The Butcher of Beverly Hills

by Jennifer Colt

  “Oh, not much. Just some silver and whatnot. Jeez. I wonder if the two incidents could be related.”

  Now we wondered, too.

  “You’re investigators also?” he said, looking at our card.

  “Private,” I said.

  “Are you here in a . . . professional capacity?”

  “No, our aunt is a friend of Mrs. Magnuson’s,” Terry told him. “We just dropped by for a social visit.”

  “Mmm. Well, keep my card. Maybe we could go out to lunch one day and swap war stories.”

  “We’d like that,” I said.

  “Call me.” He scurried up the walkway toward the cop on the front porch.

  When we got home, Paquito was yapping at the door. We cracked it open and he poked his nose outside, nostrils working furiously. Terry carefully pushed the door in further and he ran outside and dodged at our feet, spinning in circles like a tiny whirling dervish.

  “Mommy’s home!” each of us said, then glared at the other.

  Paquito started leaping into the air, yelping at Muffy, who was in my arms and straining to get down. She was a strong little thing and so determined I almost lost my hold on her. But something distracted Paquito from his new friend. He lunged at my feet, sniffing the hem of my jeans. Then he jumped from my pants leg to Terry’s, performing the same doggie reconnaissance.

  “The body,” she said. “He smells the body.”

  “You think?”

  “They can smell a single molecule of meat from a mile away.”

  We had plied our nostrils with the expensive perfume, but the fumes were evaporating and I was beginning to detect a little eau-de-decomposition under the Chanel No. 5. It smelled like the proverbial French cathouse, housing a big dead cat.

  “I’m gonna burn these clothes and sandblast my skin,” I said.

  Terry grabbed Muffy from me.

  “Here’s a little girlfriend for you, precious,” she said to Paquito. “Her name’s Muffy.” She placed the girl dog nose-to-nose with the boy dog.

  It was love at first sight.

  They quivered. They lunged. They ducked and feinted. They did their version of the minuet, noses daintily inserted into backsides, as violins played How Much Is That Doggie in the Window in the flickering candlelight of their imaginations.

  Then Muffy rushed Paquito from behind, threw her front paws on his back and began humping him.

  “Muffy, no!” I yelled. She looked up at me with bewildered black eyes. “You’re the girl, Muffy. You don’t do the humping!”

  Terry got in my face. “Why don’t you let them do what comes naturally, instead of trying to force them into a puritanical ideal of proper sex?”

  “Well, okay,” I said, chastened. “Hump away, Muff.”

  And she did, for a full thirty seconds. By then we became afraid for Paquito’s backbone. She was a sturdy little thing, weighing in at about ten pounds to Paquito’s three. Feminist principles aside, we were afraid she might snap his spine. Terry pulled her off Paquito’s back and took her into the kitchen, promising a nice treat to make up for the humpus interruptus.

  Paquito shivered and fell to the ground, panting. If his male ego had suffered from being pinned by a female aggressor, he gave no sign of it. His eyes were big, his tongue darting in and out, and he seemed to be saying to me, She’s a firebrand. What’s her name, again?

  After taking extra-long hot showers, we watched Muffy and Paquito snapping up kibble companionably side-by-side. It was clear that this tiny match had truly been made in heaven.

  Domestic tranquillity established, we went to meet Dinah.

  Barney’s Beanery was already hopping when we showed up at 8:45. The jukebox was rocking with bar hits by the likes of Bruce Springsteen, ZZ Top, and George Thoroughgood. Patrons with meaty arms in sleeveless denim vests plied their pool cues under fake Tiffany lamps. A ponytailed waitress in a midriff and bell-bottomed jeans balanced orders of huge burgers and fries on a tray as she wended her way through the crowd, wagging the butterfly tattoo above her tailbone.

  There was no sign of Dinah, so Terry and I ordered beers. The bartender set down two frosty mugs of Beck’s, weighing in at about five pounds each.

  “To Lenore,” Terry said, hoisting her beer.

  “Lenore.” I tried to clink the hefty mug, but it came out as more of a clunk. “Sounds like greed was her undoing.”

  “Yeah, but who ‘undid’ Suzie?”

  “The demon drug,” I said.

  She squinted into her beer. “You know, I’ve got an idea about Suzie and that basket from the hotel.”

  “Yeah, how sad. Hiding her drugs in her little goodie basket.”

  “But did she hide them? Remember what the clerk said? These women ‘have to have’ the baskets delivered to their rooms all the time. What do you call someone who ‘has to have’ something all the time?”

  I slapped the bar. “An addict!”

  “Bingo, babe.” She knew what she was talking about. “Now follow me for second . . . we think the doc was a druggie, and all those post-op girls at the hotel were patients of his—”

  “Right, right.”

  “And at least one of them, Lenore, was getting her surgery for free. And she was pushing the doctor on Reba.”

  “Yeah . . . ?”

  “So maybe the operative word here is pushing, with Alphonse and Hattrick doing the honors. Maybe the surgery is free ’cause they get all the girls hooked on painkillers, then they go home and push them on their friends! ‘Menopause got you down, dear? Try one of these. Another frightful tension headache? I’ve got just the thing.’ ”

  I nodded, encouraging her to continue.

  “Then before you know it,” Terry went on, “you’ve got the Mary Kays from hell—a pyramid marketing scheme, with an army of Beverly Hills broads spreading the drugs around town like candy!” She slapped the bar for emphasis and the bartender appeared immediately at her side.

  “’Nother one?” He smiled at her flirtatiously, taking her in from the purple low-rise jeans to her slinky black camisole, not even sparing me a glance.

  “No thanks,” she said, tossing her hair behind her bare shoulder.

  “Let me know when you do,” he said, then moved to the other end of the bar, where a yuppie with an empty mug had been desperately trying to get his attention.

  Okay, this was something I was used to, but it still pissed me off on occasion. I slap the bar—nothing happens. Terry slaps the bar—the guy comes running, practically panting. Why, when confronted with two identical women, were men always attracted to the one who had no use for them? Terry had this energy that reached out and snared them, reeling them in like brainless big-mouthed bass.

  “A ring of painkiller pushers operating out of a five-star hotel,” Terry continued, oblivious to the bartender’s ardor. “It’s insidiously brilliant, isn’t it?”

  “It would certainly give Lenore some raw material as a blackmailer,” I agreed.

  “So how do we confirm this?”

  “I guess we’d better go back to the hotel. See if we can get something out of that blond registration clerk. Better yet, somebody on the housekeeping staff. They’re bound to have noticed pill canisters lying around the rooms, or guests facedown in their own vomit—”

  Just then, I looked over Terry’s shoulder to see Dinah walking in the front door. My smile froze on my face. She was outfitted in urban cowboy finery that would put Clint Black to shame, hitching up her jeans as she moseyed on over to us.

  “Here she comes,” I said, stifling a chuckle.

  Terry read my expression correctly, without turning around. “She’s dressed weird, isn’t she?”

  “Yup.”

  “Hi, girls,” Dinah said as she arrived, tipping the brim of her Stetson.

  Terry spun on her bar stool to greet the policewoman. “Howdy, Sheriff,” she said, and got a Huh-yuk in response.

  We sat in a booth and munched cottage fries and burgers. Once Terry and I got over the i
nitial shock of Dinah’s getup we found she was good company, if a tinge red on the neck. Turns out she came by it honestly, though—born and raised in Norman, Oklahoma.

  “Why’d you leave?” I asked her, after she’d rhapsodized about the southwest for some time.

  “Oh, it’s fundamentalist country.” She looked at Terry. “Not too tolerant, you know what I mean?”

  Terry nodded sympathetically.

  Dinah said she’d attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa for two years before deciding to come west. “My original plan was to be a stunt rider, but they don’t make too many westerns these days, and even the ones they do make don’t have many women riders. Historical accuracy, and all. So I got interested in law enforcement and, well, here I am.”

  “Glad it worked out for you,” I said.

  “’Course, patrol work isn’t my ideal. I hope to work my way up to homicide.”

  Perfect. She was providing the very segue we needed.

  “There aren’t too many of those in Beverly Hills, are there?” I asked, playing the wide-eyed innocent. “Might be kind of boring.”

  “You’d be surprised. Take your friend Mrs. Magnuson,” she said, leaning into us and lowering her voice. “It looked like an overdose at first, but it turns out she was stabbed in the heart with an ice pick–like instrument.”

  Terry and I leaned back in our seats.

  Dinah took a swig of beer. “It’s lucky the dog didn’t eat her,” she said. “That sometimes happens . . . the owner dies, and the poor little pet has no choice between that and starving.”

  The tail of a cottage fry dropped from my lips, hit the table, and bounced to the floor.

  “That didn’t happen with your little guy, though,” Dinah said cheerfully.

  “Little girl,” Terry said. “The dog’s a she.”

  “You’ve got her,” Dinah said, “don’t you?”

  “Yeah, we took her home. I guess we’ll adopt her.”

  “So poor Suzie Magnuson was murdered,” I said, shaking my head. “Any leads?”

  Dinah gave us a long, appraising look. “I can trust you not to repeat any of this?” We nodded, with all the sincerity and trustworthiness we could muster. “We got fingerprints off those pill bottles. No matches yet, but it’s something.”

  “What kind of drugs, were they?” I said.

  “Percocet, Darvon, Dilaudid.”

  “Jesus, all of them?”

  Dinah nodded. “In quantities that would kill a darn hippo.”

  “But she didn’t overdose?” Terry said.

  “She was heavily drugged, but no, it didn’t kill her. Just incapacitated her to the point where she probably didn’t even hear her attacker come in the house.”

  “Wait,” Terry said. “If she was stabbed in the chest, why didn’t we see it?”

  “Her blood pressure was really low,” Dinah explained. “That’s why there wasn’t more blood at the scene. She might have died anyway from the drugs, but somebody saw to it that she would never wake up.”

  Terry and I took a moment to let this sink in. The wrongful death of another of Reba’s dear friends was unsettling, to say the least.

  “No chance she stabbed herself?” I asked.

  “None. There was no weapon. And besides, people don’t usually stab themselves in the heart. Don’t know why, but they’d rather cut themselves almost anywhere else. They’ll bleed themselves till they stop it pumping, but don’t go straight to the source. Makes you wonder if people who kill themselves by cutting really do want to die at all.

  “Now, I’ve told you what I know,” Dinah said, “how about a little coming back?”

  The moment of truth. Time for a girls’ room strategy session. “Uh . . .” I hesitated. “Will you excuse us for a minute, Dinah? We have to pee.”

  Dinah nodded, frowning as Terry and I slid out of the booth. Once inside the bathroom, I looked under the stalls to make sure we were alone.

  “We need to pee?” Terry said. “That’s pretty lame, Kerry.”

  “We’re twins. What does she know about it? Maybe our bladders are in complete sync.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Satisfied that we were alone, I leaned up against a stall. “So, what do we tell her?”

  “About what?”

  “About everything.”

  “Nothing.”

  “We can’t get away with that! She knows we know something, and we need her on our side.”

  Terry laughed. “Why?”

  “She’s a cop!”

  “First of all, we don’t know anything. We’ve guessed a few things, but we don’t know jack.”

  “But she’s smart. And she has aspirations to homicide. Maybe we should tell her about our . . . our theories, and see if she can help us from the inside.”

  Terry skewered me with her evilest eye. “You want to tell her about Mario?”

  Dang. Forgot about Mario.

  “I guess not.”

  “Then I guess we tell her nothing. ’Cause I’m pretty sure it all ties in.”

  “But if someone else dies—?”

  “Look, if things get out of hand, yeah. But let’s find out more before we jump into anything half-cocked. Hell, we might be able to put it all together ourselves and get paid by Reba in the process. Maybe we’ll even get a citizen’s medal of honor or some shit from the cops.”

  “Yeah, that’s gonna happen.” I rolled my eyes. “They hand out lots of medals to citizens who break the law and withhold information while impeding investigations.”

  She put her hands on my shoulders. “If things change in the next day or two, we can revisit it, okay? I promise. Now let’s go soak Dinah for everything she’s worth.”

  Cold. My sister could be cold.

  We slinked back into the booth. “I take it you’ve decided not to tell me what you know,” Dinah said, searching our faces. “That’s not exactly fair, is it?”

  Terry waved at the waitress. “Could we have the bill, please?”

  The girl hurried over to place it on the table, but Dinah wouldn’t let Terry off the hook. She kept her gaze fixed on my sister’s darting eyes.

  “Look, we’re sorry,” Terry said. “But we have to keep confidentiality. You understand—”

  Dinah gave her a crooked smile. “Yeah. But I know you’ve got something that pertains to this case, and sooner or later it’s gonna come out. I just hope it doesn’t bite you both in the behind.”

  I cast guilty eyes down to my plate.

  “Well,” Dinah said, standing. “I’d probably do the same in your shoes. But I want you to know that if you do need help, I’m here.”

  She reached for the bill, but Terry grabbed it first.

  “It’s on us,” she said to Dinah, who gave us a little nod, then rolled on out of the restaurant.

  As we made our way out to the bike, I did some thinking about our policewoman friend. She was wily, a smart cookie in spite of her redneck duds. She hadn’t set up this meeting as a favor to us, she’d suspected we had information on the case all along and had come here to pump us for it. She was likely headed straight to the homicide squad, I concluded, probably in less time than it took most rookies to get their shoes shined.

  Maybe with a fashion makeover and diction lessons, there’d be hope for her and Terry, after all.

  It was past midnight when we got home, and we were pleased to see that the pups had behaved like housebroken little ladies and gentlemen in our absence. After we took them outside, we returned Reba’s frantic calls, each of us on an extension.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded.

  “Sorry, we had legwork to do,” I told her.

  “I apologize for losing my composure this afternoon. But the death of one’s peers does tend to—” She paused, sighing. “Poor dear Suzie . . . did you find the Bacon in her house?”

  “No, but things were a little out of control,” Terry said. “We could have missed it.”

  “But there’s been another
development,” I said to Reba. “And this is strictly between us. We got it from a confidential source on the police force.”

  “What?”

  “Suzie was murdered. Stabbed through the heart.”

  “Dear God,” Reba breathed. She was silent for a long moment. “That does it!” she said. “I’m going to hire a bodyguard.”

  “Not a terrible idea,” Terry said. “Where were you thinking of getting one?”

  “Well, I was rather hoping you two would know some big, handsome brute who’d take a bullet for me.”

  I ran down the list of big, handsome, suicidal brutes of my acquaintance and came up empty. “Not right off hand,” I said. “But we’ll look into it.”

  “First Lenore, and now Suzie . . . murdered,” Reba said with a shudder in her voice. “Right in her own home!”

  “But it’s not like there’s been a rash of murders,” I reminded her. “Lenore was pronounced dead of an aneurysm. If she was murdered, it would have to have been some clever method that escaped the scrutiny of the medical staff.”

  “Oh, scrutiny my patootie,” Reba blurted out. “You could stampede a herd of elephants through that hospital and they’d never notice. They’re completely understaffed, and the ones who are left are always bellyaching about how overworked and underpaid they are. What’s the world coming to, anyway?”

  Reba was having a crisis of confidence where her cherished institutions were concerned. Only yesterday she’d pronounced Cedars-Sinai the best hospital in the world. The deaths of her friends seemed to be upending her entire worldview.

  “Try not to worry, Aunt Reba,” Terry said. “Just make sure you’ve got the house alarm on, even during the day. And tell Grizzie to keep her eyes peeled for any strange vehicles or persons on foot around the neighborhood.”

  “I will. So, see you in the morning? We’re due at Binion’s office at noon.”

  At the mention of Binion, a lightbulb went on over my head. “What does he look like, anyway?”

  “Who?” Reba asked.

  “Hugh Binion.”

  “Oh, he’s handsome. Matinee idol looks, although I doubt you girls would find him ‘hot.’ He’s much too old for your tender libidos.”