“Of course, Bert. A murder – too cool.”
“I know, it’s sort of like a dream come true: I could send my boss to jail. Who could ask for more from a job?”
“Well, I was thinking, your editor – what’s his name, Schompe? – was having an affair with Mrs. Poke, right? That not only gives him an interest in seeing Poke dead, but it also gives the Widow Poke a possible motive, too. Do you know anything about her?”
“No, but …
“And who else benefits from Poke’s death? Who takes over his ‘empire?’?”
“You mean The End? I don’t know, that’s a good question, I’ll have to …”
“Yeah, we’ve got a lot of work to do, Bert,” he said and smiled at her.
She slowly smiled back, but a chill suddenly washed over her. “Do I really want to be this cozy with a guy I left over a monkey?” she thought.
***
The next day at work, Bertie had barely logged in on her computer (password doody) when Howard appeared at her desk. She gritted her teeth. If this was the kind of place where management actively sought her out, she might have to rethink unemployment.
“Hi, what’s up, Howard?”
“You’ve got a command performance today,” he said. His smile wavered between a smirk and a gloat.
“Command performance? With whom?”
“Mr. Johnson. Dillard. Out at his mansion.”
Bertie could feel cold sweat breaking out somewhere between her shoulder blades. A rich guy – no, a rich guy she worked for – wanted to see her? Cripes, what had she done? Was he going to sue her? Hire someone to snuff her out? Or, possibly the worst of all, yell at her? Bertie had a low tolerance for being yelled at.
“Did I do something wrong?” Better to get the bad news before she got the bad news.
“No. Dillard wants to meet you, that’s all. He had a close relationship with Bromby Pompton. And Dillard likes to hear all the gossip from the parties, so you’d better think up something to tell him. Now that you’ve settled into the job a little, you’ll probably be going out to the mansion occasionally to give a report. Although Dillard doesn’t think of it as a report, he likes to call it a natter.”
“Thanks for telling me.” Bertie was glad she hadn’t been blindsided by Johnson’s request for a “natter.”
As he turned to leave, Bertie took a surreptitious, sideways glance at him. “What the hell do women see in him?” she thought. He was OK looking, but he had the dull look of someone who’d spent too much time in middle management, as if the prospect of a future-less career had washed all the color from him. In the newsroom, he was known as the Gray Ghost because he drifted through the room without ever making much of an impact.
She tried to check out his package for any sign of the “big stick” Tiffany said he carried, but he moved too fast.
She made a quick stop in the bathroom before leaving and ran into Tiffany, who was once again in her bland skirt and white blouse, flats and no makeup.
“I hear you’re headed out to the mansion for your first debriefing,” she said. Without the heavy Goth makeup, Tiffany’s features looked smudged, indistinct, as if someone had smeared them on, rather than molding them out of skin and bone.
“Yeah, what’s up with that?” Bertie asked. “I’m supposed to gossip with him?”
“That’s right. That’s really the only reason for your job. Johnson loves to hear all the dirt you can dig up during these little soirees. Stuff like who gained weight, who wore the same dress twice, who got drunk, and he’d probably cream in his pants if you could find out who’s screwing who.”
“Dillard Johnson has a Hearst complex?”
“What’s a Hearst complex?”
“You know, William Randolph Hearst.”
Tiffany looked blank.
“You don’t know who William Randolph Hearst was? C’mon, Tiffany – he was the father of the modern newspaper.”
Tiffany looked irritated. “So who cares about all that old stuff? And what does he have to do with the Big Johnson?”
“Tiffany, I can’t believe you don’t know about William Randolph Hearst. He built a huge mansion in California and invited movie stars to stay there and party. But he supposedly had peepholes built into the walls so he could spy on tjem. It sounds like Dillard Johnson is imitating Hearst.” Bertie was appalled that Tiffany showed no interest in anything that happened before she came into existence.
“Yeah, well … interesting,” Tiffany said. “If I were you, I’d stop on the way to the mansion and pick up some tabs, find a couple of juicy tidbits for Big J and make some brownie points. Auntie Bromby was a master at it.” Tiffany had been combing her hair, now straight and brown and without pink streaks. She grimaced at herself in the mirror.
“Auntie Bromby?”
“He was very close to the Johnsons, almost like family. And he was gay – I mean, if your parents named you Bromby Pompton, what choice would you have? – so the ‘Auntie’ sort of followed. He was friends with the first Mrs. Johnson’s mother and the friendship carried over the mom’s death and the Johnsons’ divorce. Oh, wait till you meet the second Mrs. Johnson.” Tiffany put her hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh, then looked sharply up at the fluorescent ceiling light.
Bertie, surprised, looked up, too. “What?” she asked.
“Just checking to see if they planted a recorder or a camera or something since we were in here yesterday.”
“In the women’s room? Cheeze, what kind of place is this? I don’t want anyone listening while I … you know.”
“Just be careful. They don’t care that you don’t want to be heard taking a dump. They’ll tape it and use it against you. Not the dump, of course, anything you say in here. But we’re safe … for now. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. So Bromby was such a part of the family that he traveled with the Johnsons, spent nights at the mansion and, get this, babysat the kids when they were little enough to need a babysitter.”
Bertie’s alarm meter started pinging. “I won’t have to babysit anyone, will I?” She’d already signed up to be Cully’s babysitter.
“Do you have any experience as a prison warden?”
Tiffany laughed at Bertie’s puzzled look. “They’re past the stage of babysitters and into juvenile delinquency. I think you’re safe. Yikes!” Tiffany looked at her watch and broke into a trot toward the door. “I’m due at the courthouse in ten minutes. Don’t forget to pick up some tabloids.”
“Maybe I’ll buy the one that always has famous people getting pregnant by aliens.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Tiffany said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bertie drove through teeth-grinding traffic and into a less-populated area where the few huge homes were built on a canyon gashing through hills covered with golden brush so dry that it would go up like fireworks with just a spark.
Los Angeles, with its crown of smog fitted tightly over its skyline, loomed in the distance in one direction and the blue, glittering waves of the Pacific gleamed in the other. Only the very rich could afford a double-faced view like that.
The Johnson mansion was relatively new, but millions had been spent to make it appear old.
The white marble walls looked as if they were made of sugar cubes that had been dunked in café-au-lait and allowed to streak dry. An acre or so of front lawn was so overplanted with flowers that it looked like a rainbow jungle. Within a hundred feet of the front lawn, a strong odor of flowers assaulted Bertie in her car, even with the windows closed. It smelled as if a spritzing war had broken out among the young women who attack customers at high-end department stores with gusts of perfume.
Bertie pulled in behind a truck with two huge trees in the back that was parked before the massive front door. The driver was talking to a harried-looking man in – good God, was that a safari outfit complete with pith helmet?
“I told you, we have to take out the trees already in the ground before we can bring in the new ones … the old ones, y
ou know what I mean,” he said to the driver, whose ball cap was pushed back on his head and whose rumpled jeans and work shirt bespoke a life of labor.
“So I dug up these old trees,” the man gestured at the trees in his truck, “to plant in place of the old trees that are already there? Tell me again why you’d want to do that, buddy.”
“Because these trees are older. How many times do I have to explain it? Older trees are better than old trees. And my name isn’t Buddy. I’m Oliver Dombeck, Mr. Johnson’s personal arborist.”
“What am I supposed to do with the old ones?”
“Oh, give them to some poor people with new trees. I don’t really care.”
A man walked up behind Bertie, startling her. She wheeled around and saw an old man bent from years of hard work. He touched the brim of his tattered cap, something that Bertie thought only happened in old movies, and reached for her keys.
“I’ll park your car for you, Ma’am,” he said. His tired eyes looked kind, and Bertie put her keys into his gnarled hand. “Thank you” she said, smiling. He looked startled, as if not many people noticed him enough to speak to him and smiled shyly.
Bertie skirted the arborist and the truck driver as they continued their conversation and rang the bell. A man in a black suit, white shirt and gray tie opened the door and introduced himself as Bobert Lang, Mr. Johnson’s executive assistant. He was young and good looking, with dark wavy hair, a square jaw, and gray eyes covered by glasses with heavy black rims. He looked like Clark Kent. He led Bertie down a hallway toward a set of glass doors at the end of a hallway, but before they could reach them, a beautiful young woman in jodhpurs, blazer and riding boots emerged from an upstairs door and ran down a curving, open staircase connecting the second floor to the first.
“It’s OK, Bobert; I’ll take her to meet Dill. I’d like to talk to her first.”
“Yes, Mrs. Johnson.”
“Hi, I’m Annabelle Johnson, Dillard’s wife. You’re Bertie Mallowan, right? Have you taken Bromby’s place?”
Bertie stared. The woman looked like Jessica Rabbit, down to the bunny overbite. She was about twenty-six years old, tall, slender and buxom with green eyes peeking out from auburn hair combed over half her face in a long swoop. She looked to Bertie to be the perfect wife for a multimillionaire, rich, relatively useless, and not too bright.
Bertie smiled at her. “Yes, I’m Bertie Mallowan.”
“Oh, you’re not Australian.”
The question startled Bertie. “Ummm, no, I’m not. Am I supposed to be?”
Tears filled Annabelle’s big green eyes. She was so obviously distressed that Bertie wondered if should apologize for her lack of Down Underness.
“Oh, pooh! I was hoping we could have our own Australian just this once. Australians are sooo in right now.”
“Ummm, I do believe that my third cousin, twice removed, is Australian,” Bertie said, improvising wildly. “He played bass didgeridoo in a band, but when it went techno in the nineties, he quit to raise koalas.”
“No, I want you to be Australian. Can you ‘do’ an Australian accent? Maybe you could just pretend to be Australian. Just say, ‘G’day, mate.’ Go ahead, try it.” The words came out of Amelia’s bunny mouth as “Gud die, mite.”
“Crikey,” Bertie thought, just as a female voice called out, “Annabelle!”
The voice came from overhead and carried such authority that for a brief second,
Bertie thought that God was really a woman and had spoken to them from on high.
Bertie and Amelia turned their heads up toward the voice, while the woman – older with beautiful white hair that hung around her face and brushed her jaw like a silver curtain – gazed down on them from the balcony running around the second floor of the foyer.
“I think that’s enough for now, don’t you? Dillard is waiting in the garden to talk to Ms. Mallowan.” She smiled at Bertie. “If you go through the doors at the end of the hallway and down the steps, you’ll find him. He’s in the French garden, near the statue of Zeus. I saw him just a few minutes ago.”
“Thank you,” Bertie replied. Who was the woman? Annabelle’s mother?
Whoever she was, Bertie was grateful she’d been saved from Annabelle and pseudo-
Australian-ness. She turned to Annabelle Johnson, but she’d already started walking away, giving the odd impression that she was slinking away, embarrassed.
Bertie walked the length of the long hallway, dark as a medieval dining hall. Her anxiety level was rising. A lot depended on this meeting; her future in the career she’d wanted ever since high school and her identity as a journalist who made a difference in the world with what she wrote.
She walked out the beveled glass doors and stopped suddenly, gasping in astonishment. She stood at the top of a staircase looking out a world so green and beautiful that she felt stunned. Exotic trees lined white stone paths that wound through what seemed like acres of land. Small meadows opened into the sun and were peopled with gleaming statues surrounded by flowering bushes. Occasionally a massive fountain spurted diamonds of water into the sky.
Coming upon this beautiful, lush garden in the middle of the dried-out, brown California landscape had sucked the air from Bertie’s lungs. It was so unexpected, so … Bertie was left grasping for adjectives.
“If I lived here, I’d never leave this garden,” Bertie thought. “I’d stay here forever and –” her thoughts were broken into by a “Halloooo.” She turned and saw a tall, slender man in his late fifties with iron gray hair in a careless sweep across his brow beckoning to her. His cheekbones were so sharp they looked lethal. He was dressed impeccably in a suit that cost six months’ worth of Bertie’s salary.
The Big Johnson.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dillard Johnson was a beautiful man. His gray eyes were fringed in long lashes and set over an aquiline nose. When he smiled, finely shaped lips parted to reveal straight, white teeth. The only flaw Bertie could detect was a smattering of faint acne scars on his olive skin.
“Hello, Ms. Mallowan. Welcome to Snarles Park.” He pronounced it Snar-less.
“Please, call me Bertie.”
“All right, Bertie.” He smiled at her. “Please … this way,” he said, putting his hand lightly on the small of her back and guiding her along the path to a wrought-iron table and chairs near a statue of a naked Zeus. He held a chair for her under the looming Zeus seated her, then sat in the chair across the table from her. Bertie, who felt uncomfortably close to the statue, glanced up at it; Zeus’ dangling penis and balls were right over her head.
She looked at Johnson and caught him smirking at her. The expression vanished quickly and Bertie realized she wasn’t meant to see it. His secret amusement at her expense sent the blood rushing to her cheeks – in anger, not embarrassment.
His face now wiped clean of expression, Johnson said, “I wanted to meet you out here because Snarles Park is my pride and joy. When I moved into this house, this was nothing but chaparral and dirt.” He waved his hand toward the greenery that surrounded them. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Sir?” she thought, where the hell did that come from? She never called anyone – male or female – sir. It was the power of the man’s presence that had ripped it from her, even in the midst of her anger. “Umm, Snarles Park, sir?”
“Yes. In doing research on my family tree, I discovered that I was descended from an old English family with the odd name Snarles. Pronounced, as you hear, Snar-less. I decided to name my home after the family estate in Covington, Snarles Park. A conceit, but at this stage of my life, I’m ready to indulge myself. I hope you’ll be spending a lot of time here, Bertie. Bromby was a part of our family and I’m sure you’ll fit in just as well. I have parties here quite often and Bromby would stay over in the mansion instead of making the long trip home to … wherever he lived.” Johnson laughed and Bertie thought it telling that he didn’t know where Pompton lived when he ha
d been such a big part of the Johnson family.
She smiled but, even after such a short time, found Johnson’s self-satisfaction off-putting. She was beginning to understand how he’d earned the nickname Big Johnson. His features, which had struck Bertie as so beautiful initially, had thinned to a foxlike veneer that vaguely unsettled her. She’d have to watch her tendency to blurt things out and, for once in her life, think before she talked.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “we’re going to be having a charity party here in a month or two and I hope you’ll consider staying with us that night. And how are you finding your work? Are you getting along well with Howard?” The question came out so casually that Bertie’s radar started beeping. If he was looking for gossip, Bertie wasn’t going to start by trashing her immediate superiors.
“Yes, sir, he’s a good editor.”
“Well, that’s good to hear.” She could read dissatisfaction with her answer on his face, but she just smiled as if she were a blissful innocent, something she hadn’t been since, oh, about the fourth grade.
“I was very impressed by the story you did about Bob Bellingham and his murder. I have an assignment for you that I think you might find interesting.” He smiled at her, but his eyes darted quickly to the stone wall encompassing the small area where they sat. It happened so fast that Bertie almost missed it.
“I’d like you to do some investigative reporting for me. You were at the party Friday where Rowley Poke died, right? Rowl and I worked hard to get the environmental movement going in L.A. and I’m worried about what’s happening to The End. You know it, right?” Johnson had an annoying habit of asking for confirmation and then not waiting for it. Bertie wondered if she should tally up the number of “rights” he asked and give him his answers at the end of the conversation: “Oh, and Mr. Johnson? Right, right, right, maybe and right.”
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