Here Comes the Ride

by Lorena McCourtney

  I was startled. Hadn’t she demanded all this for her “wedding of the century”?

  “What’s all that costing?” I asked, since we didn’t seem to be into tact here.

  “I don’t know. Maybe 250 thou? Maybe three, by the time you add on airfare and hotel bills for half of Hollywood. It’s ridiculous.”

  My thought exactly. It also made me wonder how eager these guests were to come, if they had to be bribed with expense-paid trips. And, much as I appreciated the biggest limo job I’d ever had, five days of limo service might also classify as “ridiculous.”

  “What happened to the limo services that didn’t work out?” I asked.

  “One couldn’t do the five days. Michelle got in an argument with the other people about the driver being too fat. She said it would detract from the ‘ambiance’ of the wedding.”

  I supposed I was fortunate Michelle didn’t disqualify a limo on the basis of the driver's age too. “Who’s performing the ceremony?”

  “Michelle picked some guy for his good looks. Heaven forbid we should have someone with a Donald Trump toupee or too much nose hair.”

  I tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t fuel Pam’s obvious hostility toward her stepmother. Michelle’s priorities might be a bit skewed, but . . . “You have to admit Michelle is being very generous to do all this for you.”

  “Generous?” Pam snorted. “She’s not spending her money. She’s spending mine.”

  “Your money?”

  “My dad had all this complicated money stuff set up. Michelle has control of my trust fund until I’m twenty-three or graduate college or get married. She can only spend the money for my benefit, and she has to account to some legal firm for what she does with it, but I guess she’s convinced them that anything goes for the wedding. I know Dad thought he was looking out for me, but . . .” There was a shrug in her voice as it trailed off.

  “Are you getting married just so you can get hold of the money?”

  I figured she’d tell me to mind my own business, but all she said was, “It’s a thought.”

  I thought about that beat-up VW bug back at the duplex. “Michelle apparently didn’t spend much of your money on a car for you.”

  “I saved up my allowance at school and bought it. Michelle was horrified, of course.” Pam’s smile held malicious satisfaction. “She hates it.”

  I decided now that she had come to me because she needed someone to vent to. I seemed an unlikely choice, but maybe she didn’t have anyone else. But surely a wedding like this had attendants. . . .

  “How many bridesmaids do you have?”

  “Four, I think. I wanted to have a friend from college as maid of honor, but she’s in Europe for a year. So Michelle got people. Bridesmaids and groomsmen too. She’s also getting all these hotshot guests up from Hollywood so she can show them how well she’s doing by throwing an overpriced wedding for her stepdaughter. And at the same time butter up some producer-director guy so she can get a part in his new movie.”

  “That’s what she said?”

  “Of course not. She acts like it’s all for me, but I know what she’s thinking.”

  Steffan Productions. I remembered seeing the name on that letterhead on Michelle’s desk. Was that the guy Pam was talking about?

  “But why would she want a part in a movie when she’s opening this fancy new fitness center here in Vigland?”

  “Because she figures she’s Superwoman, I suppose. Who knows? What I do know is that Michelle looks out for herself all the way.”

  “Aren’t you being a little harsh on her? Maybe she is going overboard on some of the details of the wedding, if all these extravagances are her idea, not yours. And maybe you and she aren’t exactly best buddies . . . But she did introduce you to the man you love.”

  “I think she killed my father.”

  Chapter Four

  I choked over my Pepsi and stared at her in astonishment. It was dark now, but I could see her dimly-lit face by the parking-lot lights. She looked up and met my shocked gaze.

  “This is why you asked if I knew anything about cold cases. This is why you came to see me.”

  “I figured with bullet holes in the limo, and the fact that you’d been involved with a murder before—”

  “Pam, if you know anything,” I interrupted, “go to the police!”

  “I did, when Dad died. I yelled my head off. They thought I was just an overwrought teenager making nasty accusations because I had a freaky imagination and didn’t like my stepmother.”

  That sounded plausible to me too. “So what makes you think she killed him?” I asked warily. I wiped spilled Pepsi off the steering wheel.

  “Motive, of course. Plus means and opportunity. Those are the biggies when you’re considering murder. I’ve done a lot of research for the book I’m working on.”

  I remembered Fitz mentioning those factors too. “Okay, go on.”

  “Dad had asthma. Mom rushed him to the emergency room several times when I was a kid. He was also very allergic to bee stings and had to carry one of those Epi-Pen things so he could have an injection immediately to keep him from going into anaphylactic shock if he got stung. He also had a bad hip, left over from a bicycle accident in high school. It bothered him more as he got older, I guess. He had some blood pressure and heart problems too.”

  So far what this sounded like was a man whose health was on the iffy side, someone whose death probably shouldn’t have come as any big surprise.

  Pam set the burrito on the console between the seats and took a deep breath. “Dad had had a bad night with the hip and hadn’t slept much—” She broke off sharply. “You understand what I’m telling you now is Michelle’s version, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, he’d taken some pain pills in the night, but they hadn’t helped much. So about six a.m. he took sleeping pills.”

  “Sleeping pills at six in the morning? Isn’t that a little unusual?”

  “Not for Dad.” She sounded reluctant, as if she’d rather not admit that. “Sometimes he’d even take them in the middle of the day and then get up about midnight to work on something in his office.”

  Okay, so Pam’s father lived on a strange schedule.

  “He was still asleep when Michelle left to go to her health club over in Olympia around nine. This was before she had the Superwoman Room built in the basement at the house.”

  “The Superwoman Room?” I repeated doubtfully.

  “Every room in the house has a name. Michelle calls that one the Fitness Room, but it’s the Superwoman Room to me. Which she paid for with my money because she convinced the legal people I needed to exercise and lose weight. Anyway, after the health club she went to lunch, then did some shopping. When she got home about four, Dad was dead.”

  “Dead from what?”

  “At the emergency room the doctors determined he’d been stung on the arm several times. Because of the sleeping pills, he didn't wake up when it happened. Which meant he didn’t get the shot of epinephrine he needed. And he . . . died.”

  “Pam, how awful. Where were you?”

  “Back east at school. Michelle had convinced Dad that the schools here were ‘inadequate,’ as she put it, so they sent me back there. Where I fit in like a big ugly cockroach in a bouquet of orchids. She called to tell me he was dead, and I flew out the next morning.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Fifteen. Dad was forty-nine.”

  “And Michelle?”

  “Who knows? She hasn’t had a birthday since Dad died. She had to have them before that, of course, so she could get some big gift. But I never heard any numbers mentioned.”

  “There wasn’t an investigation into his death?”

  “When I went to the police, because I was right away suspicious of her, they told me there was nothing to investigate. Dad was extremely allergic to bee stings, he’d been stung, hadn’t had proper treatment, and died. That was it. There was one o
fficer who seemed interested that Dad took sleeping pills at six in the morning, but then I had to tell him Dad often did stuff like that, and he lost interest.”

  “How did your dad get stung right there in his bed?”

  “It was May, and the window was open. Michelle said they always slept with it open. There were a lot of yellow jackets around. Several got in and stung him. Her version, of course.”

  I considered this scenario of her father’s death. If she’d said he’d died of a fall down the stairs, a drug overdose, or even an overdose of exercise in an effort to keep up with Michelle, I’d have seen possibilities for murder, but . . . bee stings? “But, Pam, if the bees just wandered in and stung him, I don’t see—”

  “I don’t think they were accidental stings. I think they were deliberate. And she left him to die.”

  “How could stings be deliberate? You can’t hire a herd of yellow jackets to fly in and sting on command.” I was immediately sorry I’d said that. It sounded facetious, and this was her father’s death we were discussing.

  “I’ve never been able to figure out that part,” she admitted reluctantly. She leaned back and sloshed the ice in her Sprite. “I can’t really see her chasing around with a net trying to catch bees. But I’m sure she did it somehow.”

  I crumpled the paper that had come around my chalupa and remembered something from long ago. “Back when I was a kid, when we went camping or picnicking, my dad always put a chunk of raw meat outside the campsite area to draw the yellow jackets away.” I paused, thinking, considering a scenario. “I suppose, if you put the meat in a jar and then, when several yellow jackets were inside, put the lid on . . .”

  “And then you took the jar of angry yellow jackets up to a sleeping person, a drugged sleeping person, and opened it up right against the skin . . .”

  “I doubt it would be that simple—”

  “That’s how she did it, Andi. You figured it out, just like that!” She reached across the console and squeezed my arm with fierce appreciation. “I knew you could do it!”

  “No. Wait! I didn’t mean I think it really happened that way.” I’d just been musing. Speculating. The last thing I wanted was to encourage this girl in what still struck me as a wildly implausible accusation. “I really can’t see Michelle out trapping yellow jackets.”

  “I can. It’s . . . sneaky. And that’s exactly what Michelle is. Sneaky. I can see exactly how she did it now. She always dished out Dad’s pills. He took stuff for high blood pressure and cholesterol, and she was always giving him vitamins and herbal stuff too. He just took whatever she handed him.”

  “That sounds as if she cared about his health, not as if she was planning to murder him.”

  Pam ignored that. “She gave him the sleeping pills that morning and deliberately gave him more than usual so not even a bomb would wake him up. Then she got these yellow jackets she’d already captured and deliberately let them sting him several times. Sliding the jar around, because all the stings in one place wouldn’t look natural. Then she just walked off and left him to die.”

  I swallowed. That would work, wouldn’t it? But surely that wasn’t what really happened. I had to remember I was dealing with a girl who was still overwrought about losing her father, a girl who was perhaps a little shaky mentally or emotionally. And wildly imaginative.

  “Pam, I think that’s rather . . . farfetched. Why would she do it?”

  “For a couple million dollars of insurance money, that’s why! Dad made a lot of money in real estate down in California. Michelle’s so-called movie career was tanking, and she figured she’d better latch onto some rich guy while she could. So she glommed onto Dad. But not long after he and Michelle were married, he lost a bundle when something went wrong with a land development deal. Maybe he didn’t even have as much money to begin with as she thought, and after the development deal went sour he sure didn’t. That was when we moved up here.”

  “Why here?”

  “Dad thought the area was ripe for development, as he put it. I guess he figured he could get in on it with less of an investment than it would take in southern California. Michelle also said I’d be better off in the schools here.”

  “But they sent you back east to school.”

  “Yeah. Little glitch in logic there, right? But Michelle always could convince Dad of almost anything.”

  Like maybe taking way more than the proper number of sleeping pills? Reluctantly I considered those three biggies of murder: motive, means, and opportunity. A check mark on each one for Michelle.

  “I think she had another reason for wanting to get out of LA too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Later. Right now what we need to do is go see that officer who seemed interested at the time and tell him everything.” She spoke as if we were already a team on this. “I think he might listen. His name was Molino. Deputy Molino.”

  “Molino?” I repeated with a certain dismay. “Detective Sergeant Molino?”

  DDS Molino, as I’d started thinking of him, for Dear Detective Sergeant Molino, back at the time I was dealing with him when the body of my former boyfriend turned up in the trunk of the limo. When Pam’s father died four years ago, DDS Molino had probably been a regular deputy rather than a detective.

  “You know him?” she asked eagerly.

  “We’ve met.” And he’d certainly let me know, even if Fitz and I had helped capture the murderer, that civilians had no business muddling around in criminal matters.

  I jumped backward in the conversation. “Your father and Michelle must not have been hard up for money when they moved up here, because they obviously spent a lot of it on remodeling the house. She shouldn’t have been desperate enough to commit murder.”

  “With Michelle, ‘hard up’ is a relative term. Down to your last couple million, maybe. And Michelle always hated this house. She wanted something big and contemporary, lots of angles and sharp rooflines. Probably stainless steel furniture. But Dad put his foot down for once and said they were getting this place. He liked the ten wooded acres around it, and the inlet frontage. Although he also told her she could remodel the interior however she wanted.”

  “She must like it now. She hasn’t sold it since your father died.”

  Pam held up a forefinger. “One of the interesting stipulations in Dad’s will. It requires that if he died she has to ‘provide a home’ for me there until I’m twenty-three, graduated from college, or married, whichever comes first. Then it’s hers. If she doesn’t do her duty and provide me with a home until then, it goes to me.”

  Her father must have had a flock of lawyers working overtime to get all these tricky details into the will and trust fund. I suspected Michelle had checked to see if they were enforceable.

  “Interesting stipulations,” I murmured. And possibly a strong reason for Michelle to push Pam’s marriage to Sterling. She’d lose control of Pam’s trust fund, but she couldn’t spend that money on herself anyway, and she’d be able to sell the house.

  “Like I said, I know Dad was trying to do his best for me and protect me, but . . .”

  But sometimes micromanagement from the grave causes more problems than it solves. I shook my head. “But murder . . .”

  “Yes, murder. And so far she’s gotten away with it. She had him cremated faster than Burger King grilling a double cheeseburger, probably so if someone got suspicious later they couldn’t do tests and find out he had a big overdose of sleeping pills in his system. But now, since you’ve figured out how she did it, we can do something.”

  We. “You’re saying you want me to go to Detective Sergeant Molino with this?”

  She scooted toward me on the seat. “It’s probably too late tonight, but we can do it first thing in the morning.”

  “Pam, I haven’t 'figured out' anything! I was just . . . speculating.” Out loud, unfortunately. “I hate to disappoint you, but I’m not a hotshot sleuth who can pull some heretofore unnoticed clue out of the woodwork and convict s
omeone with it. This is an extremely serious accusation, and Detective Sergeant Molino is going to want a lot more than wild speculation about how it might have happened.”

  I squashed everything into the litterbag hanging from a knob on the dashboard and started the engine. I pulled from the parking lot onto the street and headed back toward Vigland. Pam folded her arms and sat in rigid silence, obviously disappointed that I didn’t intend to pound on Detective Sergeant Molino’s door first thing in the morning.

  “Thank you for the ride,” she said stiffly when I turned into the driveway at the duplex.

  I turned off the engine. “Pam, you have some interesting arguments here, and the idea that your father was deliberately stung isn’t totally out of the realm of possibility. But the whole idea is just too—” I broke off. I’d started to say preposterous but amended it to a softer “—is just so unlikely.”

  “So you won’t even talk to Detective Molino about it?”

  “I don’t think there’s enough to go on.”

  Sure, a couple million dollars' worth of insurance money made for a strong motive. Murder had been done for a lot less. The scenario of how Michelle could have accomplished a murder was remotely possible. But it was also more like a plot line in one of Fitz’s old Ed Montrose episodes on TV than a real-life situation.

  “I’m sorry, Pam. What I really think you should do is reconsider this wedding. I don’t think you’re ready for it.”

  “I guess I figured you wouldn’t believe me. So it’s a sure thing you won’t believe something else about Michelle.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think she’s going to try to kill me at the wedding.”

  Chapter Five

  “You think she wants to kill you?”

  “Yes.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Pam, how do you think she could do it? Strangle you with your veil as you walk down the aisle? Plant a poisonous worm in your wedding bouquet? Douse your lobster tail with arsenic?”