Death of a Neighborhood Scrooge

by Laura Levine

  Maybe. Maybe not. The jury was still out on that one.

  “Of course you didn’t kill Scotty,” Dave piped up, outraged. “No one in their right mind would think you did.”

  That accompanied by a warning scowl in my direction.

  Missy snuggled down next to him on the sofa and took his hand in hers.

  “I suppose I should tell you,” she announced. “Dave and I have fallen in love.”

  So what else was new?

  “We’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention it to the police, though. It sort of gives us both a motive to murder Scotty.”

  Ya think?

  I was sitting there looking at the lovebirds, wondering if they could have possibly teamed up to kill Scotty (Missy distracting him while Dave snuck up and bopped him over the head with the Yule log) when Missy’s other true love showed up on the scene.

  Yes, just then “Scarlett” came prancing in to join us, tail swishing, very lady of the manor.

  Hey, y’all! I’m here! So stop what you’re doing and pay attention to moi!

  I’d long given up hope that she’d ever acknowledge my presence with Missy in the room. And indeed she didn’t, zipping right past me and making a beeline for her new squeeze.

  “Darling Scarlett!” Missy said, scooping her up in her arms. “Do you know what Mommy’s going to do? She’s going to make over the guest bedroom just for you!”

  Mommy?

  I choked back a curse.

  If anyone was Prozac’s mommy, it was some highly promiscuous alley cat.

  But aside from any biological forebears, there was only one human in that room with the right to be called Pro’s mommy, and that was yours truly.

  “You don’t mind, do you, Jaine, if Scarlett comes to visit every once in a while? I don’t know what I’m going to do without her.”

  “How about going to the pound and getting a cat of your own?” were the words I did not utter.

  Instead I mumbled something along the lines of, “We’ll see.”

  Meanwhile, Prozac, in Missy’s arms, clearly entranced with the idea of her own bedroom, was meowing up a storm.

  I’d like a canopy bed, please, with an extra soft down comforter. And a nice fluffy pillow to claw to shreds.

  “I can’t wait to fix up this mausoleum,” Missy was saying, decorating fever shining in her eyes. “The kitchen. The bathrooms. They all need makeovers. And my God, if these walls could talk, they’d scream, ‘Paint me!’ So much to do. I can’t wait to get started!”

  All this redecorating, I figured, would take a lot of moolah.

  “So Scotty left you a nice inheritance,” I said.

  (Yet another motive for murder.)

  “Actually, Scotty refused to make a will. Insisted he was way too young to even think about dying. So, as his wife, I get everything!”

  She couldn’t help busting into a jubilant grin.

  “And forgive me for sounding so crass, but I earned every penny.”

  “She certainly did,” Dave chimed in. “When I think of all the indignities she put up with from that miserable excuse for a human being . . .”

  Dave was about to embark on a list of Scotty’s many faults but was interrupted just then by the doorbell.

  Seconds later, Lupe was ushering a short stumpy guy in a shiny sharkskin suit into the living room.

  “Mr. Carmichael,” Lupe announced. “Mr. Scotty’s attorney.”

  “Of course,” Missy said, getting up to shake his hand. “We met when I signed my prenup.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Mr. Sharkskin said, with all the sincerity of a Jack in the Box clown.

  “Sit down, won’t you?” Missy said, gesturing to a spindly armchair.

  Mr. Sharkskin squeezed himself into it, and took out some paperwork from an attaché case.

  “I stopped by to offer my condolences,” he said, “and to go over Scotty’s will with you.”

  “But Scotty didn’t make a will,” Missy protested.

  “Oh, he made one. Back in his twenties. When he was still married to Elise and madly in love with her. Perhaps he forgot about it in the ensuing years. Or just didn’t want you to know about it. But I’ve got it right here in my files.”

  “And?” Missy asked, more than a tad anxious.

  “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” Mr. Sharkskin intoned, “but Elise gets everything.”

  “But that’s impossible!” Missy cried, a look of utter disbelief on her face.

  And I couldn’t help wondering if it was the look of a woman who just realized she’d taken the ultimate risk and killed her husband—all for nothing.

  Chapter 16

  So Elise had hit the jackpot. She’d inherited everything. You should have seen the look on Missy’s face when Mr. Sharkskin told her how much it was all worth: More than five mil in Scotty’s brokerage account, plus the house in Bel Air.

  For the first time since Scotty’s death, Missy genuinely looked the part of the grieving widow.

  I bid her and Dave and Mr. Sharkskin good-bye and beat a hasty retreat back to Casa Van Hooten, armed with a hot new murder suspect.

  Namely, Elise Parker.

  With more than five mil at stake, Elise made a very viable suspect indeed.

  Had she known all along about the will and, at the end of her rope, decided to cash in with a frozen Yule log?

  Possible, but not likely. If Elise knew she was going to inherit everything, why risk losing it all engaging in ongoing battles with Scotty? Why not keep the good will flowing until he popped off?

  Then I remembered her visit on Christmas Eve when she’d ransacked Scotty’s office looking for his checkbook. It had taken her quite a while before she’d returned to the living room, check in hand. What if, while poking through Scotty’s desk, she’d found a copy of the will? And what if, discovering how much she had to gain by Scotty’s death, she returned the next day to collect on her inheritance?

  Back in Mrs. Van Hooten’s kitchen, I logged on to my computer and found Elise’s address on whitepages.com.

  Time to pay the newly minted heiress a little visit.

  * * *

  Hopping into my Corolla, I made my way to Elise’s apartment in Hollywood—a shabby, water-stained affair perched atop a kabob restaurant.

  I checked the directory in a grimy doorway next to the kabob joint and buzzed Elise’s apartment, hoping she’d be home. I’d decided to drop in on her unannounced, hoping to catch her off guard.

  Luckily, she answered my buzz.

  “Who is it?” she asked, her voice scratchy over the intercom.

  “Jaine Austen.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “Not really, but—”

  “Then forget it. Now’s not a good time.”

  That’s what she thought. I wasn’t about to get turned away so easily. Time for a weensy fib.

  “I’m Mr. Carmichael’s assistant,” I blurted out. “He asked me to stop by with some legal papers for you to sign.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? I’m in 202.”

  And just like that, she was buzzing me in.

  What can I say? Sometimes it pays to be devious.

  A creaky elevator etched with an imaginative display of male genitalia delivered me to the second floor, where Elise was waiting for me outside her apartment in a faded silk bathrobe, her hair uncombed, in bedhead mode.

  “Come in,” she said, waving me inside.

  The first thing that hit me when I walked in the room was the overwhelming aroma of onion and garlic.

  “Excuse the smell,” Elise said. “It’s from the kabob joint downstairs. I’m right above the kitchen. And it never goes away. I can douse myself in perfume, and I still smell like baba ganoush.”

  I followed her past a small dining area into her living room, furnished very Early Motel 6, with a drab oatmeal sofa and particle board furniture.

  The focal point of the room was a blow-up photo of a young Elise hanging on the wall, lo
oking absolutely exquisite in a flowing sundress, her silken hair fanning out in the wind.

  “That’s me,” she said, following my gaze. “Back when I was a model.”

  What a knockout she’d been.

  “Gosh, you were beautiful. And you still are,” I hastened to add, in case she still thought she was.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, squinting at me. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  “We’ve never been formally introduced,” I said, “but I was at Scotty’s house when you showed up for your alimony check.”

  “You were working on Christmas Eve? I don’t believe it.”

  Oh, hell. I was about to be busted.

  “So typical of Scotty,” she went on, “expecting people to be on call three hundred and sixty-five days a year. You poor thing.”

  I sighed with relief as she led me over to her oatmeal sofa.

  “So,” she asked, “where are those papers Mr. Carmichael wanted me to sign?”

  Planting myself firmly on the sofa so I’d be harder to evict, I began rummaging through my purse.

  “Darn it all,” I said with feigned frustration, “I left them at the office. Mr. Carmichael’s going to kill me. I’ve got to go back and get them.”

  “Okay, hon,” Elise said, running her fingers through her none-too-clean hair. “Come back when you’ve got them.”

  No way was I actually about to leave.

  “Um . . . before I go, could I trouble you for a glass of water?” I asked with my most winning smile. “These Santa Anas make my throat so dry.”

  “Okay, sure,” she said, walking all of five steps to her kitchen. Seconds later she was back with a glass of cloudy tap water.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking a tiny sip, hoping to avoid any free-floating carcinogens.

  “What a shocker about Mr. Parker getting killed, huh?” I threw out as casually as I could.

  “Not really,” Elise said, sitting down across from me on the sofa, curling her long legs under her. “Pretty much everyone who knew Scotty detested him. So I’m not surprised he was knocked off. I just hope the cops don’t suspect me, what with my inheriting all his money.”

  “I’m sure they won’t. Especially if you have someone who can vouch for your whereabouts at the time of the murder.”

  “Unfortunately, no,” Elise sighed. “The police told me Scotty was killed sometime between ten and eleven on Christmas morning. I was home alone all morning that day. Didn’t leave my apartment till eleven-thirty to go to noon mass. Which means I have no alibi whatsoever.

  “But of course I didn’t do it,” she hastened to assure me, taking a sip from a coffee mug on an end table. “As much as I hated him, Scotty was my meal ticket.”

  She gazed down into her coffee mug and sighed.

  “Things haven’t gone well for me since our divorce. I’ve stumbled from one job to the next. Somehow I just can’t seem to hold on to them. So if anyone wanted to keep Scotty alive, it was me. I had to fight for every dime of my alimony checks, but in the end, I always got them. With Scotty gone, I would have been toast.

  “And then,” she said, shaking her head in wonder, “I found out that he’d left me everything. My God, you could’ve knocked me over with a lamb kabob. I still can’t believe it. I figured he’d leave it all to some porno site, or a charity named after himself. Maybe even to Missy. But me? Never.”

  Up close I could see the roots of her blond hair were coming in gray and her face was crosshatched with a web of fine lines—lines I suspected would soon be erased at the hands of a skilled plastic surgeon.

  “It’s funny,” she was saying, “you’d think I’d be delirious with joy, now that I’m going to be set for life. And don’t get me wrong. I’m happy. But I still can’t help feeling sad that Scotty’s dead.”

  And it was true. Unlike Missy, there appeared to be real sorrow in Elise’s eyes.

  “Sure, he put me through hell. But it wasn’t always like that. When we first married,” she said, her eyes glazing over at the memory, “he was sweet and caring. Showered me with love. I gave him the savings from my modeling career to help him out with his investment portfolio. And that’s when it all started going bad. The richer he got, the less he seemed to care about me. I was devastated when he dumped me for Missy. And enraged by the way he treated me. But on some level, I guess I never stopped loving him. Or at least the man he used to be.”

  By now tears were running down her cheeks, and I was having a hard time believing she was the killer.

  “Excuse me,” she said, unfurling her legs from the sofa. “I hate the way I look when I cry. I’m just going to splash some water on my face.”

  She headed off down a hallway to her bathroom.

  Touched by her tears, I was just about to cross her off my suspect list when I looked over at her coffee mug.

  I expected to see dregs of coffee at the bottom, but instead I saw a half an inch of some pale bubbly stuff.

  I took a sniff.

  Champagne.

  Whoa. It looked like somebody had been doing a little celebrating when I’d buzzed her on her intercom. Perhaps Elise wasn’t quite as heartbroken as her poignant performance had led me to believe.

  A feeling that was reinforced just then when her phone rang. Still in the bathroom, Elise let her machine get it.

  A chirpy woman’s voice came on the line.

  “Elise, it’s Bitsy Clayton at Coldwell Banker. I’ve found you some fabulous properties in Bel Air to look at this afternoon. Call me!”

  Returning to the living room at the tail end of her realtor’s message, Elise had the good grace to blush.

  “The first thing I did when I learned about my inheritance was to call a realtor,” she said. “As I’m sure you can understand, I can’t wait to get out of this hellhole. But I’m still really sorry Scotty’s dead.”

  Somehow this time her words didn’t seem quite so convincing.

  “Well, I guess I’d better be going,” I said, hauling myself from the sofa.

  “What time will you be back?” Elise asked.

  “Back?”

  “With the legal papers.”

  Really, I had to start keeping better track of my lies.

  “Oh, right. In about an hour or so.”

  And with that, I skedaddled out the door.

  But not before glancing over at Elise’s dinette table and seeing a box of surgical rubber gloves—the same kind of gloves you’d use if you didn’t want to leave fingerprints on a lethal Yule log.

  Chapter 17

  By the time I reached my car, Elise had catapulted to the top of my suspect list.

  With more than five million bucks to gain, no alibi, and a box of fingerprint-masking rubber gloves on her dinette table, she was shaping up to be quite a contender.

  More and more, I was convinced she could have found a copy of Scotty’s will in his office on Christmas Eve and done away with him the next day.

  All thoughts of Elise were shelved, however, when I pulled up in front of Casa Van Hooten and saw Marlon, Scotty’s hulking refrigerator of a neighbor, out on his front lawn.

  I remembered the day he’d rushed at Scotty, furious at his misanthropic neighbor for ruining his little boy’s Christmas, how he’d aimed his cantaloupe-sized fist at Scotty’s gut and had been restrained only by the combined efforts of Dave and Lupe.

  Most of all, I remembered how he’d left the house hollering that he wasn’t through with Scotty.

  I’ll be back to take care of you once and for all! were his exact words, if memory served.

  Now I wondered if he’d popped by on Christmas morning to make good on his threat.

  Clambering out of my Corolla, I hurried over to Marlon’s front lawn, where he was bent over a large Rudolph reindeer ornament strung with fairy lights. Many of the lights, I could now see, were missing, including a larger bulb for Rudolph’s nose.

  Marlon was busy replacing them from a pile on the lawn, muttering a string of muffled curse
s.

  “Hi, there!” I said, at my very chirpiest, hoping to avoid the storm cloud brewing over his head. “I’m Jaine Austen. I’m house-sitting for Mrs. Van Hooten.”

  “Yeah, I know who you are,” he said glancing up at me. “You were there the day I almost busted Scotty’s chops.”

  He picked up a fairy light and began screwing it in, the tiny bulb dwarfed by his sausage-like fingers.

  “Would you believe some vandal stole the lights off my Rudolph the other night? Wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it was that sonofabitch Scotty. Had to go all the way over to the Home Depot in Burbank to get replacement bulbs.”

  “I suppose you know about Scotty’s murder,” I said, thrilled with the opening he’d just lobbed me.

  “Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy,” Marlon said, kneeling under the sun, a sweat stain the size of New Jersey blooming on the back of his T-shirt.

  “And by the way,” he added, “I’d be happy to be a character witness for you if you need me.”

  “A character witness?”

  “Yeah, I heard the police found your fingerprint on the Yule log.”

  Wow. News sure traveled fast here in the land of the one-percenters.

  “I can assure you,” I said, with no small degree of indignation, “I’m not the one who killed Scotty.”

  “I didn’t really think you were,” Marlon said. “Figured you wouldn’t have the nerve. But I’m prepared to help out anyone who bumped off that bastard.”

  “Have any ideas who might have done it?” I asked.

  “My money’s on Missy.”

  “Missy?”

  “Anyone could see she hated the guy. Can you imagine what it must have been like to have been married to him?”

  He shuddered in disgust.

  “But Missy was out running at the time of the murder,” I said, repeating Missy’s alibi. “She left the house a little after ten and was gone almost an hour.”

  “Not true,” Marlon said. “I happened to be looking out the window and saw her coming back home at about ten minutes past ten. I remember the time because I’d just finished doing a hundred squats and I checked my watch to time myself.”