Cold Call (Iris Thorne Mysteries Book 1)

by Dianne Emley

  “Don’t deal,” Frankie said, walking up to the table. “Get up. You’re done here.”

  “Awww, maann!” Teddy swatted his chips. They flew across the felt table top. “Guys, play in Gardena. You can stick a fork in this place, it’s done.”

  The chip attendant gathered Teddy’s chips and handed him cash. Teddy grabbed it from him, pushed Frankie aside, and strode ahead.

  “Don’t let the door hit you on your way out,” Teddy heard someone say behind him. His face flushed red.

  Sally Lamb was sitting in Eddie’s white leather chair with his hands folded over his lean belly. His loose facial skin sagged into a world-weary expression. Jimmy Easter paced the floor behind the chair where Teddy was sitting, walking slowly, watching Teddy with each step, passing close enough so that Teddy could feel, or thought he could feel, Jimmy’s leather jacket brush against his hair. Teddy angled his head slightly from side to side, trying to keep Jimmy in his line of vision.

  “Gambling with my money out there?” Sally asked.

  “You guys said Friday,” Teddy said. “Bring the money Friday. It’s only Saturday. I have almost a whole week.”

  “Go home,” Sally said. “No gambling for you.”

  “But I’m feeling lucky tonight.”

  “We’re going to Gardena after this and if I find you there, I’m going to have Jimmy kick your ass.”

  “You can’t tell me what to do. I’ll go wherever I want.” Teddy shifted his shoulders uneasily as Jimmy paced behind him. “Tell him to sit down.”

  Sally continued. “Teddy, if I don’t get my money on Friday, I’m going to have to move on you. Much as I like you, business is business. I’m being up front with you.”

  “You’ll get it Friday.” Teddy scooted forward to sit on the edge of the chair. “I’ve got this scam on penny stocks. It’s beautiful.” He rubbed his palms together. “Your portfolio earned nine thousand bucks in one day. Hey, you know, a guy like you should invest in the market. You ever think about that?”

  “You know, Teddy, since you brought it up, I have been thinkin’ about this securities thing you’re in. It seems like it’s got a lot of business opportunities. Nine large is good money for a day’s work. With a little management, you could do very well.”

  “That’s a one-time-only thing, Sally. Just to get out of this jam.”

  Sally held his palms together and pressed them against his lips. “Look, I’ll cut twenty grand off what you owe me if we do some business. Or you can pay me. It’s real simple.”

  “I can’t do a scam long term! I’ll get caught. I’ll lose my license.”

  “I’m just tryin’ to help you out. You decide. Tell me on Friday.”

  Jimmy stood close to Teddy’s chair. He stroked Teddy’s cheek with the back of his index finger.

  Lewin watched Teddy come out from behind the mirrored door, slamming it behind him. He watched Teddy cross the floor and go up the stairs, passing within inches of him, and walk out of the card room into the lobby. Lewin started to follow him when he saw the door to the back office open. He drained the last of the scotch rocks and walked toward the mirrored door.

  This is getting damn interesting.

  “Sally Lamb,” Lewin said. “And… lessee… Jimmy Easter. Ha, haaaha. You guys slay me. So. You boys leave any more souvenirs in the canyon for me?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Iris Thorne took a cool shower that should have refreshed her but only solidified the bad way she felt.

  She stood in her walk-in closet and clicked the hangers. She pulled out an ankle-length white cotton nightgown trimmed in eyelet and hand embroidery, which she’d forgotten she’d bought. The price tag was still on it. The price made her gasp. Then she figured that buying it probably had been the right thing to do at the time. She wouldn’t second-guess herself. She wouldn’t start that tonight. At least she hadn’t headed straight to the mall. She’d come straight home from John Somers’s house. That was good.

  She lay on the goose-down comforter on her bed, shoving lace pillows out of the way, and closed her eyes. Twenty seconds later, she got up.

  She wrestled with the cork on a champagne bottle and it finally gave with a pop. She filled a Baccarat flute, started to bring it to her lips, then filled a second one, and left it sitting on the sink. She clinked the two glasses together.

  “To Alley, wherever you are.”

  She gestured around the room as if he was floating there, somewhere.

  “May death be kinder than life. At least quieter. I guess it was already too quiet for you.”

  She drank most of the glass, then topped it off again. She ran her finger across the dust that had gathered on a revolving herb and spice rack that someone had given her as a housewarming gift and made a mental note to speak to her cleaning lady. She looked at the herbs and spices that had paled with age. She’d never had the occasion to open any of them.

  She started to leave the kitchen and went back and took the bottle of champagne with her. She tucked the cordless phone under her arm and went onto the terrace. The sea wind tickled the air like it always did and the cotton nightgown fluttered against her legs. She gave the philodendron a drink of champagne and sat in the wooden Adirondack lounge chair that she had ordered from the company in Maine.

  This is living, she thought.

  She punched in Steve’s number and his phone rang several times before his answering machine clicked on. She hung up.

  She called back again, waited for the phone message to end, opened her mouth to speak, then hung up again without saying anything. She started to speculate about where he could be on a Saturday night, then stopped.

  She called her mother.

  “Come over, honey,” her mother said.

  No. Her mother would somehow pull the unhappiness out of her and Iris would cry and end up confirming her mother’s feeling that she should be worried about her and it would make Iris think that indeed she had made the wrong choices.

  But she told her mother about Alley. She only told her who Alley was and what happened to him and the about funeral that day but none of the other stuff about the money and the stock and the ice pick and Somers and now Joe Campbell’s father.

  But it was enough for her mother to sense the wolf at Iris’s door and she started to worry. And the weight of her mother’s worrying added to Iris’s burden.

  She went inside, got the bag from the Rodeo Drive boutique, sat cross-legged on the Oriental area rug in the living room, and dumped out the cash. She took the rubber bands off the bundles. There were mostly hundred-dollar bills. She rubbed them around on the carpet. Then she started counting.

  The microwave sang and John Somers pulled out the ballooned bag of popcorn. He grabbed the opposite corners of the package, pulled it open, and reached in, fingers dancing around the steam. He tossed a kernel to the dog who expertly snatched it out of the air, then stood at attention for more.

  “Does that have tropical oils in it?” Chloe said.

  “I don’t know. It’s good.” Somers handed her the bag.

  “It has palm oil in it. Says right here. Mom says you’ll drop dead in your tracks, the way you eat.”

  “Have your mother make the arrangements.”

  “Why do you always call her that—‘your mother’?”

  “Isn’t she?”

  “It just sounds so official, or something.”

  “She’s not getting my Dead albums when I drop.”

  “Philip doesn’t like the Grateful Dead.”

  “I’ll bet old Phil doesn’t.”

  “He likes to be called Philip.”

  “Figures.”

  “He doesn’t eat tropical oils.”

  “I bet your mother thinks I could take a lesson from old Phil, right?”

  “She says some men never grow up. With your tree house and cops and robbers.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I like this house, Dad. It’s fun.”

  “I like it too.
Tell your mother that your father says to have fun this week, okay? She forgets sometimes.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s good for your heart, too.”

  Somers threw another kernel to Buster, high this time, and the dog snatched it out of the air, his jaws closing with a snap. Somers walked into the living room, Chloe and the dog following like a quail family. He reached to the top of a bookshelf and pulled down a stack of oversized books that were lying on their sides. Dust rolled off the top.

  “Ugh,” Chloe said, “dust bunnies. Don’t you ever clean up there, Dad?”

  Somers sighed, looked at his daughter, and hoped she’d grow out of it.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” he said. “There’s a movie starting that I want to see.”

  “Wait. Is it in color?”

  “Let’s see. Yes, it was made in color.”

  “Okay, is it in English?”

  “It has… English subtitles.”

  “Awww, Dad! Not subtitles. Puleeese, no subtitles.”

  “But I named you after the girl in the movie. Don’t you want to see it?”

  “Wellll, okay. What were you going to name me if I’d been a boy?”

  “Claus.”

  “Claus?”

  “Good strong name. Claus. No one messes with Claus.”

  Somers walked down the stairs followed by Chloe, then Buster, the dog’s nails clicking on the wood floor. Chloe threw herself on Somers’s water bed, creating undulating waves. The bed was covered with a patchwork spread and was in a heavy wood frame with high posts. Somers propped up a pillow and sat next to his daughter. He put the popcorn between them and spread the books out, wiping dust off the covers with his hand.

  “Here it is, ‘Carta de México.’“

  He handed it to Chloe. “Find a town called Oaxcatil for me.”

  “Waka what?”

  He spelled it for her.

  “Where is it, about?”

  “I forgot to ask.”

  He clicked on the television just as the opening credits were starting. He threw another kernel to the dog, who waited longingly with his head stretched up onto the bed. Somers looked through the other books he had taken from the shelf and pulled a photo album onto his lap. He opened the album cover and felt a rush of nostalgia.

  The first picture was of Iris. It was on Santa Monica beach, looking north where it curves into Malibu, in winter under gray skies. Iris was bundled up in sweaters and she was smiling. She was smiling at him.

  He turned the album pages. The paper was brittle. Children had been born and half grown and paper had dried up.

  He turned a page.

  He’d never thought about love until he fell in love with Iris and it felt pretty great. It felt like the real thing from what he could tell when he was twenty years old. He hadn’t quite felt that way since.

  He turned a page.

  Then he thought that maybe he was trying to recapture something that belonged to the past. Like people wearing vintage clothing. It looks authentic but it’s still just a show. And who really wants to go back, anyway?

  He turned a page.

  But then he saw a picture of a day he’d forgotten about. He might have gone the whole rest of his life without remembering that day. It was a day when he felt transported. When everything had made crazy sense. When he had meshed with the crazy scheme of things. When his mind had been clear and his senses open.

  It was a Sunday in late summer and they’d driven to East Los Angeles in his MG with the brakes almost gone. Easlos, she’d called it. The Santa Ana winds had blown hot and hard all night, raising the crime rate, bewildering sailors, shoving the smog to the ocean, enervating everyone, circling the city with slate mountains, cleansing the sky to a brilliant blue that was hard to look at, reminding everyone of what a glorious place Southern California must have been once upon a time.

  The freeways shone white, the silicon in the asphalt sparkling like cut jewels. There wasn’t as much traffic then. You could get on the freeway at certain times and there’d be hardly anyone else there. And he drove the freeway with the MG with bad brakes with the top down, Iris Thorne at his side, driving through thin, blue air, cruising on brilliant concrete and steel. It made you feel as if you were on the pipeline to anywhere.

  Iris’s house was on top of a hill in a worn lower-middle-class neighborhood that had changed hands from the Jews to the Japanese to the Mexicans, who had it still. Iris’s father had moved there before it had been claimed by anyone and bought a lot of the cheap, rolling land. Some roads were still unpaved. Some streets still didn’t have sidewalks. Some people had chickens and ducks and rabbits in their backyards. There was undeveloped land all around, only fifteen years ago. Great hills covered with tall, dry yellow weeds that swayed and rustled in the wind, home to tortoises and road runners and snakes. It was like a day in the country.

  The air was hot and dry and Indian summer brittle.

  Iris took Somers inside to greet her parents. Her mother, forties-movie-star pretty, hanging clothes out to dry in the backyard with wooden clothespins. Her father, sunburned nose, his flat, straight hair looking like a wind off a Texas plain had just blown through it.

  They were in the house for ten minutes, had been sitting on the flowered sofa for ten seconds, tinted aluminum tumblers of pink fruit punch and ice in front of them, television on, when Iris turned to show him the pink moustache she’d made on her upper lip with the fruit punch and he’d laughed and she’d pulled his arm to go.

  They walked up the great yellow, weed-covered hill, dragging a cardboard refrigerator box that someone had left for the garbage man. The dog ran ahead and looked back to wait for them, then ran ahead again. The weeds stood four feet tall, heavy with pointy seeds that caught on everything.

  They positioned the refrigerator box at the crest of the slope, the bottom facing downhill. Iris slid in front and he straddled her, wrapping his arms around her waist, feeling her ribs through her cotton T-shirt, as narrow as a sparrow’s. They pressed their faces against the half-inch opening in the box bottom where the flaps came together. He pushed off, down the hill. They smashed through the slick weeds, gaining momentum, the rocks and dirt clods sending the box on a wild trajectory, the dog running alongside barking, both of them screaming, seeing only a flash of yellow weeds. They hit a hole that sent them flying out, ten feet in either direction, and they rolled down the hill until they finally stopped.

  He rolled onto his back and laughed at the blue sky.

  Iris stood over him, trailing the battered box by a flap, grinning, panting, then falling in the tall weeds that hid them from the world. They tore handfuls of weeds from the ground, dirt clods dangling from the ends, and lay on them and looked up at the sky, the dry wind troubling the weeds around them.

  “Shhhh, listen!” Iris said.

  She put her ear against the ground and he did the same. The weeds beneath his ear rustled and clicked and whirred.

  “It’s a different world.”

  Their legs were covered with shallow cuts, bloody and caked with dirt. He kissed her bruises, which were already starting to come up, purple against her ermine skin. He kissed her face and stroked her tangled hair. She put her hands under his T-shirt and laid her cheek against his chest. She pulled his shorts down and sat astride him. They made love, with him staring into a sky that was so bright it made his eyes hurt, feeling as if he was one with the lizards and spiders below and crows and pigeons above and the dog panting and drooling next to them and with Iris. Every pore was open, every nerve sensitized. It was simple and perfect. He wanted to hold on to Iris forever.

  Iris pulled the frosting off a Sara Lee butter pecan coffee cake. She picked off the pecans and dug out the cinnamon filling with her fingers, washing it down with champagne. She clicked through the five million cable stations. An Asian man pounded on a desk, his Korean translated into rows of Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Tagalog characters at the bottom of the screen. A hospital promised relief. Kid
s out of control? Wife depressed? Husband alcoholic? Stash them here. A nature program showed baby sea turtles breaking out of their eggs and scampering down the sand to the sea. Iris started to weep.

  She clicked to a movie where people were talking and smoking a lot. It had a flat art-film texture and was in French with subtitles. The girl called the man “bourgeois.” Iris remembered when it used to be an insult.

  She remembered seeing every French and Italian movie that came out in college, yearning in the dark for crumbling buildings, old art, thick coffee, stinky cigarettes, neat aperitifs, and sultry-eyed men with suggestive manners. Ooohhh-la-la.

  Somers had been great. He was fun. He was a pal. But he was just so… homespun. Big and freckled with a face as wide open as the grain belt. You didn’t live for the moment with someone you met in the cafeteria dishing up mystery meat, did you?

  She remembered taking Somers to this same movie and they made love afterward in his dorm room with the sun streaming in the single window and his roommate at an afternoon lab. She’d learned every inch of his body, exploring with the curiosity of the new and the leisure of youth, where the only penalty was missing the four o’clock lecture. Then they’d slept, Somers’s holding her in his arms so that she wouldn’t roll off the narrow dorm-room bed, and she’d dreamt of faraway places.

  Iris picked at the coffee cake with her fingers and watched the movie. Chloe, the protagonist, whom Iris once had thought free-spirited, bohemian, and impossibly chic now seemed lonely and adrift. The man, the bourgeois, just seemed to be a guy trying to make a nice life for his family and having a midlife crisis. And Iris felt a pang for those afternoons with Somers in his dorm room and second-guessed herself and wondered how she had got here from there.

  “Dad, isn’t that Iris?”

  “Yes, it’s Iris.”

  “When?”

  “In college.”

  “You didn’t tell me you knew her in college.”