by Betty Webb
But I certainly wasn’t going to tell Elvin Dade.
Later, during a lull in the festivities, I sidled up to Willis. “I didn’t know you were married before.”
His rant must have sobered him because he had switched from champagne to Pepsi. “Correct, Teddy. And never again. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say. I went the limit to win Serena Sue’s admiration, and it didn’t do any good. She just kept nagging me about my flaws. But to paraphrase Kit Marlowe, that was in another country, and although the wench isn’t dead, I certainly learned my lesson.”
I was about to ask if he still kept in touch with Serena Sue—every now and then I received a remorseful phone call from my own unfaithful ex—but Walt leaped into the conversation.
“Women will bleed you dry if you let them.” In vino veritas, apparently.
Willis gave him a wry grin. “Another veteran of the divorce courts?”
“Yeah, too bad it wasn’t Victor who married us. Then I could go after the money I wound up paying the witch to get rid of her.”
Willis laughed. I didn’t. I’d known Walt’s ex-wife for years and liked her. “Walt, I know we’re friends and all that, but I seem to remember the divorce somewhat differently. Didn’t she catch you with that topless dancer over at the Pretty Pink Pussycat?”
He shrugged. “A one-off, big deal. It didn’t mean anything.”
“It did to your wife.”
Walt took another swig of his Budweiser. “You women all stick together.”
Before I could reply, my cell phone rang. The display showed it was a Gunn Castle number. My father?
“Let me take this,” I told everyone, stepping out onto the dock. The air was cool, the stars were out, and so was the tide. The Merilee creaked and rocked at her slip, creating music that landlubbers, poor things, never get to hear.
But the call wasn’t from my father. It was Aster Edwina.
“Teddy, get up here right now. I did my best to hide the newspaper from your father but somehow he managed to find a copy and now he’s talking about turning himself in. He’s going to tell that fool Elvin he killed Victor and Bambi both.”
Chapter Sixteen
If I didn’t love my parents so much I’d hate them.
“This has gone on long enough!” my father yelled, waving the San Sebastian Gazette around as he paced around Gunn Castle’s elegant drawing room. “I can’t let my only child go to prison!”
Usually debonair, Dad looked like a wild man. His hair was uncombed, his eyes staring. He had even incorrectly buttoned his double-breasted sports coat and one side hung lower than the other.
Aster Edwina didn’t look much better. Neither did Mrs. McGinty.
The room crackled with tension.
“Calm down, Dad,” I said, struggling to remain calm. “I’m not going to prison. I wasn’t even officially arrested. None of that ‘person of interest’ stuff is true.”
“Don’t tell me what’s true! I know the way the law operates! Look what happened to your mother, for God’s sake! That beautiful woman is sitting in a jail cell as we speak! None of this would have happened if it weren’t for me! The least I can do is take the fall!”
When I was nine years old my father’s embezzlement scheme was outed by his partners’ newly acquired anal-compulsive accountant. The gig being up, as the saying goes, Dad flew the coop. Since he’d committed a federal crime, the Feds attached all our assets, and within weeks my mother and I lost everything. We were out on the street. Only the charity of a distant relative saved us from relocating to the homeless encampment under Gunn Narrows Bridge. Our situation would have been hopeless without my mother’s resolve. She might have lost her home, her jewels, and her furs, but she still had her looks. After several successful campaigns to marry the richest men possible, she reclaimed her former financial glory. The crimes, the deceit, and the blatant fortune-hunting had been hell on me, but I got over it.
Now this.
“Dad, there is nothing, I repeat, nothing tying me to Bambi’s murder. Elvin Dade is just a tiny little man grasping at this one last chance to throw his weight around. Once Joe gets back from Virginia and finds the real killer, all this nonsense will go away, but if you turn yourself in now, you’re screwed. You’ll wind up in Leavenworth or San Quentin, depending on who gets a piece of you first—the Feds or the great state of California.”
He hung his head. “It’s what I deserve.”
Yes, it is, I thought, but didn’t say. “If you go to prison, how do you think Mother will feel? Or me?”
“Or me!” Aster Edwina cried. “Daniel, you simply cannot do this to the people who love you!” She immediately clapped her hands over her mouth as if she’d just revealed a state secret.
Big woop.
But she had given me an idea to press my case on a different level. “Dad, if you’re in prison, what’ll happen to Dominga?”
His expression turned into one of horror, but being the sly fox that he is, he immediately covered it to one of pure innocence. “I don’t know anyone named Dominga.”
“How strange, considering she’s been your mistress for three years.”
Aster Edwina glared at him. “Daniel, is that true?”
He fixed his eyes on a thirteenth century battle axe hanging on the wall. “Of course not.”
“Oh, Dad. You forget I met her the last time I visited your place in Costa Rica. You introduced her to me as your maid but I’ve known very few maids who wear four-carat diamond solitaires. Not only that, I heard you tiptoeing down the hall to her room one night. Without your financial support, which you can only furnish if you’re un-incarcerated, Dominga will have to return to her former, er, profession. Is that what you want?”
“That wasn’t a diamond. It was a zirconia.”
“No it wasn’t.”
“Her father bought it for her.”
“A stable hand?”
“You’re such a snoop.”
“Guilty as charged, but I hope you see my point. Confessing to a crime you didn’t commit isn’t going to help anyone, especially her.” Or me. Or Caro.
With a sigh, Dad eased himself onto a Louis XIVsofa rumored to have once cushioned the tush of the Sun King himself. “I don’t know what else to do, Teddy.”
Sensing a slight decrease in the room’s tension—even the overdressed dandy in the Gainsborough portrait hanging above the fireplace appeared to breathe a sigh of relief—I went in for the kill. I sat down beside Dad and patted his liver-spotted hand. With a pang I realized my rascally father was getting old.
“Stay here with your good friend Aster Edwina. Continue doing what you’ve been doing, which is to stay in contact with your crim…ah, business associates. Learn what you can from the safety of the telephone. Remember how much valuable information you’ve already given me.”
“But it’s not enough!”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
Dad was right, though. His information, although good, had not yet supplied me with what I really needed to know: who had Victor Emerson been blackmailing?
***
Crisis averted, I returned to the Merilee and cleaned up the remnants of my friends’ impromptu party. I swept, scrubbed, and took out trash. Then I polished the silverware, rearranged the dishes in my galley cabinets, organized the junk drawer, and changed the bedding in the fore and aft bedrooms. I cleaned out my tiny closet, shined several pairs of shoes, and made up a garbage bag full of donations for Goodwill. That accomplished, I brushed Priss, Feroz, and Bonz, rubbed Neatsfoot Oil into their collars, and scoured and disinfected their respective bowls. Then I started polishing the Merilee’s brass fittings.
Halfway through, I stopped.
What was I doing? Keeping the Merilee tidy was a good idea, but not at one in the morning when I had to be
at work at six.
Exhausted, I collapsed on the aft bunk.
No fingerprints on Mr. Rat.
Bodies and minds don’t always agree on the best recipe for optimum health, so three hours later I was still awake. My aching body cried out for rest, but my mind refused to let go of the night-long mantra: No fingerprints on Mr. Rat.
I looked at the clock. Four a.m., which meant it was seven in Virginia. I shrugged the animals off me and picked my cell phone off the nightstand.
No answer, but the sound of Joe’s baritone telling me to leave a message was somehow comforting. “As soon as Homeland Security gives your phone back, call me,” I told him. “Bambi O’Dair was murdered, Mom’s still in jail, Elvin arrested me, and I’ve been ‘hiatused’ from Anteaters to Zebras. Love you!” After making a few kissy noises, I hung up. Rethinking the message I had just left, I realized no man in his right mind would return that call.
Sleep being a no-hoper, I got out of bed and fired up my laptop. Might as well use my insomnia in a more constructive manner, such as running a check on the owners of the crossbow that had killed Victor: Cary and Melissa Keegan.
Their web site revealed little about their personal lives; it only touted their medieval wares. Same for their Facebook page, although it had drawn some interesting posts from Medievalists throughout the country. I hadn’t realized there were so many.
Googling them individually proved more productive.
Cary, thuggish though he appeared, had a clean record. More than clean, actually. His name was mentioned as a volunteer for various charitable groups, including Habitat for Humanity, Special Olympics, and the Piper Center for Special Needs Children. In the article about the Piper Center, he was quoted, saying, “Before he passed, my brother Jimmy was a special child, so organizations like this really strike home. Whatever I do, I do in his memory.”
Google wasn’t as kind to sweet, cowering Melissa Keegan. During her first marriage—I hadn’t known she’d been married before—Melissa Mackey Keegan had twice been arrested for domestic violence. The first time, after hitting Mr. Mackey over the head with a hot iron skillet when he complained about burned pork chops, she was let off with a warning. But when a month later she poured scalding water on her unfortunate spouse, who had been doing nothing more violent than playing a video game, she spent two months in jail. Five months after Mackey divorced her—he apparently drew the line at scalding water—she married Cary.
Somehow Speaks-To-Souls had seen through her. I hadn’t.
I was about to Google stuntman Yancy Hass when a wet nose nudged my bare foot. Bonz had finally woken up.
“Don’t tell me you want walkies already,” I told him.
I’m telling you, telling you, he barked. Go get that leash, already.
The sound of my voice woke Feroz, and within seconds, both dogs were dancing anxiously around my feet.
Bowing to the inevitable, I logged off the Internet.
There’s something magical about being alone with dogs so early in the morning. Even the birds are still asleep. The only sounds I could hear, besides the grunts and snuffles of Bonz and Feroz, were the wind’s whispers through the Monterey pines and the incoming tide as it kissed along the shore.
Those truly relaxing minutes clarified my mind enough that when we returned to the Merilee, I knew exactly what to do.
It was time for some breaking and entering.
Chapter Seventeen
It was still dark when I pulled my rented econo-compact in front of Victor’s trailer. The police tape was still up, but we scofflaws pay no attention to such things. After pulling on a pair of latex gloves and smashing a rear window with my heavy flashlight, I slithered through and landed on Victor’s unmade bed.
In a way, trailers are like boats. Neither has much square footage, and what little space exists is used wisely, with closets and cupboards built into every possible nook and cranny. Within minutes I had searched them all without finding what I was looking for. No problem. Victors’ marriage logbooks proved him to be an assiduous bookkeeper, and I was certain that a record of his blackmailing enterprise was somewhere in this trailer. All I had to do was find it.
If I were a wily ex-con who wanted to hide a written account of criminal behavior, where would I hide it? I sat down on the ragtag sofa and switched off the flashlight. With the sense of vision out of action, other senses rushed in to fill its place. For the first time I noticed the musty smell of a closed-in room, the chirp of a sleepy bird waking in the woods behind the trailer, the drip-drip-drip of a loose faucet.
Victor would not have hidden anything under the mattress; it was such a common hiding place even the dense Elvin Dade would look there. In the freezer? Also common. Behind the toilet? Same old same old. As I sat there thinking, a faint glimmer of pale morning light leaked into the trailer, but only enough to provide contrast to the complete darkness that had been there before. The sun would be up soon, and with it, an increased chance of getting caught.
“C’mon, Victor. Where’d you hide your blackmail ledger?”
Sitting in the dark not having worked, I flicked my flashlight back on and skittered the beam around the trailer’s tiny living room. I saw ragged drapes covering the kitchen window, dirty tube socks lying between the sagging sofa, a tilting magazine rack/lampstand combination, flies enjoying breakfast on a moldy slice of bread, a crumpled tee shirt hanging…
Wait.
Magazine rack?
Taking a cue from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” where a major clue was hidden in plain sight with similar items, I stepped over to the rack and pulled out a stack of Hustlers. Not a tasteful find so early in the morning but a fortuitous one. In the November issue, nestled between facing pages showcasing the rosy rumps of two well-developed women, lay a small account book.
I opened it and struck blackmail gold.
The same code names appeared on every page. Flipping through the book to the final entry, I found…
05/15—r’cd Taxi—$250
05/16—r’cd Scarlet—$125
05/18—r’cd Woodstock—$125
05/25—r’cd Aloha—$100
05/29—r’cd Taxi—$250
Whoever Taxi was, he—or she—was really being squeezed.
But the day was getting lighter by the minute, and hanging around while I puzzled out the ledger was not a good idea, so I shoved it into my pocket and exited the trailer through the front door. Traveling via window hadn’t been fun.
I was about to enter my econo-compact when I heard another car’s engine coming along the lane that led to the trailer.
For a second I stood frozen, but the engine sounds cut off a short distance behind the trees. A car door opened, then slammed. Whoever the person was, he wasn’t worried about being caught.
Then I heard a woman’s voice. Singing.
“Gathering flowers for the Master’s bouquet,
Beautiful flowers that will never decay.
Gathered by angels and carried away
Forever to bloom in the Master’s bouquet.”
Wynona Dade wasn’t a half bad alto.
As I listened, Wynona continued to warble the hymn, but when her voice slowly faded I realized she was walking away from the trailer, not approaching it. Despite my situation, her presence made me curious, so I walked down the lane until her voice became louder. She had parked her creaky Ford Focus next to a narrow path leading into the woods, where I could see the flicker of her blue print dress weaving between the trees. I shadowed her quietly as the path looped away to the north for a few yards, then back south toward the trailer. After a few minutes the trees thinned and I could see her more clearly.
Wynona carried a bucket, but for what? Collecting magic mushrooms, perhaps? The thought of stodgy Wynona getting religiously lit on sh’rooms am
used me until I realized that with the path so close to Victor’s trailer, he might have discovered her guilty pleasure. Maybe her name was in his blackmail ledger, her code name “Scarlet,” his twisted version of a joke.
Just before the path had circled around all the way back to the trailer, the trees dwindled to nothing, revealing a sunlit opening in the woods. The only reason I hadn’t noticed it before was because the pines and undergrowth began again at the far side, completely hiding the trailer from view. When I drew closer, the scene took my breath away. A flower-strewn meadow dazzled my eyes with the blooms of gold California poppy, red and yellow columbine, deep purple redmaids, and lavender lupine.
Still singing, Wynona stopped in the middle of the clearing, put the bucket down, and bent over.
Hymns. Wildflowers.
Wynona was gathering flowers for a church altar.
Well, good for her, but her devotions were none of my business. I turned to go, then stopped. I looked back at her, then at the far side of the meadow, then again at Wynona. I had originally thought Victor might have caught her doing something naughty, but it could have worked the other way around. If the trailer wasn’t visible from here, she wasn’t visible from the trailer, either.
What if Wynona had overheard Victor in the act of shaking down one of his blackmail victims?
Before I could talk myself out of it, I stepped into the meadow and said, “Lovely morning, isn’t it Wynona?”
With a shriek she dropped a handful of yellow primrose. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Tut tut. The upright Wynona Dade swearing like a sailor.”
“Hell’s where sinners go, which I’m sure you’ll find out in due course.” She pursed her prissy mouth.
Although her irritation at seeing me was obvious, what I had expected to see wasn’t there: guilt. Being caught hanging out a few feet from the back of Victor’s trailer did not bother her, which made me certain I was right. She had something on the dead man, not the other way around.
