by Julie Smith
“Rebecca? Is this Rebecca Schwartz? The lawyer?”
“Sorry. I was expecting someone else.”
“This is Ricky.”
“Who?”
“Ricky Flynn. I met you at Julio’s. You’re Marty’s lawyer, right?”
“Yes. Hi, Ricky.”
“Listen, would it be unethical—I mean, would you have a conflict of interest… ? Look, I need a lawyer.”
“Your three minutes are up,” said the operator.
“Ricky, give me your number. I’ll call you right back.” I’d suddenly realized his voice didn’t sound right. This wasn’t the cocky Ricky of the morning. This one sounded scared. When I had him on the line again, I said, “Okay, talk slowly. Is this about Sadie?”
“No. It’s not. I think someone else is dead.”
“You think?”
“Can you meet me in Pebble Beach? Now?”
“Ricky, listen to me. If you’re not sure this person’s dead, call the police.”
He gave me the address and hung up. Damn! Why did the term bimbo apply only to women? Frenzied, I dialed the number Ricky had given me and held my breath. Someone answered on the fifth ring. “Ricky?”
“You want the guy who was just here?”
“Please. It’s an emergency.”
“Hey!” Whoever it was shouted in my ear. “Hey! Some lady wants you. It’s an emergency.”
To my surprise, Ricky came back. A good sign. He was behaving like a little boy afraid to defy his mother. If you had to have a kid for a client, it might as well be an obedient one.
“I can’t take your case if you’re not going to follow instructions.”
“Okay. She’s dead. I’m sure. I’m certain. Okay?” He sounded more frightened and more childlike with each word. He hung up again, this time resoundingly, now the petulant child. But I believed him. Whoever the woman was, I didn’t think anything could be done for her. I hoped my instinct was right.
Ava was hovering, starting to wash the dirty wineglasses. I was sure she’d heard every word, but too bad, I wasn’t used to using a kitchen as an office. “Tell Julio I had to go out,” I said briskly. I’d memorized the address Ricky gave me, but now I wrote it very deliberately on the memo pad beside the phone. “If you don’t hear from me in two hours, call the police and give them this address, will you?”
I hoped that thus being taken into my confidence would discourage her from telling Julio or anyone else what she’d heard—and it would serve as a genuine backup in case Ricky was up to no good. But somehow I wasn’t really nervous about that. For all I knew, he had killed the woman he’d called about, but I didn’t see him doing any more damage in his current state.
I found him pacing outside a mammoth Spanish-style house, a beautiful house up a long driveway with a gate. The gate had been left open.
Ricky’s face was red. I was sure he’d been crying. He was no longer wearing the baseball cap, and he’d changed to fresh jeans and a clean shirt.
“Come,” he said, and he led me to a side window, a broken one, broken from the outside, the shards of glass resting on thick carpeting inside. The room was a kind of library, or perhaps a study, lined with books (though many had been tossed on the floor) and furnished with desk and chairs. It was a good, functional workroom and would have been a lovely, restful area as well if it hadn’t been for the revolting spectacle of a woman dead on the floor, and the disarray of her fight for her life. A Lhasa apso rose from its post beside the body, trotted to the window, and nearly tore its tiny paws to shreds on broken glass as it tried to climb the wall, barking, snarling, and protecting. “Does she look dead to you?”
“Yes.”
“She is. I did a dumb thing.”
“Yes?”
“I’m the one who broke the window. She didn’t answer the door, and Mellors was barking, back here—that was the funny thing. He should have been up near the front door, where I was. So I came and looked in the window. I saw her like that and—I just didn’t think—I broke the window and jumped in. Mellors bit me.” He held up his right hand, punctured at the wrist.
I murmured something about a tetanus shot, my mind racing, trying to take it all in.
“She was cold. I think she’s been dead a long time.”
“Why didn’t the alarm go off when you broke the window?”
His boyish face registered utter bewilderment. “The alarm?”
“A house like this must have an alarm. Did you turn it off when you came in?”
“No. My God, if it had gone off—”
“And why didn’t you phone from here?”
“I panicked. I made sure she was dead and I jumped back out the window—I even forgot to let Mellors out, the library door is shut, that’s why he couldn’t get to the front—and I got in my car. All I wanted was to get out of there. Pretend it never happened.’’
“Pretend what never happened?” I was acutely aware I was sounding like Sergeant Jacobson.
He was unfazed. “That she was dead.” He let a moment go by, apparently trying once more to assimilate her death.
“But I couldn’t go anywhere. I was shaking. I shook for a while, all over, like someone with hypothermia, and finally I cried. And then when I could see, I drove. I don’t know where I was going—but I didn’t go very far. I guess some adrenaline kicked in or something and I realized I had to report it and that I could be in trouble about the window—and I thought of you. I thought you’d know what to do. Rebecca, did you ever see Harold and Maude?”
I gasped. As we talked, we’d been gradually moving away from the window, or more precisely, away from the shrill barking, but I could still see inside. The woman in the room was dressed in white slacks and some kind of pink silky blouse. She looked very slender and she had short blond hair. From the twenty or so paces I was staring from, I could see her cheekbones. Her body was crumpled, her mouth was caught in a grimace, and her head was tilted at a hideous angle; I could see ugly bruises on her neck and a rope or something around it. And yet there was no doubt in my mind she had been elegant—not flashily, ephemerally pretty, but lovely in her bones, as the saying went. She looked about thirty-five. I had assumed from Ricky’s distress and—I had to admit—from the dog’s name that she and Ricky had been close, but I wasn’t prepared for any Harold and Maude talk.
“I was in love with her,” he said. “I can’t believe she’s dead. I just can’t believe it.”
“I don’t understand.”
He sighed. “I don’t guess anyone will. I swear to God, Rebecca! I swear it.”
“Take it easy, Rick. I believe you. I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t be in love with her. She was obviously a very beautiful woman.”
And rich.
“She was, wasn’t she? But the age difference—people are sexist about that sort of thing. They just don’t want to accept it.”
“How old was she?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Middle fifties, I guess. I’m twenty-nine.”
“Well, she looked wonderful. Who was she?”
“Didn’t I say? Katy Montebello.”
“How do I know that name?”
He shrugged. “It’s big around here.”
“I remember now. Marty mentioned her. She was a patron of the aquarium.”
“That’s right. We call it ‘sponsor.’”
“So is that how you know her? From the aquarium?”
He nodded.
“Shall we sit on that bench and talk about it? You can tell me the whole story. Then we’ll call the police. Okay?”
“You sit. I’ll pace.” But he seemed relieved that I’d agreed to sit down—had made that much of a commitment to hearing him out. I sat on the white metal bench, more to give him a focus than anything else, and he stood over me, not really pacing much, but occasionally patting his pockets as I’d seen Julio do earlier that day. I could smell a faint odor of alcohol on him.
“You know, I’m a model-maker.”
“Y
es.”
“Well, I do handyman stuff and carpentry and, oh, painting—stuff like that—to keep it together, know what I mean? I’m a sculptor, really. I’d like to devote full time to my art, but I have to make a living.” He smiled, sadly, I thought. “I have a little girl.”
“Amber.”
“Yeah. Amber’s mom left me because I could never get my money trip together, and now I have to scramble or I’d never get to see Amber at all—her mom would see to that. At least now I get her weekends and a few weeks in the summer—as long as I can provide a halfway decent place for her to live. So—we all got problems, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, along comes Katy and she sees my work—at the aquarium, I mean, I do a little carpentry there, too—and she wanted me to do some work on her guest house. She has a maid, see, and the maid had to live in the main house, and that cramped Katy’s style, so she had me do this work on the guest house—for the maid—and she asked me in to have coffee and drinks and—” he shrugged “—she liked me.” He sounded astonished.
“And you liked her?”
“Umm-HMMMM.” He swallowed. “Yeah, I liked her. I liked her a lot.”
“Were you dating?”
“No. No, I wouldn’t exactly call it that. But sometimes she’d call and ask me up to have a few drinks. After I finished the carpentry, I mean.”
“And when was that?”
“About three months ago.”
“And would you spend the night?”
“Yeah. I usually would. Or sometimes I wouldn’t. We’d drink and we’d have sex and then she’d have someplace else to go. Tonight she asked me to come up early, so maybe she was going out later. I don’t know. She said she wanted to talk about something.”
“Frankly, Ricky, it sounds as if she treated you like a servant.”
He stared at the ground.
“Why did you put up with it?”
“I liked her. I was in love with her.” He looked undecided, as if there was more but he didn’t want to get into it. I had a pretty good idea what it was.
“I’m sorry to ask this, but I’m your lawyer and I need to know what went on. So here’s my question: Was there compensation?”
He flushed rosy pink, a nice color to paint a boudoir. “She’d always say it was for Amber. So I couldn’t say no.”
“She gave you money?”
“Yes. Sometimes a fifty, sometimes more. Sometimes nothing.” He straightened up and looked me in the eye. “I didn’t do it for the money. I would have married her—” Sure. For the money.
“Other gifts?”
“One.” He sat on the grass, as if finally defeated. “She drank a lot. She’d get drunk pretty often and try to give me things. And then about a week ago—I don’t know, I think someone dumped her. Someone she cared about, I mean. She got really drunk and started telling me about all the guys she’s had—besides her ex-husband, I mean. Oh, man. She named movie stars, politicians, millionaires—practically every dude that ever played in the Crosby. Jeez, it was embarrassing. But, you know, she’s got this thing for the sea. We should walk to the other side of the house—” He stopped, remembering we weren’t there on a sight-seeing trip. “Anyway, this place isn’t built right on the ocean for nothing. That’s her first love. And she’s a big sponsor at the aquarium. She’s got a real thing for it, no kidding.”
I nodded.
“So after she dumped her husband—her first husband, I mean, before she married Francis Montebello—some dude came along and wanted to marry her, but he didn’t give her a diamond. Uh-uh. He gave her a half-pound pearl.”
My ears pricked up. “How big?”
“Real big. So big you couldn’t even make jewelry out of it. Anyway, she didn’t want to marry the dude, but he said keep the pearl anyway, no one else was good enough for it, or something like that, and so she did. It got kind of famous, at least locally, because she’d show it around and stuff. It’s called the Sheffield Pearl, for some reason.”
“I think Marty told me Katy Montebello was once named Katy Sheffield.”
“Anyway, she showed it to me one other night. She kept it in a little velvet bag locked in a wall safe. She made this ritual of getting it out and letting me see it and putting it on the glass table and looking at it and I don’t know what all—it lasted, seemed like hours.”
“She was pretty drunk, huh?”
“Drunk as fifty skunks. And morose. Crying. Awful. Anyway, she gave me the pearl.”
“She gave you the pearl?”
“‘For Amber.’ She said it meant nothing to her and she wanted someone who’d really appreciate it to have it. Well, listen. I was pretty drunk, too.”
“Something like that must be worth a lot.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I was going to find out.” He tugged at a tuft of grass, pulled up a handful, and pulled up another handful. “Oh, shit!”
I waited.
“I didn’t think I should keep it. Thought I’d talk about it with her when we were both sober—and I guess she had second thoughts, too, because that’s what she wanted to talk about tonight. That’s why she invited me here.” He flushed. “To tell you the truth, she left a pretty weird message on my machine. I don’t think she remembered giving it to me.”
“What did the message say?”
“She asked if I could come over and said the time I should come and all, and then there was this pause and her voice got kind of strange and embarrassed and she said, ‘I wonder if you have my pearl?’”
“Oh, Ricky!” It wasn’t very professional, but I couldn’t keep the dismay out of my voice.
He flushed again. This was a man who shouldn’t play poker. “Yeah. Looks bad, huh?”
I shrugged.
“It’s true, though. She gave it to me, Rebecca. Think I’d steal a thing like that?”
“Did you bring it?”
He shook his head.
“No? Listen, the message made it pretty obvious she wanted it back. Were you going to pretend she never gave it to you?”
“No!”
I waited, having no choice but to play dumb to protect the anonymity of my other client—the one whose sticky little fingers couldn’t be explained by M&Ms.
“I don’t have it,” he whispered.
“You don’t have it?”
“Amber took it. I think she lost it. She won’t say what happened to it.”
“You’re sure she took it? Does she say she did?”
“She denies it, the little witch.”
“Why don’t you believe her?”
“Where I put it, she had to have taken it. Nobody broke into the house. And anyway, it was like that story about the letter, the Poe story; nobody would have looked for it there. The perfect hiding place. But when I looked for it, it wasn’t there.”
“Tell me something. Were you still drunk when you hid it?” This was mean of me, but I couldn’t stand hearing Amber falsely accused.
“I’m telling you I know where I put it.”
“Okay. Tell me what happened when you got here.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know what I can add. She didn’t answer the door, I heard the dog, and I broke the window.”
“We’d better call the police.”
But I was suddenly hit with a very unlawyerly urge—a need almost. A criminal impulse welling up from the subconscious. Well, not criminal exactly, just unprofessional. A little illegal, too, actually. A very, very naughty idea. I wanted to get a good look at the crime scene before the police did.
It was entirely possible. A rare opportunity to gather information that might help my client’s case had been given to me. There were only two problems. One was a hysterical, yipping, nipping little dog; the other was Ricky. How could I do it without involving him?
The answer was that I couldn’t. Even assuming I could get in the window without being boosted—even get in the house without letting him know what I was doing—I needed him to quiet the dog.
<
br /> “Ricky,” I said, “did you try the door?”
He looked bewildered. “Try the door?” Clearly the man was a law-abiding citizen at least some of the time—or so he wanted me to believe. Such people did not try to break into houses except when a murdered loved one lay in plain sight.
“When she didn’t answer.”
“No.”
I got up and tried it. It opened. From the doorway you could see that in the living room, a porcelain bowl and a small sculpture had been knocked off the coffee table. I said to Ricky, “We can phone from here. Let Mellors out, why don’t you? He must be dying to go outside.”
“He already went on the rug.”
“He might want to go again.”
Obediently Ricky went to get the dog, never guessing that his lawyer was leading him a bit astray, but I thought this might fly with Jacobson and Tillman. I might take a small unauthorized tour of the house before I phoned, but there would be no need to mention that part.
I took off my shoes and jumped up on Katy’s sumptuously covered sofa, where I hoped Mellors couldn’t reach. But in a minute Ricky came through with the dog in his arms, crooning to him. “He’s friendly as a puppy now. I guess I looked like a bad guy, coming through the window.”
I wandered through the house, to Katy’s office-library. A few things were in disarray, knocked down, knocked aside, like the objects on the floor in the living room. Some were small objects. One was a chair. A couple of pictures hung awry. I tried to imagine how it could have happened. Her killer had chased her, perhaps, and one or the other of them had banged into furniture.
That fit for some things, but not for the coffee table. It was as if he had pushed her, and she had hit it.
The idea brought up a series of very nasty mental pictures—of her tormentor holding her, perhaps by a wrist, walking her through the house to the study, slapping her around as they went.
It was about the pearl. It had to be. I could hear him:
“Where is it?”
Pop, as he slaps her.
She doesn’t answer, falls backward, knocking over a chair.
He hits her again and she slams against a wall, knocking pictures off balance.
But why? If Ricky was telling the truth, the pearl was hers—no one else’s—and was locally famous. That meant she hadn’t stolen it from an irate former owner, and it meant anyone might have tried to steal it from her at any time. Why now? Because they hadn’t found it in Sadie’s house or office?
