Dating Dead Men (7 page)

Joey unplugged the teakettle, and came over to hand me a mug of tea. She stretched out on the brocade chaise longue, looking vampish, her long red hair flowing over the side of the chaise, nearly to the floor.

“Anyone is capable of killing,” she said, “if they're scared enough or mad enough. Even Quakers. But I don't think P.B.'s more likely to kill than, say, you are, which is a lot less likely than your average person. Did you have a particular method in mind?”

“Shooting.”

“Really? Would P.B. have access to a gun, in the hospital?”

I wrapped the blanket tighter around myself. “Maybe. It turns out security at Rio Pescado isn't state-of-the-art. And Dr. Charlie says P.B.'s foot is healing well, so he may have some mobility—oh, heck.” I fell back onto a pillow and gazed up at Uncle Theo's circus trapeze suspended from the ceiling. Maybe I could just lie here until this was all over.

“Wollie, having introduced the topic of murder, you can't now fade out mid-sentence. You know, you look like a refugee from Eastern Europe.”

I roused myself to glance at the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. The hood of my sweatshirt was bunched up under my jacket, giving a hunchback effect. My long skirt was torn. Hair hung around my face like limp straw. This was how Doc had seen me all night. “I can't talk about it,” I said, “because I'm sworn to silence.”

“You can't tell me why you're carrying bug spray and a bust of Lenin?”

“Dante, not Lenin. Alighieri.
The Divine Comedy
.”

“Yes, I know who Dante is. I was wondering what you're doing with him.”

“He was a gift from Date Number Three, the financial planner who liked to sculpt. We were discussing whether blind dates were hell or just purgatory, and—”

“All right, you don't have to tell me anything tonight. Drink your tea.”

I focused on the tea, pale yellow. I took a sip and choked. It had a shot of alcohol in it. “No, I want to tell you, I have a profound need to tell you,” I said. “I just have to figure out which parts are okay and which . . .” I leaned back and closed my eyes. I should be getting back to Margaret. But that would require standing up, and anyway, Margaret was safe, living in a circus tent, with good psychiatric care, and I would turn her into a Get Well Soon card in Spanish and English, right after Doc and I started dating, but first Joey was taking the mug of yellow tea out of my hands as I heard myself snore.

I'm asleep, I realized. I'm dreaming.

And I'm in love.

chapter eight

“V
entura County Sheriff.” Her voice was crisp as cornflakes.

Sunset Boulevard, on the other hand, was like a hangover on this foggy Saturday morning. From the pay phone, I glanced at an abandoned shopping cart and two sleeping people, and fought down queasiness at what I was doing.

“Hi. I need to ask someone a question about a possible body?” I strove for a casual tone, as if calling Bloomingdale's and asking for Accessories.

“What is it you need to know?”

“Whether you've found one in the last—recently.”

“Found a body?” she asked. “Is this about a missing person?”

“No, it's about a found corpse. I was wondering, do you give out information like that to regular citizens? About corpses?”

“Ma'am, we have no information on bodies unless a crime's involved.”

“Okay, say a crime's involved.”

“What's your name, ma'am?”

I hung up.

Darn. I'd wasted the call. I couldn't now phone back without arousing suspicion, if the same woman answered, and I was dying for information.

The pay phone rang. I jumped, then reached out tentatively, as if the graffiti-covered box were alive. “Hello?”

“Ma'am, did you want to—”

“She's not here.” I hung up and hightailed it back to the shop. I should've said something clever, like “I'm from Iowa,” so they wouldn't connect me to that phone, this neighborhood. But telling one lie was hard enough, and you can't think of everything on three hours of sleep.

I glanced around the parking lot. Too early for customers, including Mr. Bundt's spies. I went in and switched the radio from easy listening to news.

The police would be swarming the hospital by now, maybe even armed with a sketch of me, the “kidnap victim,” based on the description furnished by the security guards. I imagined them showing it around, the artist's rendering of my limp blond hair and jean jacket, with the caption
Have You Seen This Woman?
Someone would say, “Hey! It's the sister of the guy on Unit 18—what's her name? Wollie. She's missing, huh?”

I would try a preemptive strike. I dialed Rio Pescado and left a breezy message on Dr. Charlie's voice mail, saying it was Saturday morning, I was fine, and just wondering when P.B. might get to leave RT and go back to Unit 18, his regular ward, and ziprasidone, his regular meds.

I redialed and this time got through to a psych tech named Jacob on Unit 18. We were interrupted twice by call-waiting. I had trouble clicking through to the other call, which I blamed on my new—cheap—telephone, but it gave me a moment to make up questions about the upcoming Easter potluck. This gave Jacob an opportunity to bring up dead bodies and police investigations, if he were so inclined, but Jacob was worked up about the plethora of cakes and pies coming to the potluck and the paucity of vegetables, and I had to promise a three-bean salad just to get off the phone. At least I'd established myself as being alive and well.

It was time to call P.B. I got through to the floor supervisor in the RT building, who told me my brother had gone to breakfast in the dining hall.

“Dining hall?” I said. “That's acres away. I thought he ate in his room.”

“Oh, not since he's off the crutches. I think he's missed his friends.”

“Wh—when did he get off his crutches?”

“Oh, just a day or two ago. We can't hardly keep up with him.”

I hung up, stunned. Just because someone can walk doesn't mean he's a killer, I reminded myself. Most people walk. Until I talked to P.B., it was useless to speculate, but it was now imperative to find out who Doc suspected of this murder. When he showed up, I intended to squeeze it out of him. Somehow. Drugs, maybe.

A large yellow something danced past the window and then danced back. I turned and recognized it as Fredreeq, in lemon yellow toreador pants and matching sweater set, waving her arms in excitement. “Robert Quarter,” she yelled through the glass. I gave her a “huh?” kind of shrug and she shrieked. With a beckoning gesture, she danced off once more, to Neat Nails Plus, the business adjoining mine.

In addition to her hours at my shop, Fredreeq was a part-time facialist at Neat Nails Plus. On Saturdays she opened and closed as well, for the Seventh-Day Adventist owners. Curious, I locked up my place and went next door to find Fredreeq plugging in hot wax machines and other sinister appliances in cubicles surrounding a fruit-laden altar. The salon staff was mostly Vietnamese, and the decor, with its red walls, shrouded lamps, and posters of Southeast Asia, was a combination Buddhist temple, travel agency, and opium den. “Don't tell me you've never heard of Robert Quarter,” Fredreeq said and disappeared through a bead curtain doorway into the salon's back room.

“I've never heard of Robert Quarter,” I called. “But if it's about a date—”

“Girl, don't you read the trades?” she yelled. L.A.'s two show business newpapers,
Daily Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter,
were read by everyone from pool cleaners to migrant farm workers.

“Tell me later. I have to go open up,” I said, then stopped. Near the door was a coffee table buried in strata of periodicals a full foot deep. I pushed aside beauty magazines and grabbed up every newspaper in sight. “Fredreeq, I'm borrowing a paper,” I called out, my arms full, and ran back to the shop.

         

“
M
AY
I
HELP
you?”

My first customer of the day looked up, startled, then dropped his head, like someone caught in a criminal act. He was about sixteen, with dismal posture and bad skin, and he stood at the LoveLetters, Ltd. spinner, spinning it slowly. He would take twenty minutes to choose a card, six days to write in it, and if the object of his desire did not respond, he would consider suicide. Sometimes my heart so ached for my customers, I wondered if I was cut out for this business.

I returned to the table in the northeast corner, covered with newspapers and the crumpled half page of the
L.A. Times
I'd grabbed from the Donut Stop the night before. The other half was with Doc—the more interesting half, presumably, as mine had Ralph's grocery store coupons on one side and lottery results and auction notices on the other. Mine also had no date or page number, so I was going through the pilfered papers a page at a time, looking for a match.

“Morning.” Joey, in blue jeans, emerged from the back room. The teenage customer followed her long, thin legs with his eyes. She was morning pale and her red hair shot out in all directions, follicles energized from a night in bed. “There it is,” she said, unearthing her cell phone from my mound of newspapers. “I'm hanging here today, if you don't mind; Elliot's out of town and his evil sister's visiting. She was going on last night about my chaise longue, how it violates the aesthetic integrity of the house, until I finally just hauled it out of there.”

Joey had married into an architecturally important house, which is why her former furniture kept migrating to my back room. I flipped through a Friday Calendar section. “Are you allowed to abandon a houseguest like that?” I asked. “Doesn't it violate some in-law hospitality rule?”

“No, because my sister-in-law likes the housekeeper more than she likes me. What are you doing?”

I showed her the page I was trying to match and she started to look through the papers with me. I should borrow her housekeeper for Margaret, I thought. At 7
A
.
M
., I'd taken the ferret for a courtyard stroll, replaced her glutinous Wheat Chex with tuna fish, a rice cake, lettuce, and grapes, apologized for leaving her alone, and told her I'd return as soon as I could. Margaret had been unmoved.

I felt Joey's look as I furiously turned pages. It was a big mistake, this vow of silence I'd taken. Bad enough that I couldn't talk about Doc or the corpse, but he'd been really adamant about Margaret, as if she were in some witness protection program. The fact was, I was bursting to discuss it all; I wasn't programmed for discretion. Maybe it would be okay to just ask questions, the kind that come up in general conversation. That wasn't “talking,” exactly. “Joey,” I said, “how do you find out about the progress of a murder investigation, beyond what's reported in the paper?”

Joey perked right up at this. She came from a family of law enforcement professionals and had worked herself, briefly, in a morgue. “The best way is to be a close relative of the victim, or know someone on the force. We don't have you dating any homicide cops, do we?”

A woman with a walker struggled through the front door, causing the Welcome! bell to ring incessantly until I rescued her. She cut off my hello with a toss of her steel gray spit curls and said, “Just looking,” in the tone of voice that means “Don't bug me.” I went to the register to ring up my teenage customer, then turned to find Joey exiting to the back room, phone to her ear. Prominently placed on the table for me was the Friday California section, folded open to page B9.

“Plea Bargain of Mob Figure Reversed on Appeal” said the headline. The word “Mob” seemed to pulsate. Mob. Mob. Mob.

“Shit!” cried the woman in the walker.

You're telling me, I thought, and hurried over to Birthdays, Humorous. The woman stood with an open purse, cursing. On my grass green carpet was a compact of pressed powder, broken and crushed. When I knelt to pick it up, the customer snapped shut the purse and exited, her walker thumping across the floor.

I was desperate to get back to my clue, but the woman could be a spy, lying in wait outside. This was the sort of thing Mr. Bundt would test me on, the Immediate Cleanup Response that was drilled into us on a cellular level. But there are times a person has to live dangerously. I returned to my paper.

Next to the mob article was an ad for Ernest Bovee, M.D., who specialized in cosmetic body surgery, and provided a smiling photo of himself with before and after shots of a woman's thighs. It was possible Doc saved liposuction ads. It was also possible he'd felt compelled, last night at the Donut Stop, to collect coupons. But it wasn't likely. With a sigh, I read the article.

P
LEA
B
ARGAIN OF
M
OB
F
IGURE
R
EVERSED ON
A
PPEAL

LOS ANGELES
—In a unanimous decision, the California Court of Appeals for the 2nd District ordered a guilty plea to be vacated in a conspiracy case against Ronald “the Weasel” Ronzare.

The appellate court acknowledged that overturning a plea bargain was unusual, but determined that trial judge Anna Whitestorm erred by failing to follow established procedures for ensuring that the defendant understood his plea before it was entered.

According to Ronzare's attorney Calvin Walsh, “It's all in the transcripts. [Judge Whitestorm] was in such a hurry to get to Palm Springs before rush hour, she would have accepted a guilty plea from a poodle. My client's former counsel was inexperienced, the D.A. was lazy and the judge—with all due respect—sloppy.”

Ronzare, an alleged operative for the East Coast crime family headed by Eddie “Digits” Minardi, was sentenced to 10-20 years for conspiracy to commit battery on two LAPD officers early last year. A second, more serious charge of conspiracy to commit murder was dropped. Ronzare is to be released on bail from Corcoran State Prison pending a new trial.

Conspiracy charges were dropped last year against two other suspects, Tor Ulvskog and Olof Froderberg, alleged operatives for Las Vegas's Terranova crime family.

I glanced regretfully at Dr. Ernest Bovee's smiling face, then returned to the mob story and read it again. I was still mulling over its significance five minutes later, as I collected jagged bits of tortoise-shell plastic and sucked up pressed powder with my Dustbuster.

A shadow stepped in front of me.

A hand reached down and switched off my Dustbuster.