by Jane Heller
“Well, not to worry, baby. This won’t last much longer,” Carlos reassured his wife.
I smiled again, thinking that Carlos and I were on the same page; that the romance between Mom and Victor was sure to be over soon. And then, when I heard the rest of their conversation, my smile faded.
“I’m getting the impression from Victor that she’ll be next,” Carlos added. Next? Next what? Next to be conned into handing over her money to Victor? Next to be forced onto his sailboat? Next to die?
I pressed my ear against the door, straining to hear more.
“It does look as if he’s heading in that direction with her,” Rosa agreed. “And I, for one, won’t be sorry. She’s the pushiest woman I’ve ever met.”
Yeah, yeah. So my mother was pushy. I couldn’t argue with Rosa about that, but what did she mean about heading in that direction? What direction? And why should she be sorry about it?
“Life could definitely get exciting around here,” said Carlos. “Maybe we should buy our earplugs now, just in case.”
What did he mean by that? Exciting in a way that suggested police detectives and medical examiners and forensic technicians in latex gloves? And why would they need earplugs? To keep them from having to listen to my mother’s screams?
I was scared now. Scared that maybe Rosa and Carlos, as Beverly Hills fancy-shmancy as they seemed, might have helped Victor kill his first wife. Yes, maybe they were his accomplices—maybe they were all his accomplices—and now they were gearing up for another crime with the intended victim being my poor mommy!
I burst into the kitchen. “Okay, listen up. I’ve got a problem.”
Rosa peered at my empty plate and grinned proudly. “I can see that you enjoyed the pork. Are you here for another serving? I would have been happy to bring it out to the dining room for you.”
“Skip the niceties, missy,” I said. “This isn’t about the pork.”
“Ah, then it’s more vegetables you want?” she asked sweetly.
“It has nothing to do with food,” I said. “I happen to understand Spanish and I overheard your little chat before, about how you and Carlos think that my mother will be next and that her relationship with Victor is heading in a certain direction and that you’re planning to buy earplugs. I want to know what you meant by all that, and I want to know right now.”
Rosa looked startled. “My goodness. We weren’t talking about your mother. We were talking about the secretary that Mr. Chellus hired not too long ago. She’s taken it upon herself to interfere in every aspect of our work here.”
“Yeah, his secretary, sure. You were talking about my mother and I know it. Remember how you said, ‘She’s from the Midwest’? Well, guess where my mother is from?”
“I don’t know, but the secretary is from Chicago,” said Rosa.
Oh. Okay, so it was possible that I had misunderstood and that they really were gossiping about another member of the Chellus household. But I wasn’t sold. Not a hundred percent.
“You said you thought this secretary would be next and that you would need earplugs,” I reminded them. “What was that about?”
“First let me say that I’m embarrassed for both Rosa and myself,” Carlos replied. “We should never have been talking about private matters in the public rooms, not even in Spanish. But, since you did hear us, what we meant was that we expect Mr. Chellus to fire his secretary and that there’s sure to be a lot of shouting when it happens.”
“I see,” I said. “That’s your story and you’re sticking to it, huh?”
They looked at each other and shrugged, as if they honestly didn’t know why I was getting so riled up. But I was riled up and I was going to get to the bottom of this little mystery once and for all.
I deposited my plate on the kitchen counter and marched back into the dining room. Before my mother could protest, I grabbed her hand and dragged her off to the library, where I slid the pocket doors shut and sat her down.
“I’ll try to say this as gently as possible,” I began.
“There’s nothing gentle about your manners, Stacey. To walk out on Victor in the middle of a meal is so rude that I—”
“Let me continue,” I interrupted. “It’s for your own good.”
“So continue.”
“Victor is dangerous.”
She giggled as she batted her eyelashes. “Dangerously sexy, you mean.”
“No. Dangerous. The way killers are dangerous.”
“What in the world is wrong with you, dear? Did you have too much wine?”
“No. I overheard Rosa and Carlos in the kitchen, and guess who they were talking about?”
“Victor’s secretary?”
I was speechless momentarily. So there was a secretary?
“That’s what they claimed,” I said. “Supposedly, Victor’s about to fire her.”
“He very well may fire her. She gets on everybody’s nerves.”
“Okay, here’s a question for you,” I said. “Is she from Chicago?”
My mother laughed. “Not with that southern accent. She’s from Memphis, I think. Or is it Nashville? What does it matter anyway?”
I jumped up from the sofa, waving my arms like a crazy person. “It matters a lot,” I said. “So Rosa and Carlos weren’t talking about her, just as I suspected. They were talking about you, Mom, and they didn’t want me to know it. They said they thought you were pushy and that you would be next and that they wouldn’t be sorry and that they were going to buy earplugs. When I asked them to explain themselves, they made up the story about the secretary. I think you’re in danger, Mom. I think you should get out of here and never see Victor again—before it’s too late.”
“Stacey, Stacey. What’s gotten into you?” She pulled me back down onto the sofa. “Maybe Rosa and Carlos were talking about me. So what? They don’t like me, because I butt into their business. At first I didn’t want to interfere with the way Victor ran his household, so I kept my opinions to myself. But lately I’ve spoken up about those two—they act like they own the place and neither takes kindly to a single suggestion of mine. I’m sure they wish I weren’t around.”
“Mom,” I said. “They’re not the issue. It’s Victor who doesn’t want you around.”
“What?” Her nostrils flared. “Victor loves me and I love him and I’d really appreciate it if you’d get over this adolescent hostility of yours. You can’t seem to face the fact that your father’s gone and I’m moving forward with my life.” She shot daggers at me as if I were the troublemaker.
“I do miss Daddy. You’re right about that. He wasn’t a saint, but he came pretty close.”
“There. You see? This is about your father and the close relationship you had with him—the close relationship you never had with me!”
“Mom, Mom. Please believe that it’s you I’m concerned about, not Daddy or his memory. Rosa and Carlos were talking about you, about you following in the footsteps of Victor’s wife—his dead wife.”
“Stop this nonsense,” she snapped. “What you overheard is that Rosa and Carlos are afraid that Victor and I will get married. They don’t want me supervising their duties once I’m Mrs. Chellus, which accounts for their snippy remarks having to do with me being ‘next,’ as in his next wife.”
“But you’re not planning to marry him, right? I mean, you hardly know the man.”
“I know all I need to know."
“Really? Okay, here’s a question you might want to ask him. How come he calls his dead wife Elizabeth one day and Mary the next? Isn’t there something a little odd about that?”
“It’s not odd at all. Victor’s wife’s name was Mary Elizabeth Biddlehoffer. Sometimes she liked to be called Mary. Sometimes she liked to be called Elizabeth. And sometimes she liked to be called by her childhood nickname, which was Binky. She came from a family of nicknamers, according to Victor. She had an uncle named Harold and everyone called him Roldie. You know how WASPs are.”
Why wouldn’t she listen
to me? How could I make her listen?
“Okay, here’s something else,” I said. “Maura dated Victor, Mom. My thirtysomething best friend Maura Lasky. He picked her up at a party and brought her here, and they had intimate relations.”
She rolled her eyes. “Victor dated a lot of girls your age before he met me. He didn’t mention Maura, specifically, but it doesn’t matter, because that chapter of his life is over. He and I are in love.”
“But his wife died in a sailing ‘accident’ only months after she married him. I don’t want that to happen to you!”
“Don’t be morbid. Why should it happen to me? Jewish women don’t sail.”
I sank back into my chair, utterly spent. How do you explain to your mother why it should happen to her? How do you explain that she’s putty in the hands of a smoothie like Victor? How do you explain that because she’s a widow who hasn’t been with a man in years, is newly rich, and is as gullible as it gets, she’s exactly the sort of woman he’d target? “Mom.” I touched her shoulder. “Doesn’t it scare you even a little bit that Mary Elizabeth was wealthy and that Victor profited from her death so soon after they were married?”
“What scares me is your attitude, Stacey.” She was really angry at me now. I was being a bad girl, and I was in for a lecture. “You have met Victor. You have witnessed firsthand how lovely and sweet he is. But you are determined not to see your mother happy. Why, I can’t fathom, other than that you preferred me when I was the little Cleveland housewife whose only source of pleasure was you.”
Before I could refute her theory or warn her further, she had opened the pocket doors and hurried out of the room.
It was obvious to me then. My mother would not take my warnings seriously, because she was infatuated with Victor and distracted by her celebrity. If I had a prayer of convincing her that he was not the right man for her,
I needed proof of his misdeeds. I didn’t know how to go about getting such proof, but you do what you have to when your mother is about to make a fatal mistake, just as she would return the favor.
twenty-three
Maura agreed to be my partner in crime prevention. I couldn’t go to Jack for help, since he disapproved strenuously of my poking around in Victor’s marital escapades, so much so that I didn’t even tell him I had decided to go ahead and do it. No, I didn’t like deceiving him, but our relationship was progressing smoothly and we had passed the all-important three-month mark and I believed that he would confess his love for me any day. I couldn’t afford to screw things up, not at such a critical juncture. Besides, Maura had more time to snoop than Jack did, plus she knew Victor, although marginally, and, as a result, was the ideal co-conspirator.
We began by looking into the death of Mary Elizabeth Chellus, who supposedly drowned during a sailing outing. Our first order of business was to search the LA. Times’s archives for news of the accident, which we did at Maura’s house on her computer.
“Anything?” I said, breathing down her neck as her fingers skipped over the keyboard. “It’s possible that Mary Elizabeth died over twenty years ago, and the Times’ s archives only go back seventeen years.”
“She died sixteen years ago. Take a look.”
We waited breathlessly for the article to appear on the screen.
“Boy, they didn’t devote much ink to this,” I said when the blurb—and that’s truly all it was, six or seven short paragraphs—popped up on the monitor.
The gist of the story was that the weather on the day of the Chellus’s excursion had turned threatening. Victor was at the wheel of the couple’s thirty-eight-foot sloop, the unfortunately named Lucky Lady, while Mary Elizabeth (Victor hadn’t lied to us about this; she really did go by both the Mary and the Elizabeth) was on deck trying to bring the sail down. When the boat was hit by a strong gust of wind, she slipped and fell overboard. He attempted to turn the Lucky Lady around in order to both find his wife and pull her back onboard, but the seas were choppy and he couldn’t spot her. He radioed the Coast Guard for help. By the time they arrived, Mary Elizabeth was gone. They continued to search for her until dark without success, and it wasn’t until the next morning that they made the grim discovery of her body. An autopsy was performed, the police ruled her death an accidental drowning, and Victor was said to be grief stricken.
“What do you make of it?” I asked Maura when we’d finished reading. “Other than that Victor took his sweet time getting married. If Mary Elizabeth died sixteen years ago and they were relative newlyweds at that point, he was a ripe old fiftysomething when he finally walked down the aisle. That’s unusual right there.”
“It sure is, although at the rate I’m going, I may not have any rice thrown at me until I’m in Depends.”
“That’s because your boyfriends are already in Depends. But getting back to Vic, it is odd that he waited so long to get married. I wonder what there was about Mary Elizabeth that convinced him to trade in his bachelorhood.”
“Maybe he was waiting for just the right combination in a woman,” she said. “She had to have money, she had to be inexperienced with men, and she had to be easy to fool.”
“My mother has money and is inexperienced with men, but she never used to be easy to fool. Quite the contrary.”
“Everybody’s easy to fool when they come to Hollywood and stumble on success and start believing their own press releases.”
“I know. Victor must have been overjoyed when he met Mom and realized how impressionable she was.”
“What’s interesting is that, according to this article, no one suspected him of foul play in the drowning,” Maura pointed out.
“But let’s say there was foul play,” I speculated, “and the police just didn’t pick up on it. Let’s say Mary Elizabeth didn’t slip overboard on her own but that Victor caused her to slip overboard, which wouldn’t necessarily show up in the autopsy unless he whacked her over the head first or shot her or strangled her. I bet he could have finagled the whole thing so that she went overboard without a single mark on her body.”
“If he was professional about it, yeah,” said Maura. “But that would suggest he either had help—like a hit man—or that he’d committed murder before.”
“Committed murder before?” I said. “But he’s only had one wife. Who else would he have murdered?”
“You’re right. I’m getting off the track. The truth is, we don’t have anything on Victor. We’re back to square one.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Why don’t we take a ride to Marina Del Rey, where Mr. and Mrs. Chellus kept their sailboat. We could ask around, see if anyone remembers the accident.”
“It was a long time ago and the marina is the biggest one in the country. Who’s going to remember an old boat or its owners?”
“Only one way to find out,” I said.
We drove to the marina on Saturday morning, parked the car, and accosted every craggy-faced guy in a nautical shirt, asking every one of them if they remembered the Lucky Lady or the Mary Elizabeth Chellus accident. None of them did. Then we stopped in at all the yacht clubs based at the marina and tried to find someone familiar with the case. No success there, either. We finally found our way into the headquarters for the Coast Guard and the sheriff station, and started hounding people there.
“How can you not remember?” I snapped at the young coast guardsman who happened to be standing near the reception desk. I was growing frustrated and had become rather cranky. “The boat was docked right here at this marina! Yes, it was sixteen years ago, but the woman died, for God’s sake!”
“I wasn’t working here sixteen years ago,” he replied. “I was in elementary school.”
It wasn’t insulting enough that I was considered too old by Hollywood standards? Now I was too old to get answers to questions that could save my mother’s life? Please. “Aren’t there records we could look at? Maybe there was a report filed? Couldn’t you be a little more helpful?”
I must have been raising my voice and
attracting attention, because someone from the sheriff’s department sauntered over and asked what the trouble was. I brightened when I saw that this someone appeared to be old enough to be the other guy’s grandfather.
“Sorry for the disturbance,” I said. “I’m Stacey Reiser and this is my friend Maura Lasky, and we’re trying to get information about a woman whose boat used to be docked here.”
“Joe Harmony. How’re you doing?” he said. I saw from his badge that he was a deputy sheriff. What’s more, he was pleasant looking in a graying, Dennis Franz sort of way. “What’s the woman’s name?”
“Mary Elizabeth Chellus,” said Maura, who sidled up closer to Joe. (He was her type, agewise.) “She and her husband Victor had a thirty-eight-foot sloop called the Lucky Lady. Sixteen years ago, they went out for a sail and she drowned. Is there any chance you remember the accident, Joe?”
He winked at her. (Apparently, she was his type, too.) “Sure do.”
“Really?” I said excitedly. “What do you remember?”
“I remember that her husband was heartbroken, mostly,” he said. “When the Coast Guard gave up the search for her that night, he was about as busted up as a man could be.”
“Right,” I said, “but what about the investigation? What, I mean is, why wasn’t there one?”
“Once they got the autopsy results, there was nothing to investigate,” he said. “The woman fell overboard and drowned.”
“Or was pushed,” I said. “Didn’t anyone suspect that her husband could have caused her to drown?”
Joe chuckled. “No offense, miss, but I think you’ve been watching too much TV.”
He should talk. There was a TV on in the background, and he kept sneaking peeks at it, which was not very confidence inspiring, given that he was a law enforcement officer and that what he was sneaking peeks at was an infomercial hawking women’s lingerie.
“I guess what I’m getting at is that the autopsy could have been incomplete. Isn’t that so, Joe?”
“Not usually and not this one. Like I said, I remember when they found the body the day after the drowning. There was no gunshot wound, no blunt trauma to the head, no strangulation marks on the neck, nothing to suggest that Mrs. Chellus’s death was anything other than what her husband said it was. It was all very routine, if you can call a drowning routine. It stuck in my mind because I had a buddy whose boat was docked right next to the Lucky Lady. As he told it, the Chelluses were a nice couple—Beverly Hills types but not snooty. They didn’t fight, didn’t throw parties, didn’t engage in reckless behavior. The day she drowned it was cloudy, with a forecast of rain, but nothing that would keep a sailor out of the water. My buddy said they showed up in their foul weather gear, carrying their cooler the way they always did.”
