Three Bedrooms, Two Baths, One Very Dead Corpse

by James, David

  We opened a bottle of champagne and spent the night talking, reliving old times. We each fired up a big, fat Arturo Fuente Hemingway Masterpiece and puffed away, laughing and reliving the places we’d celebrated life together: Chile, New Zealand, Kenya, Iceland, Russia. Oh God, it was all just too wonderful. The Egyptians have a saying that to speak of the dead is to make them live again. Perhaps they were thinking about memories too.

  “Oh shit!” Alex said. “We really had some good times, didn’t we?”

  “The best . . . the absolute best,” I replied. “I don’t think I will ever enjoy myself like that again,” I added, turning to look at Alex, who was seated right beside me. For fifteen thousand millennia we looked into each other’s eyes, feeling that closeness that only comes from one soul touching another, completely, reverentially, carefully, tenderly.

  We heard a car drive up in the driveway, and the moment was gone. Like two guilty lovers almost caught in the act, we moved to different sofas while Ken knocked on the door and then entered.

  “Well,” he said, beaming with pride, “we have a full confession.”

  “That’s wonderful, Ken!” I exclaimed, wanting to kiss him, but feeling that it would be cruel toward Alex in light of what almost happened between Mr. Thorne and me. I stayed seated, letting the congratulations do its work without making Alex feel left out. I did motion to a chair beside me for Ken to sit down. What would Freud have said? That I was still in love with Alex, but falling for Ken, too, and I was positioning myself right smack in the middle of them? That I wanted to hear all about Anne’s confession and was seating Ken in the middle so that all could share? Maybe. I decided to be in denial. Sometimes a chair is just a chair, I told myself.

  Ken started breathlessly rubbing his hands almost with glee. “Where do I begin?”

  “To tell the story of how great a love can be?” I started.

  “The sweet love story that is older than the sea?” Alex continued.

  Ken, still riding high from bringing in Palm Springs’s most notorious killer in years, seemed confused. Then his eyes brightened. “Shirley Bassey would be proud,” he added. “Or Andy Williams.”

  A knowing look passed between Alex and I. He got it. Goddamnit, he got it.

  “Your theory about Doc having another girlfriend was correct. I have to admit, I wouldn’t have seen it myself. He was dating Anne Clexton for two years; but because she was a Realtor and worked for Mary Dodge, he couldn’t chance anyone finding out, since that would destroy his credibility in the eco-community. Plus, now that money was starting to really roll in with their contacts in well-heeled places, there was even more at stake. So, at some point, Doc meets Monica and falls head over heels.”

  “Or maybe Monica makes sure Doc falls head over heels, since perhaps she’s discovered a new wellspring of financial wealth,” Alex suggested.

  “That’s certainly possible,” Ken conceded.

  “Oh, it’s more than possible,” Alex replied. “We saw the rock on Monica’s hand the day we visited her . . . and the red Maserati. I think she knew she had hit the jackpot.”

  Ken continued, “So Doc dumped Anne for a woman much younger, sexier, and skinnier than her. Anne is furious and decides to get revenge. At the same time, she really hates Mary Dodge for a whole host of reasons. Anne told me Mary cheats her, belittles her, and takes all the glory, delegating Anne to one notch above a secretary. So Anne decides to get revenge on Doc, Monica, and Mary. One stone, three birds.”

  “It’s brilliant in its simplicity. Simple if you see the reasoning behind it, but completely clouded by the red herring of the Chino Cone, which had nothing to do with it,” I said.

  “Exactly,” replied Ken. “So Anne starts setting up Cathy Paige to become the fall girl, so to speak. She started stealing Cathy’s things, putting them in different places—trying to make Cathy nervous and jumpy as a cat. Oh, get this . . . Anne was putting Vi-varin tablets in Cathy’s coffee to make her even jumpier.”

  “Now it makes sense, Ken,” Alex said. “When we went to see Cathy, she said the coffee must have been a cheaper brand . . . that it was bitter. But she offered mugs to us, and they tasted fine. She must have only put the tablets in Cathy’s coffee.”

  “Correct again. So Anne sets her plan in motion. Anne picks a house that is somewhat isolated, yours being at the end of a cul-de-sac, with heavy foliage in front. It’s also vacant, with no owners inside; plus, Caliente Sands is so new, almost no one lives there yet, so there aren’t a lot of witnesses to see what Anne has planned. Over the course of several months before D-day, Anne goes with Cathy to check up on Mary’s listings, looking over Cathy’s shoulder to get the Personal Identification Number for her electronic keybox. When Mary Dodge is called by your client, Amanda, to list 2666 Boulder Drive, Anne intercepts the call, sets up an appointment, and doesn’t tell Mary about the listing appointment and lets Mary miss it, guaranteeing that Mary doesn’t get the listing.”

  “Oh, I see,” I commented. “If Mary got the listing, it would be a little too close to home for murder. After all, Mary wouldn’t murder someone in her own listing.. . . And this would be just another way to stick it to her hated employer.”

  “More or less,” Ken agreed. “A day or two before the murder, Anne calls Doc and threatens to tell everyone about their relationship, which would ruin Doc. She tells Doc to be at 2666 Boulder Drive to talk it over. She cuts several branches from Mary’s oleander hedge to implicate Mary and boils up a poisonous tea for Doc. That night, Anne makes a quick trip to your place, gets into your car—because you don’t lock your car—and pops the hood and cuts your battery cables. The day of the murder, she steals Cathy’s electronic key from her desk, puts on a red dress, which will implicate Mary, drives over to a client listing that Mary has in South Palm Springs, borrows a silver Mercedes G-class SUV being stored for the summer in a client’s garage, and drives over to Caliente Sands. She parks down the street just in case someone remembers a license plate number, but she struts down the street, throwing just enough sex into her walk so that the landscapers notice her. She is carrying a box filled with Danish and poison Earl Grey tea. When Doc arrives, she gives him a glass of the tea, knowing that it’s his favorite, and even better, that the bergamot in Earl Grey tea will mask the taste of the oleander. Anne also knows that Doc—and this is something I didn’t know until yesterday—has a history of irregular heartbeat. She gets as much tea into him as possible while she stalls him with talk about him dropping her. About twenty minutes, the tea starts to work on Doc, and he falls to the floor, probably suffering seizures and uncontrollable muscle shaking, destroying much of the furniture. When Doc has finally died, Anne gets an idea to introduce a red herring into this scene: She grabs a handful of rocks from the planting bed in the backyard and stuffs them into his mouth to make people think a message of some sort is being conveyed. Kind of like a warning, like leaving a horse head in someone’s bed.”

  “Then,” I continued, “she leaves the house, carrying out two fab-fifties glasses belonging to my stager because she doesn’t want to leave traces of the poison behind. It seems like a sloppy cover-up, Ken, considering the lab will only take a day to figure out what killed Doc.”

  “You’re not thinking, Amanda. There’s another reason for taking the glasses and not breaking them.”

  I thought for second, but like standing at the chalkboard in eighth grade in front of my lesbian algebra teacher, Miss Franklin, wishing for an answer to a quadratic equation to come to me, I saw only a blank.

  Alex rescued me. “Fingerprints. Even if the glass is broken, the prints are still there. And that could be a fatal mistake for Anne.”

  “Correct,” Ken said. “So Doc is dead, Mary is under suspicion, and everything is going according to plan. Then Cathy Paige throws a monkey wrench into the works by confessing to Anne that she remembered that Doc had another girlfriend: Anne herself. I’m guessing that Anne had Cathy sworn to secrecy, but when she knew that Cathy was too
dangerous to let live, she pulled out the poison again.”

  “Which helped Anne in a perverse way, since it helped to divert suspicion of Doc’s murder followed by Monica’s directly. Another red herring in the way. It was Anne who set your door on fire and put the black widows in your car. More red herrings. But those two attacks made me suspicious. They seemed so amateurish. And they didn’t make any sense since you weren’t involved in the Chino Cone protest movement. That’s when I started to doubt that theory. I’m not sure why Anne did those attacks. . . . I guess you can’t always expect an psychopathic killer to be logical. Perhaps by being illogical, she helped to confuse the motives for the killings.”

  “So let me guess the last part. Anne goes to visit Monica on some pretext of confessing something about Mary Dodge that would solve Doc’s murder. She visits Monica and poisons her.”

  “With castor beans . . . nasty poison. It makes oleander look like child’s play. She ground it up and probably put it into Monica’s tea. Or maybe told her it was an herbal tea, and Monica, not being the brightest bulb in the chandelier, trusted her. Since Monica had no heart problems, it took longer for the symptoms to show. Anne said she waited three hours in Monica’s house for her to die.”

  “Jesus, creepy,” I said. I mean, what else could you say?

  “Then she dragged Monica to her car, drove her over here, and dragged her into your backyard and tossed her in the pool. Again, why you? I think you became a convenient dumping ground for victims . . . and I think in her mind, Anne thought that if enough attacks happened to you, the police would begin to think there was some kind of pattern. Again, a red herring . . . confusion on top of confusion . . . in her own crazy way, brilliant.”

  “And the rest we know,” I ventured. “By sheer coincidence, she found out Regina and I went up to Pappy and Harriet’s and would possibly uncover her past with Doc . . . and the whole thing would come unraveled.”

  “And that, as they say, is that.” Ken then looked at Alex, then at me, then back at Alex, as if waiting for one of us to make a move, or to say something. What was next? He knew the case had been resolved, but the conflicting emotions between Alex and I hadn’t.

  As usual, Alex was always the gentleman with impeccable radar.

  “Well, it’s been quite a day,” he said, putting on a yawn and an arm stretching that wouldn’t have fooled anyone. But it was the right thing to do at the right time. And that, in a nutshell, was Alex. “I’d better be going.”

  He got up to give me a kiss on my forehead, but not before knocking over a tall vase with flowers, which, in turn, knocked over a bottle of champagne, which knocked over another bottle, smashing all three fluted glasses, and upending an ashtray and its contents.

  Alex was aghast. “I’m so sorry, Amanda.”

  “I’m actually quite happy,” I admitted.

  “Happy?”

  “Happy it was you and not me . . . it means the curse on me is over.”

  Alex smiled, gave me a kiss on the forehead, shook Ken’s hand, and congratulated him on a job well done. And he left, driving home alone while I might have the man of my dreams right here in my arms.

  That night, Ken finally made love to me and it was terrific. Absolutely terrific. Like Alex would have. I have to admit, during the sex, I did think of Alex briefly. And that was the wonderful thing about having been in love with someone once. They never really leave you. They will always be a part of you. But at some point, you have to move on. And that night, I did. Sort of.

  Stylish luxury realtor Amanda Thorne is feeling the pinch of the slumping economy. But the crazed world of reality television just may be her ticket to the biggest listing in Palm Springs. Too bad her co-stars are dropping like flies all over the property . . .

  Times are tough and the real estate market is tanking, even in posh Palm Springs. So when former client Ian Forbes, the eccentric head of an international hair care empire, offers Amanda a chance to list his palatial Spanish style pad, she reluctantly takes him up on it. All she has to do is appear on the bizarre reality dating show he’s filming—and starring in—at his estate.

  Under the watchful eye of chic, black-clad relationship counselor Aurora Cleft, a throng of attractive contestants descend on the mansion in hopes of winning Ian’s heart—and his fortune. With so much at stake, the competition quickly grows fierce, and it’s almost no surprise when two of Ian’s prospective lovers turn up dead.

  Amanda is certain the killer is among the house’s catty cast of characters, so she enlists the help of her trusty ex-husband, Alex, and her hunky homicide detective boyfriend, Ken Becker, to wade through all the faux reality and get to the truth.

  As she navigates the mansion’s screwball maze of model good looks, A-list connections, and impossibly tall stilettos, Amanda quickly discovers that everyone had a conceivable motive for murder. And now that there are two more realtors competing with her for the lucrative listing, it seems the killer won’t be the only one who’s out for blood . . .

  Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of David James’s next Amanda Thorne mystery

  A NOT SO MODEL HOME

  coming next month in hardcover!

  Chapter 1

  The Cold, Hard, Bitch Slap of Reality

  Regina Belle, my sexagenarian neighbor, and I are watching the Cougars of Santa Barbara at her house on a TV still residing in a Mediterranean-style faux-wood cabinet. This is not a nature documentary on the indigenous felines of California’s Santa Ynez Mountains. No, this is a program about rich, bitchy, overindulgent women from the port city of Santa Barbara whose antics and bad behavior would put Paris Hilton to shame. Regina loves the program, and since I’m looking to get out and be more social, this fits the bill. Plus, her home is right next door, so it’s within staggering distance after several blenders of tequila sunrises. Regina is wearing a new T-shirt sporting the phrase: BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.

  Me, I normally avoid reality shows precisely because there’s so little reality in them. This is something that seems to escape most people. The dead giveaway is the fact that there always seems to be a camera ready to catch a tempestuous bitch storming out a door, or to be there at the exact moment an awkward meeting just so happens at a local restaurant. The other thing that gets me is that no one ever seems to flub a line when speaking. I can see the director asking for numerous retakes to get the line right, to capture the perfect pout or sneer. Let me tell you, life never works out that way. Because of my Catholic upbringing, I never have the ability to say the perfect comeback, packed full of venom like a pissed-off puff adder. Let me correct that last sentence. I always have the perfect comeback. Unfortunately, it comes to me three hours later, after I’ve stewed and fumed about a testy encounter and congratulated myself in not owning a gun. But it does no good to get in your car, drive over to the offending person’s house, ring their doorbell, and let ’em have it. It’s lost the impact, the immediacy, even if you top it all off with a biting bitch slap.

  The weird thing about all these reality shows is they’ve turned the idea of a protagonist upside down. When I was a kid, you were supposed to look up to a show’s main character. He or she was supposed to have redeeming characteristics. They were supposed to be smart, witty, sympathetic, kind, or at the very least, likable. Not anymore. You only rise to the top if you’re vain, selfish, emotionally stunted, and above all, ready to act out for the cameras. Big time.

  Regina, however, loves the Cougars of Santa Barbara for one reason only: “I love the fact that here are these vulgar, nouveau riche women horrifying the local Episcopalian stuck-ups with their antics,” she would confess.

  “Okay, Regina, how many times were you thrown out of Santa Barbara?”

  “Twice,” Regina replied.

  “So Cougars is your revenge?”

  “Partly. I also like the idea of owning a younger lover.”

  “Regina, from what I can see going in and out of your house, you have younger
lovers.”

  “Amanda, I’m old—all my lovers are younger, comatose, or dead.”

  “Well, someone should call social services about some of these boys on Cougars. Some of them can’t even be twenty-one.”

  “Amanda, the age of consent in California is eighteen.”

  “You seem rather sure about that.”

  “Knowledge is power,” Regina smiled smugly.

  “Knowledge that keeps you from being arrested.”

  “Exactly. So tell me, Amanda, what’s wrong with women having all the power in a relationship for once?”

  “Nothing, Regina. I applaud it wholeheartedly. But these women are paying for it.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s called prostitution, Regina.”

  Regina waved away my morals with a flip of her hand. “When I was working for Warner Brothers back in ’53, I had a lot of the actors pay my way and no one gave it a second thought.”

  “But by becoming the paid-for girl, you lose your power in the relationship.”

  Regina was not to be outdone. “Women and men give up power all the time in a relationship.”

  “When?”

  “Sex!”

  “That’s different, Regina. You wear that horse saddle willingly.”

  “Just like when you let Ken handcuff you to the bed.”

  “Touché, Regina.”

  Boy, you gotta be careful what you tell your friends. Ken, for the record, is a detective for the Palm Springs Police Department. Currently, we are seeing each other casually. Since we’re both divorced, neither of us is intent on running into a new relationship. And furthermore, yes, I let Ken handcuff me to the bed while making love. You got a problem with that?

  “But remember, Regina, this is a reality show,” I said, putting vicious quotation marks around the word reality with two fingers on each hand. “There’s very little that’s real about it. I have a theory about these reality shows.”