Wycli
ff forced himself to breathe. ‘No.’
‘I thought you might, because I’m the only one who knows where it’s hidden.’ She hefted the gun again. ‘The only one except you.’
‘Put it away.’
‘How many people did you shoot, Wycliff? Did you kill any of them?’
His voice was sandpaper in his throat. ‘I didn’t shoot anyone.’
‘If I turn this gun over to the police and they match it to any killings that took place when it wasn’t in my possession, you could be in a lot of trouble. The recent killings in Beverly Hills, for example. The woman and her psychiatrist. The woman Laurie Abramowitz hired you to kill, and the poor innocent bystander who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
His mouth had gone completely dry. ‘Laurie Abramowitz,’ he chocked out, his voice a hollow echo of hers.
Charlotte nodded. ‘You didn’t know Laurie and I were friends, did you?’ Without waiting for an answer, she continued, ‘Of course you didn’t. If you had, you never would have gone through with it. And you would have dropped me like a hot rock before I could complete my work with you. My work,’ she said, finally allowing herself to gloat, ‘that has, at long last, set me free.’
That first encounter with Laurie at the iPhone store, Charlotte explained, was no accident. It was premeditated, carefully thought out.
‘Laurie and I met socially, and over a period of time we became close. One evening, we got together for drinks. We got a little tipsy, and let our hair down.’ She corrected herself. ‘She let hers down. I didn’t. You know me. I never reveal what’s in my hand.’
The gun she was holding rocked back in forth like a metronome. ‘By now, Wycliff, you should be able to guess what that problem was.’
He was mute, listening to her. He felt like a prisoner standing before a judge as his death sentence was handed down.
‘Her partner was her problem. They’d had a bad falling out, professionally and personally. They had to go their separate ways. Which was a problem for Laurie. She couldn’t afford a breakup.’
Wycliff kept his eyes on the gun as Charlotte fondled it. He was too far from her to make a move.
‘But she did have a way out. They had taken out million-dollar life insurance policies on each other. If one of them died, the other would be the beneficiary. Their policies had double indemnity clauses. Do you know what that is, Wycliff? Did you ever see the movie? It’s the best work Barbara Stanwyck ever did.’ She smiled. ‘That reminds me. You remember the first time we met, at the Chateau Marmont bar? Of course you do. You were trying to figure out the name of the movie star you thought I was. Barbara Stanwyck, of course, has been dead and gone these many years, poor angel. But if she was still alive and closer to my age, she would have been my model. You might be calling me Barbara instead of Charlotte.’ She smiled. ‘Although I prefer Charlotte. There are a lot of Barbaras in the world my age. Not so many Charlottes.’
She continued. ‘A double-indemnity clause, my dear protégé, states that if a person dies under certain circumstances, one of which is murder, the beneficiary gets paid double. The million-dollar policy is doubled to two million. That’s good money, Wycliff. A woman can live a nice life on two million dollars.’
So could a man, Wycliff thought, as he listened to Charlotte spinning her story. I was going to live great on a lot less.
‘But to collect, Laurie needed her former partner dead. And that’s where you came in.’
You pathetic asshole, Wycliff thought. You knew the deal with Laurie stank like last week’s garbage, and you went ahead with it anyway. Charlotte was right: you’re a loser.
‘It was a calculated risk, Laurie giving you the first hundred thousand,’ Charlotte said. ‘You could have taken it and run for the hills. She was worried that you would. But I knew my Wycliff. I knew he wouldn’t run. Like I knew he would give that money to John. And Billy’s, too.
‘A share of the pot of gold wasn’t enough for you. You wanted it all.’ She pointed the gun at him again, like a schoolmarm pointing a ruler at an unruly student. ‘Pigs get rich, Wycliff, and hogs get slaughtered.’
Amelia warned me. And I didn’t listen.
‘It’s a win-win all around, Wycliff. Laurie collected her two million dollars, and gave me a nice finder’s fee. I got the house, and John and I split Billy’s money. Win-win.’ She paused and smiled. ‘Except for you. Because if there’s a winner, there has to be a loser, too, doesn’t there? Tag. You’re it.’
She trained the gun at his chest, holding it steady with both hands. ‘One hour, Wycliff. Start packing.’
Keeping his eyes riveted to the weapon in her hand, he stood up. Moving in tandem to keep her distance from him, she also rose, maintaining her tight grip on the gun. ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Wycliff,’ she warned him. ‘I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you force me to. The police will believe me, of course. A small woman against a big man who has already killed two people. I had to defend myself. Thank God I had this gun. The gun that was used to murder two innocent people.’
Her eyes were on his, unblinking. ‘I don’t want to shoot you, Wycliff. It would be messy and complicated. But I will if you force me to. It wasn’t a five-foot-four woman running away from those Beverly Hills murders. It was a six-foot two-inch man.’
Wycliff started towards the bedroom, moving carefully so as not to spook her. ‘Hey, Charlotte,’ he said, keeping his voice disarmingly low and calm, ‘if you’re really going to shoot me with that gun, you should have remembered to reload it.’
He took a step towards her. She backed away from him and pulled the trigger.
The click on the empty chamber was as deafening as it would have been if an actual bullet had been detonated. Before she could recover from her shock and pull the trigger again Wycliff was on her, his hand grabbing for the gun to rip it from her hand. Their bodies were pressed together, so the sound of the discharge was muted. Any passer-by hearing the shot would think it was a car backfiring.
‘Oh, God!’ she cried out, as she staggered away from him and collapsed onto the floor. ‘It burns.’
Wycliff knelt down and pried the weapon from her fingers. ‘Where does it hurt?’ he asked her, almost tenderly.
Her hand touched her abdomen. ‘Here.’
Her blouse was already seeping blood. He pulled the wet material away. The bullet had entered her soft belly below her navel. The wound oozed steadily, in rhythm with her heartbeat.
‘You’ve been gut shot,’ he told her.
‘It hurts,’ she whispered. Tears were forming in her eyes. ‘It hurts really badly.’
‘I know it does,’ he said. ‘That’s a nasty wound to get.’ He had treated gunshot wounds like this one when he did his time in the jail infirmary. Left untreated, they killed slowly and painfully.
‘Call an ambulance,’ she begged him. ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘I don’t want you to, either.’ That was true, despite everything she had done to him. She had fucked him over completely and ripped his life to shreds, but she had changed him, as well. And she had been wrong. He was a player.
‘I can’t call for help,’ he told her. ‘I would if I could. But if I save your life, I’ll be giving up mine.’
‘You’re going to let me die.’
He cradled her head in his lap, making sure she didn’t bleed on him. ‘I wish I could help you, Charlotte, I really do. But it’s too late for that now.’
THIRTY
He took a bundle of towels from the linen closet and slid them under Charlotte’s body, so the bleeding wouldn’t stain the rug. She clung to life for almost an hour. Mercifully, she passed out long before she died. When he was sure it was over he laid her out on the floor, curled up in the fetal position. To the casual eye, she might have been sleeping. Until you noticed all the blood.
Wycliff was thinking clearly now. He got a sheet from the bedroom closet and lifted her body and the bloody towels onto it. The lower side of her body was turning da
rk, while the top was losing color, looking like muddled marble. She was becoming a statue, frozen in time. ‘Goodbye, Charlotte,’ he said softly to the corpse. ‘You did me good before you did me bad, so thanks for the good times.’
He wrapped the body and towels in the sheet and secured the bloody package with duct tape. Then he stuffed all his belongings into garbage bags, making sure he didn’t leave anything behind. There was no point in wiping the place clean of his fingerprints. He had lived here for months, it was logical he would leave some spoor. But it was not his house anymore, he had signed it over to Charlotte.
It was late now, past midnight. The street was quiet and dark. He carried the corpse outside and placed it in the trunk of the rental car. Then he went back into the house and brought out the garbage bags containing his stuff, which he tossed into the back seat. There wasn’t much, mostly the clothing and accessories Charlotte had bought for him. Once he got on the road he’d get rid of everything, so there would be no trace left behind of their connection to each other.
The lawn mower and the other gardening tools were neatly stacked against the far wall of the garage. He picked up a shovel and carried it outside. He put the shovel in the trunk of the car, alongside the wrapped body.
One last reconnoiter of the house. He turned out the lights, locked up, and drove away forever.
The construction site had been readied for the foundation to be poured. Early in the morning, cement trucks would arrive and discharge their tons of concrete. The cement would harden within hours. Wycliff had driven by a few days earlier, He had done foundation work a few months before, back in Arizona. He could see that the walls of the molds for the cement had been dug several feet below ground level. He lifted Charlotte’s wrapped corpse out of the trunk of the car and dropped it into one of the holes. Then he grabbed the shovel, jumped down, and went to work. It didn’t take long to dig a hole big enough to stuff the grisly package into. He shoveled the loose dirt back over it and smoothed it out. No one would pay attention to any irregularity. By mid-morning, the body would be buried under several tons of industrial mud. If they couldn’t find Jimmy Hoffa, they wouldn’t find an old-lady grifter, either.
Turn Left at Doheny--A tough-edged crime novel set in Los Angeles Page 25
