The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  I said nothing.

  “I’m not calling you dumb or weak, OK?” he said. “It’s just that we don’t have time for you to go all the way through detective school before we move on this. So please—I’m asking you: stay away from the mission for now. I’ve got to run up to Canada on that other case I mentioned. By then I know there’ll be work for you to do here. I just want to keep you safe. OK?”

  “OK.”

  He looked at me harder. “OK?”

  “OK!”

  _____

  Daniel phoned around noon, as Gina and I were cleaning the apartment to Nancy Wilson singing “It Never Entered My Mind” on one of her blues collections.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “On the way home from LAX.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Petey’s going to be…fine with them.” But he spoke without his usual cheerful conviction.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, your aunts are…uh…eccentric.”

  “Oh! Of course. They’ve both always been a little nuts. That’s just the family.”

  He laughed. “Right. Well, it’s obvious they love Petey, they’re thrilled to have him. He seemed to take to them pretty well too. They paid total attention to him and made sure he was cozy. Nice room for him, with about a thousand pillows. Those girls are mad for shams, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Neither one of them’s a big talker.”

  I laughed.

  He went on, “Sheila’s always going around in these army boots, digging in the dirt outside. Petey liked that. She said she’s going to make him harvest the pumpkins with her, if he stays long enough.”

  “Well, good exercise.”

  “Yeah! Their house is this incredible time capsule. Those mahogany moldings.”

  “Yup. Do they still have the inlaid tables and the cream pitchers?”

  “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Thousands of cream pitchers.”

  “How was Aunt Toots?”

  “Uh, fine, I guess. She’s really into crafts. I’d forgotten about crafts. Nobody in California does crafts, do they?”

  “Not that I know of. What’s her thing now?”

  “Was she into the beer can thing when you last saw her?”

  “No, that must be new, what’s that?”

  “Well, she rinses out her beer cans and then she uses tin snips to cut them into little models. She knows how to do a rocking chair and a little car, but the car takes two cans plus some of those brass things teachers used to stab papers together with.”

  “I see.”

  “She’s got fourteen beer-can rocking chairs on a shelf, and sitting in each one is a dried-apple-face doll.”

  “Oh, God. Are any of those in Petey’s room? They’ll give him nightmares.”

  “No, no.”

  “What else?”

  “I’m afraid they found his ScoreLad offensive.”

  “Oh.”

  “They acted pretty horrified of it.”

  “Hm.”

  “They seem to think he’ll go blind if he plays with it too much.”

  “I think they’re getting that mixed up with another thing that if a boy plays with it too much he’ll go—”

  “Rita!”

  “Well, they’re probably right. For all we know, all these little boys with ScoreLads’ll be going around with white canes when they’re twenty-five. I hate the damn thing too.”

  “Do you know their phone service goes in and out?”

  “Yes. That’s the rural life, you know.”

  “Well, anyway, I think Petey’ll be OK. He discovered this old gazebo that’s all grown over with vines, a fabulous hideout.”

  “I remember that gazebo, Gina and I used to plot against the boys in it. Good. Did he cry when you left?”

  “No, you know, he didn’t. He’s learned to be a pretty tough little guy. I told him his job was to take care of these two nice aunties, and he said, ‘Roger, I’m on it,’ and he took off into the field to pull up a rutabaga for dinner.”

  “Wow.”

  “He was disappointed they didn’t have a dog, in spite of your telling him they wouldn’t.”

  “But Sheila and Toots seemed, you know, OK?”

  “Oh, yeah. They’re pretty vigorous—you should see Sheila’s biceps from all that woodcutting.”

  “Well, they’re only in their sixties.”

  “Neither of them ever married?”

  “No, I don’t think they ever found guys who could handle them. I remember Toots telling me once, ‘Men are too much bother. If I wanted a man around here I’d buy a goat!’”

  Gina, overhearing from the next room, laughed long and hard. Daniel muttered, “Sometimes I feel the same way.”

  “Me too.”

  “Well, anyway,” he said, “Petey will be safe with them, and I’m sure he’s going to learn ten times more living with them than going to kindergarten in West Hollywood. They were very gracious to me.”

  “They put you up, right?”

  “Yeah, for both nights. Nice little bed in the den. I just had to avoid making eye contact with the taxidermized boar’s head in there.”

  “Oh yeah, him.”

  “Those tusks.”

  “Yeah, my uncle Fritz shot him in Texas, oh, thirty years ago.”

  “It’s an eclectic item.”

  “That head is their most prized possession, believe it or not.”

  “Well, they’ve got it pretty well secured, I’d say. Which is good, because Petey was immediately fascinated by it.”

  “Daniel—”

  “Yeah?”

  “You won’t tell anybody where he is, will you?”

  “Of course not. Relax, Rita.”

  Chapter 15 – Guys Should be Ugly

  George Rowe fingered the wig. The sign on the plastic bin said ONLY $3. He gripped the copper-colored vortex of curls firmly, then clawed it all over. The curls loosened, then sprang into a psych-ward tangle.

  “Hey!” said the thrift shop’s proprietor.

  “I’ll buy it,” said Rowe. “These shoes too, and the sweatshirt. These briefs too.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t throw those out,” said the proprietor.

  Back at his friend Gonzalo’s house in Los Feliz Rowe dropped off his bundle in the bathroom, then went to the kitchen.

  Gonzalo, the jazz-trumpet-playing neurologist, had gone surfing on this pretty Saturday afternoon because tasty swells were coming in from the south at Malibu.

  Fending off the attentions of Tamiroff, Gonzalo’s assertive Russian wolfhound, Rowe opened the kitchen cupboards one by one. He collected a bottle of corn oil, two birthday candles, a glass baking dish, and a roll of paper towels. He found a few safety pins and a book of matches in a junk drawer. He went out to the backyard, sidestepping piles of Tamiroff crap, picked up a few egg-sized stones from a decorative bed, and brought everything into the green-tiled bathroom.

  He stripped and sighed into the mirror. “Ugly bastard,” he said to his reflection. Proud of his strong physique, he was glad his face was rough. Broad forehead, round nose. Straight eyebrows. Jutting ears. Guys should be ugly, he felt, except when they smile.

  He lighted one of the birthday candles and held it to the bottom of the baking dish, depositing a layer of soot all over it. When the candle burned down, he blew it out and set the dish aside.

  Holding the wig over the sink, he combed corn oil through the scratchy curls with his fingers, then blotted the thing with a paper towel and set it aside.

  He stepped into the pair of gray, ragged briefs from the bottom of the underwear bin at the thrift shop. He had sniffed them and shaken them out in case of roaches in the store; they were OK.

  When he had stooped to pick up Sven in the apartment-building fire, he had split his pants. He took out those black pants now and repaired the split crudely with the safety pins, then put them on. He dropped the stones into the pockets, making the pants sag sloppily.

&nbs
p; He slipped his bare feet into the thrift-shop shoes, a pair of beige vinyl boats.

  The sweatshirt was gray and had a born-free type picture of a howling wolf on the front, with a spirit catcher emblem on the back. He rubbed some corn oil on his hands, then smeared them in the soot on the baking dish. He dirtied the sweatshirt with the resulting black goo, not overdoing it, paying special attention to the seams and underarms.

  He made more black goo, then worked over his ankles, neck, face, and hands, and looked in the mirror. He moistened a paper towel and wiped off some of the black, leaving a greasy smooth dirtiness behind.

  Next, he opened a plastic mouthguard case and took out a set of upper buck teeth and fitted them over his own teeth. These were not cheap plastic teeth from a costume shop; they were realistic chompers made for him by a theatrical dentist he had once done some work for. He kept them in a small kit bag in his car, along with a few other odds and ends. The once or twice he’d used the teeth, they’d worked well, very well. Only the two front-most teeth were really bucked out. The look was arresting, but not overkill. He stroked his stubble.

  It was unfortunate for buck-toothed people that their buck teeth gave the impression of stupidity, but that’s the way it was. When Rowe wore these teeth, people looked at him with pitying condescension, then away.

  Lastly, he eased the wig on. The oily tendrils hung into his eyes. He tucked the side curls behind his ears, creating a pathetic fast-lane kind of look. That was it.

  He smiled at himself.

  _____

  Rowe got off the number 53 bus ten blocks from the ABC Mission and ambled toward it, settling into a loser’s gait, low foot-swing. Then he changed his mind and perked it up a bit. He wanted to be down on his luck but hopeful, perhaps ready to listen to somebody’s gospel of change.

  He stopped at a liquor store and paid for a pint of Richards Wild Irish Rose wine with two singles and change.

  The only other white person in the store caught his eye: a skaggy pregnant woman buying a pint of bottom-shelf vodka.

  Inwardly Rowe shook his head at the miserable series of choices the woman had to have made. She’d taken to the streets and gotten pregnant to boot, and still she was using; he could practically see the residue coming out of her pores—her skin had that unmistakable drugged-out slackness.

  He left the store and walked along. Just before rounding the corner to the mission he unscrewed the wine cap and took a pull, momentarily forgetting his teeth and bumping them on the bottle’s threaded mouth. He swished the poisonous-tasting stuff around his mouth, and stepped over to the curb ready to spit it out. But a couple of young guys turned from a doorway to watch him, so instead of spitting, which would have looked odd, he swallowed it. Jesus, how many unknown chemicals were in it, each trying to cancel out the bad flavor of another. He uncapped the bottle again and discreetly spilled a little on his sweatshirt.

  A serious alcoholic he’d known had once explained to him, with great patience, how fortified wine gives you the most alcohol for the money, and all you have to do is get to know the pricing at your local booze shop to decide which brand to buy. This man had made a point of dressing as cleanly as possible so that he could occasionally treat himself to better wine by walking into the family-style Italian restaurants of Oakland, which is where he lived, and sitting down at a table just vacated by diners but not yet cleared. He’d slug down whatever few ounces of wine they’d left behind, usually in the woman’s glass. He’d smell her lipstick on the rim as he drank, and he told Rowe to try it sometime, it was a turn-on. The friend was principled enough not to steal tips.

  Rowe shook off that memory.

  The foot traffic at night around the ABC Mission was fairly heavy; addicts find it hard to hold on to cars. The slow shuffle of the homeless sanded down their shoes as they formed pairs and trios to talk and smoke and scheme about where their next meal or high might come from. Lots of wheelchairs too, some powered, some piled high with possessions and pushed along by their owners.

  He clumped up to the security person at the mission’s gate. He was surprised to be looking into the face of the tall dreadlocked black guy who, with the white woman, had chased him away from the Eighth Street district where Rita and Kip had gotten shot.

  Well, well.

  The fellow seemed all right; that is, calm and intelligent.

  Rowe didn’t show his surprise; he kept his slovenly poise and said in a thick voice, “I’m hungry.”

  “Come in then, brother,” said the man kindly.

  A short time later Rowe was chowing down a bowl full of macaroni and cheese and some green beans, drinking hot tea at a long table with other men. Almost all the roughly two hundred diners tonight were men. Rowe noticed that among the few women was the pregnant addict from the liquor store. She ate slowly, her head lowered to her dish like a dog’s.

  All too typical, he thought. Spends what few dollars she’s got on that pint of liquor, then comes here to eat free.

  The woman wore a pair of pink sweatpants, the waistband distended around her bulging belly. How far along was she, he wondered. Six, seven months? Her grimy feet sported a pair of parakeet-blue sandals. Her arms, sticking out from a tight Donald Duck T-shirt, were like broomsticks, and a dirty bandage covered probably some festering sore on an upper arm. She might have been pretty had she not let herself go; she looked to be about forty-five but was probably much younger.

  He felt sorry for her and for the baby she was carrying. What a lousy start some kids get in life.

  The sebaceous tendrils of the wig hung in his eyes.

  Amaryllis B. Cubitt had gotten up in front to say a grace, then had taken off.

  Rowe kept glancing around. He caught a look at a female security guard but didn’t see her face very well. Her fireplug build was right.

  It was dark out now, and many of the diners wandered into the night because it was clear and warm, perhaps still in the seventies. If you had some cardboard—or even a plentiful supply of newspapers—you could insulate yourself quite well to sleep. That’s a fact he’d learned a long time ago.

  He followed the rest down to the men’s dormitory, lingering slower and slower in the corridor until he was alone. He slipped away.

  The mission’s business spilled into all the rooms of the former junior high. He wandered the halls, trying to get a feel for the place. He looked for doors with newer locksets. He found two, one at either end of an upstairs corridor.

  The security staff were busy overseeing the bedding-down process, which was mostly handled by volunteers who were one of two types: mild-looking but very big sons of bitches, or little and ex-con-looking. As he moved, he kept hearing the same voices coming from the lobby and realized the custom of the security people must be to congregate in the front lobby whenever they didn’t have something else to do. That way they could keep an eye on the courtyard and the street out front, and handle anybody coming in or going out. He wondered if anyone patrolled the outer reaches of the property after dark.

  It was easy to elude the security staff. He counted five of them tonight, four men and the woman.

  He thought about those two locked doors and decided to wait, maybe until midnight when the security detail might go down by a couple more.

  He found a hiding place behind a pile of donated junk near an open stairwell. No sooner had he settled down to wait, however, than he heard a commotion.

  “Leave me alone,” a female voice rasped, over sounds of scuffling.

  Rowe poked his head up.

  The pregnant skag was being followed down the corridor toward him by a couple of bums he’d eaten dinner with. One said, “All I want’s a kiss, that’s all.”

  The other drooled, “You’re so pretty.”

  They plucked at her like gulls testing a piece of garbage.

  “Get away from me,” she croaked, her voice practically shot, like the rest of her. Scared shitless.

  Rowe sprang from his hiding place.

  The two
creeps and the woman were so startled they almost fell over each other.

  “Leave her alone.” Rowe’s buck teeth helped him to remember to speak a little slurringly, as he had earlier in the evening.

  “Easy, man,” said the first creep, backing away like the coward he was.

  The second simply grunted and strolled off down the corridor, flinging over his shoulder, “Ugly bitch anyway.”

  Rowe stared the two all the way down the corridor. The air in the corridor smelled of cardboard cartons.

  He took the woman’s thin arm. She turned her face up to his.

  Their eyes touched.

  For seconds, neither could speak. Many, many seconds. Their faces were as blank, as stupefied as if they’d been smacked with a couple of frying pans.

  At last Rowe choked, “Rita.”

  Chapter 16 – Latex, Transoms, and Ox

  Seeing George’s face coalesce from beneath those greasy curls was one of the great shocks of my life.

  I was too stunned to even laugh.

  Both of us stood stoically gazing at each other in our horrible ensembles, then George guided me down a quiet corridor.

  “You’re marvelous,” he murmured.

  “You look as convincing as I do,” I said. He really did look atrocious. Further, I was impressed with how he’d changed his body language, ordinarily so strong, to that of an anxious loser: canted forward from the waist, his lower body lagging behind, as if he wasn’t quite of one mind about where to walk, let alone anything else.

  He said, “I wouldn’t if I were trying to look pregnant. I told you to stay away from here.”

  “Yeah, well. Who did you?”

  “Who did me?”

  “You know: who did your wig and makeup and costume?”

  He laughed silently. “I did.”

  “No way.”

  “Way.”

  “Awesome, George, awesome.” I have to admit, my heart was fluttering with pleasure, having run into him so unexpectedly. Goddamn it. “Down to the dirty ankles. The safety pins up the butt seam are inspired.”