Her feet ripped across the gravel driveway. She launched into the bungalow and swung to slam the door shut behind her. The man’s brogue wedged in the frame. Wilma pushed. The man pushed harder. He forced his way in and shut the door behind him. The screams stopped right about then.
Jack had read this story enough times to get through it without crying. Enough times to have it memorized and almost enough times to believe it. He folded it once again and stuffed it back in his jacket.
He climbed the concrete steps of 243 Newland Street and paused on the porch. A poinsettia plant in a glazed black pot bloomed its flaming red flowers. Two rockers sat next to the front door. One was painted yellow, the other blue. The sun had paled them both. The yellow rocker’s seat had been worn down to the original wood. Jack knelt to inspect the knitting bag between the rockers. He found a handful of cream-colored doilies. The name on the mailbox read “Van Meter.” He had to start somewhere, so he started here, by knocking on the door.
It took some shuffling and mumbling, but eventually a woman opened the door. She was too young to be called old, but too old to stick with that platinum dye job. Jack said, “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m looking for either a Mr. or Mrs. Philip Van Meter. Would I be right in assuming you’re Mrs. Van Meter?”
The woman jutted her hip to the left and planted a hand on it. “What are you selling, honey?”
Jack pulled his father’s badge and license from his back hip pocket. He showed it to her. “Mrs. Van Meter, I’m an investigator.” He flipped his wallet closed and replaced it. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about an incident that occurred in your backyard about two years ago.”
“You’re either talking about the orange tree I planted there or the whore who took a face plant in my bathtub.”
A wave of heat raced through Jack’s veins. The nerve endings on his face tingled. He tucked it away under a polite tone of voice. “I’m speaking of Mrs. Chesley. Wilma.”
“Her name was Wilma all right, but you got the wrong last name. She was no Missus.”
“She was widowed. Maybe she used her maiden name with you. Greene.”
“Sounds right.” Mrs. Van Meter blew a wayward bang off her eyebrow. The bang fell right back where it had strayed to begin with. “Anyway, there’s not much to tell. She got drunk, fell in the tub. What’s to investigate?”
Jack pointed at the rockers. “Perhaps we could sit and chat for just a couple of minutes.”
Mrs. Van Meter nodded. She walked around Jack and took up residence in the yellow rocker. Jack settled into the blue one. Mrs. Van Meter said, “Tell me your story before I tell you mine. What are you after?”
“Mrs. Van Meter, I do freelance work for an insurance company. I’ve been asked to determine just how accidental Miss Greene’s death was.”
“What for?”
“They don’t tell me, exactly. My guess is someone took out a life insurance policy on her and now he wants to get paid.”
“Who would insure that tramp?”
Jack dug out a bag of tobacco and set to rolling a cigarette. “Like I said, they don’t tell me.”
Mrs. Van Meter snapped her fingers. “I bet it was her husband. I bet she wasn’t a widow like she said. I bet she was a grass widow. Now that husband wants to collect. But, hell, maybe he did it.”
Jack offered Mrs. Van Meter the cigarette. She accepted. He lit it for her, amazed at how steady his hand was. He hoped his voice and face were staying as steady and his anger was still well below the surface. He started rolling another smoke for himself. “Perhaps you should be the investigator.”
“I could find more than the police did, that’s for sure.”
Jack stopped rolling. “They didn’t find much?”
“They didn’t care. They picked up the body and left. Didn’t ask no questions or nothing. All they did was tell me to stay clear of the bungalow. Said they’d clean it themselves.”
“Did they?”
“They had a woman do it. A little fat Mex. Left the place spotless. I was showing it to renters that afternoon.”
Jack twisted the ends of his cigarette, lit it. He inhaled and glanced at the rooming house across the street. “Why do you think her husband may have done it?”
Mrs. Van Meter leaned on the arm of the rocker and tilted her head toward Jack. Passersby could’ve immediately recognized the gossip pose, had there been any passersby. The block was empty of all living things except a mackerel tabby and the house finch he had his eyes on. Mrs. Van Meter said, “Well, Miss Greene came home that evening drunk as a skunk. The sun had barely set. It was maybe eight thirty, nine o’clock. About twenty minutes later, a car comes rolling down the drive. A Packard so old it looked taped together. The fellow must have known her pretty well because he didn’t knock on her door or anything. Just walked right in like he was the one paying me rent. Next thing you know, they’re screaming at each other just like a married couple. She comes running out wearing nothing but a bathrobe. It was indecent, I tell you. I looked out the window right over there and saw one of her breasts flopping like mad outside the robe. Bouncing like it wanted to play in the breeze.”
“How embarrassing,” Jack said.
“Well, she tucked it away soon enough.” Mrs. Van Meter tapped her ash onto the porch. She rubbed her house slipper over it until it ground into the concrete. “Anyway, she runs into the street here, and the fellow comes out chasing her. She’s screaming bloody murder. He’s diving for her left and right. It was a mess.”
“Sounds bad.”
“Well, she was a drunk. We’d hear her all the time, blasting her phonograph, having little parties, laughing like she wanted the whole world to know something was funny.”
“And she screamed a lot?”
Mrs. Van Meter placed a thumb and forefinger on opposite sides of her mouth and rubbed them just below her bottom lip until they met in the middle. If any lipstick had drifted down, this move would’ve put it back in place. Her makeup hadn’t drifted or moved. It was immaculate. She’d put on her face before putting on shoes this morning. “No,” she said. “Except for that night I never heard her scream.”
“And you said ‘we.’ You said, ‘We’d hear her all the time.’ Do you mean you and Mr. Van Meter?”
“Of course. Who else?”
“And Mr. Van Meter was with you on the night in question?”
“I don’t like what you’re insinuating. Where else would my husband be after the sun sets other than right here with me?”
Jack smiled a gentle grin he’d learned during his early days on the force, when he’d partnered with a cagey veteran named Dave Hammond. Hammond had the best poker face Jack had ever seen. He taught Jack a trick or two. Jack said, “I apologize, Mrs. Van Meter. My assumption was that he was home. I’m just double-checking everything.”
Mrs. Van Meter leaned back in the rocker and crossed her arms. “And what else do you assume?”
“These are just guesses on my part, Mrs. Van Meter. Please understand that. But I guess that Mr. Van Meter is either elderly or was in some way incapacitated on the night of July 14, 1944.”
Mrs. Van Meter gasped. Her eyes opened wide. She exhaled slowly. “I’ll have you know my husband is not elderly in the least. He is my age, and he’s healthy as an ox.”
“And he sat in his living room while a woman who never screamed was screaming bloody murder in front of his house? He did nothing?”
Mrs. Van Meter tossed her cigarette butt in the weedy lawn. She stood and opened her front door. With one foot inside her house, she turned back to Jack. “Write this down, Mr. Investigator,” she said. “Wilma Greene was a drunk and a whore. Whatever she got, she had it coming.”
Mrs. Van Meter slammed the door behind her.
Jack left the porch, struggling to banish the thoughts of committing the second murder at this address.
He spent the rest of the morning combing the neighborhood. He started referring to Wilma as Miss Greene, which allowed him to use his father�
�s license more freely, let the neighbors really examine his credentials. The other neighbors were housewives like Mrs. Van Meter, but they were friendlier. They invited Jack inside, offered him coffee or tea, filled him in on local gossip, and talked about each other. And they all had the same story that Mrs. Van Meter had. Wilma had fled into the street screaming. No one came out to help her. A few minutes later, she was dead. The police never investigated.
For a few months after the incident, the neighbors had talked among themselves. This was how they all came to tell the same story, more or less. They were suspicious. It was too coincidental that someone would slip in a bathtub on the same night she ran into the street screaming. But she was a drunk. They all agreed. And she was a whore. There was no doubt about that. That whole “widow” business was just something she told them for sympathy. Quietly, tacitly, they all seemed to get together and agree that, murder or not, it didn’t matter and she didn’t matter. They didn’t say much to anyone and no one came asking until Jack did.
Jack heard this story enough times to keep his hackles down when he heard them call Wilma a whore. He heard it enough to know the rage was coming and hold it back before it could show on his face. Since she appeared to be doing fifty-yard dashes from one side of her bungalow to the other, Jack hit every house on Newland within a hundred yards.
He spoke to his first man at the last house he visited. A fellow who introduced himself as Mr. Lemus. He bypassed the kitchen table and the living room couch and led Jack into a sunny back room. Three or four easels were scattered about the room, all with canvases starting to soak up paint but nowhere close to resembling anything anyone would consider done. The canvases leaning against the walls had enough paint on them to be called finished, but Jack had no idea whether or not they were good. The colors seemed too dull and metallic to him. He couldn’t make heads or tails of the shapes or what they were supposed to be a picture of. Sometimes, if he used his imagination, he could see something that might be an arm or a carburetor or a fighting cock. Mostly, they were just blocks and triangles and curves, pictographs in a language he hadn’t learned. He raised his eyebrows and nodded with each painting in a mimicry of a man impressed. He asked questions and filled in space with a number of noncommittal wows and isn’t-that-somethings.
After several minutes of this, Jack steered Lemus toward the business at hand: the night of July 14, 1944. Lemus laid out the neighborhood version of events. Jack listened and jotted notes like he hadn’t heard it a dozen times already that day. When Lemus finished, Jack said, “This Miss Greene must have been a horrible person.”
Lemus ran his fingers through the hair on his temples. He’d clearly used henna in it to hide the gray, but the henna was fading and the gray was resurfacing. “Not horrible, no.”
“But she was prostituting herself in this, what looks to be a nice, family neighborhood.”
“Well.” Lemus used his thumbnail to clean the paint from underneath his forefingernail. He looked down at his hands as he spoke. “She wasn’t a prostitute. She just had a lot of men over to her place.”
“And she had loud sex with them? Could you hear it throughout the neighborhood?”
“No.”
“Could you hear it at all?”
“No.”
“But it must have been every night, then?”
Lemus raised his eyes into a stare directed out his back windows. Jack gazed back there, also, caught sight of a jacaranda in full, purple bloom. He turned back to Lemus. Lemus took a few seconds to put his thoughts together. “Now that you mention it, I hadn’t seen men coming or going for several months before her death. Maybe six, seven months.” He picked at dry paint on his pants. “In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that she only had men over a lot when she first moved in. There was a month or two there when she really cut loose. And after that, it would come in waves. She’d have a wild weekend, going nonstop, then nothing for weeks or months.”
“Do you remember when that was? When she first moved in?”
“It was right around the time I had a show over at El Alisal Gallery. I guess that would be sometime around February or March of ’43. Does that sound right?”
It sounded right. It would’ve been just about the time the Air Force had declared Jack dead. Right when Wilma was widowed. Jack flipped through his notes as if that information needed to be written down. “I think so,” he said.
Lemus kept staring at the jacaranda blooms, kept digging at paint. He was clearly working toward something in his mind. Jack gave him the time to think. This was something Jack’s father had never done during investigations. The old man would charge in, looking to bust heads. Manners and patience were never part of his game. You’d tell him what he wanted to hear or he’d crack you in the jaw. The problem with that, Jack realized as a young man and saw again and again when he worked with cops like that on the force, is that people only tell you what they think you want to hear. Jack could tell himself what he wanted to hear. He was investigating this business to learn what he needed to hear. So he let Lemus gaze and think.
Finally, Lemus came out with it. “I know I should have done something that night. I should have gone into the street and seen what the screaming was about. I should have tried to help.” Lemus squeezed his eyes tight and constricted his face, building a dam against whatever emotions were trying to flood his face. He held this for a few seconds. He took a deep breath.
Jack dug a handkerchief from his back pocket—a plain white cotton number—and passed it to Lemus. Lemus waved it off.
“You know she had a twin?” he asked.
“Yeah?” Jack stuffed his handkerchief back into his pocket.
“Birdy or something. I met her at one or two of Wilma’s parties. Sharp kid. Looked just like Wilma. She came around after Wilma died. Haunted the neighborhood for a week or two, asking questions, knocking on doors just like you’re doing. No one would talk to her.”
Jack scooted forward in his seat. This was new. None of the other neighbors mentioned Gertie. “Why not?” he asked.
“Best not to get involved, especially when people are getting killed.”
Jack shrugged. Part of him understood. If only he’d felt that way three years ago.… He tucked it away. “Why are you telling me about the twin now?”
“Just to let you know someone put a bullet in her for asking too many questions.”
“What?”
“I heard the bullet hit her cigarette tin, get deflected up, and then lodge in her collarbone. Who knows? I got the story from the local knitting circle. They’ve been known to stretch the truth.” Lemus stood and motioned back toward the front door. “Anyway, it doesn’t take a whole lot of gunshots before people start to learn what to say and what not to say.”
Jack nodded. As he shifted his weight to stand, he realized that his hand was inside his jacket and his fingers were grazing the grip of the Springfield again.
WILMA, 1943
WHEN THE CAR started its descent down the Conejo grade, Wilma caught her first glimpse of Camarillo. It gave her a feeling of sunshine and optimism, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Flat stretches of lush farmland spread across the valley floor to the ocean. Patches of green dotted the golden hillsides as if they’d been painted there in watercolor. It all seemed so crisp and clear and clean, even the little town at the foothill with its white mission-style church next to a humble, rounded steeple. Islands on the horizon cut sharp brown lines into the expansive blue. Wilma had been trying to keep her mouth shut for this whole ride, but the view from this downhill road loosened her up. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
One of the white coats in the front seat turned to speak to her. “Sure. You’ll love it here.”
“Nothing like a vacation in the bughouse,” Wilma said.
The other white coat, the one who was driving, said, “You better believe it, sister. This place is fantastic.”
White Coat One backed him up. “Especially if you like hor
ses. Do you like horses?”
“Who doesn’t like horses?” Wilma asked.
White Coat One pointed to the hills off to the left of the car. “Look at those mountain trails. You’ll get to go horseback riding on all of them.”
It seemed farfetched, but there were trails. Wilma could see those. There were even a few people on horses on the trails. “Really?” she asked.
“Like my partner said, you’re going to love it,” White Coat Two added.
White Coat One turned in his seat to face Wilma. “If you don’t like horseback riding, we have hiking excursions. Not on the same trails as the horseback riders use. We don’t want you stepping in anything untoward.”
“Lord, no,” White Coat Two said.
“And the hills are full of daisies. The girls at the asylum love to pick them after lunch, then lounge in the grass, making daisy chains.”
“You’re pulling my leg,” Wilma said.
“Do you like water sports?” White Coat Two asked.
“Like what?”
“Canoeing,” White Coat One said. “There’s a river that runs alongside the hospital. We take patients canoeing in it.”
“Really?”
White Coat Two kept his eyes on the road but nodded vigorously. “Not just in the river. We have Polynesian boats. You know, the canoes with the floats on either side? If you’re good enough in the river, you can paddle around through the ocean.”
This seemed like too much for Wilma. Before she could protest, White Coat One said, “It’s like being in the South Seas.”
“The Marquesas,” White Coat Two said. “Tahiti.”
“Hawaii,” the two white coats said together.
“Yes, ma’am,” White Coat One said. “This may be the best two months of your life.”
Wait. What? Two months? Was Wilma hearing that right? She asked, “Two months?”
“That’s what the paper says,” White Coat One said.
“And did we tell you about the springtime productions of Shakespeare in the park the hospital sponsors?” White Coat Two asked.
Dead Extra Page 3
