“Oh, not since he's off the crutches. I think he's missed his friends.”
“Wh—when did he get off his crutches?”
“Oh, just a day or two ago. We can't hardly keep up with him.”
I hung up, stunned. Just because someone can walk doesn't mean he's a killer, I reminded myself. Most people walk. Until I talked to P.B., it was useless to speculate, but it was now imperative to find out who Doc suspected of this murder. When he showed up, I intended to squeeze it out of him. Somehow. Drugs, maybe.
A large yellow something danced past the window and then danced back. I turned and recognized it as Fredreeq, in lemon yellow toreador pants and matching sweater set, waving her arms in excitement. “Robert Quarter,” she yelled through the glass. I gave her a “huh?” kind of shrug and she shrieked. With a beckoning gesture, she danced off once more, to Neat Nails Plus, the business adjoining mine.
In addition to her hours at my shop, Fredreeq was a part-time facialist at Neat Nails Plus. On Saturdays she opened and closed as well, for the Seventh-Day Adventist owners. Curious, I locked up my place and went next door to find Fredreeq plugging in hot wax machines and other sinister appliances in cubicles surrounding a fruit-laden altar. The salon staff was mostly Vietnamese, and the decor, with its red walls, shrouded lamps, and posters of Southeast Asia, was a combination Buddhist temple, travel agency, and opium den. “Don't tell me you've never heard of Robert Quarter,” Fredreeq said and disappeared through a bead curtain doorway into the salon's back room.
“I've never heard of Robert Quarter,” I called. “But if it's about a date—”
“Girl, don't you read the trades?” she yelled. L.A.'s two show business newpapers, Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, were read by everyone from pool cleaners to migrant farm workers.
“Tell me later. I have to go open up,” I said, then stopped. Near the door was a coffee table buried in strata of periodicals a full foot deep. I pushed aside beauty magazines and grabbed up every newspaper in sight. “Fredreeq, I'm borrowing a paper,” I called out, my arms full, and ran back to the shop.
“ MAY I HELP you?”
My first customer of the day looked up, startled, then dropped his head, like someone caught in a criminal act. He was about sixteen, with dismal posture and bad skin, and he stood at the LoveLetters, Ltd. spinner, spinning it slowly. He would take twenty minutes to choose a card, six days to write in it, and if the object of his desire did not respond, he would consider suicide. Sometimes my heart so ached for my customers, I wondered if I was cut out for this business.
I returned to the table in the northeast corner, covered with newspapers and the crumpled half page of the L.A. Times I'd grabbed from the Donut Stop the night before. The other half was with Doc—the more interesting half, presumably, as mine had Ralph's grocery store coupons on one side and lottery results and auction notices on the other. Mine also had no date or page number, so I was going through the pilfered papers a page at a time, looking for a match.
“Morning.” Joey, in blue jeans, emerged from the back room. The teenage customer followed her long, thin legs with his eyes. She was morning pale and her red hair shot out in all directions, follicles energized from a night in bed. “There it is,” she said, unearthing her cell phone from my mound of newspapers. “I'm hanging here today, if you don't mind; Elliot's out of town and his evil sister's visiting. She was going on last night about my chaise longue, how it violates the aesthetic integrity of the house, until I finally just hauled it out of there.”
Joey had married into an architecturally important house, which is why her former furniture kept migrating to my back room. I flipped through a Friday Calendar section. “Are you allowed to abandon a houseguest like that?” I asked. “Doesn't it violate some in-law hospitality rule?”
“No, because my sister-in-law likes the housekeeper more than she likes me. What are you doing?”
I showed her the page I was trying to match and she started to look through the papers with me. I should borrow her housekeeper for Margaret, I thought. At 7 A.M., I'd taken the ferret for a courtyard stroll, replaced her glutinous Wheat Chex with tuna fish, a rice cake, lettuce, and grapes, apologized for leaving her alone, and told her I'd return as soon as I could. Margaret had been unmoved.
I felt Joey's look as I furiously turned pages. It was a big mistake, this vow of silence I'd taken. Bad enough that I couldn't talk about Doc or the corpse, but he'd been really adamant about Margaret, as if she were in some witness protection program. The fact was, I was bursting to discuss it all; I wasn't programmed for discretion. Maybe it would be okay to just ask questions, the kind that come up in general conversation. That wasn't “talking,” exactly. “Joey,” I said, “how do you find out about the progress of a murder investigation, beyond what's reported in the paper?”
Joey perked right up at this. She came from a family of law enforcement professionals and had worked herself, briefly, in a morgue. “The best way is to be a close relative of the victim, or know someone on the force. We don't have you dating any homicide cops, do we?”
A woman with a walker struggled through the front door, causing the Welcome! bell to ring incessantly until I rescued her. She cut off my hello with a toss of her steel gray spit curls and said, “Just looking,” in the tone of voice that means “Don't bug me.” I went to the register to ring up my teenage customer, then turned to find Joey exiting to the back room, phone to her ear. Prominently placed on the table for me was the Friday California section, folded open to page B9.
“Plea Bargain of Mob Figure Reversed on Appeal” said the headline. The word “Mob” seemed to pulsate. Mob. Mob. Mob.
“Shit!” cried the woman in the walker.
You're telling me, I thought, and hurried over to Birthdays, Humorous. The woman stood with an open purse, cursing. On my grass green carpet was a compact of pressed powder, broken and crushed. When I knelt to pick it up, the customer snapped shut the purse and exited, her walker thumping across the floor.
I was desperate to get back to my clue, but the woman could be a spy, lying in wait outside. This was the sort of thing Mr. Bundt would test me on, the Immediate Cleanup Response that was drilled into us on a cellular level. But there are times a person has to live dangerously. I returned to my paper.
Next to the mob article was an ad for Ernest Bovee, M.D., who specialized in cosmetic body surgery, and provided a smiling photo of himself with before and after shots of a woman's thighs. It was possible Doc saved liposuction ads. It was also possible he'd felt compelled, last night at the Donut Stop, to collect coupons. But it wasn't likely. With a sigh, I read the article.
PLEA BARGAIN OF MOB FIGURE REVERSED ON APPEAL
LOS ANGELES—In a unanimous decision, the California Court of Appeals for the 2nd District ordered a guilty plea to be vacated in a conspiracy case against Ronald “the Weasel” Ronzare.
The appellate court acknowledged that overturning a plea bargain was unusual, but determined that trial judge Anna Whitestorm erred by failing to follow established procedures for ensuring that the defendant understood his plea before it was entered.
According to Ronzare's attorney Calvin Walsh, “It's all in the transcripts. [Judge Whitestorm] was in such a hurry to get to Palm Springs before rush hour, she would have accepted a guilty plea from a poodle. My client's former counsel was inexperienced, the D.A. was lazy and the judge—with all due respect—sloppy.”
Ronzare, an alleged operative for the East Coast crime family headed by Eddie “Digits” Minardi, was sentenced to 10-20 years for conspiracy to commit battery on two LAPD officers early last year. A second, more serious charge of conspiracy to commit murder was dropped. Ronzare is to be released on bail from Corcoran State Prison pending a new trial.
Conspiracy charges were dropped last year against two other suspects, Tor Ulvskog and Olof Froderberg, alleged operatives for Las Vegas's Terranova crime family.
I glanced regretfully at Dr. Ernest Bovee's smiling f
ace, then returned to the mob story and read it again. I was still mulling over its significance five minutes later, as I collected jagged bits of tortoise-shell plastic and sucked up pressed powder with my Dustbuster.
A shadow stepped in front of me.
A hand reached down and switched off my Dustbuster.
chapter nine
He wasn't a customer. This was not a person who went card shopping.
I was backed up against the Birthday rack, Dustbuster pointed at him like a gun.
He had several inches on me, a big man, and not a young one—sixty, at least. His hair was white and the rest of him was tan, and not just a living-in-southern-California-without-sunscreen tan. His tan was like a vocation.
“Can't stand those.” He nodded at the Dustbuster. “Remind me of a former—”
I waited, but he seemed to forget he had a sentence in progress. I lowered the Dustbuster. He raised his hands, big brown paws, and with a flash of metal—massive Rolex, heavy gold chain-link bracelet—reached into the pocket of his suit and withdrew a slip of paper. It was a nice enough suit, but one that had been around awhile, judging from the smells emanating from it. Mothballs, for instance. “Is your name . . . Welleslington Shelley?”
“Wollstonecraft.”
He hacked a pretty serious smoker's hack and stared. “That's a first name?”
“In this case. And you are—?”
He wheezed. “The authorities.”
Dear God, I thought, they've come for me. A vision of Ruta appeared, aproned, hands on hips. “What authorities call themselves the authorities?” she asked. “But you play along with him. That's how you play it safe.”
I said, “What is it you want, Officer—?”
He pondered the piece of paper again, as if waiting for reading glasses to materialize. Then, “Do you drive a Volkswagen vehicle, license 1NJC, uh—”
“Close enough.” If he was a cop, I was the attorney general.
“Could you tell me where your vehicle is now located?”
My heart rate speeded up. “Could you tell me why you want to know?”
“It was involved with an accident, so we're checking the whereabouts.”
Doc. My throat tightened. “What sort of accident?”
“We're not at liberty to diverge, uh, divert—”
“Divulge?” I asked.
“Yeah. That type of information. Look, just tell me where the goddamn car is.”
“Are cops supposed to swear?” He was clearly not a cop, but I thought he should do a better job of impersonating one.
Before he could respond, a customer came in, distracting us. I said, “Would you excuse me for just one moment?” and went to greet him.
The customer wore a blue crewneck cashmere sweater that matched his eyes. He gave me a long look and said no, he didn't need help finding anything.
Spy?
I went behind the counter, set down the Dustbuster, and took a deep breath. If Mr. Sweater was one of Mr. Bundt's plainclothespeople, all I had to do was act normal and professional. Of course, I'd have a better shot at this minus the wheezing man. Who was the wheezing man, anyway? At the moment, he frowned at one of the birthday card spinners, his eyebrows merging. They were thick and black—
“Girlie! I don't got all day,” he called out.
With a glance at the sweatered man, I hurried to Aisle 2. “Please don't bark—”
“Just tell me where's your car and I'm outta here.”
“I lent my car to a friend.”
“What's the name of this friend?” he asked. Behind him, in the mural-painted wall, the lemon tree opened a crack.
“Well, he's not really a friend,” I said. “I just met him.”
“You gave your car to someone you don't know?”
“Okay, could we not—raise our voices?”
The lemon tree opened all the way. Joey emerged, lowering sunglasses to scrutinize him. The sweatered man was staring at us too.
“Tell me where I can reach you,” I whispered, “and I'll give you a call the second my car's back.”
He took a deep, labored breath and nodded. “I'll write down my numbers.”
He followed me to the counter, accepted a pen and a Kitten Cuddles notepad, and wrote painstakingly. The little hairs on the back of his knuckles were white, like the hair on his head. He said, “That's my cellular, and that's voice mail, I live on a boat, I don't have a real phone. And here's my name: Carmine.” He wrote it in capital letters, then leaned on the counter, sending an odor of old wool and Old Spice my way. “We're looking for a piece of merchandise in connection with this. Your friend mention that?”
“What kind of merchandise?”
“Something he shouldn't mess with, that's what kind. He knows what kind.” Carmine leaned in closer and removed a cigar from his pocket. His eyes, bulbous and bloodshot, bored into mine. “Tell him this: If the merchandise isn't returned, he's in some very big trouble. Very big.” He hacked again, hard enough to rearrange his lungs. Then he stuck the cigar between his teeth and was gone.
I wanted to disinfect the counter.
On Aisle 5, my other customer stared at the front door, watching his exit. Joey joined me at the register. We looked out the window to see Carmine approach his car, a Cadillac Eldorado. It was white, setting off his tan. “Creepy,” she said.
“Joey,” I said, “is there a chance that man could be a cop?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding slowly. “On reruns of Hawaii Five-O.”
IT HAD RAINED raisin bran. My kitchen was covered in it. The empty box lay overturned on the floor.
There was no other sign of Margaret.
Half the nylon leash dangled from the refrigerator handle, chewed and frayed. I got on my knees and searched, consumed with visions of the ferret drowned in the toilet, ground in the disposal, browned in the toaster oven. Darn it, I'd told Doc I was all wrong for this. There was a reason I had no pets: I couldn't even keep houseplants.
I combed the tiny apartment and was back in the kitchen, starting over, when I saw her. A cupboard door, opened a crack, revealed a pair of eyes. Margaret was deep in the recesses of the shelf, amid Tupperware. Her leash fragment had caught on a cast-iron kettle, but she seemed reasonably calm. “I'll give you this,” I said, liberating her. “You're a good sport.”
I tied a string to her and we went outside. We waited for Mrs. Albertini to round the corner on her daily Lenten pilgrimage to Mass, then grabbed a few minutes of grass time. Back inside, I put Margaret in the shower, hoping the sliding door would contain her and that she wouldn't figure out how to turn on the water. I gave her a washcloth for company.
I swept up bran and listened to news of fires in Florida and the condition of the yen, but no local murders. I turned off the radio and noticed my answering machine blinking.
“Margaret, pick up,” said the message. “Margaret? M. Ferret: Are you there?”
Doc. I caught my breath.
“Kidding, Wollie. Ferrets are actually not capable of answering phones. Hey, I'm springing the patient legally. Happy? The problem is, the administrative type who signs off on these things is gone today. I'll call you tonight and we'll talk about it.”
I replayed the message, trying to detect some hidden sentiment, a sign Doc was pining away for me. I didn't find one, but just to be sure, I played it four more times.
NEVER HAVING BEEN in a pet store before, I couldn't say whether they all smelled like Pet Planet, the air heavy and somehow unhygienic, even with no real animals in the place but fish. Aquariums lined the windows, luring Joey to their blue-green depths.
Only a true friend would come through during a pet emergency without pointing out that I had no pets, but Joey was that kind of friend, letting me borrow her Saab. Since I couldn't drive a stick shift, I had to borrow Joey too.
I made my way through aisles of toys, spinners full of flavored bones, and bins of pig ears—pig ears?—to the small-animal habitats. The best of them was the Pet Palace
, a green carpeted split-level with entertainment center and gym. But the price was prohibitive, so I chose a plain metal job, a new leash, and looked around for food.
There was nothing for ferrets in the food aisle, so I took my crate to the counter and asked. I spoke quietly, mindful of Joey's proximity and my vow of secrecy.
“No ferret food,” the clerk whispered. “Did you see the hammocks, though?”
“Ham hocks?” Why was she whispering, I wondered.
“Hammocks. For ferrets. They're made of plush, they come in turtles and lobsters, and attach to all the habitats. Fourteen ninety-nine.”
I wasn't clear on why a ferret would want to recline on a swinging lobster, but there was no time to ask. Joey appeared at my side.
“Wollie,” she asked, “is there any reason someone might be following you?”
chapter ten
Hancock Park was a world away from Pet Planet, aesthetically speaking, and we arrived there after a series of circuitous turns. The houses were ancient by L.A. standards, some stone, some ivy-covered, all with front lawns and real sidewalks where children rode tricycles. It was as if one of the better neighborhoods of Cleveland or Philadelphia had come west for the weather.
I loved these streets. Pieces of my childhood were lived here, as Ruta and her husband had occupied the guest house of an honest-to-goodness mansion, the husband a sort of butler to the family, and Ruta the nanny to the children, all grown by the time we came to her. My brother and I spent long summer days there, afternoons during the school months, and most Saturdays, for three years. I preferred the cramped guest house to the cavernous main house, but it was in the main house that P.B. discovered the Steinway grand piano and everyone else discovered P.B.'s almost frightening ability to reproduce any music he heard, his stubby fingers racing across the keyboard in complicated arrangements that flowed out of him like water from a faucet. In the beginning he was so small, his feet didn't reach the pedals. But as he grew and his talent grew, so did his effect on people. He was an engaging child, funny and introspective and outgoing all at once, right at home in the ballroom-sized living room, not burdened, as I was, by the knowledge that we didn't belong there. I was eleven the summer Ruta died, deemed old enough to look after P.B. and myself from then on. We were watching cartoons the stifling August morning a van pulled up to our Burbank apartment to deliver the old Steinway. The memory of that day made up for a lot of other days in my life, the knowledge that people, even far-off people, people living in the mansions of Hancock Park, were capable of such acts.
Dating Dead Men Page 7
