The Innocents Club

by Taylor Smith

  “I’ll have all your room calls routed to my office,” Latham assured her, “and I’ll call you myself if I hear anything. Do you have a cell phone?”

  “I didn’t bring it with me,” Mariah said. “I was trying to get away from all that.” She looked over at Frank, but he also shook his head.

  “Didn’t bring it,” he said.

  “Well, we have a few for the use of our guests,” Latham said. “I’ll give you one, and if your daughter calls—”

  “Two,” Frank said. “We need two phones, in case we have to split up.”

  “Two,” Mariah echoed. “And two cars, Frank. I’ll go after Lindsay while you take care of copying those papers we were discussing. As a matter of fact,” she added, turning to the assistant manager once more, “you must have office-support facilities for your guests, don’t you? Mr. Tucker here needs to run off some documents.”

  “Am I to assume Mr. Tucker is now a guest of ours?”

  “He’s with me,” Mariah said firmly.

  “I see. Well, then, two phones,” the assistant manager said, frowning at Tucker, “and someone to assist Mr. Tucker with his paperwork. Anything else?”

  “That’s all for now,” Mariah said. “But please, if my daughter calls, make sure you give her the cell-phone number and let her know I’m on my way. She should just sit tight until I get there.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The autopsy on Albert Jacob Korman had been inconclusive, Scheiber told his captain by phone after he and Eckert arrived back at the victim’s house from the Santa Ana morgue. “No obvious signs of trauma, no gross abnormalities of the internal organs, hardly any water in the lungs,” he recounted. “Some tiny broken blood vessels suggesting oxygen deprivation, but the medical examiner was stumped as to the reason for it. Since Korman didn’t appear to have drowned and there was no evidence of heart attack or stroke, it wasn’t clear why his lungs and heart shouldn’t have been working normally.”

  “So how’s the M.E. going to call it?” the captain asked.

  “He’s not, until the tox screens come back. Thing is,” Scheiber added ominously, standing guard over a dead bird on Korman’s sidewalk, “Eckert and I are back at the victim’s house, checking out a tip I got this morning, and we may have found the culprit. We’re going to need a Haz Mat team over here.”

  “What kind of hazardous materials are we talking here?” the captain asked.

  “Damned if I know,” Scheiber said, “but it looks pretty lethal. We need a disposal team ASAP.”

  He and Eckert were at the side of Korman’s garage next to a row of trash cans, and Scheiber was carefully avoiding touching anything with the latex-gloved hand that had lifted the lid off Korman’s green waste-recycling bin. He’d set the lid aside on the low wall between Korman’s house and the architect neighbor’s while he checked to see if the roses the old guy had reportedly been pruning were still there. Thorns, the M.E. had conceded, might account for the cuts and scratches both he and Iris Klassen had noted on Korman’s hands.

  The bin did hold several pruned rose branches, but when Eckert had moved in to photograph them, Scheiber had shouted a warning to get back. A sparrow that had landed on the damp lid of the green waste bin, pecking at condensed water droplets, suddenly begun to stagger, then keeled over onto the sidewalk. Scheiber and Eckert had watched the bird draw one or two feeble breaths as it lay on the ground, and then its eyes had rolled back in its head and it went still.

  “I think it’s some kind of biological agent. Potent,” Scheiber added.

  Johnson, the uniform assigned to stand guard outside the sealed house that morning, suddenly returned from the coffee break Scheiber had sent him on, and as he rounded the corner from the back lane, Eckert urgently waved him away from the dead bird and the bin, telling him in a low murmur what had happened. He’d left the lane gate open, and an old couple strolling by paused to peer curiously down the side yard, drawn by the police cars parked in the lane and the yellow crime-scene tape strung around the perimeter. Spotting Scheiber frowning at them, Johnson returned to his post, herding the old couple back into the lane and closing the gate behind him.

  “Okay,” the captain said, “I’ll call in backup units. Cordon off the area and I’ll get onto the county right away to send in a Haz Mat detail. Jesus! Just what we need on a Fourth of July holiday.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Scheiber said grimly, disconnecting the call. He dialed once more to check his messages. There was one from Mariah Bolt.

  “Now what?” Eckert asked after he’d hung up.

  “We wait, I guess,” Scheiber said, “and keep a close watch on the front courtyard, as well. We don’t dare leave it unguarded. All we need is for some curious kid or holiday drunk to stumble over the wall into those bushes out there, and we’ll really have a disaster on our hands. Speaking of kids,” he added, “I just picked up a message from Mariah Bolt on my voice mail. Seems her teenage daughter’s run off. She thinks the girl’s headed this way. She’s on her way down to pick her up.”

  “You going to call it in to the watch commander?” Eckert asked.

  Scheiber grimaced. “Like he hasn’t got enough on his plate today. I don’t think so. If the girl shows up, we’ll make sure she stays put. But I don’t even know what she looks like, so I’d be hard-pressed to issue a lookout. She’ll probably head for the beach or the Fun Zone, anyway. It’s all I need, to be worrying about some famous dead guy’s spoiled, runaway granddaughter.”

  “Jeez! Testy today, aren’t we?”

  Scheiber ran a weary hand through his hair. “I got up at four-thirty. And I promised my stepson I’d try to bring him down for the fireworks tonight. The way this day’s going, I may have to renege, and I hate that. That kid’s already got one old man who never comes through for him. He doesn’t need another one.”

  “You might be okay. And if we run late, maybe Liz can drive down with him and meet you here. I can hold the fort while you go over to the beach for a while.”

  “Thanks, bud. But what about Iris?”

  “She’s a good fort-holder, too. Anyway, for all we know, crazy holiday like this, she’ll probably end up getting called out to work, too.”

  “Ain’t public service a bitch, though?” Scheiber said. A scratching sound at the kitchen window drew his attention, and he turned to find Korman’s fat cat whining at him through the glass. “I feel like I’m running a frigging petting zoo instead of a homicide division. All right, all right,” he grumbled, adding to Eckert, “You stand guard while I go feed him. I should probably call animal control to come get him, but I hate to think he’ll end up being put down.”

  “Maybe Korman’s sons will want him,” Eckert said. “Iris talked to one of them last night. They were trying to get a flight in today, last I heard.”

  Scheiber tapped on the glass, “You hear that? You get a one-day reprieve,” he told the cat. “They don’t spring you in the next twenty-four hours, buster, it’s Kitty Sing Sing for you.”

  Mariah made agonizingly slow progress on the holiday-packed roads into Newport Beach. She was on the San Diego Freeway, just entering Garden Grove, fifteen or twenty miles shy of Newport, when the cell phone rang. “Your daughter just called,” Barbara Latham, the hotel’s assistant manager said. “She had been to your friend’s house and found it sealed. She said there was a policeman there who told her he’d died.”

  “Oh, God,” Mariah said quietly. “Poor Lindsay. Did you tell her I was on my way down to get her?”

  “Yes, I did,” Latham said. “I tried to give her your cell number, too, but she didn’t have anything to write with.”

  “Did she say where she’d be?”

  “At a neighbor’s. I suggested she just wait there.”

  “Which neighbor?”

  “I’m not sure, but she said she’d be outside watching for you.”

  “Okay, that’s great, thank you. And Frank Tucker? Is he still there, do you know?”

  “The last ti
me I checked, he had my secretary addressing and stuffing envelopes for him,” Latham said. “You do, um, know that there will be a charge for her time and the materials he uses?”

  “Yes, go ahead and put them on my bill,” Mariah said. “We appreciate your assistance, Ms. Latham.”

  “Hmm,” the other woman said.

  “Would you tell him Lindsay called, and that I’ll call him as soon as I have her?”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Mariah finally found the Newport exit, but when she crossed over onto the peninsula, the traffic only got worse. Balboa Boulevard was largely unchanged from the way she’d remembered it: two narrow lanes in either direction, both squeezed by solid lines of meter-parked cars along the outer lanes and the median strip. The sidewalks and crosswalks were packed with holiday tourists carrying coolers, blankets and beach chairs, and as she peeked down side streets toward the beach, she saw a solid mass of striped umbrellas and tanned bodies. Lindsay could not have picked a worse day to get lost in Newport Beach.

  It was the first time she herself had been back in two decades. While the Balboa strip was still chockablock with souvenir stands, surf shops and restaurants whose grip on life looked fleeting at best, most of the cottages seemed considerably spruced up, a sure sign that the town had shifted from being a predominantly rental and summer cottage community to one of year-round, home-owning residents.

  Mariah smiled a little as the Mustang inched through heavy traffic past her elementary school, whose playground consisted of the beach and where the end of recess had always been signaled by the scuffing sound of four hundred small feet tracking sand onto the much-abused red linoleum floors. Magnolia Street, where she’d grown up, was three blocks beyond that, but between cars jostling for nonexistent parking spaces and pedestrians jaywalking with lethal-looking beach umbrellas, Mariah had time to catch barely a glimpse of their old cottage. Or rather, the cottage Renata had allowed them to continue to occupy after she’d run off with Ben, then abandoned him to the wolves, she thought bitterly. Left him to die in Paris so Arlen Hunter wouldn’t take away her trust fund.

  At Medina Street, she turned away from the beach and headed for the harbor side of the peninsula, where the town’s more expensive summer homes sat cheek by jowl on postage-stamp lots. Rather than the sight of the hoi polloi tanning beer bellies on their front step, the residents on that side preferred to overlook their sailboats anchored in the harbor.

  But Mariah hadn’t gone more than a dozen yards down the side street before she ran into flashing lights and a barricade marked Orange County Hazardous Waste Disposal. A uniformed police officer held up a hand to stop her and wave her down a side street, back out of the neighborhood, but Mariah shook her head and pulled up alongside him.

  “The street’s closed,” he said. “You can’t park here.”

  “I’m looking for Detective Scheiber. Is he here?”

  “Scheiber? Yeah, he is. What’s your name?”

  When Mariah told him, he had her wait while he stepped away and put in a radio call. He was back a moment later. “Okay, he says you can go in. He’ll meet you at the corner of Edgewater and Medina, on the water walk. You have to leave your car out here. Park it over there in the alley and stay well clear of the Haz Mat people.”

  She nodded, tempted to ask what it was all about but figuring she’d find out from Scheiber, anyway. Also, fearing she knew already. She pulled the Mustang over behind a black and white. Climbing out of the car, she spotted a couple of people dressed like astronauts in full, self-ventilated protective gear that covered them from head to toe, only their faces visible through clear Plexiglas masks. They were wheeling two gray steel drums down a ramp off the back of an orange and white van and into the backyard of a house that looked distinctly like the pictures Chap and Emma Korman had sent Mariah when they’d first bought their shingled Newport retirement cottage—not that Chap had ever really been able to bring himself to retire. At the thought of him, Mariah felt tears spring to her eyes.

  Scheiber was waiting at the corner for her. The air smelled of charcoal, sunscreen, sea water and diesel. While the streets had been cleared for the disposal operation, the decks of several boats in the harbor were crowded with spectators enjoying the show as they toasted the holiday.

  “Roses,” he said glumly. He pointed to Chap’s front courtyard, a few houses up from were they stood. “It looks like they were recently pruned back from the fence. Looks like your friend Tucker was right about transdermal toxins,” Scheiber added, telling her how he’d watched a bird die after coming into contact with the pruned branches.

  “Like a canary in a mine,” Mariah said soberly. “If you’d touched those branches, you might have been the next victim.”

  Scheiber nodded. “They’re taking out the entire front flower bed—plants and topsoil, right down to the substratum clay. Who knows how much was affected? Depending on what they find, they’ll do more soil testing, see whether the whole property has to be condemned.”

  Mariah shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think they’ll find that this toxin has a very brief half-life. If you hadn’t found it today, you probably never would have. The traces disintegrate that fast.”

  “Why is it you and that Tucker character don’t seem surprised by any of this?” Scheiber asked, frowning. “I put this question to him, and now I’m putting it to you—is this some kind of Company operation gone haywire here? And don’t bullshit me, lady, because this is not remotely amusing.”

  “Look, Detective,” she said just as angrily, “I’ve known Chap Korman since I was eight years old. He was the closest thing to a godfather I had, and I happened to have loved that sweet old guy. Believe me, no one is more upset about what happened to him than I am.”

  He nodded. “Fair enough,” he said, “but you still seem to know a lot about this business. Why is that?”

  “There was a similar case in Britain about fifteen years ago,” Mariah told him. “A Russian political defector was found dead in his rose garden outside London. Turned out his roses had been dusted with trace residues of a synthesized version of cobra venom.”

  “Cobra venom?” Scheiber repeated, incredulous.

  “Yes. Same paralytic effects, only twice as lethal and three times as fast-working as the real thing.”

  “Jeez, Louise.” The detective blanched. “By the way, I had a call from Detective Ripley—the guy you met at the LAPD this morning?” Mariah nodded, and Scheiber continued. “He followed up on that veteran you told him about who tried to protect you from the crazed cyclist. Turns out the guy died in the ambulance on the way to the E.R. Funny thing was, they ran a field test for opiates, thinking he was high on something, but it came up negative. Same thing in the E.R. The autopsy’s pending, but at this point, they haven’t got a clue what killed him. You think it might have been something like this?” he asked, cocking his thumb at the Haz Mat team. “And maybe whatever killed him was meant for you?”

  Mariah felt the blood drain from her face. “Maybe,” she said.

  He didn’t look surprised, but he didn’t look happy, either. “Okay, that’s it,” he said. “I think it’s time you and I and your buddy Tucker had a good long talk. Where is he, anyway?”

  “He had some business to take care of while I came to pick up my daughter.” Mariah glanced around. “Where is she, by the way?”

  “I haven’t seen her.”

  “What do you mean, you haven’t seen her?” Mariah said, her heart beginning to pound. “I had a call as I was driving down here, saying she’d phoned my hotel over an hour ago. She’d found Chap’s house sealed up, and had spoken to a police officer. She was going to wait outside for me.”

  “She didn’t talk to me,” Scheiber said, adding as he glanced at his watch, “but I only arrived about forty-five minutes ago. Come on. We’ll find the officer who was guarding the place. Maybe he knows something he forgot to tell me.”

  They approached a small group of uniformed and plain-clo
thes police officials standing a couple of doors down from Chap’s, one of whom was introduced as Scheiber’s partner, and another, in uniform, as Johnson. The officer frowned. “There were a lot of people stopping to ask what happened,” he said. “It’s not like South Central L.A. here. People don’t see houses strung up with crime-scene tape every day.”

  Mariah pulled her wallet out of her purse and opened it to show him Lindsay’s school picture. “This is my daughter—except her hair’s short now. Red. She’s slim, quite a bit taller than me, around five-eight.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Johnson said, nodding at the picture. “I did talk to her, as a matter of fact. She seemed pretty shocked to hear Mr. Korman had died, as I recall. I thought she was just a neighbor or something.”

  Mariah snapped her fingers. “A neighbor! That’s it. She said she was calling from a neighbor’s house. She was supposed to wait outside there until I arrived.”

  Scheiber’s partner, Eckert, shook his head. “We went door-to-door to evacuate the houses in the immediate vicinity when the Haz Mat team arrived,” he said. “Standard operating procedure. Nobody was home on either side of Mr. Korman’s house. I didn’t see her at the houses we cleared across the back lane, either.”

  “Yeah, but come to think of it,” Johnson said, “I did see her again a little later. Maybe it was before you guys got here. She was petting a dog—one of those Hush Puppy dogs, you know?”

  “A basset hound?” Scheiber asked. He and Eckert exchanged knowing looks.

  “Yeah, a basset, that’s it. Some guy was walking it and stopped to talk to her.”

  “Balding? Dressed in black?” Sheiber asked. Johnson nodded.

  “The architect,” Eckert said.

  “What architect?” Mariah asked.

  “Mr. Korman’s next-door neighbor, Douglas Porter,” Scheiber said. “But like Dave here said, he wasn’t in when we went door-to-door. He seems to have been pretty friendly with Mr. Korman, though. As a matter of fact, Porter knew you and your daughter were coming. He mentioned how much he’d been looking forward to meeting you.”