by James, David
I expected a strong response, but nothing. The comment seemed to sail right over her metaphysical head. For a person who claimed to have great insight into unseen worlds, she was quite blind to what was happening in this one . . . and definitely deaf to sarcasm.
Eagle Feather wasn’t done trashing Coyote Woman yet. “She even uses store-bought sage to create her bundles for smudging. Can you imagine?!” she exclaimed, as if Coyote Woman ate Christian Baby Puffs for breakfast.
I didn’t know what a smudging was and didn’t want to know. I sensed that this conversation was going nowhere, so I felt that a hasty retreat was in order.
“Listen, Eagle Feather . . .”
“Margie. You can call me Margie.”
“Margie, I’ve already agreed to a cleansing of my listing by Coyote Woman. If it doesn’t work or she leaves some unsightly spirits behind or doesn’t do windows, I’ll give you a call.”
“I have nothing more to say to you, except that you will regret your choice. Bad energy is nothing to play around with, because it can turn on you. We are dealing with forces larger and more powerful than anything that we can imagine, Miss Thorne. Good-bye.”
“Eagle . . . Margie, I’m not really into all this stuff—” I was cut off.
“Miss Thorne, I curse you. Ei-bartu-do-ra-me-borga-chuleesa!”
I stood there holding the receiver for some time, thinking that I had just been cursed over a cell phone. I didn’t pay it much attention at the time. After all, when you find a body in your listing, it’s a tough act to follow.
CHAPTER 8
Think Before Putting Strange Things in Your Mouth
Alex phoned me at ten to inform me that he just transferred his license to my real-estate office, so he could start anytime. I had to go back to open 2666 Boulder Drive for the cleaners, set all the furniture back up, and take stock with my stager of everything that was damaged.
As it turned out, when I had the chance to enter my listing in body-free circumstances, more of the furnishings had taken a beating than I had realized. As Ronald stood in the living room where Doc had bought the farm, his eyes began to tear up; then he began to visibly shake.
“I know, I know, Ronald,” I consoled. “I was pretty shook up when I saw Doc lying there.”
“How could . . . how could . . . !” Ronald tried to spit out.
“Easy now,” I whispered, patting him on the shoulder.
Ronald calmed himself enough to speak loudly, but clearly. “What kind of sicko could do such a thing to an Eames surfboard table! Vintage!” Ronald sputtered, pointing at the two broken pieces lying dejectedly on the floor.
“Look on the bright side, Ronald. Before, you had just one surfboard table . . . now you have two boogie board tables.”
He flashed me a look that said, We are not amused.
“Maybe you can use them as side tables,” I suggested, trying to find the silver lining in a dark cloud. “You just have to sand down the rough edges and—” I started to say, but Ronald raised his hand and held it facing me as a warning that I had already dug myself into a hole and that I should stop digging.
Next to the remains of the surfboard table lay pieces of glass from the vintage fifties highball glasses. Figuring that there was little that I could do to comfort my distraught but somewhat callous stager, I got down on my knees to pick up the shards of glass so that no one got injured from them. As I gathered them up in my hand, it struck me that something was wrong.
“Ronald, how many highball glasses did you have set up on this tray?”
“Six, why?”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. It was tough enough finding a set of six to begin with. They’re pretty rare.”
“Ronald, I am so sorry about all this.”
“Don’t worry,” he relented. “It goes with the territory. So why were you asking about the number of glasses?”
“Well, the glasses aren’t tempered, so the broken pieces are quite large. And when you put them together, only four were broken.”
Ronald looked puzzled. “Maybe the murderer took two into the kitchen or somewhere else in the house.”
“Why?” I replied. “To share a nice bottle of Riesling before Doc died?”
“Maybe Doc was thirsty.”
“Enough of the jokes, but I checked the house before you arrived. Everywhere. No glasses.”
“That’s strange. So you think the killer took the highball glasses?
“Yes, it looks like it,” I conceded.
“But why? For value? They’re not worth much as a pair. Wait. Maybe he had a partial collection of the same thing. Now he has a full set, thanks to me,” Ronald conceded dejectedly.
“Well, maybe we can take comfort in the fact that they were probably painted in lead-based metallic paint. Pure poison.”
I rose up and dumped the pieces of glass into a plastic garbage bag that I had put in the living room to hold the broken furnishings.
“That is strange. Very strange,” I muttered.
Ronald threw a broken picture frame into the bag.
“Amanda, did the police tell you how Doc was killed?”
“No, and I don’t think they’re going to, either.”
“Well, there doesn’t seem to be any blood on the floor. That would rule out stabbing or shooting.”
“No, there wasn’t any blood. And I don’t remember any marks around his throat; but then again, I wasn’t exactly looking for signs of murder. But wait, I do remember the oddest thing: Doc’s mouth was full of rocks.”
“Rocks?” Ronald blurted out. “You mean, like pebbles?”
“Um, no, bigger. About the size of a grape. Dozens of them. His mouth looked like a senior citizen at a one-visit-only salad bar.”
Ronald screwed up his face as he imagined what it would be like to have a mouth stuffed full of rocks.
“Do you think that someone force-fed Doc rocks until he choked on them?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Sheesh, what a terrible way to die!”
“I suppose Doc might have been killed that way, but I imagine there wouldn’t be a lot of people who would sit calmly by and let an attacker shove rocks into their mouths.”
“Doc’s killer must have drugged him.”
“Not that I have a lot of experience in shoving rocks into my mouth, but I would think that even with a mouthful of rocks, you could still breathe by sucking air through all the cracks between the rocks.”
“I can’t say I’ve tried it, either, but it sounds plausible,” Ronald suggested.
A strange idea came over me.
“I have an idea,” I said excitedly, and made for the back door. I bent down into the flower bed and picked up a handful of granite rocks that had been placed there to cover the dirt and prettify everything.
I came back into the house and went into the kitchen, dumping the granite stones into the sink and running the hot water on them for some time. Ronald came into the kitchen to see what I was up to.
“Amanda, you didn’t hit your head on a rock when you fell off your bike yesterday, did you?”
“Hit my head?”
“Yes, you’re acting like a person who recently took a blow to the head.”
“Ronald! I’m trying to get to the bottom of things. I want to confirm a theory. Here, help me dry these rocks with these paper towels.”
“Amanda, you’re not really going to put these rocks in your mouth, are you?” Ronald pleaded. “They’re . . . dirty!”
I bent forward and looked Ronald square in the eyes.
“Ronald, I want you to look me straight in the eyes and tell me that you haven’t had worse things in your mouth.”
Ronald thought for a moment. “Fine, you win.”
“Now,” I said, pointing at the rocks, “these are about the same size as the ones I saw in Doc’s mouth. I’m going to put them in one at a time . . .”
Ronald was clearly concerned—and I didn’t blame him. “Be careful
of your dental work! I once cracked a crown on a body piercing.”
I looked over at Ronald.
“Well, I did!” Ronald exclaimed.
I had placed the rocks carefully in my mouth one by one until I had reached the degree of fullness I had observed in Doc’s mouth. I then concentrated on my breathing, the air hissing as I sucked it in past the granite obstacles lodged in my mouth. I heard the front door to the house open, and a few seconds later, Alex appeared in the doorway and froze there, unsure at first at what he was seeing.
Ronald turned to look at Alex like a man caught cheating with the wife of another man.
“Wis fisn’t wot dis wooks wike,” the stifled words huffed out of my full mouth.
Alex shrugged his shoulders. “She was like that as a child, Ronald. Always putting things in her mouth.”
After we had extracted the granite from my mouth, the three of us stood around in the kitchen taking stock of things.
“I discovered one thing I hadn’t thought of,” I confided.
“And what was that?” Ronald asked.
Alex, always one step ahead of me, put his finger on his nose.
“Yeah, that’s right. Doc could breathe through his nose. I didn’t think of that at the time because I was so intent on the rocks-in-the-mouth angle.” My eyes brightened. “Unless . . . unless the killer shoved the rocks into Doc’s mouth so far, they became lodged in his windpipe and he suffocated.”
Alex shook his head. “If that were true, then Doc’s face and head would have been blue from lack of oxygen. It’s called cyanosis. Was his face blue?”
“No,” I replied with certainty. “That’s why I married this guy in the first place, Ronald,” I said, patting Alex on his shoulder. “He was just a veritable gold mine of ways to kill people. But getting back to the rocks . . . so it looks like unless the man who killed Doc Winters put a clothespin on his nose or held his nostrils closed, Doc didn’t die from asphyxiation. So why the rocks?”
“Anger, revenge, or even a warning,” Alex surmised. “Or just a red herring.”
“Oh,” I responded. “No, I don’t think so. I think it was a warning.”
Ronald looked surprised. “You mean, like, people who stand in the way of building in the Chino Cone beware—this could happen to you—you rock huggers?”
“Exactly,” Alex said.
“Wow,” I said. “Someone is really serious about this stuff. I know there’s millions of dollars at stake here, but to kill someone for that?”
Alex gave big sigh. “People have killed for far less. In the movie Fargo, those losers killed all those people for a few dollars.”
“True,” Ronald added. “And when I get my hands on the person who destroyed that Eames table, I’ll be doing the murdering.”
“Ronald, I’m so sorry,” I said. “If it’s money you need . . .”
“Amanda, dahling, it’s not the money—everything I stage with is insured, but just the thought that someone would break a vintage mid-century table like that without thinking . . . We’re obviously dealing with a psychotic madman!”
Mid-century modernism, something that Palm Springs had in spades, was taken very seriously here. To some, it was something that you had to abide with, clashing with your Chip-and-Dip (Chippendale) furniture brought from the East Coast. To others, it was a holy relic, sacred and worthy of endless worship.
The cleaning staff arrived and I set them to work while Alex and I discussed what happened in greater detail. Ronald left to attend elsewhere to a sofa that a thoughtless open-house attendee had punctured with a high heel. Why a person would be standing on a couch in heels at an open house was beyond me. But in all my years of selling homes, I’ve just about seen it all while showing properties: people having sex, oblivious to the fact that I was standing there with clients; closets of single men filled with women’s dresses, bustiers, and silk teddies; closets full of CIA-GRADE rifles and handguns; bricks of cocaine.
Alex asked me to give him a blow-by-blow description of what I saw and what I did yesterday.
“I know you told me this yesterday, but now that you’re standing here, you might remember details that you forgot.”
“Check. When I arrived, a swarm of agents were standing on the sidewalk and driveway, waiting to get in.”
“You already forgot one detail, Amanda.”
“And what was that?”
“You neglected to mention that there was a crew of landscapers on the lawn three doors down, putting in plants and sprinkler systems.”
“Now, how did you know that, Alex?”
“Because they’re five doors down today.”
“Yes, but how did you know they were there yesterday? You weren’t here yesterday.”
“Just look at the sod marks. The farther you go away from this place, the more faint the lines between the pieces of sod are. So, they’ve been going down the street from west to east. Any more questions?”
“Not now.”
“Please continue, Amanda.”
“Well, when I arrived, I hobbled up to the front door and opened it . . .”
“Okay, stop right there. Was the door locked?”
I thought for a moment.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?” Alex interrogated.
“What is this, the Nuremberg Trials?”
“Amanda, I just don’t want you to leave anything out.”
“Now, wait a minute, does this mean you’re going to support me in my investigation?”
“Yes.”
“Well, forgive me for doubting you, but I seem to remember just yesterday that you warned me against trying to do this on my own.”
“That’s correct, but with my help, you won’t be on your own. Why do you think I came back to Apex? It wasn’t for the listings.”
“Woo-hoo! So you’re really in this case with me?!”
“Amanda, have you ever known me to shirk away from anything?”
“Well . . .”
“When I said I was going to bungee off that eight-hundred-foot-high bridge in New Zealand, I did it, didn’t I?”
“Yes, yes, you did.”
“And when I set out to climb Everest, didn’t I go through with it?”
“Yes, but you didn’t make the summit. You said it got windy or something.”
“Yes, I chickened out from the one-hundred-and-five-mile-an-hour winds. But I made it to the South Col.”
“You are correct.”
“And when you asked me to sit through the entire Wagner Ring series with you, I went to the opera with you, didn’t I?”
“Yes, even though you had the look on your face at the time that you would rather be holding the back of that anaconda’s head like you did in South America.”
“Getting bitten by the world’s most powerful snake was preferable to sitting through several nights listening to opera from Hitler’s favorite composer.”
I threw my arms around Alex and gave him a hug.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Amanda. Now, where were we? Oh, yes, you unlocked the door.”
“No one had gone in even though there was a Supra keybox on the front doorknob.”
“And you know that because your keybox report only showed that Cathy Paige and Ed Jensen had entered 2666 earlier that morning?”
“That’s right. So when I opened the door, the first thing I noticed was the mess.”
“Anything peculiar about the way things were scattered? A pattern, maybe?”
“No, just a bunch of stuff smashed around Doc . . . as if all the fighting had gone on right at the sofa.”
“Okay, so you opened the door and then what?”
“I came in and I think I walked toward the kitchen counter to put my purse down when I noticed a body lying there.”
“Go on.”
“I was shocked, but I wasn’t scared. I mean, I had a whole cadre of agents behind me, and who could be more vicious than a bunch of re
al-estate agents?”
“Right. Then what?”
“At first, I thought the person on the floor had suffered a heart attack or stroke or something. But he was lying there awful still, so I had this sense that he was dead. So I got close and could see that he wasn’t breathing . . . the chest was motionless. So, seeing that I couldn’t do anything, I backed up because I knew the police would investigate and I didn’t want to disturb the scene.”
“So at that point, you believed Doc had been murdered?”
“I didn’t know it was Doc until someone behind me shouted it out. My first thought was that he was some kind of homeless man who broke in, looking for a place to stay for the night, and that he drank himself to death.”
“That’s what you thought?”
“Of course. I mean, Doc is kinda scraggly. Well, I was hoping that it was a heart attack—I guess that didn’t come out right—but something in my bones told me otherwise.”
“Interesting.”
“I mean, the mess looked like there was a fight or some kind of struggle. But I figured, maybe the guy had a heart attack and fell back on the furniture, then started grasping things in a desperate attempt at getting help. I wasn’t really sure what had happened.”
“Okay, then what?”
“As I got closer, I noticed the rocks in his mouth,” I said.
“And what went through your mind as you saw the rocks?”
“I thought, gee, are those igneous or metamorphic rocks?”
Another smirk from Alex.
“Okay, next question. Were all the rocks in his mouth—I mean, were there any lying around on the floor like the killer couldn’t fit them all in?”
A big lightbulb went off over my head.
“Oh, I see where you’re going with this, Alex. In other words, was the rock thing planned, or did the killer hurriedly grab some rocks outside and shove them inside his mouth, which would probably leave some extras?”
“Exactly.”
“No, Alex, they were all in. None were left on the floor. But . . . but let me poke a possible hole in your theory, Alex. The cheeks can expand greatly, so unless the killer had picked up way too many rocks, it would be possible to fit all of them in. The mouth can expand to accommodate a great many things.”
“Indeed, it can,” Alex said with a sly wink.
