The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  All I could say was, “Oh, my God.”

  He pushed his hat back. “But you didn’t say I couldn’t draw what I see.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I thought Mr. de Sauvenard was giving Joey presents. But now I think he tried to make it look like Joey stole that watch.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  “Besides,” added Petey, “it’s realer if you draw it.”

  George asked, “Presents? Did you also see him put money into Joey’s wallet?”

  Petey glanced worriedly at me.

  “It’s OK,” I said.

  He worked his head up and down. “Right after.”

  “There ya go,” I said.

  We all stared at Kenner.

  He shrugged, trying to appear casual. Then he actually smiled, and it was the exact same smile I’d seen on his face at my apartment when he’d learned from his mom that Lance and Gina had gotten engaged. Slimy, insincere smile.

  Kenner knew it wouldn’t do to act angry anymore.

  “Hey,” said Kenner, clinging to one last denial, “kids make up things all the time.” He tried for a careless tone.

  It’s funny, I thought, how lying turns a good-looking person like that so butt-ugly so fast. My stomach oozed downward into my pelvis as I realized how right I’d been all along, ever since I saw Kenner sneak into that cabin. What I hadn’t realized then was the extent of his treachery. I thought it was just Gina he’d been after, not figuring that he also wanted to frame Joey for Lance’s...murder. Yes, murder, that’s what it was. And I hadn’t realized he’d already been in that cabin alone, earlier, doing just that.

  Observed by my invisible mini Leonardo here.

  “Hey, little guy,” said Kenner, trying again, squatting to Petey’s level. “I like you.”

  “I don’t like you.” Petey’s eyes were beady.

  “That was a fun little game we were playing there, wasn’t it?” He reached for Petey’s shoulder as if to pat it.

  Petey stepped sideways and said out of the corner of his mouth, “I’m not six months old, you know.”

  My heart surged with as much love and pride as I’d ever felt for him.

  Kenner gave up on Petey. I saw his boots start to orient themselves toward the door.

  George and Alger were ready for violence. Alger’s lanky ponytail had flopped in front of his shoulder; he whipped it back.

  I said, “So you had to unwrap the canvas around Lance, then paw through his clothes to find that watch, didn’t you? Must have been a pleasant task. One-handed, no less.”

  Kenner shot me a filthy look.

  “In fact, I think I can smell him on you,” I pressed.

  Kenner swallowed.

  “Kenner,” said George, “why don’t you just get it off your chest? I might be able to help you if—”

  He stopped as Kenner reached behind himself and drew a knife from his waistband.

  “Get back!” he said, feeling us closing in on him, though none of us had moved.

  “I see,” said George patiently, unmoved by the sight of the blade.

  It was a medium-sized hunter, an expensive-looking knife.

  “That’s Lance’s knife,” said George. “I thought about removing it from his belt. But I didn’t want to take away a dead man’s last defense.”

  Alger, off to the side near Joey Preston, nodded with guy-spirit.

  I said, “Come here, Petey.” He ran to me and I held him behind me. I felt his head poking out around my hip. I forced myself to calmness. He could always feel my vibe. Christ almighty, Kenner had had that knife on him a few minutes ago when I stopped him from coming in alone. Rita, said my inner bitch reluctantly, you’re better at hand-to-hand than you thought.

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” said Kenner, breathing fast.

  “I know you didn’t,” said George. “Put down the knife.”

  “He had to have,” I contradicted.

  “No,” said George. “This is getting tiresome.”

  I hadn’t realized how tightly he’d been gathering himself until he sprang at Kenner. He planted one foot on the floor—boom!—then kicked Kenner’s knife out of his hand with the other.

  Alger scooped up the knife as George grabbed Kenner by the storm flap of his jacket and rammed him against the wall.

  “All right, you son of a bitch.” George was breathing hard now, his face flushed, neck tendons popping. Sweat glistened on his scalp beneath his umber-colored crew cut.

  Kenner was dead-pale. His hand crawled along the wall behind him.

  George said, “You came up here three weeks ago and tried to hire Joey Preston to kill your brother, didn’t you?” He shouted into Kenner’s face, spraying him with drill sergeant-esque spit. Kenner shut his eyes and mouth tight to avoid it. He really did look like a shitless recruit.

  He shook his head.

  Joey spoke up, “No. George, uh—”

  “Shut up,” George cut him off. “Kenner, you offered him money—a lot of money to the likes of him—didn’t you? More than a hundred thousand, but not more than half a million.”

  Kenner’s eyes flew wide with shock. “How did you find that out? From Leland?”

  George smiled not nicely.

  “Kenner couldn’t have that much money,” I said. “He’s practically broke; he wanted to make his movie for what, thirty thousand?”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Joey Preston.

  “Yes, he does,” said George. “He was broke, but not anymore. He’s working a deal with Leland Harris—Bertrice de Sauvenard’s most trusted advisor—to siphon cash from Silver Coast and split it. Phony real estate deals. Russian copper.”

  “What?” I said.

  “In fact, your bank account, Kenner, has just under two million in it right now, doesn’t it?”

  “Fuck you,” spat Kenner.

  George gave him a shake, jostling his broken arm. “Keep your spit to yourself.”

  “Ow! Owow!”

  “And you and Harris have a deal to get rid of your mother next, don’t you? With Lance dead, you’d be the sole heir. Except possibly for Gina, in case they’d gotten married, or even if she was pregnant. Which is what made you come rushing up here as soon as you found out about the engagement—to hunt her down and kill her yourself, because your hired assassin was long gone. Good thing Rita figured that out when she did.”

  Petey looked up at me. “You saved Aunt Gina.”

  “Be quiet, honey.”

  George jostled Kenner again. “How did you get Harris to go along with your plan? What did you have over him?”

  Nonspittingly, Kenner repeated, “Fuck you.”

  “I’m the only reason you’re alive, you narcissistic son of a bitch!”

  “What do you mean?” Kenner’s hand kept crawling along the wall behind him, back and forth, like a white spider.

  “Because I left you out of it when I told Ivan Platonov that Harris was planning to screw him!”

  Kenner went dead silent, as a person does when absorbing a huge impact.

  I didn’t quite know what was going on, except that the game, for Kenner, kept changing.

  And he skillfully kept adapting.

  While he’d been grateful that George and I had fought those wackos in the woods and got him out of there, that rescue, I saw, was nothing to him compared with what George had just told him.

  “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.” Kenner looked at George with sudden weak-kneed amazement. I believe there was some unconditional gratitude in there as well, but he was hiding it. “Oh, Jesus. You know about Platonov. When did you find out about Platonov?” Kenner was eyeing George with an amount of respect I’d never seen in him before. And he was curious, and I realized that he now viewed George as something of an equal. Somehow, he now felt safe in George’s grip.

  Isn’t it insane: to be literally rammed up against a wall, your body fucked up, your brother dead (though this makes you happy), your plans unraveling because of the concerted efforts of a te
am of people who’d just as soon see you in hell—and suddenly feel pretty OK with things?

  “All right,” said Kenner, reading my mind. “You all think you have the upper hand? No. I have the upper hand.”

  Having edged out from behind me, at my side now, Petey remarked, “But both of his hands are lower than Mr. Rowe’s. How—”

  I clamped his shoulder.

  “Leland Harris,” said Kenner, “will soon wind up wishing he were dead a lot sooner than he’s going to be. But he’ll never give me up.”

  “Why not?” said George, relaxing his grip to give Kenner enough breath to tell us what he now wanted to tell.

  “We both have our needs,” he began, enigmatically.

  “You feel above the rest of us,” said George.

  “I am above the rest of you. I’m much more intelligent, and, of course, I’m an artist.”

  “You’re a selfish, greedy bastard.”

  Kenner laughed dismissively.

  “I need what I need. OK. And you know what? My family knew it too. Lance once said he’d do anything for me.” He glanced at each of us, meaningfully, in turn. “My mother said the same thing.”

  My God, I thought, this is what a real live monster looks like. George said, “Get to the point. Your relationship with Harris began when you were in high school. You found out something about him back then, didn’t you, something he thought he’d gotten away with?”

  “Did my mother tell you about my school project?”

  “Yes, but she doesn’t know the underlying story.”

  “Neither did my dad.” Kenner cleared his throat, actually smirking with pride. “Here’s who you’re dealing with. It was way back in high school. I went to my dad’s firm and did a project on the company, I researched the financial history and did a report for my class. Dad let me in on the books; I hung out all morning in the file room, looking through all these old transaction ledgers. Leland didn’t know about it until lunchtime, then he came charging in to see what I was doing. Nobody else was there. I looked up at him and said, ‘I know.’”

  “H’h,” George grunted. “Your mom remembers that day. She thinks Leland liked you, she thinks he took you under his wing.”

  “Ha. Of course I couldn’t have analyzed every ledger in one morning, and half of it I couldn’t understand anyway; it’s just that I happened to come across a book that had fourteen pages razored out from 1979. And I wondered why. The ledgers had been bound after they’d been typed. So I traced the carbons.” As Kenner talked I could smell and taste those ’50s-era offices, Dictabelts still lying around, the air cool, the linoleum floors waxed to a heel-clicking shine beneath the secretaries’ feet. Uniform paper coffee cups. Desks with their incandescent gooseneck lamps. The big shots glassed in like sharks in aquariums, their offices carpeted with the latest in stain-resistant synthetics.

  “I found the carbons in another file, I guess Leland must’ve forgot about them or thought they weren’t kept very long. I found that somebody had funneled money from the sale-leaseback of ten thousand acres of timber in Oregon into a blind account in—ding!—Switzerland. I thought that was really glamorous, and obviously unusual, and I’d put the carbons in my notebook to show my dad and I was sitting there pondering it when Leland came running in, and from his face I knew he’d done it. The total amount was about eighty thousand dollars, which was a nice chunk of change back then. Starter money for something. Nice chunk of change now, for that matter.”

  “Then,” said George, “he wanted to be your friend.”

  “He wanted to be my friend in the worst way!” Kenner laughed, savoring the memory. “I didn’t know how to leverage what I knew, so I just kept my mouth shut and remembered something my dad told me: ‘Information is power, and he that’s got the most will always win.’ There were times when I half-forgot about those ledger sheets.”

  “But eventually you decided to act on them.”

  “Yeah. I waited until I needed Leland for something big.”

  “Your film?”

  “The time was right.”

  “Showed some patience there.”

  “I always was mature for my age.”

  Through all this, even when he laughed, Kenner’s eyes were cold, un-animated. They were, I realized, the eyes of a sociopath. He was exactly like the self-justifying killers on the TV programs: always coolly insisting on their innocence, endlessly, tirelessly writhing to find a way out even when on a cellblock.

  George said, “Come on, Kenner, the film was your excuse to move on something you’d wanted to do for a long time: eliminate your family for the money.”

  “You’re wrong, no, no, it’s not like that at all.”

  “Knowing the esteem Leland was held in by your mother, I guess he was easy to blackmail.”

  Kenner smiled wryly. “Oh, he got right on board! He told me how strapped he was personally, and we—we sort of teamed up.”

  “My God,” marveled George.

  After a pause, Kenner said, “Leland was already working on even better ideas for getting money out of Silver Coast than I could dream of.”

  “Did they include murdering your brother and mother?”

  “I didn’t kill anybody. You’ll never put that on me.”

  I thought George was going to strangle him, but he said, “Joey Preston,” still in Kenner’s face, as if he wished his words were shotgun pellets, “it’s time to tell us. Did you kill Lance de Sauvenard?”

  “I did not! Oh, Lord, I did not!”

  “Then who did? You were there!”

  “Oh, Lord a-mighty!” He lifted his face to the rafters, to his God out there in the howling, scouring storm.

  George shouted, “You can’t protect him anymore! What happened to your father? What happened between you and Gilbert Boyd the day Kenner de Sauvenard showed up at your gas station?”

  “Oh,” moaned Joey, squeezing his temples.

  “It’s all going to come out anyway,” said George.

  “He’ll kill me,” said Joey.

  “Who—your dad?”

  “No, Kenner! He swore he’d kill me if—”

  “He’s not gonna kill anybody!” George gave Kenner an extra shake, like a dog with a barn rat, to prove it.

  Joey said, “That’s easy for you to say. I can’t protect myself!”

  “Agh!” cried Kenner.

  “Here,” said Alger, handing Joey the knife George had kicked out of Kenner’s hand—Lance’s knife. He did this seriously, almost ceremonially, holding the blade with his fingertips and presenting the handle across his arm.

  Joey took the knife and seemed to relax.

  Boy, I thought, talk about the thin veneer of civilization. A stick, a stone, a knife: a village.

  What happened next proved it even further: as George gave Kenner that shake, he must have let up on his grip. A man in captivity will always be ready for an opportunity, half-assed though it may be.

  Kenner wrenched himself free. As George reacted with a gasp, Kenner was already in the anteroom; his boots bam-klunk-bam as he bolted out the door. The storm raised its voice, then the door banged shut.

  “Let him go,” said George. “He won’t last long out there by himself; he’s going to have to walk all night to keep from freezing. There’s no way we’d track him in this weather anyway.”

  “Artists like to have experiences,” I noted helpfully.

  George put his hands on his hips. “I hope he enjoys this one.”

  Chapter 31 – Joey Mans Up

  It took Joey Preston only a few minutes to tell us what we needed to know about the plot against Lance de Sauvenard. “No use holding out now,” he said. “Kenner came up here like you said, three or four weeks ago. Says you look like you’ve seen better days. H’h, look at me, I’m a grease-monkeyin’, deer-trackin’, halibut-fishin’ son of a bitch. I never had better days. Got my dirty coveralls on, he’s there in his clothes. In his car. Mercedes diesel, says it’s been modified to run on kitchen grease! Th
at guy could afford any kind of fuel he wanted for that thing! I go what’s up? He tells me—Joey’s voice hushed down with genuine, sad horror. “Says remember little Lance, the bastard? His own brother he calls that name. I remembered Lance all right. Yeah, he made fun of me and I never liked him. Well, Alger, you were there. He destroyed me in this town, you want to know the full truth. He sent—that girl in town—those pictures of me.”

  Joey Preston shifted his hips in his bunk and hiked himself a little straighter. “How do you get over something like that when people don’t let you forget it, all the way through school, all the way beyond school, up to the present day? Here we are, still talking about it! Kenner says well, now’s your chance at him. He’s gonna come through here in a little while, few days, a week from now.”

  “What did you say?” asked George.

  “I told him I thought about Lance de Sauvenard most days.”

  “Kenner offered you money.”

  “Hunnerd thousand now, hunnerd thousand later. You won’t believe me.”

  “I’ll believe you.” George was standing with his fists on his hips, planted in the center of the room so manly and intelligent. Petey mirrored his body language.

  “I says no.” Joey’s eyes were soft and wondering. “I can’t kill a man for any reason. I hunt for food, not for pleasure.”

  “All right,” said George.

  “But Truck overheard our talk. Always did try to make my business his.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Too much of a novelty, this stranger comin’ through, he sneaks up behind the bushes to listen. Kenner leaves, he says who was that? I tell him Kenner de Sauvenard. Oooh, a de Sauvenard! In that case you’re an idiot, he tells me. ’N’ why’s that? Because we can all benefit from you doin’ somethin’ you do every fall anyways. What’s the goddamn difference? He puts his face right in mine, and you know he doesn’t look so good since that accident with the rabbit gun. Kind of made me sick to look at him, tell you the truth. He says, hell, what’s there to it? You track it, you get it in your crosshairs, you pull the trigger. Only this way, you don’t have to field dress it, quarter it, and hump it to the road! You don’t eat it, but you’re set for life! I says two hunnerd grand isn’t necessarily set for life. Truck says you don’t do it, I will. You’ll do bullcrap, I says. We argued pretty hard over it.”