Death Was the Other Woman (21 page)

As we watched her make her careful way, I realized I may inadvertently have saved Rita's life. If all I now suspected was true, it was possible that Brucie and Cal would have slipped Rita into the drink along with me once the ship was motoring toward Hawaii. Just as this thought flitted through my head, I saw Rita's eyes slide over the three of us—me, Mustard, and Dex—as though she hadn't seen us at all. That's when I realized another thing: I may have saved her life, but right this moment I wasn't sure she'd thank me.

“You know, it's a damned shame and even kind of a waste,” Dex said. “A woman like that, she seems to so love her clothes, wouldn't you say, Kitty?”

“I guess,” I replied, unsure where this was going.

“I wonder how she'll like the more limited wardrobe she'll have in prison.”

“I don't think she'll like it much. For one thing, the prison blues will clash with her hair.”

“I expect you're right, Kitty,” he said thoughtfully, watching as they led her past us. “I expect she won't like it at all.”

“WHAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND
”—Houlahan's voice held a slight slur—“was why she double-crossed him.”

“Too many players,” Mustard piped up. “Which she? Which he? I'm havin' trouble keepin' ‘em all straight.”

Houlahan looked piercingly at Mustard, as though he didn't quite understand. And I guess he wouldn't have understood it all in any case. Not now. Not yet. That would have to come.

“Well, why would Rita double-cross Dempsey? It seems like she had a pretty sweet setup. They both did. They'd have gotten away with it all, and no one the wiser.”

Dex, always the perfect host, reached into his desk and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. He reached across the cluttered surface, topping glasses as necessary. He did it with the air of a man who was using this simple act as a touchstone while he thought. I could see why; it was a confusing enough tale.

Dex and I had pulled every available chair into his office. Now Dex was behind his desk, and O'Reilly, Houlahan, Mustard, and I sat around him. I was pleased to be included in the group, not relegated to my own desk and instructed to type. I'd expected the order when we'd parked in front of the office, but it hadn't come. O'Reilly and Houlahan didn't need impressing on this day. And Dex knew that my part in the matter had been vital and foolhardy. He'd told me about both in the car in no uncertain terms.

“Near as I can figure,” Dex said now, “in the end the double cross was because of a girl.”

“Ain't it always?” Houlahan said with a smirk.

Dex nodded, but said, “It ain't always, but it is often enough that it makes you think.”

“Brucie,” Mustard said. Maybe I was the only one who could hear a slight note of sadness in his voice. Disappointment. What might have been.

Dex nodded, and like a couple of German shepherds, the flatfoots were instantly alert.

“What's that?” O'Reilly said.

“Nothin',” Dex replied. “It doesn't matter now.” He sighed deeply and ran his hands through his hair. It was a familiar enough gesture, and I knew exactly what it meant. The flatfoots had to be told about Brucie and about how she fit into all this. They needed all the details if justice was to be done. But they didn't need it right this second, not with Mustard sitting right there and looking as miserable as I'd ever seen him. “OK,” he said finally, “it does matter, but there are a few pieces I'm still putting together. And there's a client I need to talk to before I can spill the whole thing.”

“Tomorrow morning?” O'Reilly said. “At the station.”

“Sure. Sure thing, fellas.”

“Scout's honor?” Houlahan said.

Dex nodded. “Scout's honor,” he said, though I was fairly confident he'd never been a scout.

O'Reilly maybe had the same idea, and he narrowed his eyes at Dex, but didn't pursue the matter. Instead he drained his glass, then held it out for more. “The girl said there was another man in the cabin at first,” he said, while Dex poured. “But we couldn't find any trace.”

“The girl is Miss Kitty Pangborn here,” Dex instructed, pointing at me.

“Katherine,” I corrected.

“And she said the guy was a torpedo named Cal,” Dex said.

“How'd she know he was a torpedo?” Houlahan asked.

“Your mouth is moving, but your head is pointed in the wrong direction,” I said pertly. “I'm sitting right here.”

“OK, sister,” he said, addressing me for the first time. “How'd you know he was a torpedo?”

I shrugged. “It fits, is all. He talked about killing me, calm as you please. He would have done it too, I'm sure. He said they'd wait until dark, then ‘slip' me ‘into the drink.' “ There was more I could have said. Stuff about Brucie. Brucie and the brother I suspected wasn't. But I held onto it for now. I needed to talk to Dex. Alone. What I had to say shouldn't be said in front of Mustard; he shouldn't hear it that way first. Besides, the way I figured it, there was no hurry. The
City of Los Angeles
would be seven days on the water. Plenty of time to work out how best to handle the matter, how to finally tell the police and have them wire down there so the authorities at Hilo could apprehend Brucie and Calvin when the ship docked.

“Slip you into the drink, huh? Nice. Wouldn't even have had to waste a bullet.” Mustard said it jovially, but belated concern for me etched his brow.

I grinned back at him. “That's right, Mustard. No use wasting perfectly good bullets when there's no call.”

“Here's another thing I don't get,” Dex said, interrupting the exchange. “You said you locked the fingerprints we took in San Francisco into the office safe, right?”

I nodded. “That's right. Before Cal and I headed out to . . .” I shot a look at Mustard, knowing his place in Venice was his secret. Or at least it had been until he took Brucie there and I inadvertently dragged along her lover.

“Out where?” Houlahan insisted now.

“Out to Venice,” Mustard finished. “We'd stashed Brucie out there.” I could almost feel the flatfoots perk up again at the name, but then they settled down. Either the booze was softening them up, or they realized Dex would deal with them straight later. Maybe both.

“Right,” I said. “I locked the fingerprints in the safe that day. Before we left. And I've racked my brain about it too, Dex, because who would have broken in and taken them?”

“Because who would have known they were there?” Dex added.

“Right. The only thing I can figure is this: when I opened the safe, Cal was there in your office. Sleeping.”

Dex arched a single eyebrow.
“My
office.”

“Sorry but. . . yeah. I didn't know what else to do with him. And don't forget, at the time I was sure he was Brucie's brother. The only thing I can figure is that maybe he
wasn't
sleeping. Maybe he saw me open the safe and put something in there— maybe he even had some idea what the something was—and later on he checked in with Rita, who told him—or someone— to come back and glom the envelope.”

Dex kicked back a bit and looked thoughtful. “I guess that's as good an explanation as any,” he said at length. “And the way things have turned out, it looks like it might be the only one we get.”

Mustard drained his glass, put his head in his hands, and rubbed his ginger hair. “What a business,” he said distractedly, into the table. “What a mixed-up business the whole thing has turned out to be.”

“You got that straight,” I said. “Which reminds me ... we now know for sure that Dempsey wasn't the one killed at the house on Lafayette Square. So if not Dempsey, who was killed there?”

This the flatfoots had already worked out. “We won't know for a few days yet, but we're figuring it was G. Eddie Powell. He'd been working for Dempsey for a few months, and his wife reported him missing three days ago.”

“What's the G stand for?” Mustard asked distractedly.

Houlahan shrugged. “Gregory? Gorgeous? Graham? It doesn't matter. What
does
matter ...”

O'Reilly picked up the story as if he and Houlahan were an old married couple: “What matters is G. Eddie was probably hired because he looked a lot like Dempsey. Same build, similar coloring, good-looking gay. Dempsey and Rita probably had this cooked up for some time.”

Dex took up the story. “So they killed G. Eddie at Dempsey's house. I was supposed to witness the whole thing. Only I was sleeping when it went down, and missed all the action.”

“Remind me not to hire you to do any P.I. work,” O'Reilly chirped.

“That's too bad,” Dex replied dryly. “I could have made a small fortune off the two of you.”

“But why take the body to San Francisco?” I asked. “Why not just dump it into the river, let the sharks here take care of things?”

“It wasn't the sharks, kiddo,” Dex replied. “It was the distance. The way I figure it, Dempsey wanted the body found so Lucid Wilson and his boys wouldn't go off looking for him. Dempsey and Rita didn't just want to leave a cold trail, they wanted to leave
no
trail. Frisco was perfect because it's far enough away to make identification difficult. It would just give them that much more time to get away.”

“Is that why Rita was in San Francisco? When I saw her at the club with Morgana?” I asked.

“That's what I was thinkin'.” Dex nodded. “Dempsey was probably holed up someplace—maybe even in the city—while Rita made sure the body got found and ID'd as Dempsey, in time for the two of them to get away clean.”

“But they'd probably hoped for a couple more days before the body turned up,” Mustard said. “If he'd been more decomposed, it would have been that much harder to identify him. Hell, a few weeks in the drink, no one would have been able to identify him at all.”

“He was plenty decomposed,” I said with a gulp, remembering. In an effort to calm myself, I took a tentative sip of the whiskey Dex had insisted on pouring for me. It burned going down. I could feel myself relax, though I wasn't sure if the whiskey helped or not.

It was over. It was done. And I was glad.

WHEN I GOT HOME
it was late, and I was so tired I just wanted a bowl of soup and my bed. Marjorie caught up with me on the stairs.

“Mrs. Jergens was here earlier,” she told me. On a certain level I wasn't surprised.

“She's not here now though.” I didn't need to ask.

“No, that's right. She's not. She had a young man with her. He loaded her trunk and her boxes into a car, and she told me she wouldn't be back.”

I was saddened but not entirely surprised by this, either. What she said next, however,
did
surprise me.

“She left this for you,” Marjorie said, reaching into the pocket of her housedress and pulling out a creamy envelope. “And she apologized, though I'm not sure for what. And she didn't ask for the month's rent back.” Marjorie didn't have to tell me that she was relieved about that part. Empty rooms didn't fill any soup pots.

I took the letter into what had, for an instant, been Brucie's room—she'd not spent even a single night there. The room was unoccupied again, and no sign of Brucie had been left behind. Even the flowers I'd bought for her had been cleaned up, and not a single dead leaf remained.

I sat in one of the wingback chairs and looked out the window and over the city. It was full dark, but downtown Los Angeles was ablaze with lights. Marjorie had said that my mother liked to sit in this very spot and read when she was with child. What did she think about at those times? Did she think about me? I imagine she did. She would have thought about the phantom me, kicks increasing as I readied myself to come into the world.

What would my mother have said about all of this? I wondered. But I had no reference for discovery. After a while I knew I couldn't delay any longer. I sat more deeply in the chair, preparing myself for what was to come.

Dear Miss Katherine,
the letter began, a nod, I knew, to the one evening we'd shared in the house, and her mirth at the way Marjorie still addressed me. I realized that I'd never seen Brucie's handwriting before this instant. It was tidy. Neat, but with flourishes. Like an artist might write. Like a bird trying to find her way out of her cage.

By now you'll know a great deal. What a mess I've made of everything. You mustn't think too badly of me. The lies I told were never against you, and I hoped none of them would hurt you. In fact, if I were allowed only one regret
—
and I have more than one, believe you me
—
it's that we didn't get to become friends. I know that if things were different, we should have done.

There are things that I could tell you, details that would make things more clear, but to be honest, I'm not sure I have clarity myself.

I'm going far away. I'm going to find someplace where they've never even heard of Lucid Wilson or Chummy McGee. And I'm going to be better there, Kitty. I'm going to be the me I've always wanted to be.

Please give my regards to Mustard. Another regret or six. But he deserves a better girl. A girl whose heart is as pure as the one he thought he saw in me.

Thank you for taking me into your home, and sorry again for all the trouble I caused.

And it was signed, simply,
Brucie.

I read the note once all the way through, and then I read it again trying to find the things she hadn't said. They weren't there, or if they were, I couldn't see them.

When I thought things over, I realized that if half of what I suspected was true, even though everyone had been playing everyone else, Brucie had been the puppetmaster who had, in the end, controlled all the strings. Somehow the description didn't seem to fit the merry young woman I'd met. But there you have it. Sometimes, as they say, appearances can be deceiving.

I wondered if she'd orchestrated the death of her husband so that the way would be clear for her to manipulate Dempsey. And then, with Dempsey dealt with, she could run away with Calvin. It was even possible that Calvin was also merely a means to an end. Malleable and handsome, he would have played the part of pawn quite well.

I knew I'd probably never have the answers to all of these questions, and it made me a little sad. Brucie, the bright, beautiful smiling girl. Brucie of the big brown eyes and the seal-sleek hair. Those are the things I'd seen, but now I knew there'd been so much more.

She'd asked for my forgiveness, but I didn't know that it was really in my power to grant it. For what it was worth, I could forgive Brucie. She'd done terrible things, but none of them had been against me. Her demons though—well, I doubted they'd forgive her anything. Because forgiveness—real forgiveness—must come from within.