Virtually Dead

by Peter May

  Michael leaned on the bookcase and watched Janey dusting for prints. “Anything interesting, Miss Amat?”

  She shrugged. “Nah. No weapon. No obvious calling cards. We’ll have to bag the rug and a few bits and pieces. Plenty of prints, but they’re probably mostly his and hers. We’ll do an inch-by-inch once we’ve cleared the room.” She glanced at him, and held him fondly in her gaze for a moment. “Howya doing, Mike?”

  “Better for seeing you, Janey.”

  She grinned. “Yeh, that’ll be right. The only time guys are happy to see me is when I’m heading out the door.”

  “That’s just cos you’ve got such a cute ass.”

  “Hah! Mid-thirties and sagging. I don’t think so, Mike.”

  “Hey, any guy would be glad to get his hands on your butt.”

  “Yeh? So how come I haven’t met any of them?” She grinned and cocked a provocative eyebrow in his direction. “Unless, of course, you’re offering.”

  He grinned. “I’m more of a tit man myself.”

  “Damn! And I don’t have much in that department.” She cupped what little she had in each hand, pulled a face and turned back to her dusting. “Speaking of large breasts, what’s happening with that girl from Huntington Beach who was after your body?”

  Michael’s face clouded slightly, and he tried to sound casual. “Nah. Wouldn’t have worked, Janey.”

  She turned a frown in his direction. “You mean, you never put hands on her butt either?”

  He shrugged. “I figure they put the implants in the wrong place. I thought I had big hands, too. But never could get them around it.”

  He turned away then, his smile fading, and stared out through the French windows at the ocean view. He hadn’t laid hands on anyone in a long time and couldn’t imagine that he ever could again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sunlight seeped in all around the edges of the Venetian blinds, long cracks of light falling in zigzag patterns across the furniture of the darkened room. Michael closed his eyes and saw again green, manicured lawns rising up across an undulating hillside punctuated by the occasional tree. No headstones here, just slabs engraved and laid in the ground. Plots sold, like so much real estate, with spectacular views of the Pacific, prices elevated by the proximity of John Wayne’s grave just a little further up the hill. Twenty thousand dollars to lay your body down for the last time in Pacific View Memorial Park, with airplanes from John Wayne airport flying overhead every few minutes to soothe your final sleep.

  It had been a fine, fall day when they put Mora in the ground here. Shirt-sleeve weather. And the mourners had gathered, uncomfortable in dark suits and coats and hats, a small group of friends and relatives, most of whom had assiduously avoided eye contact with Michael. Her late husband’s children and ex-wife had arranged a lunch afterwards. A celebration, Michael thought. The chance to pick over her remains and discuss the recovery of their lost inheritance. He had not been invited, and wouldn’t have gone even if he had.

  He stood long after they had left, watching the gravediggers shovelling dry, loose dirt over her coffin, and turned his face up toward the sun, in the hope that it might dry his tears.

  In the end he had walked back down the hill to his car and driven home to an empty house and an empty life, wondering if it would ever again be filled with anything but pain.

  A sound in the room made him open his eyes, and he saw Angela’s silhouette in the chair opposite. He could almost feel her impatience as she crossed her legs. “You’re obsessing, Michael. Grief is a natural process for dealing with bereavement. But you are turning it into a cause célèbre. You are focusing on Mora’s death as your loss rather than hers. And yes, of course, you suffered loss. But the dead are gone, and in the end the living must move on. You aren’t moving on. You have put your life on pause, the green light winking. You’re wallowing in your own self-pity.”

  “It’s not true, Angela. I’m trying. I really am. That’s why I went back to my old job.” He paused, and allowed himself an ironic smile in the dark. “That, and the fact that I needed the money.”

  “You never told me why you quit in the first place.”

  “Mora wanted me to. She had so much money, neither of us needed to work. And after three years of widowhood, she wanted to play.”

  “And you couldn’t play if you were tied to a job.”

  “Yes.” He remembered the arguments. At first he had been dead against it. He loved his job, and he knew that without it his independence would be gone. It was her money, not his. He would be a kept man. But she had won in the end, turning those big, sad, brown eyes on him and trotting out the well-worn clichés. Life was not a rehearsal. Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today—tomorrow may never come. And for her it had been prophetic. Such a short time they had had together, and in the end he was pleased he had quit. They had travelled the world. Italy, France, the Far East, the Caribbean. So many happy moments, now just so many memories. But at least he had them.

  “So how is it going? Orange County Forensic Science Service, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Originally I was at Santa Ana. But I’m based at Newport Beach now.”

  He heard her smile. “So you can just about walk to work.”

  “Just about.” But he was thinking about how it had been. Those first few days back at work. People he had known for years. It wasn’t that they were hostile, or even cool. Just lacking in warmth. He said, “They don’t understand.”

  “Who don’t understand what?”

  “My coworkers. They can’t figure out what I’m doing back there. It’s like they think I’m slumming, or something. Idle rich kid just playing at it. They figure I’m worth a fortune, so why the hell would I want to work? If only they knew.”

  “Do you feel they are judging you in some way?”

  “I’m sure of it. I’m sure they think I only married her for the money. After all, she was so much older than me.”

  “Not so old, Michael. Ten years is nothing between adults. And she was still in her early forties, wasn’t she?”

  He nodded and thought, she can’t see me nodding. “Yes,” he said.

  There was a long silence. Then, “And did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Marry her for her money.”

  “Of course not!” He heard the pitch of his voice rising and wondered if he was protesting too much. If maybe there was some grain of truth in the thought and he didn’t want to face it. “At first, maybe, the money made her seem glamorous. Attractive. But in the end I fell for her. She was a good-looking woman, but that wasn’t it either. It was her. It was Mora. There was a beautiful, still centre to her that just drew me in and held me there. I was totally beguiled, Angela.”

  “And what drew her to you?”

  He smiled. “At first I think it was my youth.”

  “And you’re an attractive man.”

  He tried to see her face in the dark, but it was lost in shadow. “I’ve never had any trouble attracting women, if that’s what you mean.” He was a good-looking young man, tall, athletically built, with long dark hair that he swept back from a broad, tanned forehead set above ice-chip blue eyes. They were the genetic inheritance of his Celtic ancestry. Or perhaps the Eastern European gene pool that had spawned his great grandfather, from whom he had also inherited his surname. Kapinsky. Not a name he liked much. But he was the keeper of it, and the last in the line. “It doesn’t matter what attracted either of us in the beginning. We fell in love. And that’s what sustained us. And whatever money she might have left me, I’d trade every last penny of it to have her back.”

  This time the silence lasted even longer than before. Then he heard her sigh and saw her rise from her chair. Light flooded the room as she opened the blinds. He screwed up his eyes against the pain of it until his pupils contracted.

  Angela’s sitting room, where she conducted her sessions, was an elegant room. Framed certificates and diplomas in almost every imaginable branch
of psychology, lined oak panelled walls. A soft leather sofa and armchairs stood among brass standard lamps with green glass shades on a sumptuous, thick-piled oatmeal carpet rising to crimson velvet drapes. She turned back toward him. An attractive woman herself. Thick, straight, blond hair tumbling over square shoulders. A willowy figure. Green eyes that seemed to penetrate the soul. She was not that much older than Michael, he had speculated the first time they met. Mid-to-late thirties, perhaps. But there was no wedding ring. No hint of a man around the house. She was something of an enigma.

  She turned back to Michael. “Same time on Thursday?”

  “Sure.” He eased himself reluctantly from her sofa and braced himself to face the world again.

  ***

  He stepped out from the side entrance of her beachfront villa and followed the path to a high gate that opened on to the boardwalk. The houses here had narrow frontages, many of them recently remodelled. But they were deceptively large, and ran back nearly half a block to a wide access lane that serviced two streets of houses laid back to back. A wide expanse of golden, sandy beach stretched away to the cold blue of the ocean, and lifeguard stations raised on stilts were set every few hundred yards to monitor the safety of the crowds who would descend in the summer.

  Tall palms and gnarled Joshua trees crowded tiny gardens where outdoor tables and chairs and huge gas barbecues, were still covered over for the season. The boardwalk was almost deserted, except for an overweight woman in a red tracksuit and straw hat walking at a leisurely pace, swinging the hand of her elderly husband. They seemed so relaxed. Comfortable with each other. Walking in silence, hand in hand, enjoying the sun. Michael envied them.

  He turned and headed south toward the ferry. He and Mora had often come down here to walk the dog. Taking their time. Heading for the Crab Cooker, where they would frequently buy giant crab claws and homemade tartare sauce to carry back to the house for a lunch they would wash down with chilled, dry California Sauvignon blanc.

  The ferry itself was little more than a barge that could carry three or four vehicles at a time across the few hundred yards that separated the peninsula from Balboa Island. Two of them plied back and forth between wooden landing stages. On the peninsula side, a small ferris wheel near the Maritime Museum stood silent, except for the wind fibrillating through the fine web of cable that made up its superstructure.

  The shack that rented out boats and arranged parasailing was deserted, racks of sun hats and tee-shirts fluttering in the breeze outside. Michael walked down the ramp to the waiting ferry and sat on the bench beside the pilot’s cabin and felt the breeze in his face as it chugged its way slowly across the channel.

  As he strolled down the sidewalk of the island’s Grand Canal, he let his gaze wander along the row of millionaires’ homes, mock mansions built out of plyboard masked by stone facing and stucco and clapboard siding. Each one had its yacht at the door. Fifty-, sixty-, seventy-foot vessels. He and Mora had been among that in-crowd once, popular, on everyone’s invitation list. Their house, after all, stood in one of Corona del Mar’s most sought-after locations, overlooking all the others. But their friends had known that the money was hers, and after she died the invitations to Michael had ceased. He was not, after all, really one of them.

  He cut through Balboa Avenue to Marine Avenue and bought himself a caramel machiatto at Starbucks. He and Mora had stopped here for coffee most days. He continued to come regularly with his laptop, an escape from the house. And people still remembered Mora. Retired people in running shoes and sweat pants and baseball caps. Smiles spread across age-spattered faces that had seen too much sun and too many years.

  “Hi, Michael, how are you today?”

  He guessed that like everyone else they thought he was still rich. Sure, he had a house worth four million—in a healthy market. But he had also inherited an outstanding home loan of three million, which was about all he might get in a sale during this period of economic downturn. And he was rapidly running out of the means to keep up the payments.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was a fifteen-minute drive from the house in Dolphin Terrace to the Lido, where the lawyer’s office stood at the end of a wooden landing one floor up, opposite the marina. Michael could smell food cooking in the waterfront restaurants. Fresh fish. Garlic. The warm, yeasty scent of hot bread.

  Huge yachts and seventy foot MV’s rose and fell on the gentle swell, tethered to moorings that cost twenty thousand a month to rent.

  Jack Sandler was smooth in every sense of the word. He had a voice like velvet, a face shaved to a shiny finish, and a bald head that seemed to have been polished to reflect the sun. Michael guessed that he earned big bucks, even for a lawyer. He had a huge desk, as polished and shiny as his skull, and an unparalleled view over the harbour. He ushered Michael into a seat by the window and sat himself down behind his big desk, peering at his client over orderly piles of files and papers.

  “How are you doing, Michael?” he said as if Michael were his best friend. “You’re looking well, my man.” But behind the facade, Michael was certain he must be wondering if his client was going to have the wherewithal to pay the bill.

  Michael had no interest in exchanging pleasantries. “What’s the news, Jack?”

  “Not good I’m afraid, Michael.” Sandler’s smile seem to fix itself on his face, before finally he allowed it to morph into something like a frown. “Looks like the judgment’s gonna go against you. Best we can hope for is that they’ll accept some kind of a deal and settle out of court.”

  Michael had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, like a stone slowly sinking through quicksand. He had seen this coming since the funeral. Mora had inherited her money from her husband, whom she had met when she went to work for his newspaper and magazine publishing empire in San Francisco. Originally she had interviewed for the job as his PA. He told her later she hadn’t got the job because he had known immediately he would fall for her. She went to work at first for one of his executives. But she had still drawn him like a magnet, and he had spent more time in her office than in his own. In the end they had fallen in love. He had divorced his wife, made a settlement, set up trust funds for his kids, and married Mora. They should have lived happily ever after. But just five years later he died from a rare form of brain cancer, and she inherited the company.

  For a year she had tried to run the operation as he had, but she hadn’t the heart or the gift for it, and in the end sold up—for a staggering fifty million dollars. Which was when her late husband’s ex-wife and his kids made their first attempt to grab a slice of the cake. On that occasion the courts had thrown out their case, but Mora’s guilt had led her to gift cash to each of the kids, and ten million to the former wife. A mistake. For it had created a precedent, established a recognition by her that the family of her late husband had some entitlement. Certainly more than Michael. Which was the argument they were making now.

  The trouble was that Mora had been no businesswoman. She had made a series of bad investments, spent money like water, and what had started out as a small fortune had dwindled to just a few million, most of which was tied up in property. Her stocks and shares provided barely enough income to cover the running costs of the house and pay the home loan.

  “Well, I don’t know what I can offer them, Jack. A few dodgy investments, a lot of debt.”

  “We’ll have to do a valuation, Michael. Get a figure on what the stocks and shares are worth, how much you’ll get for the house. You’ve put it on the market, haven’t you?”

  Michael nodded. “But things are slow. Real estate is in a slump right now. People are making silly offers that would put me into negative equity. I’m going to have to ride it out if I want to get the best price.”

  “Well, if the valuation on the property is equal to or less than the size of the home loan, they can’t argue that one. Unless they want to take on the debt. But I think you are going to have to wave goodbye to the stocks and shares.”

  A s
igh of pure frustration forced itself through Michael’s lips. “That’s all that’s feeding the loan repayments, Jack. And the cost of running the place. You know that house costs thirty thousand bucks a year in taxes alone?”

  Jack canted his head apologetically and folded his hands on the desk in front of him. “Then you’re just going to have to sell it for what you can get, Michael. I’m sorry.”

  ***

  They say that death always comes in threes. And that bad news never comes alone. Mora’s money seemed tainted. It had brought only fleeting happiness to her husband, and then to her. Now both of them were dead, and it flashed through Michael’s mind that maybe he was next. The third in the death cycle of three. Or maybe the money would take its death curse with it. If so, the greed of Mora’s dead husband’s family would bring them more than they were bargaining for.

  As for the bad news. The next instalment wasn’t long in coming.

  Michael sat amongst the potted palms in the office allocated to the manager of the State Bank of Southern California, Newport Beach branch. It was a fish bowl looking out across an open-plan office where customers bargained with bank staff over loans and overdrafts. His meeting with Jack Sandler had been a little over two hours earlier.

  Michael was not on first name terms with Walter Yuri, who liked to be called Mister. Mr. Yuri was a short, avuncular man with a fine head of dark hair going grey, a neatly trimmed moustache, and the bedside manner of a family doctor. He breezed into the office, a busy and distracted man.

  “Sorry to keep you, Mr. Kapinsky. This subprime lending debacle is putting everyone under pressure. God knows where it’s all going to end. Vicious cycle, you know. Vicious cycle.” He sat down behind his desk. “I’ve been saying it for years. The government can’t prop up the economy with consumer spending that’s financed by credit. Sooner or later people have to pay back the loans. Or default on them. Which is what’s happening now.”

  Michael shrugged. “Of course, I don’t suppose the banks can shoulder any of the responsibility. I mean, who can blame them for offering unsecured loans to people who couldn’t afford them?”