Perfect Sax

by Jerrilyn Farmer

  “Thanks.”

  “But what am I supposed to drive?” I asked, suddenly worried that the entire tide of transportation was turning against me once more.

  “Beats me. I can ask Baronowski if we can give you a lift, but we’re not going to be leaving anytime soon.”

  “That’s okay, Hilts,” Honnett said. “My car is right here.”

  “Good, then,” he said, and ducked back into my house.

  Honnett grabbed my suitcase and waited for me to lead him down the front steps to the street.

  That was when it hit me. What I had intended to do before all the bizarre activities of the past few hours began to twist and turn.

  “Wait here,” I said, and turned back to the house. I walked quickly through the entry and into the office I share with Wes. Below my side of the partner’s desk, where the chair was pushed neatly into the kneehole, I bent to retrieve a cardboard box. Inside were the papers and assorted pictures and files I’d cleaned up much earlier in the day—Albert Grasso’s paperwork.

  I grabbed my backup diskettes from my computer and a few other necessary office folders and scooted out the door into the cool air. It was almost five and I realized Wes and Holly might start to worry again if I didn’t show up at Wesley’s place soon.

  “You ready?” Honnett asked quietly.

  “Let’s go.”

  We got down to the street and I noticed that the cop guarding the house and the news vans were gone. Once the body had been taken away, they must have figured they were out of luck for any more dirt. It was late, they had deadlines. Thank goodness for that. The last thing I could handle at the moment was an array of microphones shoved in my face.

  We got to Honnett’s Mustang and he unlocked the trunk for me, placing my suitcase inside and holding out his hand to store the cardboard carton there as well. I gave it to him and settled myself on the passenger side of the car.

  “You want me to drive or you want to sit here and talk?” he asked, when he was in the driver’s seat.

  “Drive and talk,” I answered.

  “Fine.” He got the car in gear and did a neat 180-degree turn, heading back up Whitley. “Where does Wes live these days?”

  My partner, Wesley Westcott, is constantly on the move. He’s had eight addresses in the past five years. He has a side business of fixing up historic old houses and selling them. Each time he buys a new house, he moves into the wreck-in-progress and lives among the carpenters and the dust and the electricians. Every time he finishes one of his masterpieces, he moves in all his fine furniture and puts the house on the market. These past ten years, L.A. has been in a nonstop real estate boom and these top-of-the-line properties, fixed up to the hilt, sell very well. As it turns out, Wes spends about 90 percent of his time living in a gutted mess or a construction site, 5 percent of his time in a great mansion, and the other 5 percent boxing or unboxing all of his belongings and moving.

  “He’s in Hancock Park,” I directed. “On Hudson. On the Wilshire Country Club side.”

  “Near Beverly?”

  “Near Third.”

  Honnett nodded and steered his car out of the Hollywood foothills and into the flats, heading first south and then west.

  “Look,” he said finally. “You going to be okay? This is pretty tough, finding that young woman in your house.”

  “I can’t believe it.” It had yet to really sink in. Hadn’t I just been talking to Sara? Hadn’t we just put our heads together, Holly and I, to see if we could get her out of a jam? That boyfriend of hers. I just remembered him.

  “Chuck,” I said quickly. “I forgot to tell Baronowski and Hilts about Sara’s boyfriend.”

  “You know him?” he asked, interested.

  “No. See, Sara was just a temporary employee. She worked parties when it fit into her school schedule, that kind of thing. But tonight, the reason I loaned her my old car was because she was worried about her boyfriend. He goes to ‘SC, I think. Grad student. Anyway, he was having a rough time with his Ph.D. Sara was sorry she left him alone tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows?” I was frustrated. When you manage a constantly changing staff of young servers and bartenders, you don’t always listen to every little detail of their lives. If you did, you would be more into soap opera and less into event planning. “I didn’t pay the closest attention, but she was really worried. She thought he might be suicidal…”

  Honnett shot me a look.

  “…but I’m sure she was just getting dramatic. Anyway, she was supposed to go home and then come right over and drop off my Jeep. I specifically made her promise to return the car to me tonight. I…”

  Honnett stopped at a red light on Santa Monica and looked at me. He could see me thinking it over. He could see it sinking in.

  “Maybe if I hadn’t been such a hard case, she would still be alive,” I said softly. “If I hadn’t forced Sara Jackson to drive out to my place so late at night, maybe she wouldn’t have been killed.”

  “We don’t know what happened,” Honnett reminded me. But kindly. “Until we do, this could have happened anywhere. Don’t beat yourself up, Maddie.”

  “Right.” Like I could ever let anything like this go.

  “Tell me, why didn’t Sara just drive her own car home from that party tonight?”

  “Some mechanical thing,” I said absently, thinking about the role I might have played in that young woman’s death.

  “So blame that. Blame her bad luck with her car. Don’t blame yourself, Maddie. You were trying to help the poor kid.”

  “I know,” I said. “Some help.”

  The light changed and Honnett accelerated through the intersection.

  “Did you really think I had been killed?” I asked Honnett.

  He didn’t answer right away. And then he didn’t answer directly. He said, “I know you don’t trust me. I get that. But you should believe me when I tell you this. I never meant to hurt you, Maddie. I never intended to make you miserable. You are the last person in the world I would want to be unhappy.”

  That sounded okay, but I was leery of Honnett. I waited to hear it all.

  The fact is, a few months ago Honnett dropped the bomb on me that he was going back to his wife. His wife. The wife, I should point out, he never told me he still had hanging around. He delivered this news flash at a big party I was putting on at one of the studios and I just about flipped out. There we had been, getting closer and closer, and I had thought we were actually making a sort of good start. Then he tells me there’s a wife still in the picture. It was so classic. I couldn’t stand that I had been tricked or deceived or played. The guy I was falling for had a wife, damn it! I don’t know. I suppose there might have been a reasonable, rational way to continue such a conversation that night. For my part, I just told him to get the hell out of my life and ran off for a weekend in Vegas with a new male friend. Call me communicationally challenged. Whatever.

  “You are so young,” Honnett said, with affection in his voice. I loved that voice, so masculine and deep. When it held any softness at all, it made me melt.

  “I am not,” I argued. I knew Honnett had qualms about our age difference from the start. I’m twenty-nine. He’s forty-four. Big deal. He had a thing about it, though. And here he was bringing it up again, like that was the problem. Like the fact that he was hiding a wife in the wings had nothing to do with it.

  “I am not putting you down,” he said. “Don’t get so defensive. I just mean that you haven’t had as many years to screw up your life as I have. You don’t have as many ghosts from the past, I’m betting.”

  “I’ve got my share,” I said huffily.

  “Yeah, sure you do,” he said, chuckling. “And so do I. Since you are such an experienced old woman, I know you’ll understand how a person’s history can sometimes catch up with him.”

  “You mean past relationships?”

  “Well, in my case I think I told you I had been married before.”


  “Right. What a convenient way for you to have put it. Not too specific, were you? And I thought you meant it was all over. You were divorced. You were free to start something new with me.”

  “You want clear? Here it is. I’ve been married twice,” he said. “Once to a gal I met in college. In Texas.”

  “Were you some big football hero?”

  “I believe I was,” he said, laughing at me. “We Texas boys love to play ball. Anyway, she was a sorority girl. A pretty sorority girl from a nice Dallas family. She liked having a good time. She liked to buy nice clothes. You can picture the type. She wasn’t too wild about me joining the PD. Things had never been too good between us. We were too young. You hear that a lot, right? But I was working all the time anyway, so I didn’t get how unhappy we really were. After about seven years, she left me for a guy who owned a plane.”

  “A plane guy?”

  “Yep. His daddy owned a furniture warehouse in San Antonio, I believe. Anyway, we hadn’t had any kids. She didn’t want any, she told me. I tried to change her mind about the plane guy, but…” He smiled and shook his head. “I was young then. Maybe about your age.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Some time went by and I moved to Los Angeles, and a couple years later I met Sherrie. She worked for the LAPD, too.”

  I looked up, surprised. “She’s a cop?”

  He nodded. “She’s a cop. Anyway, she had just gone through a rough divorce herself. We hooked up and just sort of fell together. I figured she was more my kind of person, you know? She loved being a cop and she was proud of how well I was doing, moving up, that sort of thing. We got married and thought we’d have a family.”

  “You have kids?”

  “We weren’t successful. Sherrie wanted to do the fertility things. We spent a lot of money and she really suffered, taking hormones and whatnot, trying to get pregnant.”

  “Well, now you’ve done it,” I said. “Now you’ve managed to get me feeling sorry for this wife of yours. Thanks.”

  “Anyway, we were not successful in other ways. We had grown apart. She and I had never had that much magic. I began to realize how it really was with Sherrie. She was more interested in having a kid and being someone’s mom than in being my wife.”

  “Oh.”

  “So we separated. This was maybe two years back. We should have gotten the whole divorce thing settled, but I couldn’t afford it and she knew it. I’d used up all of my savings on fertility clinics and things like that. We’d even signed up for private adoption and that cost money, too.”

  “So why did you go back to her?” I asked. “Why did you leave me?”

  “I am still tied to this woman, Maddie. I still care for her. I still feel guilty I wasn’t committed enough to our marriage to make it work.”

  “Guilt!” I was tired of the concept, tired of its grasp. I knew it well. Hadn’t I just insisted that some poor, overworked girl rearrange her evening so she could drive my filthy old car home? Hadn’t that led to her death? I buried my head in my hands.

  “Sherrie called me out of the blue. I honestly hadn’t heard a word from her in several months, Maddie. She called me to say she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer.” I stared at him as he drove in the dark night. “She was scared to go through it alone.”

  “But your marriage was over…”

  “She made promises that we could go to see a counselor together. She wanted me to move back into our old house and…and to take care of her while she went through the chemo.”

  I shook my head. No words would come.

  He drove on, waiting for me to catch up.

  “Do you still love her?”

  He took a while to answer. “Maddie, it’s complicated.”

  What had I expected? An unequivocal no? He was still attached to his ailing wife. And really, in the light of this other woman’s anguish, how could I think he wouldn’t be? I was ashamed of myself. “Of course you should help her, Chuck. Of course.”

  “This isn’t the way I wanted to tell you,” he said, sounded frustrated.

  “Honnett,” I said, “I can’t think anymore about you and me. Not tonight. I’m just not—”

  “Shh. That’s okay,” he said. “You have every right to hate me, Maddie. I know it.”

  We turned onto Hudson and traveled silently to Wesley’s block. I showed Honnett where to pull over. He helped me carry my luggage and carton up the drive. Wesley’s new project was a large two-story English stone manor house, currently deep in the demolition stage. There was a Porta Potti out at the curb for the construction crew, and a large Dumpster next to the driveway, filled with debris.

  “How are you going to stay here?” Honnett asked, looking at the state of the place.

  “Wesley is living out back in the guest house. He’s leaving it alone until he finishes up restoring the front house. I’ll stay with him back there.” I led Honnett along a path that wound around and behind the three-car garage.

  “Is his guest house going to be big enough?”

  We crossed the patio behind the garage and then the lawn that led up to the pool. The sky seemed to be lightening from black to navy blue.

  “That’s where you’re staying?” Honnett asked, taking in the perfect miniature mansion beyond the pool. “It’s larger than my condo.”

  “It’s got two bedrooms. Wes has been using the second bedroom for storage, but I guess we’ll figure it all out. I just don’t want to think about any of this right now.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, putting down my things and putting his hands on my head, brushing back my hair. “I know you are completely wasted. I won’t try to kiss you again or anything.”

  “Oh, really?” It must just the perverseness of my nature that I couldn’t let him leave like that. At the door of the guest house, I leaned into Honnett’s arms and lifted my face.

  As he bent down and gave me a tentative kiss, the door opened and Holly and Wesley started screaming with relief.

  For better or worse, I was home.

  “Living Space”

  I staggered to the love seat in the living room of Wesley’s charming guest house and just sighed. “I am too tired to talk, too tired to stand, too tired to…itch,” I said, collapsing onto the down-filled cushions. The white linen slipcover made an almost noiseless whoosh.

  “Of course you are!” Holly took my heavy suitcase and the rest of my things and disappeared into the second bedroom. I closed my eyelids and felt my tired eyes burn, and then gently the tension began to ease. When I opened them again, Holly popped out of the bedroom on tiptoe.

  “She’s still awake,” Wes whispered to Holly, ever alert to the flicker of my lids.

  “We cleaned out the extra room,” Holly whispered to me.

  “I moved in that old Philadelphia spindle bed, the one you love,” Wes whispered to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, trying to smile through my grogginess.

  “Want to go to bed?” Holly asked, still talking low.

  “I do,” I said, but didn’t budge. They waited. A few moments more and I had to ask, “Something smells wonderful. What did you bake?”

  “Mandelbrot,” Wes said. “I know you don’t want to eat. I just needed to get it out of my system.”

  “Did you use my auntie Evelyn’s recipe?” I closed my eyes again, breathing in the warm scent of bitter orange and walnuts and sugar. I knew he had. Wes loves authentic ethnic cuisine and had miraculously seduced several well-kept family secrets out of my eighty-year-old great-aunt. Mandelbrot is a dry, semisweet cookie, sort of like Jewish biscotti. My mother was Polish Jewish, my dad was Italian English. It makes for a schizoid culinary heritage.

  “Yes, I did, but don’t feel like you are obliged to taste them right now. You know they will keep. Do you want to go to bed?”

  “I don’t know,” I announced, and then opened my eyes once more. “I seem to be stuck.” There sat my two best friends, so concerned about me that they were willing to leave all
questions and curiosity and worries about the events of the past evening for later.

  “Just say the first thing that comes into your mind,” Holly advised. “Maybe you don’t know what you want, but something will pop out.”

  “Shower.”

  “See, there!” Holly chirped. “I should have my own cable show. It works.”

  Wesley’s guest house has only one bathroom, but it was huge. Built in the thirties as a sort of folly, the guest house has ridiculously grand twelve-foot ceilings, which not only add a slightly surreal touch to the dimensions of the cottage, but also permit the extensive use of large crystal chandeliers—even in the loo. The vintage bathroom was tiled in the style of its Art Deco period, all sea-foam green six-inch squares on the floor and about eight feet up the walls. Border tiles were of forest green and here and there were Art Deco accent tiles featuring geometrical pink lilies with dark leaves on a sea-foam ground. All the porcelain fixtures, the toilet, sink, and tub, were a matching shade of pale green.

  It was like stepping back in time as I stepped into the green tub, turned the hot and cold faucets until I got the right mix, and pulled the lever to switch on the shower. Under sharp spikes of hot water, I just drifted away to a time where none of the present evening’s troubles could intrude. Steam filled the room as I stood there, thinking of nothing more disturbing than which of the five trendy shampoos Wes had neatly lined up on the built-in tile shelf might work for my tangle of wet curls.

  When I emerged from the bathroom, clean and warm, with a pale green towel wrapped around my head, I was wearing a freshly pressed pair of Wesley’s pajamas, soft white cotton, which he had kindly left out for me on the small chair in the bathroom. I had rolled up the waistband, and was doing the same with the long sleeves, but I felt so much better I almost couldn’t believe it.

  It is funny how tired you can be one minute, and then somehow you get that extra energy, that second wind. I know I missed an entire night of sleep, but I can do that sometimes, and just keep going.

  “You look pretty good,” Holly said, checking me out.