Just Desserts : A Bed-and-breakfast Mystery (17 page)

“Dash?” A squirming Lester was trying to break Mavis’s hold on his plaid jacket. In spite of himself, he grinned.

“Dash, huh? Hey, I like that better than Ankles!”

Ellie had reappeared, clutching Harvey’s state-of-the-art emergency case. “Ice,” said Harvey, helping Otto sit up.

“That’s all he needs for now.”

For once, Oriana assumed the role of selfless spouse, hurrying off with Renie into the kitchen. Otto was tentatively rubbing his jaw, malevolent little eyes cast up at Lester. “I’ll sue your butt off! Where’s my lawyer?”

Mavis shouldered Gwen out of the way. Refusing to relin-quish Lester, she gave his lapels a sharp shake. “Simmer down, everybody! What’s this about Wanda and Otto?” She yanked Lester closer until they were nose-to-nose. “Watch what you say. I’m making mental notes for KINE-TV.”

For Lester, it was muscle over media as far as Mavis was concerned. “Hey, lady, I’m more than willing to talk! That’s why I drove up here from Cedar River this morning. But give me a break! Let go, will you? You’re fraying the threads!”

Mavis hesitated just long enough to remind Lester who was in charge, then released him. Harvey and Lance were helping Otto into an armchair in the living room. Armed with ice, Oriana ministered to her husband. Ellie stood by the armchair, holding Harvey’s medical kit at the ready.

Gwen and Dash sat down on the window seat while Judith
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commandeered a footstool. Renie appeared with the last of the shrimp florentine, clutching the plate with a possessive air. Lester started to sit back down on the sofa, thought better of it, and struck a pose in front of the fireplace. He cracked his knuckles, this time more gingerly, and was preparing to speak when Joe Flynn and Officer Price strolled into the living room. Seeing Otto about to explode, Judith intervened with rapid-fire introductions. Joe and Price responded with solemn handshakes and appropriate sentiments.

“Mr. Busbee is about to make a…clarification,” said Judith, resuming her place on the footstool.

“What is this, Jude?” asked Joe under his breath as he nudged Judith over and sat down beside her. Judith ignored both his question and the pressure of his hip.

Lester’s posture on the hearth suggested a racetrack tout imitating the lord of the manor. He smoothed back the long graying hair he’d trained to grow over the farthest reaches of his bald spot and hooked his thumbs in his belt. Satisfied that his audience was at full attention, he cleared his throat and launched into speech:

“Wanda was a good broad,” he began, “as Ankles—excuse me, Dash—here can tell you. She was big-hearted, liked to have a few laughs, worked hard at her job, and was always there when you needed her. Wanda was somebody you could count on.” Lester’s blue eyes misted over as he dug deeper into his impromptu eulogy. “She was like a sister to me.” He paused and sniffed. “Hell, she
was
my sister, half-sister, that is, but so what?” He turned vaguely defiant, as if he expected his listeners to split hairs over blood ties. “So what I want to know is, who killed the poor kid? I haven’t been here half an hour and I already got my ideas.” He glared at a hostile Otto, who would have sprung from his chair had he not been restrained by Lance and Oriana. “My money’s on you, Otto Brodie! You’re her dad, and I don’t see any tears!”

Protests again erupted from the Brodie contingent. Lester let them run their course, then strutted a bit and cracked
126 / Mary Daheim

his knuckles. Judith winced. Next to her, Joe sat with a pleasant, if noncommittal, expression on his face. At the moment, he looked more like a guest at an informal gathering than a homicide detective.

“Well, well,” said Lester after the latest tumult had died down, “you all seem surprised. Funny, I didn’t think this was some big secret.”

A fuming Otto renewed his bluster, but Joe emerged from his pose to cut him off. “It’s not, Mr. Busbee. Wanda’s par-entage is a matter of public record. So is Mr. Brodie’s marriage to her mother. We’ve confirmed all that with the authorities down south.”

“Daddy!” Gwen threw her arms around Otto’s neck. “How could you! Did Mommy know?”

“
I
didn’t know,” exclaimed Oriana. “
Dio mio!
I married Bluebeard!”

“Put a cork in it,” muttered Otto, eyes narrowing as he took in Lester, lounging against the mantelpiece. “Okay, okay, I made a mistake about a hundred years ago! Big deal.

It was a crazy fling, a Vegas J.P., a romp in the hay. I was young, she was a knockout.” He stopped, running a hand over his naked pate. When he spoke again, it was in a deeper, more reflective tone. “Hell, she was a movie starlet.

I was still a kid, playing the bigshot and making deals with defense contractors. I got caught up in that L.A. action. I didn’t even realize Gloria was nuts until I found her out in front of our motel, making like a detour sign.”

Oriana was holding her head in both hands, a study of the Wronged Woman. Gwen had backed away from her father’s chair, her fingers clutching at Dash’s shirt. Ellie was exchanging puzzled glances with Harvey while Mavis scribbled on a notepad she’d found in Judith’s treasured eighteenth-century escritoire. Lance sat next to his wife on the sofa, eyes fixed on a guide to Midwestern birds which reposed atop the coffee table.

“This Gloria was Wanda’s mother?” he asked in an uncertain voice. Taking the pervasive silence for assent, Lance shook his head and regarded his father with bewil-JUST DESSERTS / 127

derment. “She was your wife. And she was crazy as a”—he paused, his gaze reverting to the guidebook—“loon?”

Gwen shuddered. “Then Wanda was our half-sister! How horrible!” The comment could have referred either to Wanda’s demise or her family connection. Judith wasn’t sure.

“Gee,” said Lance in wonder, “that’s right. That’s
weird!
”

He actually frowned, mulling over the enormity of it all.

Otto took a deep breath and fingered his bruised chin. “I told Minnie, before we got married. I’m no deceiver. But we decided to keep it to ourselves. The thing was, I didn’t know about the kid.” He gave himself a little shake, quivering from top to toe, then turned to the distraught Oriana. “I didn’t tell you because…well, I sort of forgot, and that’s the truth.

It happened so long ago.”

A sudden silence fell over the room. The afternoon light was thinning as the sun gave up its attempt to peer through the gray clouds. At the front of the house, the evergreen trees stirred in the wind and a flock of starlings fled the branches of the big old maple. On the leaden waters of the bay, a tugboat hauled a huge blue barge into port while seagulls trailed behind like an honor guard.

It was Mavis who broke the spell, using her most direct interrogative manner: “Who got the divorce, Otto? You, or…this Gloria?”

Otto gave his daughter-in-law a baleful look. “She did. In those days it was the gentlemanly thing to do, before all this women’s lib claptrap. Nowadays, everybody can be at fault.”

Mavis’s tight features expressed disdain for such rampant chauvinism. Lester, however, had stopped cracking his knuckles. “Hold it,” he said, looking half amused and half surprised. He started to laugh, a finger pointing at all of them. “Wanda getting murdered is no laughing matter, but if there’s any joke here, it’s on you. Gloria didn’t get a divorce. Mrs. Otto Ernst Brodie is alive and trying to stop traffic in Pismo Beach.”

TWELVE

THE DOORS TO the front parlor were closed, with Officer Price and two other policemen keeping watch on the bellicose Brodies. Lester Busbee had been sent out of harm’s way, over to the Rankers’s, where the ever-hospitable Arlene promised a late lunch in exchange for the latest news.

Judith had started a fire in the grate to ward off the gathering winter gloom. She sat at the little table with Joe and Renie, sharing mugs of hot chocolate and a big bowl of popcorn. Sweetums, making a rare attempt to get into his mistress’s good graces, swished his scraggly tail against Judith’s leg. It would have been a cozy January scene, had the topic of conversation not been murder.

“You two have done your homework,” Joe said in admira-tion after the cousins had finished relating their most recent discoveries and suppositions. “Despite your skepticism, we’ve done ours, too. Most of what you figured checks out. The part about Otto’s first wife not getting a divorce stumped me this morning. We as-128

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sumed she had, but maybe in Mexico. But Lester’s right, Woody just told me Gloria is residing at the mental institution in Pismo Beach as Mrs. Otto Brodie. The poor old girl has been there since March of 1943.”

Discreetly, Judith tried to extract a popcorn kernel from her back teeth. “Wow, forty-six years! In other words, since right after Wanda was born. I suppose Otto could be telling the truth about not knowing Gloria had had a baby. She might have been too gaga to let him know.”

“That’s possible.” Joe sat back in the chair, hands clasped behind his head. “It’s time to have another talk with Otto.

Do you really think he recognized Wanda when he came into the kitchen last night?”

“Last night.” The words came out on a weary sigh. To Judith, Wanda’s murder seemed to have occurred days earlier, maybe even weeks. For all that she was trying to keep to some sort of schedule in her role as hostess, Judith had lost track of real time. “Yes, he may have,” she replied, trying to visualize the confrontation between Otto and the alleged Madame Gushenka. “Something certainly put him off. Then Madame…Wanda made some remark about ‘seeing through people’ which was more cryptic than I guessed at the time.”

Joe nodded. “So maybe Wanda rigged all this to meet Otto. She initiated contact with Oriana, remember. That wrong number was no accident, and for all her outward sophistication, Oriana is a gullible soul. Lester says Wanda had seen Otto before, in Palm Springs. I suspect he’s right.”

He got to his feet, stretching his neck muscles and warming his backside in front of the fire. “The other question is, did any of the others know about Otto being Wanda’s father?”

“Dash?” suggested Renie, scraping out the last of the popcorn.

Joe considered. “That would depend on when Wanda found out that Otto was her father. Let’s say she finds out when she gets her birth certificate for her first driver’s license.

But there’s a whole page of Brodies in the L.A.

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phone book—yes, we checked—and God only knows how many in the area. So, being a typically flighty and/or lazy teenager, she doesn’t pursue the matter. Lester indicated that she only tracked Otto down in the last couple of years.”

“A.D.,” said Judith, then clarified in the face of Renie’s puzzled expression. “After Dash. But at the time of her marriage to Dash, she probably knew
who
Otto was, if not
where
. Dash’s introduction to Gwen strikes me as being trumped up, too. Unless, of, course, he was just after her money.” She picked up her mug, discovered the hot chocolate had grown quite cold, and set it back down on the table.

“You know something, Joe,” she said, giving him a sidelong look and a crooked smile, “Renie and I have been babbling like a pair of brooks. But you haven’t told us a damned thing, other than what we’ve figured out for ourselves.”

A less confident man would have had the grace to look sheepish. But Joe Flynn merely shrugged and gave Judith a wry smile. “This is business, Jude-girl, not show-and-tell.

You’re doing just fine with your amateur night performance.

Don’t screw us up—remember we have to go through procedures—and when we’re done, we’ll figure out which one of these yo-yos is the perp. Okay?” He stood on his tiptoes, leaning forward, hands behind his back.

It wasn’t okay, as far as Judith was concerned. Joe’s so-called professionalism rankled. He was dragging his feet, concealing information, acting as if he really didn’t trust her, despite everything. Which, she realized, was nothing much, at least for the last twenty odd years. She was about to lash out at him when Renie, obviously sensing trouble, intervened:

“You said you were getting some data up from L.A. on the hit-and-run and the amnesia cases. Have you found any tie-in so far with Wanda or the Brodies?” Renie’s voice had changed, taking on the more studied tones of
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her formal graphic design presentations in the city’s most important corner offices.

Joe was taken aback by Renie’s unexpected metamorphos-is. “Okay,” he agreed, “I can give you what little I’ve got. The Edelstein hit-and-run case was closed six months after the accident. There were no witnesses, no traceable skid marks, nothing. And Wanda never worked at Star of Jerusalem.”

“What about Harvey?” asked Judith, trading wrath for hope.

“Harvey was at St. Peregrine’s until he came to Norway General.” Joe picked up a Hummel figurine from the mantel.

“Wanda might have dated Edelstein, who knows? At any rate, L.A. can’t find any connection between Edelstein’s death and this case.”

“Then there
is
a connection between Harvey and Wanda,”

said Judith. “Assuming Harvey was at St. Peregrine’s during Wanda’s era.”

“She was there quite a while,” agreed Joe. “Harvey was on the staff for at least ten years. The question is, was there any way Wanda could have found out that Otto was Harvey’s uncle? Our operating room oracle isn’t exactly the chatty, chummy type. I doubt he’d just casually mention his family connections to one of the nurses.”

Renie had also stood up, leaning on the back of her chair.

“It’s definitely not his style. Who’s Rakesh?” she queried, still in her board room voice.

Joe grinned, then carefully replaced the Hummel. “I thought you’d never ask. Omar Rakesh apparently was the only poor Arab in L.A. He was on welfare when Wanda met him in 1983. They were married the same year, divorced in

’86. Omar folded his tent and moved to Montana.”

Judith and Renie exchanged frustrated glances. It seemed there was nothing to be gleaned from the Rakesh angle, either. “Okay,” sighed Judith, “what about Dr. O’Doul and the amnesia case?”