X Dames: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 3)

by J. J. Henderson

  “Dad said you had a gig on a TV show,” said Marcia.

  “Right,” said Lucy. “But did he tell you what it’s about?”

  “No.”

  “It’s called the X Dames.” She thumbnailed it, then finished with a flourish. “And now let’s cut to the chase: I think you girls should come down to Sayulita with me and get on the show and enter the contest. They’re not done casting yet, and you’d be perfect. Young, cool, pretty, and great surfers. You’re made for it. Both of you.”

  “Damn,” said Mariah. “I can’t just split school to—man, any other time I’d be there in a Malibu minute, but I’ve got three weeks left in this quarter. And I’m looking at a B average. I can’t blow that.”

  “Where do I sign up?” said Marcia. “I’ve just finished a bunch of paintings, I’m like totally sick of my job, and I would love to go to Mexico.”

  “Plus she’s like the best non-competing woman surfer in LA, I swear to God,” said Mariah. “Besides me, of course.”

  “I kick your heinie all over the waves, Sis,” laughed Marcia.

  “No way.”

  “Way.”

  “Let me run it by my people,” Lucy said, talking the talk. “But I’m pretty sure it’ll work. I might even be able to swing you a ticket and a place to stay.”

  “That would be awesome,” Marcia said as they pulled up to the building at 637. “So you still want to check out my paintings?”

  “Absolutely,” Lucy said.

  Marcia’s paintings showed great promise, Lucy thought. Portraits of her fellow waitresses, restaurant regulars, cooks, friends and neighbors. The paintings were noirish, with hints of Hopper; somewhat derivative but infused, beneath the self-conscious bleakness, with a wonderful sense of LA light. She had the makings of a fine artist, potentially, but needed more training. “So why aren’t you in art school?” Lucy asked, after telling Marcia what she thought. That the work was good but could be a lot better.

  “Because I can’t afford it and my dad didn’t want to pay for it and so—” she shrugged. “I’m waitressing and painting in my spare time. And surfing, of course.”

  What a jerk, Lucy thought, recalling the four-by-six-foot pieces of self-indulgent junk she’d seen downstairs, and the six apartment buildings. The guy can’t afford to send his daughter to art school?! “That’s too bad. Well, listen, aside from the TV exposure, first prize in the X Dames is twenty-five grand for each round and a hundred grand for the grand finale, last I heard. So—”

  “I win the contest I can afford to go to art school?” Marcia said. “That would be so awesome, Lucy!”

  “I was thinking exactly the same thing,” she said. “So why don’t you check with your dad about going to Mexico?”

  “Check with my dad? No way. He’ll be like, you don’t need to go to Mexico, you’re just trying to avoid responsibility, you gotta pay your rent and car insurance and all that bullshit. No, I’m just going to go, Lucy. Mariah can tell him what’s up.”

  “You have a passport?”

  “Of course. And I’m 23 so there’s no stopping me.”

  Lucy ran it by Teresa en route to Pasadena. Teresa got Bobby on her cell phone, and after she described Marcia as a redhot Goth artist surfer babe, he said fine, you and Lucy think she’s hot, put her on the show. Just like that. Lucy called Marcia and told her to get packing, that a gofer would be in touch with flight information, and that they were off tomorrow. Marcia was unabashedly thrilled, which pleased Lucy no end.

  Leaving smog-browned LA behind, they crested a freeway hill to find the hazy green borough of Pasadena spread out before them. “Thanks for doing that, Ter,” Lucy said. “I know that girl’s going to be a hot property, one way or another.”

  “Hey, I’ve known those girls since they were pint-sized. They’re both great. I would have cast them as X-ers myself but I had no idea they surfed. Seriously I mean.”

  “They both kick ass in the waves. And Marcia’s not a bad artist, either,” said Lucy. “She’ll be perfect for the show.” She looked over the green sweep of Pasadena. “So refresh my memory on our next mission.”

  “Al DeLuca,” Teresa said. “He’s a dirty old demi-god of the LA art world. He’s been holed up in this falling-down Frank Lloyd Wright house for about nine hundred years, and supposedly he’s got several of Milton Schamberg’s early paintings in the garage, or basement, or somewhere. Plus he and Milton screwed many of the same Bohemian bimbos back in the day. He’s a primary source, in other words, and I have been hounding him for an interview since I started this project. I don’t know why he changed his mind—maybe he heard about Paxton and feels sorry for me—but in any case he finally returned my call last week, and we set this up.

  “But all that background ain’t shit. The real deal is that he’s the last guy standing who was there the night Milton’s wife died.”

  “The truth at last?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping. If I can get that maybe I can finish the damn book.”

  “So this is—”

  “A major moment in my quest.”

  “I guess.”

  They got off the freeway, spent ten minutes going around in circles, and then found the place. On a quiet side street overlooking the Rose Bowl, it lay hidden behind massive walls of unkempt foliage, the only evidence of civilization being a broken-down Jaguar XKE parked out front with several parking tickets on the windshield. A man watering an immaculate lawn in front of an immaculate house across the street gave them the evil eye as they climbed out of the bug, sized the place up, and approached the rusted iron front gate.

  From the gate they could see a house made of grimy gray-white cinderblocks, in a form that recalled a Mayan temple, buried behind layers of foliage on the other side of an unmowed thirty foot stretch of crabgrass. Towering untended bougainvillea bushes threatened to devour the symmetrical building, its central portal framed by pilasters decorated with ziggurat patterns. “Chichen Itza goes Pasadena,” said Lucy. “Even though it’s a mess it’s a cool building, don’t you think?”

  “Wright did several of these mocko-Mayan projects around LA,” Teresa said. “This was one of the low budget models.” She rang a buzzer by the gate. They heard nothing. They waited. She rang it again. They sensed movement behind the bougainvillea. “There’s the fabulous Al now,” said Teresa, as the door opened and a scrawny old guy appeared in the doorway. He wore grubby cut-off jeans, flip flops, nothing else. He hobbled three steps down off the entry porch and headed towards them.

  “Who the hell are you?” he said. As he got closer they got a better look. Long, thin gray hair fringed a bald spot. His beard was ragged, his skin slack over a skeletal frame. He looked like a dirty old hippie man. His hands were stained with paint. Lucy could smell it. He was still working. Good for him.

  “Teresa MacDonald, Al. And this is my friend—”

  “Tomorrow. You said tomorrow,” he said, arriving at the gate. He squinted through it at them.

  “That was yesterday, Al. Which means I said today. At eleven a.m. Now it is five minutes past eleven. This is Lucy, my friend from New York.”

  “New York? What the hell you want to live in New York for? Bunch of backstabbing art critics and—oh, never mind,” he went on. “I’m busy now. I’m working. Haven’t worked in a while. But then when I decided to talk to you I thought I’d better make some new work so we’d have something to talk about besides all that crap from the 1960s. So I got inspired and I’m doing a new series now.” He grinned slyly. “You’re going to love the new work, ladies. Milton Schamberg eh? Ha! He always told me he’d give his right nut to be able to paint a figure like I can. The guy was an abstract expressionist because he couldn’t figure out how to draw a goddamn thing.”

  “Hmmm,” Terry said. “Well, anyways—”

  “All right, all right,” he said, fumbling with the gate. “You’re here so what the hell.” He opened it. “Come in.” They went in and followed him across the yard. He hobbled a bit, b
ut not much, in fact for an eightysomething guy he was surprisingly spry, goatlike. “I’m not going to apologize for my house,” he said as they ascended the steps. “It’s been a mess for forty years so I figure why bother cleaning it now? Besides my maid quit a couple of weeks ago—she didn’t like working around my paintings—and I haven’t had time to find another one.” They followed him into a large living room that smelled of fresh oil paint. DeLuca was hard at work—a half-finished piece sat on an easel in the middle of the room, next to a large table strewn with paint jars and cans of various sizes, along with palettes and brushes. The room was lit with cheap spots in metal shades, clipped onto window frames and curtain rods and chair backs and everything else. Plants had grown over the windows outside, rendering the room fairly dark, but the spots threw bright hot light on the paintings that leaned against walls, easels, and chairs.

  One look and they knew why the maid had quit. Like Dan Hobgood—only Al deLuca was a far more accomplished painter—Al DeLuca had a single subject for every painting, at least in this current series. And that subject was the private parts of the female anatomy, rendered in warm, rich color and realistic detail on a huge scale.

  There they stood, the two women in their thirties and the ancient artist, surrounded by his huge, colorful paintings of female genitalia. Vaginas. Pussies. Cunts. Twats. Kukas. Petaled like flowers, sculpturally shaved or naturally furred, decorated here and there with delicately jeweled rings or tiny silver posts, in sizes ranging from a square foot to six by six feet, realistically rendered, they filled the room.

  Every one of them possessed an undeniable beauty, in their layered, flowery, individualized way, Lucy thought, but kept quiet. This was Teresa’s party. But Lucy knew this: whatever else you wanted to say about him, he worships what he’s painting, blasphemously intimate or not. An artist named Judy Chicago had already covered this territory in intensely rich detail several decades back, but you know, Lucy figured, landscapes have been done by hundreds of painters, as have portraits. In the age of tell-all and show-all, why not this?

  Teresa looked at him deadpan. “So who are your models, Al?” she said.

  He gestured at a stack of magazines on a table otherwise strewn with empty take-out food containers. “Pornography provides all the imagery I need,” he said. “They turn women into trash, and I turn them back into art.”

  “Interesting,” said Teresa. “I wonder who’ll show them?”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn who shows them,” DeLuca said. “I’m painting for myself, and for posterity.”

  “Right on,” said Teresa. “But I wonder if—I don’t think I can do an interview in here, Al. These paintings are way too distracting. Would you mind if we moved to another room?”

  “If you promise to model for me. Both of you,” he said, then cracked up. “Just kidding, ladies. Yes yes, let’s go in the kitchen. I know you’re interested in seeing my Schambergs so I set them up in there.”

  They followed him through a doorway into the kitchen, a tiny, dark, cluttered space that reeked of stale tobacco smoke. “That so-called genius Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t know shit about how people actually live,” DeLuca gestured at a table built in to the far wall. “This kitchen sucks.” A pair of foot square paintings sat on top, resting against the wall. He turned on the lights. Fluorescents sputtered to life, turning everything a pale shade of green.

  “Ah,” said Terry. “The Schambergs.” She went over. Lucy followed. The twinned paintings were small, abstract, dark things, not particularly interesting. “These would have been from his Chicago days, right? Before he moved out west?”

  “Hell if I know,” DeLuca said. “We did a trade one time, probably early sixties, when we were drunk. I think I gave him a drawing of a dog I did.”

  “Actually it was a cat. I saw it,” Terry said. “His son’s still got it up at the spaceship.” Terry made some notes in a small binder she’d conjured up out of a pocket. Lucy recalled seeing a cat drawing in the bathroom at the flying saucer house. It hung on the wall over the guest bathroom toilet, so guys could look at it while they peed. A place of dubious distinction, she thought.

  “That’s all fine and dandy,” said DeLuca. “So you’ve seen the great Schambergs,” he said dismissively of the paintings. “But that’s not really why you’re here, is it?” He sat at the table, laid the two paintings face down, and lit a cigarette. “Hey, I’m eighty-four years old and I’ve been smoking for sixty years. So don’t even start.”

  “No problem, Al,” Teresa said.

  “Good. So what then?”

  “Yes, you’re right,” Terry said, sitting across from DeLuca. Lucy stood close to the door, but there was no escaping the smoke. “What I’m really interested in is—”

  “The night Milton’s wife died,” he finished for her. “The notorious night of Sheila’s demise. That’s why you’re here.” He smirked. “Yes, I was there, and yes, I saw it happen.” He stopped, sucked on his cigarette, coughed up a gob, and spit it into a dirty dishtowel. “It was 1965, ’66,” he went on. “I can’t recall exactly, but Sheila’s brother Ronnie knew Ken Kesey because he’d gone to school with him at Stanford. Kesey showed up with that gang of fuckups, the Merry Pranksters, and the next thing we all knew Ronnie had a handful of acid tabs. LSD. Whoo-hoo!” he cackled. “The first goddamned LSD in southern California, manufactured by the notorious Owsley himself, we were told. We didn’t know what the hell it was so we started taking it and man, our brains were fried. I mean who knew! It was madness up there. The flying saucer—while he was building it we really thought it was a spaceship half the time, and that we all came from another planet to land on earth and would be returning soon. What a scene. Everybody naked, that little kid Bobby charging around—that kid saw everything, I tell you—and these guys from the Byrds and Love and the Mothers of Invention and all these bands were around, jamming. So.” He stopped, flipped over a Schamberg, and proceeded to put his cigarette out right in the middle of it. “So much for that piece of shit,” he said, smirking. “I’ve been wanting to do that for about thirty years.” The pungent smell of burning oil paint layered itself onto the tobacco reek.

  “Jesus, Al, you didn’t have to—”

  “Don’t go telling me what to do, young lady,” he interrupted Teresa. “You can see as well as I can that the painting’s a piece of crap.”

  “But it’s historically significant, Al. You know that Milton’s reputation is going to be salvaged by my book.”

  “I’ll be dead by the time your goddamn book comes out, young lady.” He lit another cigarette, coughed, and laughed. “I’ve got lung cancer. What do you know! Hahaha.”

  “I see,” said Terry. “So you’re burning bridges since there’s no point in—”

  “No point in anything, except painting pussy,” he cackled, then straightened up, dragged on his smoke, and went on. “We were all eating acid like candy, and then one day right around sunset Milton says to Sheila, I can fly, and she says, so can I, so they stood on the edge of the deck together, joined hands—me and about six other people were sitting around completely stoned, watching them as if they were—what?” His face grew dark. “I don’t know, but the next thing we all knew, they were holding hands and getting ready to jump, bending their knees together, and then—Milton let go just as she jumped, and she tumbled three hundred feet, where she bounced off a big rock and then fell another hundred feet. Milton just stood there, staring down. Finally he said Oh My God I didn’t really think she was—I never intended. I was the first over to his side, and I looked down and saw this little crumpled body way the hell down there. I looked at Milton, and in his eyes I saw—” He sucked on his smoke, coughed, and stopped, waiting for a cue.

  “What did you see in his eyes?” Terry said softly.

  “That he had planned the whole thing. Or at least orchestrated it. Stoned as he was and I was, I knew in that instant that he was a killer. And that he’d gotten sick of Sheila and didn’t want her around.”
He dragged on his cigarette again, and blew the smoke out.

  “So he didn’t push her but he—”

  “Made it happen,” DeLuca said. “I split before the cops showed up, because I didn’t want to have to explain what I saw to them. Not in the state I was in. But everybody there covered Milton’s ass because they didn’t want the party to end.

  “And you know what?” he added dramatically. “I never saw Milton again after that day. Didn’t go to his funeral, which was a couple of years later—he managed to kill himself with drugs, too,” he added. “His so-called heart attack was speed or cocaine at work, no doubt about it.” He slid out from his seat at the table, creakily stood, and said, “So there you have it, ladies. Maybe you can finish your goddamn book now, and start another one on something more worthy. Like my goddamned career, since I could always paint circles around that son of a bitch.”

  They all went back into the living room, where the spots still glowed on the paintings. “Look at these,” said DeLuca. “Compare them to that shit in the kitchen.”

  “Thanks for your time, Al,” Teresa said quietly. She looked at her watch. “But we’ve got a meeting.”

  “So go, goddammit, go,” he snapped. “Get the hell out of my house.” Lucy opened the front door and sucked in some fresh air. Teresa joined her a few seconds later. The door slammed behind her.

  “What a cranky old lunatic,” Lucy said.

  “No shit,” Teresa said. “But I got my story, didn’t I? Admittedly it was kind of anti-climactic, but I’m certain that writing up this particular encounter will be quite amusing. And I can write it so that it feels like it mattered, know what I mean? The jump/push murder/suicide, whatever it was.” She sighed. “In spite of what he says I don’t think Al really knows what happened that day. But ambiguity has its own charms, I think.” She paused. “In any case I gotta move forward or I’ll never get the damned book done. So let’s get out of here.”