“Where you’re trying to take me, I got trouble going,” Winnie said. “See, all this would rest on a personality switch. Warner Stillwell’s spent half a lifetime with your dad. Let’s say, he only pretended to love your father because a the life-style he was provided with. Still, the man’s over seventy. He’s got it made the rest a the way, long as he stays on the ranch and continues what he’s been doing, and …”
“Hack Starkey!” she interrupted. “Maybe he’s been heavily involved with Starkey. Maybe Starkey doesn’t want to live on the ranch. Maybe he wants to do the things with Warner that Daddy did with Warner.”
“Return to Sorrento?”
“Something like that.”
“And Starkey persuades him that you gotta go, so the ranch can be Warner’s to sell. But Starkey’s not a professional killer and he butchers the shot he takes at you out on the trail. And he’s a pretty sloppy guy on a surveillance too, when he’s checking out your house.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t like it,” Winnie said. “How do you explain the will and the trust arriving at your house, but not the land deed?”
“There was something I deliberately withheld from Martin Scroggins. Something that would’ve made him interrogate Warner Stillwell immediately, no matter what.”
“Yeah?”
“At the time those documents were sent, I was staying at the ranch. Arranging for the funeral at the desert cemetery after the coroner was through with Daddy’s body. Making notifications. Doing a thousand little things. Helping to see Warner through his grief, at least I thought he was grieving.”
“Who had access to your mailbox on Linda Isle?”
“Anybody on the list I’ve given to the gate guards.”
“Who would that be?”
“A housekeeper comes in once a week, a girl from Guatemala who’s worked around this island for years. Then there’s the water delivery man. Corky Peebles and three other girlfriends’re on the list as well. I put Ralph Cunningham on the list in case we had more business about the divorce. And Warner Stillwell, he’s on the list. Hack Starkey could’ve come and claimed to be Warner Stillwell.”
“How would he get inside your house?”
“The maid and the service people get the key from the guard and return it when they’ve finished with their work. Warner and Daddy, they had their own key, in case they ever cared to drop in unexpectedly, but they never did. They were old-fashioned gentlemen who’d never come unannounced.”
“Would the gate guards keep the logs from last year? And would the logs have license numbers of your visitors?”
“I assure you our gate guards are not policemen.”
“Okay, so Hack Starkey coulda got in and stolen that piece a mail. Still, I don’t like the notion that Warner suddenly turned homicidal over big bucks because your dad conveniently killed himself. That’s the part I don’t like. I don’t like convenience when it comes to a murder for profit. Which is not a crime of impulse.”
“At least you have a motive. A motive for murder.”
“What I’m thinking now is, I’d like to get rid of all the convenient events here. We been talking about a motive for your murder. How about all this being a continuing plot? For a double murder? Your father first, then you.”
Tess spilled her beer across the table. But she scooted back quickly enough to keep it from staining that white linen dress.
15
Higher Power
Buster Wiles wasn’t sure if the hollow banging that woke him was from his erratic heartbeat or the cheap plumbing. He felt like he’d fought an orangutan in an elevator. He knew he’d be hurting in the morning, but not like this! From the neck down he was covered with ugly abrasions and bruises: purple, black and lime green. He couldn’t remember ever bruising green before.
Worse than all of that was the hangover. Everything he couldn’t see felt swollen and inflamed. His nerves twitched and danced. His hands seemed palsied, and every arrhythmical heartbeat sloshed painfully to his head. Buster needed a surgical collar to support a skull this big.
Buster tried to take a cold shower but the jets hurt. He tried to dry with a soft towel but the towel hurt. Buster limped outside his apartment and stood naked on the back porch to dry in the sun, blinded by the light. He ran the risk of some kid on the way to school seeing him and maybe telling a teacher who might call the cops, but he figured the way things were going in California these days they’d probably need videotape of the crime as well as a signed confession that he waved his whanger before anybody would bother. That made him think of last night’s news. The notorious McMartin Preschool Molestation Case was entering its third year in Los Angeles Superior Court, and had already cost the California taxpayers fifteen million dollars. If due process in California had come to three-year trials, why should he worry about the misdemeanor of exposing his shattered body on the back porch of a crummy apartment in Newport Beach, U.S.A.?
Buster was hurting too much to make coffee. So he just sat facing the morning sun and thought about Life, his life in The Golden Orange. About living in this little city with its police force of 145 officers, where the average cop can’t afford to live if he wants a decent house. And how very soon there’d be only 144. He thought of many seemingly unconnected things. For instance, he thought of how he helped to protect one of the biggest Rolls-Royce dealerships in the world, he, the driver of a Ford Escort. He thought of how a Mercedes was considered a Chevy Nova around these parts, and if you don’t at least drive a Lotus Turbo keep it to yourself, they say.
Buster Wiles knew that these disturbing thoughts were flooding his swollen brain because he needed to rationalize what he knew he was going to do. What he had to do if the remainder of his life was to have comfort and meaning and dignity. If he was to enjoy what was left of youth. If there was any of that left to a man of forty-five.
The time had come for Buster Wiles to address the Cop’s Syllogism, which has led thousands of burned-out, overwhelmingly cynical members of the law enforcement business into alcoholism or drug addiction, police corruption or suicide.
The Cops’ Syllogism is very simple and exceedingly dangerous: “People are garbage. I am a person. Therefore …” Once it’s consciously or unconsciously acknowledged and accepted, whatever follows is something bad.
And so at last, after months of grappling with a tottering superego, the conscience of Buster Wiles had at last collapsed, and lay like a bloated corpse in the surf. There was no turning back now. As soon as he was recovered from the ravages of this morning he would proceed with his “career change.” He was going to take the assignment, absolutely.
“How are you today?” she said, hobbling down the alley.
Buster lowered his face from the sun’s rays, but didn’t move and he made no effort to cover his nakedness. He just sat there in a folding chair, almost dry enough to go in and get dressed, and looked blandly at the old crone pushing a shopping basket through the alley.
He’d never known where she lived. She wasn’t exactly a bag lady, more of a pack rat, always wearing layers of dresses. Always pushing a shopping cart loaded with junk. The nameless old woman lived somewhere between Twenty-eighth and Thirty-third streets, near Winnie Farlowe, or so Buster supposed. Yet he wouldn’t have been surprised if she owned ten thousand shares of Xerox. Around here, anything was possible.
Her stockings were rolled around ankles as white as the shells that lay on Buster’s porch near a pair of black swim fins so old and rotten he didn’t care if an alley thief stole them.
She looked over at Buster again and said, “Fine, I hope.”
Buster said, “Huh?”
“I just asked, how are you today?” said the nameless old woman. “And you didn’t answer.”
“I don’t like trick questions,” said the utterly naked man, suddenly stricken with nausea.
The smell of food woke Winnie up. He knew at once she was making him a killer omelet. He jumped out of bed, for once not reluctant
to slide from between those peach-colored sheets. He showered, shaved, put on a clean Reyn Spooner flowered shirt, jeans, and Top-Siders. Forget the socks; he didn’t have to impress her anymore. The omelet was ready by the time he got downstairs.
“We have become wonderful one-times-one,” she said. “I don’t even have to call you.”
“The killer omelet did the job.” He sat down expectantly. “Don’t you ever eat?”
“I haven’t been going to my aerobics class. I don’t dare eat.”
“I got regrets heavier than you,” he said. “Not even a piece a toast?”
“I’ll watch you eat and I’ll drink coffee.”
The omelet wasn’t perfect in that the jalapeños weren’t fresh like the ones at the ranch. But Winnie told her it was heavenly, and when he’d finished he said, “When am I going home again?”
“I’ll let you know in a year or two.”
“Am I a prisoner here?”
“Yes.”
“Know one a the things I admire about you?” he said. “I like how you talked to your cleaning lady yesterday afternoon. You aren’t one a those women they’re ever gonna call ‘Uh.’”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I been around these parts long enough to see how Nouveau Newport talks to servants. Like, ‘Oh, call me Jill! Don’t call me Mrs. Roderick!’ But the Salvadoran maid ain’t about to ever call her Jill, so she ends up callin her ‘Uh.’ Gets real difficult sometimes when the maid’s gotta yell for the lady a the house. She goes: ‘Uh! Uh! Telephone! Uh! You there, Uh?’ You been dealing with servants all your life. You got no problem.”
“I know you well enough to guess that you’re the one getting around to a problem.”
“What worries me is, what they’re gonna call me. The help, I mean. If I keep hanging around with you? See, I look like Winnie. I talk like Winnie. I am …”
“A love. You’re a love. Now stop worrying about our future together. Those things have a way of working out.”
“Or not,” he said.
“So what’s our next move insofar as my problem is concerned? My little problem with murder?”
“Okay,” Winnie said. “First thing I wanna do is look through your dad’s stuff. Specially his wallet. Maybe there’s a name. A phone number.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I gotta look. Or maybe a credit card receipt from when he bought gas on the way from the ranch to Little Corona Beach. And if not, I wonder how much gas was in his car when they found it.”
“It was parked by Ocean Boulevard, just above the beach. The keys were still in it. I guess a man doesn’t worry about car theft if he’s going to shoot himself. Warner had it driven back home to the ranch.”
“A killer might not worry about theft either, if he’s in a hurry to unwrap and dump a body he’s just taken outta the trunk.”
“Would it have taken two men to do it?”
“Almost certainly,”
“Hack Starkey and Warner? That’s what you think?”
He shrugged and said, “Can I see his stuff?”
She retrieved it from the hall closet: the cardboard box still bore the coroner’s tape. Winnie took the box into the dining room so he could spread things out on the table.
“Do you mind if I go shopping while you look through his things? I haven’t had the guts to open that box yet.”
“Sure, I understand,” he said.
After she’d gone Winnie looked at his watch and saw that it was absolutely not late enough to have a drink. So he had a beer. It was only a light beer, he told himself.
He sipped the beer while unfolding the clothing from the box: a short-sleeved shirt with a button-down collar. A pair of tan poplin trousers, cordovan loafers, blue cotton socks, boxer shorts. Everything was badly wrinkled and the shoes were caked with salt brine. Beach sand littered the bottom of the box.
The wallet was brown calfskin and its contents had been bagged separately. Winnie removed the credit cards, the driver’s license, a photo of Tess wearing a mortarboard when she’d graduated from Stanford, a photo of Warner Stillwell as a young man, and ninety-six dollars in cash. He didn’t find a gasoline receipt or anything remarkable in the wallet. He was disappointed that there was no address book.
He was folding up the clothes when he glanced in the box and saw it: half a shell. He retrieved it from the box and held it in his palm, a shell no larger than a pearly button. Winnie’s heart started pounding almost as it had the evening he’d first seen a shell like this. Back when someone had fired gunshots, probably with evil intent.
Then Winnie found a whole shell caught in the cuff of Conrad Binder’s trousers, where the cuff was stitched to the leg. He now held in his hand one-and-a-half freshwater shells from an ancient lake near a place called El Refugio.
He almost ran to his car to look for Tess, but he realized she could have gone anywhere to shop. He sat down to plan his next move. He picked up the telephone and called the Newport Beach Police Department to make an appointment with Detective Sammy Vogel. But before he left Tess Binder’s house he poured three fingers of vodka. Just to calm his nerves.
The excitement mounted the moment he walked into the station. Winnie Farlowe was involved in police work again! Sort of. Then a teenager—one of the police cadets who work at the front desk—said, “Can I help you, sir?” And he knew he was just another outsider.
Sammy Vogel took him to the lunchroom, where, at this time of day, they could have some privacy.
“How you keeping in the outside world, Win?” the detective asked, after he bought them both a cup of coffee.
“Can’t complain,” Winnie said, sitting at what used to be his favorite table. He’d drunk a lot of coffee at this table.
“Glad to see you didn’t get your dick trimmed for that Christmas caper.”
“Yeah, probation,” Winnie said. “I can handle it.”
“So, what can I do for you?”
“It’s about Conrad P. Binder? The guy that you fished out last summer?”
“Oh yeah,” Vogel said. “What about him?”
“I’m sorta friendly with his daughter, and, uh, she has some ideas.”
“Yeah? About what?”
“Are you sure, absolutely sure he iced himself?”
“You mean could he’ve been capped by somebody else?”
“Yeah.”
“No way. I was there when they posted the body. There was stippling in his scalp.”
“Yeah, but somebody else coulda put the gun there and pulled the trigger,” Winnie said.
“The gun was found beside him, on the sand.”
“Prints?”
“You kidding? Sand. Surf. Elements.”
“I’m jist trying to find out if it was … possible. See, she was told there was lividity on both sides, so she got to thinking maybe the body was shot somewhere else and then transported to Little Corona and dumped on the beach. Did the car have a lotta gas in it?”
The balding little detective then began a session in snideness. Sammy Vogel had always been a state-of-the-art smirker. He talked with his hands and fingers as though he was signing to the deaf. “Tell her she watches too much TV. Lividity was caused by the body being turned over on the beach by the tide. It flipped him like hamburger, front to back. After several hours on each side he gradually drifted down toward the water.”
“He was actually floating?”
“Not quite. And the car had half a tank, because he’d filled it the day before, out near La Quinta. His housemate verified it.”
“Usually you need a hard surface for lividity.”
“I told you he was lying on the beach. Wet sand is hard.”
It was plain to see what reaction he was going to get, but in that he’d gone this far, Winnie reached into the pocket of his jeans and took out the button-sized shells.
“They’re freshwater shells. From the Coachella Valley. By La Quinta, to be specific.”
�
��I didn’t know there was an ocean out there,” the detective said, smirking.
“There used to be an inland sea. I could probably take these to an expert and prove they didn’t come out of the Pacific Ocean.”
“So?”
Winnie removed a whole shell from his shirt pocket. It was identical to the others. He put them on the table, three in a row.
The smirking detective said, “This a new variation of the old shell game?”
Winnie pointed to the one from his shirt pocket, and said, “This one came from the cuff of the pants Conrad Binder wore the night he died.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Did you find any other shells like this? Maybe in his shoes or …”
“There were no shells,” Sammy Vogel said. “Damn it, Win, whaddaya trying to stir up here? That was a suicide! I got his stuff from the coroner myself. There were no shells that I ever saw. Whaddaya trying to do here?”
“Well, what if he was shot by somebody out there on his property? What if they dragged him through the desert sand and dumped him in the trunk of a car for a couple hours? Lividity might form on one side after a long drive to Newport. Then they carried him down to the beach and dropped him on the other side. And there you find him with freshwater shells in his cuff.”
Vogel hesitated a moment, then said, “I think you been hitting the bottle just as hard as people say you are. I think your I.Q.’s dropped to eighty. Eighty proof.”
“You don’t have to get hostile, Sammy.”
“Hostile? Me? You come in here and imply that one of my cases—a suicide—is suddenly a whodunit murder? Because of a little seashell? Why should I get hostile?”
“Not a seashell. A freshwater shell. In his cuff, and half a one in the box his clothes were in. Maybe fell outta his shoe.”
Golden Orange Page 19
