by James, David
Oh shit!
I had never seen a dead person before. Let me modify that. Being raised in a Catholic household with a legion of elderly relatives who died almost on a daily basis during my childhood, I had seen more dead bodies than a New York City coroner. But I had never seen one that was the result of violence committed by a person or persons unknown. And apparently, neither had most of the agents who brought up the rear behind me, since no one had screamed yet. The scene was so surreal, and people were so stunned that no one said a thing, but they kept close at my heels like frightened characters in a comedy murder movie. I approached the corpse and, to my surprise, found that his mouth was open and improbably filled with something no one would ever have suspected: rocks. Yes, rocks. There were so many of the grape-sized stones crammed in the victim’s mouth, they forced his cheeks out like a chipmunk’s storing nuts for the winter. Then, like a dull cliché, a woman agent who entered the house saw the body, let out a blood-curling scream, and ran from the house like a cadre of demons were in hot pursuit of her, just inches behind, snapping at the heels of her cheap shoes.
The other agents kept looking at the body, then at me, then back to the body. So, since nature abhors a vacuum, I chose to fill it.
“The furnishings and the body are negotiable in the house’s price,” I said, not realizing that a joke right now was probably not the best idea. But I couldn’t help it. Whenever I got into a tense situation, my way of dealing with the tension was to let loose a joke.
“OH MY GOD, THAT’S DOC WINTERS, THE ENVIRONMENTALIST!” a woman agent in a too-short skirt exclaimed. “Oh dear,” she said, lowering her voice. “This isn’t good at all. He’s been a thorn in the side of developers and Realtors for years, and now he’s been murdered. This isn’t good at all.”
I was somewhat new to the desert, but I had read all about Mr. Winters’s efforts to stop development in the Chino Cone area, a triangular slice of land leading uphill to the Palm Springs aerial tramway. As one of the last large tracts of land in Palm Springs, this area held special interest for builders since this land had a panoramic view of almost the entire valley from its elevated position high above the desert floor. Developers and city leaders made the case that what Palm Springs needed was high-end housing with well-heeled residents in order to attract upscale businesses to the moribund downtown. The other half of city residents felt that they’d rather look up at the granite foothills and craggy peaks instead of hundreds of McMansions. I, of course, weighed in on the side of controlling suburban sprawl, making mine—and Alex’s—the lone voices in the local real-estate business. I did my best to keep my opinions on the matter my little secret.
Now we had a body on our hands, and this was not going to stay a secret.
“I’ve called 911,” someone said. “They’re on their way.”
“Doc Winters,” another voice said. “Dead. Good! The bastard. A real prick.”
I turned to see who was speaking ill of the dead. An agent in a cheap Hawaiian shirt (Why do people have to wear rayon Hawaiian shirts in the desert?) with a red face and harvest gold hair was looking down at Doc with a sneering smile on his face.
“Excuse me,” I said, rising to my full six-foot one-inch height. “A man here is dead, and I think we could have a little respect.”
Mr. Red Face continued, “If there weren’t so many witnesses standing here, I’d give the ol’ Doc a swift kick in the ass. That fuckin’ rock hugger is—was—holding the whole town ransom. He cares more about a bunch of goddamn lizards than he does about houses and jobs. Now that someone’s had the guts to do the job, he’s out of the way and maybe this city can get on with moving forward.”
The crowd of agents fell eerily silent. Most of them registered shock at the coarseness of Mr. Redface’s tirade, but I also detected that some of them quietly agreed with the cheap Hawaiian shirt.
I tried to hold my tongue, but I could do so no longer.
“Listen, you—I-don’t-know-what-your-name-is, but why do we have to stand by and let others turn Palm Springs into another Los Angeles or Phoenix? I would think that by preserving our mountain views, we would make the houses that already exist here worth more. Plus, think supply and demand. Restricting the amount of houses built would increase the value of what’s already here,” I said to a crowd of blank, unyielding faces. I might as well have been talking to a group of simians.
Mr. Redface was about to open his fat, little face when the scream of sirens broke the confrontational atmosphere of the room.
Since I had seen a lot of crime programs on television, I decided to be the sensible one and suggest that we don’t let anyone else into the house until the police arrived. I also suggested that we move away from the body and stand off to the side so as not to contaminate the crime scene.
“Who’s she all of a sudden?” Redface had to chime in again. “Fuckin’ Angela Landberry?”
“That’s Lansbury,” I corrected. True, a corpse was lying at my feet, but I was going to be damned if I was going to let a misinformed idiot with hair the color of a 1960s stove run roughshod over everything.
A police car screamed to a halt in front of the house, scattering agents right and left. Two officers, male and female, entered the house and seeing a dozen or so agents standing there, herded us all outside and took statements from all of us, most of them differing wildly from each other, even though the gist of what happened was that I walked inside and found a body. The rest merely entered the house and stared at the body. Simple. The body just laid there. But from what I was overhearing, it sounded like a pitched battle had ensued. And shots had been fired. Several, in fact. Throughout all of this, I did notice one curious but unmistakable thing: The other Realtors were shaking their heads and gabbing with just each other. And when I began to pace around to let off a little steam, the agents parted and let me through. I felt like a shark swimming through a school of fish. It never dawned on me until now that some—maybe all of these people—thought I was in some way connected to this murder. Or an even more frightening thought, that I had killed Doc Winters myself. I was considering the dire effect this incident could have on my career when I heard my name being called behind me.
“Mrs. Thorne?”
I turned to see a man in a suit coming toward me. A very handsome man. In a situation like this, I don’t think I would have noticed his looks or anything about him, but I was struck by his ice-blue eyes. Like a Siberian husky’s, except that both of his were the same color. And his hair was my favorite color: jet-black hair with small strands of distinguished gray placed perfectly for effect. Very Cary Grant.
“Yes, I’m Amanda. Amanda Thorne.”
“Mrs. Thorne, I’m Detective Ken Becker, Palm Springs Police. I’m told that you have the listing for this house?”
“Yes, this is its first showing . . . off to a great start, huh?”
The detective managed a small laugh.
“Mrs. Thorne . . .
“Amanda, please.”
“Amanda. Would you tell me exactly what happened when you came to the house?”
“Well, my car wouldn’t start, so I ended up riding here on my bicycle. When I—”
“Your car wouldn’t start?” Detective Becker interrupted. “Is your car an older model?”
“No, it’s only a year old, that’s the damnest thing about it. I just had the thing tuned up.”
“Interesting. Could I go see your car after we finish here?”
“Sure,” I said. “Oh, I get it. You think someone tampered with it, don’t you?”
“Perhaps.”
“That’s funny. I never considered that possibility until now. Of course, I never expected to find a body in my open house, either.”
He asked me to describe in detail everything that happened today, right up to and including how I opened the door to the house and found the body. When I finished, he fell silent, staring at his notes, then began flipping back and forth through the notebook he had been jotting in. Back a
nd forth, back and forth, circling or underlining important facts with a very expensive ink pen. Standing there with nothing to do, I found myself looking over the detective, summing him up for a possible date. Here I was giving testimony to a murder investigation, and I found myself getting turned on by this officer standing in front of me. Normally, I would’ve been shocked by my thinking, but I chalked up my reaction as pure horniness—plain and simple. After all, it had been a long time. And secondly, I loved a man in uniform—even though he wasn’t wearing one now (and probably hadn’t in years since having been promoted to what I presumed was a detective). But I knew for sure that he had one at home in a closet, expertly cleaned and pressed and hanging on a cedar hanger. And I just bet that he looked damn sexy in it too. Okay, okay, Amanda, now slow down. Before we go too far, let’s make sure he’s not gay first. You’ve made that mistake once before . . . better not do it again. Plus, remember, you’re in Palm Springs now. Your chance of the detective being straight is barely 50/50.
The moustache is very sexy, but it’s trimmed so impeccably, so precisely, I’m going to have to chalk it up to being gay. (Why do so many gay men have moustaches? To hide the stretch marks. Alex told me that one last week.)
Hair, neatly trimmed. Cropped short. Gay. Although, he is a cop, of sorts. They like to wear their hair short—an authority thing. Okay, we’ll call that one a toss-up.
Look at the shoes. Sleek, fairly expensive. Not cutting edge, but they are up with the times. I’m going to have to put this one solidly in the column of gay. Straight men seem to have a gene missing when it comes to picking out great shoes. But these are highly questionable. I would think that a police detective would wear something sensible, comfortable. Something you could crouch in the mud wearing without worrying about how they’d stand up. But these look like they’ve never touched the ground. Plus, these are definitely not from Florsheim.
On to the personal products now. I leaned ever so slightly toward our dear detective and took a camouflaged sniff. My nostrils barely fluttered.
“Allergies?” the detective suggested.
Jesus, this guy doesn’t miss a thing. “Oh, yes, a touch,” I replied.
“Happens this time of the year,” the detective replied. “They scalp the lawns here.”
“Scalp?”
“They dry out the summer grass, the Bermuda, then shave it down to a fraction of an inch. Tons of dust go up in the air during the process. Then they throw down cow manure and winter rye seed so the grass looks green all winter.”
“It sounds like a lot of work, and a lot of pollution.”
The detective looked up and stole what I was sure was a glance at me. He didn’t think I was looking directly at him when he got his look, but his eyes met mine, and held just a nanosecond too long, I thought.
“The grass that handles the heat of summer goes dormant here in the winter. The snowbirds want to come here and see green lawns all winter. So that’s what they get,” he added.
This was weird. Here we were talking about dead grass and I swear to God there was a whole body language conversation taking place, just under the surface of the banal. I continued my evaluation of Becker’s personal care products. I couldn’t sense any rarified fragrances, so the detective earned a point in the hetero column.
Two points in the homo column and perhaps one in the hetero. Total them all, and still you didn’t ever know for sure. And even if you were good at noticing all the telltale signs, you were still no better than before. It got more confusing all the time. The gay men were getting butcher. They’ve been wearing their hair shorter on top and more cropped on the sides. Some are even out-butching the Marines. (Of course, as many are getting older and receding hairlines come into play, shorter hair isn’t an option.) They’ve been slapping on the muscles at a faster rate than straight men. And I’ve noticed gay men wearing fatigues and big black boots more and more. Straight men are starting to look downright feminine.
And if that isn’t confusing enough, we heterosexual women have to deal with the latest innovation in the sex evolution: the metrosexual. It’s the straight woman’s dream come true. A man who is sensitive, caring, knows how to groom and dress himself, and enjoys fucking women. But the trouble is, these men are so close to being gay, that instead of being confident and deliriously happy with them, I always feel that if I were to land one, I’d always be looking over my shoulder to see if my boyfriend was stealing glances at other men. Like they had one foot in the closet and the other outside. Never in, never out. And me, always wondering, never trusting. Some relationship.
Before I drove myself mad, I decided that I should stop beating around the bush and find some more direct way of determining if I was barking up the right tree.
“So what does your wife think about your line of work, bodies and all?” I asked, realizing that this wasn’t the smoothest way of getting my answers. This guy, after all, was very perceptive.
“There is no Mrs. Becker,” he replied, very businesslike. “I’m divorced,” Becker added.
“Oh, me too,” I gushed. There’s hope, I thought to myself. I was just about to probe a little more when I saw a sight that made my blood run cold: a TV news van. The van had barely stopped moving when a news crew, headed by a blond Barbie-wannabe, sprang out of the van and broke into a gallop toward the detective and me. I asked Ken if I could have his jacket.
“You cold?”
“No,” I pleaded, “I don’t want them to catch me looking like this!”
As he handed me his sport jacket, he said, “You know you’re going to look like a probable suspect with this over your head?”
“I’d rather look like I killed a family of sixteen than have the local news crew catch me looking like this,” I admitted, throwing his jacket over my head.
Ken led me down the sidewalk to his car, where, like a gentleman, he opened the door to my side, and I slipped into the passenger seat, but not before clunking my head against the roof rather loudly, just about a half inch above my left eye. Fuck!
Ken closed my door, then a moment later, opened his and slipped in beside me. He started the car, and as he threw his vehicle in gear, I suddenly remembered my beloved and very expensive Specialized carbon-graphite road cycle propped up against the house where I left it before this whole mess began. I tossed off the jacket just in time to see both a TV camera crew and a photographer, looming at my window with her camera, who, I might add, managed to get plenty of perp shots and footage of me before the car sped away.
“Shit!” Ken exclaimed as the car neared the end of the street and turned onto the main artery that would take us out of Caliente Sands. “I’m so sorry about that, Amanda.”
“You did your best, Ken. I didn’t even see the photographer sneak up. She came out of nowhere.”
“Let me call back to the crew and have them drop off your bike when they come to take a look at your car.”
We rode to The Curse pretty much in silence. Me, I was too stunned to say anything, and Detective Becker was lost in thought. When we arrived at my house, I got out of the car, and Ken began to run back over questions that he had been mulling around in his head.
“So let me get this straight. No one had been in the house besides you when you opened the door this morning?”
“The entire cast of Cats could’ve been in there since I put the lockbox on yesterday.”
“Explain how this thing works. I know that you punch in a code into that handheld device there and you point it at the keybox, and it opens and gives you the keys to the house, but is there any way of knowing who’s been in the house?”
“Absolutely. All I have to do is go online and I can tell you the name of the agents who have been in and out of 2666 Boulder Drive.”
“I would appreciate if you would do that, but tell me first—is there any way of making your electronic key look like someone else’s?”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose I had one of those handheld electronic ke
ys like you have there. Could I enter someone else’s code with my key so the keybox would think I was another agent?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t think so. When you get your key, it has just one code that corresponds to it. The local board of Realtors are the only people who can change it. You’d have to go into their offices and switch it, but then again, each key has one specific code. So when I go to a house with a lockbox, enter my code and aim it at the lockbox, the lockbox opens it and knows that the person who got the house keys is Amanda Thorne.”
“So what if I stole your electronic box there?”
“It wouldn’t do you much good. You don’t know my code,” I remarked, showing the detective my code in the electronic display window.
“I could guess.”
“You’ve got four numbers in any combination—you could be there all night trying. When you enter the wrong code, it takes a while for the key to tell you’ve got it wrong. It searches and searches, realizing that your code doesn’t match your device, then it buzzes and tells you access is denied. Plus, you have to update this bloody thing every night by putting it in a cradle, and it either calls through a phone line or it updates via your computer’s Internet connection.”
“I see. Amanda, would you go into the house and get me a list of anyone who’s been in that house since you put the lockbox on? I’m going to wait here for my crew to arrive.”
I made my way into The Curse, past Edwin who was jackhammering into the cement slab foundation, and sat down at my computer. Normally, most people upon arriving home to find a contractor burrowing into their house’s foundation would ask what’s wrong, how much this was going to cost, and how long this would take. Me, I was getting used to living with Hell House. I didn’t even ask anymore.
