Three Bedrooms, Two Baths, One Very Dead Corpse

by James, David

  “No, darlin. I got it through one of my sources.”

  “One of your sources, huh,” I surmised. “This wouldn’t happen to be that cop whose car I’ve seen parked around here in the middle of the night, would it?”

  Regina kicked at the dirt while looking down coyly. “Maybe.”

  “So you fished it out of him in the throes of passion?”

  “No, I got him all hot and horny and refused point-blank to have sex until he told me. And at his age, you don’t have sex all that often, so I was holding him hostage. When you have ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

  “You have a T-shirt that says that.”

  “Yes, yes, I do.”

  “So he was poisoned? With what? Arsenic?”

  “Nope.”

  “Strychnine?”

  “Not even close.”

  “Cynanide?”

  “No, I’ll give you a clue—it’s found in your backyard.”

  “Rattlesnakes?”

  “No.”

  Scorpions?”

  “No.”

  “Black widow spiders?”

  “Unh-uh.”

  “But, Regina, that’s what’s in my backyard.”

  “Yes, I know, dear. You really have to break down and call an exterminator. You can’t be friendly to the earth all the time!”

  “Yes, but they were here first,” I remarked, trying to be friends to all creatures great and small.

  “Yes, but who’s paying the mortgage and the taxes?”

  “But I’m afraid the poisons will affect Edwin. He lives in my backyard.”

  “Honey, the poisons aren’t going to affect Edwin.”

  “Yes, but I’m afraid they’ll slow him down . . . he moves slow enough as it is. My house will never be finished.”

  “Let’s get back to the poison,” Regina said, nudging the conversation back into its groove. “You’ll never guess what poisoned Doc.”

  “I give up . . . what?”

  “Oleander.”

  “Oleander?”

  “Yes . . . probably the most common plant in Palm Springs. Probably half the properties use it as a hedge or screening plant.”

  “I didn’t even know it was poisonous.”

  “It sure is. The bark, leaves, flowers . . . all of it.”

  “So that means that someone had to feed Doc a bunch of oleander leaves in order to kill him . . . a fairly unlikely scenario since Doc probably knew his botany.”

  “Correct,” Regina emphasized with an arthritic finger pointed at me. “Someone probably made a tea of the plant parts and served it to Doc.”

  “And probably mixed it with some other legitimate tea to mask the taste . . . not that anyone would know what oleander tea tasted like. Alive, at least. So whoever served the tea to Doc had to be either a friend or someone he trusted.” I thought a minute, then something occurred to me. “So if he was poisoned, why the struggle? The furniture at my listing was knocked all over the place.”

  “Convulsions from the poison?”

  “Probably,” I replied. “So why go to all the trouble to poison Doc? Why not shoot him and bury him in the miles of untouched desert that surrounds us?”

  Regina pointed at me again for drama—once an actress, always an actress. “Because someone wants to scare the environmentalists, the preservationists. And how do you do that? Easy, you use natural, botanical poisons. It’s like a revenge . . . using nature against those trying to preserve it. Take that, you nature lovers! Here’s a dose of your own medicine.”

  “Marvin Sultan!” I responded. “Boy, if I could tell you how many times people have offered his name as a potential killer.”

  “And Mary Dodge’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “She goes hand-in-hand with Marvin. In fact, she’s had his schlong in her hand more than once. In her coochey too!”

  “Noooo!” I exclaimed.

  “Oh yeah! Maria Rodriguez’s daughter, Suzanna, used to be Marvin’s secretary in Los Angeles. She went into his office once, not even knowing he was there, and what does she see happening on Marvin’s desk?”

  “Mary Dodge is polishing Marvin Sultan’s tent pole?”

  “More. He’s schtupping her and doesn’t even stop when Maria’s daughter walks in. He, of courses, finishes with Mary, then calls Suzanna on his cell phone and fires her for walking in on them. He doesn’t even have the courtesy to walk out to Suzanna’s desk and sack her. Just calls her on his cell phone.”

  “So, Regina, you think Mary and Marvin are our two suspects?”

  “It sure looks like it.”

  We were both lost in thought for a moment. Regina spoke up.

  “Or, people who are on board with Marvin. No offense intended, honey, but a lot of Realtors could stand to make a lot of money handling the sale of land to Marvin and other developers who will want to create neighborhoods right next to Marvin Gardens. I’m not so sure he isn’t dealing with other agents behind Mary’s back. He’d sell his own mother for a nickel.”

  “That much, huh?” I said.

  CHAPTER 12

  A Mean Transvestite Is Such a Drag

  Besides the Palm Springs Follies, our little city is not known for its theater. But what it lacks in Chorus Line’s, Evita’s, and Rent’s, it makes up for in drag. Somewhat. The annual gay pride parade in Palm Springs is so full of drag, you can barely bat an eyelash without hitting a man in a dress. That being said, there is a shocking lack of world-class drag performances in a town so filled with gay men and women. Oh sure, we have Penny Slots from Las Vegas, Dee Ridgable, Ella Catraz, Jackie Oasis, and my favorite, Mildred Pierced. But where are the real stars?

  Despite that, Alex dragged me to Cocka2’s for a Sunday afternoon ritual: the 2-o’clock drag show. Alex had just ordered another gin and tonic for us as a drag queen named Winnie Bago brought the house down with a barnburner rendition of “Stain on My Pillow.” As the stagehands were changing the bare-bones set for the next act, I decided that this was as good a time as ever to get in a quick pee.

  I made my way through the crowd, jostled by inebriated gay men in Hawaiian shirts wearing leis. Drinks sloshed right and left, making a wet suit a wiser choice than shorts and T-shirt.

  As I rounded the corner for the hallway to the women’s restroom, a drag queen bumped into me. No, make that smashed into me. I looked into the face of the drag queen and instead of coming face-to-face with a happy trannie, I met up with a full grimace. A man wearing heavy facial makeup was scowling at me with a homicidal expression. It was more horrible than my worst clown nightmare.

  The throngs in the background yelled and laughed to an ear-splitting roar, but time just stopped as the psycho-trannie continued to stare at me. Was he planning to kill me? Or waiting for me to apologize for him slamming into me? As we stood in a Mexican standoff with too much makeup, I looked at his hairy chest that he didn’t bother to shave and noticed the strangest charm hanging on a gold chain that struggled to unbury itself from its hirsute thicket. The amulet was in the shape of a gold pig head with devil horns.

  Eventually, one of us blinked and I headed back to join Alex. A new performer had entered the stage. Straight from her “very limited engagement” in Las Vegas at the Drag Strip Lounge on Vegas’s famous semicircular gay-bar street, the Fruit Loop, was Miss Anthropy, who, true to her name, began politely but systematically dismantling the customers in the manner of Dame Edith Everage.

  “I just ran into . . . well, he ran into me . . . the saddest drag queen I ever met. The meanest too. I thought all drag queens were out to spread laughter and criminal dress sense.”

  “I thought that too. But you haven’t seen Miss Anthropy yet. I heard she’s like going to see Blue Man Group.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “You definitely don’t want to sit in the front row.”

  “Uh . . . let’s move to the back of the bar.”

  “Good idea,” Alex replied.

  Alex and I watc
hed the rest of the show from a safe distance, danced for twenty minutes or so, chatted with a few friends, then left Cocka2’s. It was just like old times. Okay, maybe not exactly the same. When Alex and I were married, we were never once under suspicion of murder.

  On Monday, I went into the office to do a little research. Being a Realtor, it was easy to find out a lot of things without ever leaving my desk at work. I found all the Assessor Parcel Numbers of the lots up in the Chino Cone, the area Doc was trying to protect. Then I went on the tax rolls and found out who owned the various parcels of land, and how many times they’ve changed owners and at what prices. And lo and behold, an amusing little pattern started turning up. All the various parcels of land up in the Cone belonged to various people until just recently. Even more interesting was the fact that just one entity owned a great deal of them now: Everest & Peak Properties, Ltd. Even more shocking was the fact that Mary Dodge handled the bulk of those sales.

  So who was Everest & Peak?

  I placed a call to Jimmy, my know-all lawyer friend who knew about as much about what went on in this town as Regina—he just had more of a business slant than Regina.

  “. . . Marvin came up with that name because he tried to climb Mt. Everest a few years back. The old fuck was out of shape, had never climbed anything higher than the social ladder, and had a fear of heights, but when you have millions of dollars, you can pay some unfortunate son-of-a-bitch guide who needs the money to push your fat carcass up the world’s tallest mountain, even if it kills everyone in your climbing team—which he did. Two Sherpas died when Marvin sent them down a tricky slope to pick up his satellite telephone, which he had dropped. The guy never made it past the second base camp, thousands of feet short, but he goes and names his partnership after Everest like he made it to the top. Does that give you some idea of this guy’s character?”

  “So he’s kinda like Nixon, Hitler, and Donald Trump all rolled into one?”

  “Right. Maybe throw in a little Mussolini . . . the guy’s a porker. Amanda?”

  “Yes, Jimmy?”

  “Why do you want to know all this? You got a big deal going on with him? Watch yourself. . . when you deal with this guy, Marvin is the only one who wins.”

  “I’m not dealing with him,” I answered back.

  “Amanda, I hope you’re not snooping around him, trying to tie him into this land grab, are you?”

  “No, certainly not . . . well, kinda, well, maybe just a little.”

  “Amanda, this isn’t Nancy Drew here. This guy may be a laughingstock behind his back, but there have been more than a few people who dared to make trouble for him and disappeared.”

  “So why don’t the cops arrest him?”

  “Habeas corpus,” Gary replied. “No corpse, no case . . . like Jimmy Hoffa.”

  I spent hours on the Internet digging up more information on Marvin Sultan, and there was a lot of dirt to be dug up. There were Web sites galore, news articles, bulletin boards—you name it. And they all said the same thing: Marvin was a blood-sucking jackal who was ruthless in the extreme. If Marvin wanted a shopping mall, condo development, or boat marina in a certain place at a certain time, he almost always got it—no matter what the locals wanted. Was I getting myself in over my head? I had a third-degree brown belt in Isshinryu karate, and I could run fast, almost endlessly. And I could scream loud enough to shatter windows or wield a stiletto pump like a ninja nunchuck. Surely, I could protect myself.

  But before I approached Mary Dodge, I selected a much easier target: Cathy Paige. I had a lot more questions to ask now that I knew what was going on with Mary Dodge. I called Cathy and invited her to lunch, feeling that if I got her off the Dodger’s turf, she might feel more comfortable about opening up. Plus, I didn’t want Mary to see me coming into the office to talk to Cathy again. I phoned Alex to let him know my plans.

  “So you don’t want me there?” Alex responded to my intentions.

  “Alex, I think if there was just one person, it wouldn’t be like an inquisition.”

  “The Spanish?”

  “Which no one ever expects.”

  “Where are you taking her?”

  “Spenser’s . . . I thought the garden would be nice today, plus I’ve requested a table way in the back . . . away from everyone else.”

  “Good thinking. You have your questions all written out?”

  “Yup.”

  “Would you ask a question for me?”

  “Sure, anything.”

  “Ask her if Mary Dodge is a cyborg.”

  “She’s not a cyborg, Alex.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because cyborgs don’t need breast implants, nor do they need to have their faces lifted. Just new batteries now and then.”

  I arrived at Spencer’s. In keeping with the clandestine nature of this lunch, I was wearing my Jackie O face-engulfing sunglasses for complete anonymity. Cathy arrived shortly after I did, threading her way through the sea of chairs, swooshing back and forth like an Olympic skier on a slalom course. Anne Clexton was right. This was one nervous cat. Cathy flung herself into her seat, then folded her hands in her lap like a schoolgirl being grilled by the Mother Superior about how black shoe polish got onto the toilet seat that Sister Mary sat on that morning. (Okay, so I still feel guilty about that.)

  “Thank you so much for joining me, Cathy.”

  “Oh, my pleasure.”

  “Cathy, the reason I’m asking you these questions is because I need to clear my name, so to speak. It’s a personal thing. So I need your help in answering a few questions.”

  “It seems that’s all I’ve been doing lately.”

  “The police?”

  “Detective Becker. He’s been calling me like twenty times a day. ‘What exactly did you see when you entered the house? Did you see anything suspicious? Did you see anyone outside? Was the door locked?’ Questions, questions, questions!”

  “So everything was normal when you toured the home?”

  “Uh . . . yes. Yes, it was.”

  A nanosecond of hesitation, followed by an epiphany on my part. While you’d think that an in-depth knowledge of poisons was something right up my alley with a spooky grandmother like I had, it occurred to me that if Cathy saw nothing out of the ordinary when she previewed the home, then Doc had to enter the home after Cathy, be served oleander-poisoned tea, the poison had to have time to take effect, Doc had to go through the death throes and smash up the place, give the killer time to remove any clues, and exit the house in plenty of time before any agent got to the house for the caravan, which started at 9:00 A.M. Something didn’t add up.

  “Cathy, I did a little investigating and found out that Mary Dodge is acting as agent for Marvin Sultan, who has bought up just about every piece of saleable land in the Chino Cone.”

  “Are you sure?” Cathy feigned.

  “I’m quite sure. And I’m sure the police are way ahead of me.”

  I could see that Cathy was mulling this all over.

  “Amanda, could we order lunch first? I’m just starving!”

  “Sure, sure, Cathy. My treat.”

  I watched Cathy as her eyes darted back and forth across the menu like an electronic Ping-Pong game. She wasn’t giving the slightest bit of attention to the entrées. She was clearly shaken by the possibility that the law and I were closing in on her, and that her story was about to come unraveled like a cheap sweater. She ordered a salad and a glass of chardonnay. I followed suit.

  Then, in the background, Mary Dodge came into view. I thought you had to strike the ground with a hickory branch to summon her, but she merely walked into the restaurant, saw me with Cathy, and took her seat, coincidentally facing me with an unobstructed view.

  “Cathy, can I be frank?”

  “Okay, I’ll be Cathy and you be Frank,” she said with a nervous giggle.

  “Did Mary put you up to this?”

  “Put me up to . . .?” she said, playing dumb.

&nb
sp; “Put you up in the Presidential Suite at Caesar’s Palace. C’mon, Cathy, you know what I meant. Did she ask you to go to my listing for her?”

  “No, no . . . It’s like I told you. I had a client I wanted to preview the property for . . . and I wanted to be first. I had a client that your home would be perfect for.”

  Keep pushing, Amanda, keep pushing . . . she’s on the run.

  “And would you mind telling me who that client was?”

  Another moment of hesitation. Too long of a moment.

  “Er . . . Jack Ellis.”

  “Cathy, come clean with me. I know for a fact that Jack just closed on a house that Mary Dodge sold him three weeks ago . . . 457 Miramar Road. Patty Pearson had the listing.”

  “He wants another house . . . for investment purposes,” Cathy shot back.

  “Cathy, I’m friends with Patty. She told me about this deal because she was having so much trouble getting him to qualify for a loan. He doesn’t have money for a second.”

  The salads arrived.

  Cathy got up suddenly, knocking over her chair in the process. “On second thought, I’m not hungry, Amanda. I’m sorry about lunch,” she said, rushing out of the restaurant crying, but not so quickly that she didn’t get a faceful of Mary Dodge, who stared at Cathy with a look of horror on her face. Then like a ripple across a pond filled with a mat of green algae, Mary’s look was back to normal, or what was normal for her.

  I could tell that she was looking at me from time to time, but mostly, she laughed and smiled at her client. I knew it was a client because it was a well-known fact that Mary didn’t have any friends. Apparently, she had screwed them all. Or eaten them.

  Whether she laughed or smiled or listened, Mary always had a pained look that formed the substrata beneath her surface emotions.

  Cool as a cucumber, I picked up my salad, which the waiter had placed in a Styrofoam clamshell, and stood up to leave, when déjà vu happened all over again. The tablecloth and a half-dozen dishes and glasses decided to follow me on my way out of the restaurant and cascaded onto the patio flagstones.

  “You know, I’ve got to start wearing skirts with buttons,” I said to the diners who stared at me with looks of shock on their faces.