We inherited the house from our mother’s father, Pops. It sits off of Beverly Glen, a winding road that cuts through the mountains that separate the San Fernando Valley from Los Angeles proper. The structure isn’t worth its weight in matchsticks, but property values around us have shot up insanely, and real estate agents are always dropping by to see if we’re willing to sell. But we would never think of it. In an age of tract homes and mini-malls and smog, our little homestead is like a magic wooded getaway, tucked deep into the curves of the narrow canyon road. We have a family of possums that lives under the house, sparrows that nest on the outside deck, and a wild deer that visits our backyard. But no real pets, not since childhood.
“He’s kind of cute for vermin,” I said, stroking Paquito’s bony spine.
“He’s much more relaxed here with us,” Terry observed. “He probably knows we’d never kick him or make him wear a Hannibal Lecter mask.”
“Lenore doesn’t deserve him,” I said.
She perked up. “So we can keep him?” she said like a kid with ice cream on the brain.
“First you want to keep her money, then her pet!”
“She probably won’t want him back. After all, he ran off with one of her body parts and left little carnivore holes in it.”
Uck.
“We can’t have a dog in our line of work,” I said. “We never know when we’ll be home.”
“We could get a doggie door!”
“Are you kidding? We can’t let him outside. He’d be a coyote snack so fast it’d make your head spin!”
She petted him, dejected. “I guess you’re right.”
“Anyway, she’ll probably want him back. I would.”
“Me, too,” she said, a little quaver in her voice. “I think . . . I think I’m falling in love with him.”
“Yeah.” I kissed his fuzzy skull. “But he isn’t ours to love.”
We pulled up to Lenore’s coral-colored Spanish mansion at ten o’clock the next morning, the dog and the money envelope in tow. We were going to say a sorrowful farewell to Paquito, drop him off with the maid, and then pop over to Reba’s for a gab session before seeing Lenore at the hospital.
As we made our way up the walk under forty-foot palm trees, my eyes traveled to the upstairs balcony, where smoke drifted skyward. A young Latina fanned at the smoke, looking down at us as she stubbed out her cigarette, and then disappeared. We rang the chimes, just as she pulled open the heavy oak door.
She was sleek-skinned and pretty in a skanky kind of way. Low-riding jeans and a short T-shirt that showed off her trim midriff, a gold navel ring shining from its epicenter. Her hair was long and gleaming blue-black, her eyes heavily lined, her lips pouty pink. I put her age at around nineteen, her attitude at fifty-year-old, burned-out barfly.
“Señora Richling-Vallegos no está,” she said.
“Yeah, we know,” I told her. “Do you speak English?”
The girl’s expression said that she was withholding that information until she knew what we’d be saying to her in English.
“We were hired by Mrs. Richling to find something,” Terry said. “We went to see her at the hotel and she’s, uh, had an accident.”
“Accident?” the girl said, frowning.
“Yes, unfortunately,” Terry said, unzipping her motorcycle jacket while letting her eyes travel from the girl’s cleavage down to her exposed navel. “She’s in Cedars-Sinai Hospital.”
“Qué pasó?” she said casually, no alarm in her voice.
“She needs some restitching after her surgery, is all,” I said, taking Paquito out of Terry’s hands and holding him out to her. “We brought the dog so you could take care of him.”
The girl leaned on the door and sighed, giving Paquito a look of disgust. “That’s no dog. Es una rata.”
“Yes, but he belongs to Mrs. Richling. You kind of have to take him.”
She shrugged and reached for him. “Sure, give him to me. I’ll put him down the garbage disposal. I put a whole chicken down there once, bones ’n’ everything. I’ll say he got squished by a truck.”
Paquito seemed to comprehend the girl’s diabolical threats. He started trembling and whimpering and a thin trickle of pee-pee ran down the front of my leather jacket. Terry saw it first and guffawed.
I thrust Paquito out to arm’s length and another little stream shot out and hit Terry’s arm, dousing her spiked leather watchband. Terry winced and shook her arm frantically.
I looked back at the girl, who was now the only one laughing. “Think you could spare a few paper towels?” I asked her.
She gave me a sly look that said, Told you he was a pain in the ass. Then she turned and walked toward the kitchen through the foyer, past a sweeping staircase with Moorish tiles on the steps and a wrought-iron balustrade. I noticed she was barefoot, with a chipped pedicure in blue glitter nail polish.
“Does she strike you as the typical Beverly Hills servant?” I whispered to Terry when the girl was out of earshot.
She shrugged.
“I mean, she’s smoking on the balcony, has total attitude, and dresses like one of Britney’s backup singers.”
“Yeah,” Terry jeered, “and you want to give her the money.”
Before I could reply, the girl reappeared with a handful of paper towels. We thanked her and wiped off the piddle.
“What did you say your name was?” I asked her.
“Rini,” she said.
“Pretty name.”
“Short for Irina.” She laughed. “Pussy name.”
Indeed.
“Well, Rini, we’ve decided to hang on to Paquito until Mrs. Richling gets out of the hospital.”
“Fine with me.” She gave me an engaging smile. “But you know, I wasn’t really going to put him in the disposal.”
I wasn’t even remotely convinced of that. If not the garbage disposal she’d find another way for him to meet a horrible end, like accidentally stepping on his itty-bitty spine in four-inch stilettos while she rushed down the stairs for a night out.
“I didn’t think you were,” I said, “but we’ve gotten kind of attached to him, so we’ll just keep him for a day or two.”
“By the way, what kind of food does he eat?” Terry asked.
“You won’t believe it.” Rini rolled her big black eyes dramatically. “She feeds him caviar and goose liver pâté.”
Caviar and pâté? For a dog? That was the wretchedest excess I’d ever heard of, and doubly astonishing for someone of Lenore’s thrifty habits. It had to be terrible for the pup’s health, in any case.
“That’s okay,” Terry said. “We’ve got lots of that around. Does he drink champagne or just water?”
Rini snorted. “Bottled water.”
“Well, we’ll see to it that all his needs are taken care of.” Terry turned and began striding purposefully back down the walkway toward the motorcycle, stuffing the tiny dog back inside her jacket as she went.
I handed the bunched-up paper towels to Rini, damp side in. She took them between the tips of thumb and forefinger like a soiled baby’s diaper.
“Do you know Mrs. Richling’s husband, Mario?”
“Of course. I’m the maid.”
She gave the word extra emphasis, as if she were trying to convince me.
“Seen him lately?” I asked her.
Her eyes became mean little slits. “No.”
“Did he say anything about where he was going? Or who he was going with?”
“Nuh-uh.” She moved to close the door in my face.
“Just wondered.” I thrust my hand in the doorway with our neon-pink business card. “Give me a call if you want to check up on the dog or anything.”
She took the card and glanced at it, before looking back at me. “Double Indemnity?”
“Yep.”
“Whatever.” She slammed the door.
Yeah, I thought as I turned to leave, whatever quacks like a duck is a duck, and Ms. Rini didn’t begin to quack
like a housekeeper for a Beverly Hills mansion.
She was a street-smart chiquita who’d probably never scrubbed a floor in her life. So who was she, really? My money was on some kind of connection to Mario. Sister, cousin, compatriot. But why would Lenore be giving her shelter if that were the case? And why the pretension of being a maid?
Maybe for the same reason Lenore had pretended that the tough guy she married was a famous polo player from South America.
Terry was ecstatic about keeping Paquito. This could be a real problem, I realized. She had a talent for neurotic attachment, and I knew that if she bonded with him too closely she’d spend days in bed with psychosomatic chest pains and migraines when we had to give him up.
“Look, why don’t we see if Aunt Reba and Cousin Robert will keep him?” I said to her.
“No way.”
“He belongs in Beverly Hills. Not in the canyon with no heat and hungry predators. Come on, it’ll be no trouble for them to take him.”
“Grizzie’ll stomp him to death. What if he pees on the furniture? She’ll wind back and hurl him all the way to Culver City!”
Griselda was Reba’s stout Irish housekeeper. An honest-to-god scullery maid with big, beefy red hands who worked like a fiend, sighed really loud about ten times an hour, and muttered to herself with occasional outbursts of “Aye, ye’ll soon see” and “Aye, that’ll fix yer boat,” like a chunky female Popeye.
“He won’t pee on the furniture,” I said. “They can keep him in the kitchen. Or maybe Robert will like him and take him into his studio.”
Cousin Robert was Reba’s bouncing baby boy of fifty, a would-be artist who lived with Mama in the fifteen-room Tudor mansion on Palm Drive, dabbling in painting and swilling a never-ending stream of inspiration in the form of Armagnac, Tanqueray, and Cristal.
“Oh, great. What if he gets drunk and steps on him?” Terry whined. “He can’t even see past his own stomach!”
I gave her a withering look. She was pulling out all the stops in order to keep Paquito, even stooping to defaming her own flesh and blood.
“What an awful thing to say,” I scolded her. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Oh bite me,” she replied.
We arrived at Reba’s mansion and punched in the security code at the gate. It opened slowly and ponderously like the entrance to Buckingham Palace, and we pulled into the large circular drive.
We’d decided to get as much information as we could from Reba about Lenore’s marital woes without mentioning Mario’s death. We didn’t want to alarm her unduly, and hearing that Lenore’s husband had been gunned down in cold blood just might set off an alarm or two.
“What did you think of the maid?” Terry asked me.
“She’s no maid.”
“That’s what I thought, too.”
“She may be related to Mario,” I speculated.
“Why? Just because they’re both Latinos?”
“No, because they’re both bad news.”
I rang the bell and Cousin Robert answered the door, satin robe open over his hairy, rounded gut, breath one hundred– proof before the day had even begun.
“Entrez, my lovelies!” He planted sloppy flammable kisses on each of us.
“How’s it going, dude?” I said, stepping over the threshold. “Setting the art world on fire?”
“Well, I had a nibble from a gallery that represents emerging artists,” he said. “They loved my work until they met me, then evidently decided I could stay submerged. I don’t think they could picture trotting me out at their chichi little cocktail parties, could you?”
“Yes,” Terry said. “Yes, I can picture you at a cocktail party, actually.”
“Thank you, sweets. I can always count on a kind word from my cousins.” He scuffed across the marble foyer in his pink satin mules. “Mumsy? The Nancies Drew are here.”
“Come on in, girls,” Reba called from the dining room.
Reba Price-Slatherton is our great-aunt on our mother’s side. The second wife of Jeffrey Price, who was Cousin Robert’s father. Reba married two more times after Jeffrey’s death for a total of five husbands—each richer and more infirm than the last—and had more money than God as a result. (Not that I’d recommend He hit her up for a loan any time soon—she was just the tiniest bit tightfisted.)
As far as Reba knew, we still had funds from our father’s life insurance. We never told her otherwise. We were too proud to let her know the extent of our poverty, and besides, we were afraid she’d try to rectify the situation by rustling up some nice, terminally ill millionaires for us to date. Not that it could be much worse than the series of dwarves, losers, and misfits I’d been out with lately—Los Angeles is a breeding ground for them. The truth is, I was jaded beyond my years when it came to men. But Terry managed to remain a hopeless romantic, with stars in her eyes for every pretty girl she met.
Reba was reading the paper in a quilted pink bed jacket and paisley silk pajamas, her face made up like a road map despite the early hour, her hair sprayed into a stiff hennaed helmet. She was avidly soaking up items from the crime blotter, riveted by the mayhem that existed just outside the borders of her rarefied world.
“How about this one?” she said. “A Long Beach factory worker took a blowtorch to his shift manager, then sued the company for stress leave. Mmm-mmm. What is the world coming to?” She nibbled on an English muffin with orange marmalade and a slice of mango. It was all we ever saw her eat. I guess it’s how she kept her birdlike figure. Either that, or she was visited by liposucking vampires that came through the French windows at night.
Robert tipped a bottle of cognac into his coffee. “This, girls, is called a carajillo.” He drew out the double l’s, grinding them in his throat. “I learned to drink them on the Costa Brava. They start the day with them over there.”
Clearly we were to infer that if you were sophisticated enough to learn the name of a drink in Europe, you weren’t a lush if you had a snootful with breakfast—you were continental.
“Isn’t it kind of early?” I ventured.
“Oh, just a little hair of the dog.” Robert poured a skosh more cognac into his cup. “Speaking of which, is that a dog under your jacket, Teresa, or is an alien about to spring forth from your stomach, gnashing its horrid little teeth at us?”
“Oh, we wanted to talk to you about that—” Terry started to say.
Reba gasped at the breach of etiquette. “You brought an animal to the table?”
“Don’t worry. He’s very clean,” Terry said, unzipping her jacket.
Grizzie entered with a tray of English muffins just as Terry set Paquito on the floor. The poor woman took one look at him and threw the muffins up in the air, the silver tray clattering to the floor behind her.
“R-r-r-a-t!” she screamed, as muffins rained down around us.
I guessed right away there weren’t too many mutant lapdogs roaming the emerald hills of her homeland.
Terry leaped up from her chair. “Jesus, Grizzie! It’s not a rat! It’s a dog!”
Paquito dived at a muffin on the floor, grabbing it in his teeth and running under the table. Terry and I got down on our hands and knees, reaching for him. “C’mere, Paquito, c’mere boy!”
But he wouldn’t come. He dodged our hands and growled, thrashing the muffin back and forth like it was a gazelle and he was the fierce dingo that had felled it. Paquito devour carcass on Serengeti! Grrrrrrrr!
I finally managed to snatch him under the belly and clambered to my feet, extracting one muffin from the tiny jaws of death and peeling another one off of my elbow.
“Well, I’ll be a kitten’s knittin’.” Grizzie squinted at him. “’Tis a dog, is it?”
“Of course, Griselda,” Reba said. “It’s Lenore’s little beast. I recognize it now. What on earth happened to its hair?”
“He shedded it,” Terry said.
“Shedded it!” Grizzie shouted, as if it were some sort of excretory function. “He�
�ll not shed on my floors, filthy little beggar!”
I cradled him in my arm. “He’s not filthy. He’s very sweet. We were going to see if you wouldn’t mind keeping him for a few days. He’s really no trouble.”
“Not on yer life!” Grizzie exploded.
“Puh-lease,” Robert groaned.
“Darlings, what a dreadfully stupid idea,” Reba said.
“Told ya,” Terry chimed in.
And that settled it. Paquito would stay with us.
When things had calmed down, and we’d been served fresh muffins and coffee, we finally got down to business. Paquito was snoozing in Terry’s lap, and Robert was either asleep or passed out, his chest resting against the edge of the table, head dangling forward as he inhaled with loud, wet sucking sounds.
“So, have you had any word from Lenore?” Terry asked Reba.
She shook her head and sighed. “I haven’t been able to speak to her. The staff told me she’s not taking calls, but I mean, not even from me?”
“So,” I said, lowering my voice, “we don’t know the . . . disposition of the ear.”
Reba shuddered, reaching up to twirl a two-carat diamond in her own lobe. “No. I can’t believe it. I simply can’t believe it. Daniel Hattrick was the most sought-after surgeon in Beverly Hills for the longest time—”
“We were told that Lenore got her surgery for free,” Terry said.
“For free?” Reba sniffed. “Well, you certainly get what you pay for.”
“That’s very unusual, don’t you think? Does she have a relationship with the doctor that would account for it?” I asked.
“Not that I know of. Although she was always tooting his horn. Even got me to go in for a consultation once, which come to think of it was a free consultation. I didn’t use him, but perhaps others did on her recommendation, and he repaid her with a free face-lift. Of course, he’s having so much difficulty now with the lawsuits and whatnot . . . maybe he had to do some pro bono work to get people back.”
“Any chance he’d do something like this on purpose?” Terry asked.
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 6
