by K. K. Beck
Trembling, Quentin reached into his pocket, removed a cellular phone, and dialed 9-1-1.
“Where? Where?” said Melanie. Rosemary began to sob and Melanie disentangled herself from her and ran up the rest of the stairs. Outside the open door of the master bedroom she saw the fallen breakfast tray, a poached egg still on its toast on the carpet, a teacup on its side.
In Nadia’s huge swan bed, Lila lay on her back, looking more asleep than dead. From her chest protruded the jeweled hilt of what appeared to be a very large dagger. The doors to the balcony were wide open. A gentle breeze lifted the hems of the sheer white curtains that hung there, making Lila’s incredible stillness even more striking.
* * *
“It’s only in the last few years that I’ve really been able to come to terms with the parental betrayal that made me what I am today,” Gail began. “My own marriage couldn’t last because on a deeper level I wasn’t cool with my own parents’ bogusness.”
Nick cleared his throat. “I see.” Actually he didn’t.
“Naming my baby Kali-Ra was an act of rebellion against my mother,” said Gail. “You see, Valerian Ricardo was my real dad, so I named her after his character. It was the only way I could pass on my true heritage. Anyway, all my friends liked it.”
Callie rolled her eyes and muttered, “You could have named me Valerie.”
Nick looked over at Callie. “So we’re, um, related?” he said.
She gave him a knowing little smile. “Kinda.”
Gail looked surprised. “Yes, I guess we are related,” she said. She gave Nick a cursory glance, then sighed and gazed over his shoulder at the mantelpiece in a dramatic way and got back to her own story. “Anyway, when I was seventeen it all came crashing down on me. I found out that my birth certificate said I was born in the Florence Crittenden Home, a place for unwed mothers, and where it said ‘father,’ it said ‘Valerian Ricardo.’ Mom had lied to me, and it took me years of therapy to deal with that trust thing. My adoptees support group helped a lot but I’m still in recovery. Survivors have to take it day by day.”
Nick figured people who’d been in years of therapy and support groups didn’t mind personal questions. In fact, they probably relished them. “Did you confront her?” he asked.
Gail clicked her tongue contemptuously. “Mom said Bud Vanderhof was my real dad, but he’d joined the army and been shipped to Korea without knowing I was on the way. She said she was scared and her very strict parents had already been worried about Valerian’s inviting her in for candy and stuff. They thought he wasn’t a wholesome influence, so they bought it when she said he was my father. Then, when Dad came home on leave and found out about me, he married her, and she took back her story about Valerian Ricardo and said Dad was my biological father.”
Gail’s face took on the stubborn look Nick had seen briefly on Callie’s face. It looked less attractive on the older woman. “I never believed it for a minute. Bud Vanderhof was nothing like me. When I finally met Valerian Ricardo I realized I had inherited a lot of his creativity.” She turned to Nick and said with a trace of smugness, “I do collages.”
“So you actually met Uncle Sid? Valerian Ricardo, I mean?” asked Nick.
“Uh-huh. When I was nineteen, I found him in the phone book. It’s an unusual name. I went over and met him. We actually got to be friends, even though he was pretty old. I didn’t get along with my parents at all at that point. There was a real generation-gap thing going. I really related to my real dad. He let me and my friends crash there a lot in the basement of the apartment house he managed.
“We thought he was really fascinating. He was interested in a lot of things that were coming up in the sixties. Like altered mind states and new ways of looking at spirituality.”
“He was a total drug pig,” said Callie, rolling her eyes.
“He was misunderstood,” said Gail. “He was way ahead of his time. Not that I’m into substance abuse now, of course,” she added primly, “or chemical brain alteration instead of meditation and healthy spirituality. But in those days we saw drugs as a way to overcome some of the uptight values of our parents. It was before we understood about true wellness. Anyway, he’d done a lot of hash and opium in the twenties. He was happy to get reconnected.
“And he was happy to meet me and my friends. He was kind of a lonely old man, spending a lot of time trying to get away from Lila in this really depressing little boiler room lined with roach killer cans and greasy tools. He’d tried to make it kind of homey, with Oriental carpets and some of his occult-type books and furniture he built and designed himself.”
“Yeah, like the thing they found him strapped to,” said Callie with more eye rolling. “Yuck.”
Gail frowned. “He had an unusual outlook on life. Why are you so judgmental?”
“Did he say if he was your father or not?” asked Nick.
Gail looked evasive. “Not in so many words. He said that we were spiritually linked. I said I believed he was my father and he said, ‘Then it is so, my child.’ He couldn’t come right out and admit it because of Lila. My showing up caused a lot of tension between Lila and Valerian.”
“I met Lila last night, Mom,” said Callie. “She turned on me and said ‘You’re back’ and that I was a sly little minx. I think she thought I was Grandma.”
“I’m not surprised. You look exactly like your Grandma Betty Lou did when she was just a teenager and had that affair with my dad. She was a very mature-looking fifteen-year-old.”
Gail sighed and shook her head sadly. “Lila had never processed her anger and she was very negative and hostile. Especially when Valerian wanted to come with me and my friends to the country and start a spiritual retreat–commune thing. He felt that the world was ready to hear his message once again, and that me and my friends could set him up as a kind of hip elder Timothy Leary–type thing. Lila was not open to that, because she wanted him all to herself. She was a major control freak.
“Anyway, it never happened because he died suddenly right before we were all going to get into this big old school bus and take off. It was so sad.”
Gail looked as if she were about to weep, and Callie said, “Tell him about the box, Mom. That’s proof, isn’t it?”
“Oh. Yeah. When we went to pick him up and go off to start our utopian community, he was already dead. I went inside and Lila was just coming out of the basement room where we used to meet. Some tenant had just discovered him and he was in there phoning an ambulance or something, but it was clear he had died. Lila hated me and she said, cold as ice, ‘Valerian won’t be joining you because he’s gone beyond the veil. He’ll be safe there on the other side and someday I’ll join him.’ Then she handed me this box, and she said, in a nicer, softer way that was really kind of moving, I’ll never forget it, ‘Here, he wanted you to have this. It’s all that’s left from his old life. Now leave me alone in my grief, or I’ll tell the cops about you and your friends and your dope.’”
Gail went over to the bookshelf and took down a small, square, gold cigarette box with the initials V and R in art deco letters made of tiny diamonds on the hinged lid. “It’s all I have of him,” she said sadly.
“Actually, it’s worth quite a bit,” said Callie. “I had it checked out. It’s all real. I think it proves that Mom was his daughter and he knew it and Lila knew it.”
Nick opened the box. There was some whitish dust inside, probably cocaine dregs from Uncle Sid’s last orgy. “So Callie is his granddaughter,” said Nick, handing the box back to Gail.
“And Mom is his heir,” said Callie. “But she won’t do anything about it. There’s a lot of money involved in the rights to the books, and I want to make sure we get what’s coming to us.”
Nick remembered how he’d told her about his own fantasy of inheriting the rights. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he said.
“I thought you might be after the same thing. I wanted to scope things out up at Nadia Wentworth’s,” said Callie
evasively.
“Is that what you were doing outside Melanie Oakley’s office? Eavesdropping?”
She smiled. “I had already figured out the things were back in copyright. The Copyright Office has a website with all the rules about the Uruguay Round and everything.”
Gail sighed. “Honey, I told you not to get your hopes up. First of all, Grandma was always in total denial, and now she’s dead. Second, there’s Lila. And finally, there’s that company that owns the rights. We’ve been over all this. You made me pay for that lawyer’s consultation and he said to forget it.”
Nick cleared his throat. “Glen Pendergast says he isn’t sure Lila and Valerian Ricardo were actually legally married. Would that make a difference?”
“That’s what I think too,” said Callie. “She didn’t have the right to sell off the copyrights to those Maurice Fender people. They belonged to us.”
Gail turned to Nick. “I’m afraid Callie’s getting a little carried away by all this. She always sneered at my real dad. Wouldn’t read the books or anything. Now, she seems obsessed. It really freaked me out when she got that Kali-Ra tattoo. I’ve tried to get her to talk the issue out with my own therapist.”
“I hated Valerian Ricardo because you were always going on about how your life was screwed up because of him,” said Callie. “I think that’s what drove Dad away. And I hated him because you gave me this stupid name. But now that there’s a lot of money involved, I feel differently.”
She turned to Nick. “I told myself that if I got into the fact that my name was Kali-Ra, kind of turned into her, allowed her spirit to take over or whatever, that it would be a good way to stay focused on my goal and really believe, and that I would get what I want. A visualization thing, you know? That’s how I met you. I was at the Scheherazade, soaking up power vibes, and I saw Lila’s book and you led me right to Nadia Wentworth. If you believe, it will happen.”
“Oh,” said Nick. “But we can’t always get what we want, even if we want it a lot, can we?”
“I believe that if you want something badly enough and never give up, it will happen,” said Callie with conviction. Nick remembered hearing a similar philosophy from Big Bird on Sesame Street when he was a kid. Later he was told in grade school that you can be whatever you want to be, a major league pitcher or whatever, if you hold fast to your dream. He had felt vaguely guilty about not buying into it until he studied real philosophy at the University of Minnesota, and realized with some relief that it was crap.
“I brought her up to empower herself,” said Gail. “But, honey, I meant it in more of a spiritual way.”
“I want us to have a lot of money,” snapped Callie. “What’s wrong with that? God, Mom, you’re so fucking passive.”
Nick looked over at her as she glowered at her mother. She sounded pretty crass and greedy right now, but maybe it wasn’t her fault. Her ditz of a mother had brought her up with a lot of fuzzy ideas.
CHAPTER XXIX
CLOUDS OF SUSPICION
A neat, bald man with a small, pale mustache and heavy-lidded blue eyes was sitting behind the desk in Melanie’s office tapping a pencil. He was a police detective, conducting brief, preliminary interviews with all the members of the household in turn. He looked more like a banker than a cop, and his neutral manner irritated Glen Pendergast, who sat across from him. Glen was red in the face and slightly bouncy.
“You see, it’s straight out of The Dagger of Kali-Ra. The beautiful, headstrong debutante, Madge Barclay, is found dead in her bed, the ceremonial dagger of Kali-Ra plunged into her snowy bosom. Actually, she’s not dead, she just fainted because she’s one of those rare people with their heart on the right instead of the left, but you get the picture. The dagger of Kali-Ra is described in detail. A cabochon emerald surrounded by rubies.”
The detective nodded. Glen continued. “What’s really interesting here is the motive. Madge Barclay’s near fatal mistake was to impersonate Kali-Ra at a masquerade ball. You see, she was in love with Raymond Vernon, who had told her all about Kali-Ra. Of course it was all futile, because a close reading of the books makes it clear that Raymond Vernon is a fetishist of indeterminate sexual orientation who isn’t really interested in women in any normal sense. But my point is that last night Lila was in Nadia’s bed. The killer or killers thought they were killing Nadia Wentworth, who was going to impersonate Kali-Ra in the movies!”
“Very interesting, professor.” The detective leaned forward with a sympathetic air. “Or can I call you Glen? You seem pretty involved with this whole Kali-Ra thing. Would you say you were obsessed with it? I mean did it just seem to take over your life? Gosh, that must have been tough, Glen. Maybe the pressure to get something like that off your chest is just too much to bear sometimes.”
Pendergast glared back at him. “Are you insinuating I’m some kind of nut?”
“Not at all. It’s just that you seem pretty worked up about all this.”
“Of course I’m worked up,” said Glen, rising to his feet and pounding the desk. “Someone is trying to kill the woman I love! These fiends must be stopped!”
“Of course, of course. Now, could you describe the weapon again?” the detective said pleasantly.
“A cabochon emerald surrounded by rubies,” said Glen.
The detective smiled. “Gee, Glen, how do you know that if you didn’t actually see the weapon?”
* * *
Huddled in the corner of a sofa, Quentin Smith was whispering on his cell phone to Margaret. “I told Maurice that Lila Ricardo was in the house. I told him she was the only impediment to a settlement. Now she’s dead. He said he’d take care of it himself. My God, Margaret, what if he did? What should I do?”
“Tell them the truth,” she whispered back. “Otherwise, they might think you did it.”
“I could have,” he said. “Last night I actually thought about killing that old woman with my bare hands.”
Just then a uniformed policeman room loomed up behind him. “The detective would like to talk to you next,” he said. “He’s finished with Dr. Pendergast.”
“I gotta go,” said Quentin in a panicky voice. Had the cop heard him say he’d thought about killing Lila?
* * *
By the time Nick and Callie arrived at Villa Vera to pick up the car, paparazzi and vans sprouting satellite dishes had massed outside the gates.
“What’s going on?” asked Nick.
“I don’t know. Maybe they’re covering the stuff that went on here last night,” said Callie nervously. “That jar falling and all that. Remember I told you I had a weird experience, like a hallucination? I’m beginning to wonder if some of it wasn’t real. My visualization techniques are more powerful than I thought.”
Nick wasn’t in the mood for any more irrationality just now. “Well, we have to get in there. I have to return the rental car.” They parked up the road and hiked up to the gates.
A couple of police officers, one male, one female, were standing outside. Nick approached them and said, “My name is Nick Iversen, and this is Callie, um, Caroline Cunningham. We left our car here last night and—”
“Iversen? Cunningham?” said the policewoman consulting a clipboard. “I’ll escort you in.”
“What’s going on?” asked Nick as he and Callie followed her up the drive. The officer didn’t answer. She was speaking into a walkie-talkie. “I got those two witnesses we’re interested in,” she was saying.
“Oh my God,” said Callie.
“What’s happened?” said Nick after the officer had replaced the walkie-talkie in its holster.
“A homicide,” she answered.
Callie clutched Nick’s arm. “Oh, no,” she said. “God, I hope—who was it?”
“The detectives will tell you all about it.”
“Who was killed? Was it Nadia Wentworth?” asked Nick.
“An older lady,” said the policewoman.
“Lila!” Callie said softly. She had the same strange look he’d
seen in her eyes last night when she’d said that Lila might not last the night.
* * *
“I see,” said the detective after Quentin had finished outlining his theories. “So you’re saying you think this voodoo assassin guy flew in last night from the Caribbean and killed an old lady in bed with a machete under orders from your boss. Interesting.” He jotted a few notes in a spiral-bound notebook. “If you knew this was going to happen, why didn’t you warn the victim?”
“No! I’m not saying I knew about it for sure, or even that it happened. I’m just saying you should check it out.” Quentin lowered his voice. “I feel it is my duty to tell you that there is also a possible Mafia connection here.”
“Okay.”
“My boss was using Vince Fontana to threaten Nadia.”
“You mean the guy who sells those tapes on TV. Yes, I understand he was here last night.”
“With a scary-looking enforcer-type guy named Bruno, trying to shake down Nadia Wentworth. Apparently, he has mob connections.”
The detective nodded. “We’ll look into it.”
“Explaining it all will take some time, but I have an important appointment this morning. A federal prosecutor is interviewing me about a complex and ongoing conspiracy.”
“I’m sure you’ll have lots to tell him.”
“It actually relates in a strange way to what might have gone on here last night.”
The detective nodded solemnly. “I wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of people think all conspiracies are really one big one. Like the Kennedy assassination or whatever.”
“Yeah. Well, I could get back to you later,” said Quentin. “I want to cooperate.”
“We appreciate that.”
“I’ll call you,” said Quentin.
“No, don’t do that. We’ll call you.” After Quentin left, the detective wrote the word “fruitcake” in his notebook next to Quentin’s name, and picked up the phone. He was still waiting to hear the autopsy report. It should be ready now.
