by Joanne Pence
“Then you know where to find her if you want more information later. And check out Holton real close. I don’t like his attitude.”
He grabbed Angie’s arm and nearly lifted her from her shoes as he rushed her out the door.
Paavo followed Angie to her house, she in her Testarossa, he in his ancient Austin Healey. It was lucky that in San Francisco air-conditioning and powerful heaters weren’t absolutely essential in cars, because his had never had air and his heater was so weak as to be almost useless. The cost to upgrade was at least double what the car was worth.
He followed her to the tenants’ parking garage and took the spot that would have belonged to her neighbor, Stan, if Stan had a car.
They rode up in the elevator in silence. Paavo was too angry to talk, despite Angie’s attempts at pleasantries.
She unlocked the door to her apartment. As soon as they stepped inside, she faced him.
“Why are you so upset with me?” she asked innocently.
“What the hell’s going on, Angie?”
“With Oliver Hardy’s death?” she asked.
“With you,” he bellowed.
She took off her coat and opened the closet door to hang it up. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Your old fiancé tells me he’s seeing you again and wants to marry you—with your father’s blessing—and you ask me what I’m talking about?”
She paled, her coat in one hand, a hanger in the other. “Derrick said that?”
“That’s not all he said.” Paavo strode toward her, one hand against the wall next to the closet. She backed up and bumped into a row of coats and jackets.
“He said you’ve gotten a new business, that he’s met Earl and eaten at Wings of an Angel, that you’re seeing him.”
She spun around and hung up her coat. “It’s not the way he made it sound.” Her words were so soft he had to lean closer to hear her.
“If I thought it was, I wouldn’t be here.” He wanted to touch her, to hold her and have her say everything was fine, but he couldn’t allow himself that easy way out. “Why didn’t you tell me about any of this? Your business … UFOs … Holton.”
He was too close. She put her hand against his shoulder so she could pass by him and go to the center of the room, where she could breathe. He stepped aside, willingly giving way to her.
She stood with her back to him, her hands clasped at her waist. “I was afraid you’d laugh at me.”
A long time passed. When he spoke, his voice was a whisper. “When have I ever laughed at you, Angie?”
His words cut through her. Tears stung her eyes and she looked down at her hands until she was able to speak again. “I came up with an idea for a fun business. I would arrange dinner parties based on a theme. Fantasy Dinners, I called it. Unfortunately, I only received one offer. Well, one legitimate offer, I should say. The very first offer I got, I threw away and forgot about. Some guy called and asked if the fantasy could involve fishnet stockings and Frederick’s of Hollywood.”
Paavo took her arm and turned her so that she faced him. His lips were tightly pursed.
“The only real response I received,” she continued, “was from a wealthy society woman named Triana Crisswell. I wanted to be sure the business made sense before I told you or my family about it. There was just one problem. I had to learn about UFOs to develop the fantasy.”
He nodded.
“That was why I called Derrick. That’s all there was to it. Now, suddenly, Algernon’s small dinner party has grown to three hundred people, one man’s disappeared, another is dead, Derrick sees aliens, and you’re mad at me.” She couldn’t hold back any longer. She started to cry.
He could endure almost anything—seeing dead bodies, the day-to-day tedium of paperwork, the emptiness of his home—but he could never endure Angie’s tears. “Don’t cry,” he said, placing his hands on her shoulders.
Her tears made her even angrier—at herself for crying and at him for causing her to. “Do you think I care so little about you I’m calling up old boyfriends to see if they’re any better the second time around? I could have been married ten times over. But I never met anyone I wanted to spend my life with until—” Her tear-streaked face lifted. “Until recently.”
“Angie, stop.”
“I want you to be proud of me, damn it! But no matter what I do, I screw it up. I thought, this time I won’t tell you about it unless it’s a success. If so, I’d spring it on you. If not, you’d never hear a word about it.” She tried to turn away, but he stopped her.
“I am proud of you,” he said. “Proud of the warm, generous, loving person you are. I don’t give a damn about your business success or lack of it, Angie. Some of the most successful businessmen and women around are the worst assholes you could imagine.” He put his hand on her chin and lifted it. “I don’t care how successful you are, or aren’t. I want to be with you.” He wiped a tear from her cheeks with his thumb and lightly kissed her. “Don’t hide what you’re up to from me. Not ever.”
He handed her his handkerchief to wipe her tears. She put her head against his shoulder, then looked up at him. “You smell like a woman’s perfume factory. Am I questioning you about it? No, I trust you.”
“I trust you, too, Angie. You know that.” He stroked her cheek. “It’s Holton I don’t trust. And the perfume was thanks to a few overzealous salesclerks.”
She perked up. “Oh? Were you in some department stores or something like that? Was it for work … or some other reason?”
“It’s nearly Christmas, after all.”
She tried to hide her excitement at the thought of him walking around department stores looking for presents. She had to be one of the ones he was shopping for. Maybe the only one he was shopping for. He and his buddies weren’t exactly the exchange-presents types. But she was. The thought of her big, scowling detective stomping around a department store trying to come up with something to buy her brought a smile to her lips and warmth to her heart. “Yes, it is nearly Christmas. We’ll have our own celebration here Christmas Eve, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, “if you promise me one thing.”
Her smile disappeared. “What’s that?”
“Promise that you’ll never keep secrets from me. Promise that you’ll never believe I’d laugh at you about anything.”
The intensity of his words, the realization of how she had hurt him, nearly made her cry again. “I can do that,” she whispered. “I promise.”
16
“How’s the investigation going, Rebecca?” Paavo asked as he took the chair beside Inspector Mayfield’s desk.
She looked over at him and smiled. “Well, hello.” The other inspectors loved to point out to him that the only time Mayfield let down her I’m-as-tough-a-cop-as-any-man stance was when she was around him. “I don’t think there’s anything here that warrants much more looking into. Seems fairly cut-and-dried, actually.”
“How so?” he asked.
“Well, like we concluded last night, Harding—that’s his real name, John Oliver Harding—was depressed about his mother’s death. The two had been close, and her death devastated him. He had no other relatives, no friends to speak of, and was weird, clumsy, and overweight. He apparently was unhappy about the lecture, and felt the world was going to end very soon. He was not only into the UFO side of the millennium change, but a fanatic about the coming Armageddon. He wasn’t religious, though, and that fact might have made it even worse for him. He thought the world, and life, was meaningless. You’re born, you suffer, you die. In other words, a prime candidate for sitting on a window ledge and just letting go.”
“Nice psychology, Rebecca. Now let’s hear it by the book.”
She waved her arms helplessly. “There are no police procedures for this. He died from the fall—that’s what the autopsy concluded. We’ll wait for the toxicology reports. Maybe he was high or drunk. Apparently he was no stranger to Mary Jane, and even a little crack now and th
en. He might have gone up there to toke up.”
“You would have found evidence.”
“We might still.”
“If you keep looking, yes.”
She clamped her mouth shut, then breathed deeply. “All right, you’ve made your point. We will keep looking.”
Paavo nodded. “One other thing. What have you learned about Derrick Holton? He claims to have been a scientist with NASA. Is that true?”
“Not only is it true, he was one of the brightest they had. Then something happened with a girlfriend—no one knew exactly—and he asked for a temporary transfer just to get away for a while. They sent him off to a facility in Nevada and he came back changed. He quit NASA and became president of a UFO group.”
Paavo guessed the breakup with Angie had driven Holton away. But what could have happened in Nevada to change him so much he turned away from his profession?
“Did you ask him why he quit NASA?”
“I tried, but I couldn’t get any answers that made sense.”
“What were his answers?”
“He kept repeating that he could no longer be a part of a lie, not when he had seen the truth.”
Paavo shook his head, not knowing what Holton meant. Mayfield left and Paavo went back to his desk.
“What’s up, partner?” Yosh asked, lifting his head from the report he was writing on Felix Rolfe. “I can see the wheels turning full speed in that brain of yours.”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“Oh? You could have fooled me. Everything okay with Angie?”
“Angie? What makes you ask?”
“I guess women are on my mind.” He turned back to his report. “It’s nothing.”
“Women?” Paavo asked. “Why is that?”
“Nothing.”
Paavo sat down at his desk, swiveled his chair toward Yosh, and leaned back. He remembered Yosh’s odd reaction to one of Calderon’s comments about relationships, and Yosh’s volunteering to cover on Christmas Day. “We’ve been partners too long, Yosh,” he said after a while. “We both say it’s nothing when it’s something. Want to tell me what’s going on?”
Yosh snapped his head toward Paavo, surprise etched on his face. “You trying to tell me you can see behind my mysterious-East facade? And everyone in the bureau says you’re the most inscrutable SOB they’ve ever met. What does this mean? We learning how to read each other?”
Paavo grinned. “Looks like.”
Yosh tossed aside his pen and leaned back in his chair. “The thing is, I should be feeling really good about Nancy. She’s developed an interest in calligraphy—writing stylized Chinese characters.”
“She’s studying Chinese?”
“It’s a kind of art. We call them kanji in Japanese. An entire painting might consist of just one character—say, the one for love, or trust, or tree. The painter tries to make the kanji somehow evoke the feeling of the word. There’s a lot of skill, too, that goes into the brush strokes used. The artist can’t let his hand shake or use more than one brush stroke to make each line of the kanji. Each line must be perfect.”
“It sounds pretty difficult.”
“It is. She’s apparently very good at it. She goes to class all the time. Her teacher—her sensei, as she calls him—encourages her.”
“I don’t get it,” Paavo said. “What’s the problem?”
Yosh took a deep breath before he continued. “Lately, she’s been working on the word center. Sounds simple, right? While she works, she has to think about the deep meaning of the word. About what’s at her center. What’s at the center of our marriage. Of me!” He stopped speaking, his expression pained.
“There’s plenty at your center,” Paavo said. “Your ethics, for starters, and your heart, and your empathy despite the world you deal with. Nancy knows all that.”
“Not well enough,” he said quietly.
“She needs to hang around the people we have to face every day. Talk about people with no center,” Paavo said quietly as his thoughts turned to Angie, how she centered him and seemed to be the heart of everything he thought of, dreamed of, even believed in. He glanced up at Yosh. “Nancy should look at the people involved with all these millennium cults. For all their so-called searching, most have no idea what to believe, or where the truth is. They find truth in nothing, and as a result, they believe anything. Where is their center?”
“Nancy compared me and my center with her sensei,” Yosh said. “I came up short. Actually, I came up tall. He’s a squirrelly little guy—small, refined, like upper-class Japanese. Me, I’m big. Northern Japanese peasant stock. Not very exciting stuff.”
“I can’t believe it,” Paavo said. “Nancy’s crazy about you.”
“She used to be. Now she’s turning back to other things Japanese. Calligraphy. The tea ceremony with all its stylized gentleness. This sensei encourages her in that, too. She’s even taking Japanese lessons! Being third-generation, like I am, she never learned to speak the old language, just a word here and there. But with all this diversity stuff being so big here in the city, she’s thinking that if everyone else in the country sees her as Japanese first and American second, she may as well study what it’s all about.”
“That has nothing to do with your relationship.”
“I don’t know. What’s more Japanese, an artistic teacher or a cop who studies dead bodies?” Yosh studied the floor. “A man who looks for a mutilation murderer isn’t the sort my wife finds thrilling these days.”
Paavo’s shoulders slumped. “I know what you mean,” he said wearily. “Angie’s got an old boyfriend hanging around her. She says she’s not interested in him, and I believe her, but that’s not the case on the guy’s part. He’s still plenty interested. And told me so.”
Yosh’s head lifted. “You’re kidding.”
“He told me her father approves of him.”
“Shit.”
“And he’s got a Ph.D.”
Yosh smacked his fist on the desktop. “Hell, does he walk on water, too?”
“He believes in UFOs.”
Yosh’s mouth dropped open, then he began to chuckle. “Now you’re talking.”
Paavo stared out the window. “It’s easy to focus on that one quirk and overlook what makes the guy good for a woman like Angie.”
“You’re good for a woman like Angie, pal.” Yosh was exuberant, sounding like his upbeat self again. “She knows it and so do I. I wouldn’t throw you over for some scientific geek.”
Paavo grinned. “That’s encouraging. Well, if I were Nancy, I wouldn’t throw you over for some scrawny painter.”
Yosh laughed. “Why don’t women have the good sense we do?”
“Damned if I understand them. Hell, I can’t even figure out what to buy one for Christmas.”
Yosh sighed. “I might get Nancy a vacuum cleaner she’s been talking about.”
Paavo shook his head, his eyes mischievous. “You do that, Yosh, and you’re going to make that painter look better than ever.”
Angie felt like a zombie when she walked into Wings of an Angel just before noon. Earl hurried her to a table. “What can I get you to drink, Miss Angie? You ain’t lookin’ so hot today.”
“Gee, thanks, Earl. I really needed to hear that.” She put her head in her hands. “Just some coffee.”
“You wanna sangwitch? Some spaghetti?”
“I’ll have something light—how about a frittata?”
“I don’ t’ink Butch has much fancy stuff to put in one—no aspary-gus or any a dat kinda stuff.”
“Diced onions, diced peppers, and a little cheese, ham, or Italian sausage is all I need.”
“Oh. I t’ink he can do dat.” Earl’s eyebrows scrunched with worry. “So, how’s da inspector dese days?”
She glanced up at him. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. He’d been hurt and angry with her, and she couldn’t blame him. She felt miserable about it. She should have told him what she was up to. It was wrong to have hidde
n it. But something more was troubling him, something he hadn’t talked about yet.
Earl’s gaze held hers a moment, his eyes sad, then he gave a small nod and walked back toward the kitchen. Angie slumped back in her chair. The previous night seemed like a bad dream. She’d fallen asleep watching a lecture, and from that time on, everything that had happened seemed fuzzy and slightly out of focus.
About six A.M. she had awakened to stare at the ceiling. Her mind kept replaying the horrible scene of the previous night at the lecture hall. Why would anyone kill Oliver Hardy? Personally, she had found him creepy, but the others didn’t seem bothered by him. Phil, Kronos, to a lesser extent Elvis, and—she was sorry to say—even Derrick himself were all peculiar people. No wonder Oliver didn’t bother them.
She’d tried to turn her thoughts to the fantasy dinner, tried to plan some menus, but images of Tardis Hall and Paavo’s disappointment in her got in the way. That was why she had decided to come here to eat, and see her friends.
Earl came back with a tall, steaming cup of coffee and placed it before her. “Butch’ll make you a real good frittata, Miss Angie,” he said. “His cookin’ll make you feel a lot better.”
“Thanks, Earl.”
Just then the door to the restaurant opened, and two of Earl’s favorite customers, Rosie and Lena, entered. Earl slicked back his hair, straightened his spine, and strutted over to welcome them. He was obviously sweet on them both.
At the same time, Vinnie came through the kitchen doors, marched straight to Angie’s table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. Vinnie, like Earl, was somewhere in his sixties, but where Earl was short and round and solid, Vinnie was short and round and soft—probably because his chief form of work was to order Butch or Earl to do something. Angie was surprised to see him, though. He rarely ventured out of his downstairs office.
“I heard that you’re actin’ real down,” he said. All three of the guys had similar old-time San Francisco accents, which were an offshoot of the accents of the Brooklynites and Irish who had settled in the city over a century earlier.
