The Spinoza Trilogy (13 page)

“
You keep talking about ‘before the accidents’.”

I nodded, looking away.

“Tell me about the accidents.”

And so I did that, too. I found myself going over my wife’s car accident in detail. Or as much of it as I could, since I had not been there. She had been coming home from work. It had been raining. Her car, as best as anyone could figure out, had slid out of control. I knew my wife. She was a great driver. Some asshole piece of shit had probably cut her off. I knew it. I felt it in the very marrow of my bones. He had cut her off and she had swerved and lost control and went spinning across the slippery freeway. She had hit the center divider head on, only to be hit immediately after by a tour bus cruising down the carpool lane. A tour bus that had been speeding recklessly, no doubt.

Dr. Vivian listened to all of this calmly, compassionately, making sympathetic sounds where appropriate.

She asked me a few more questions and I found myself explaining the hate I had felt—still felt—for everything, especially God and my wife’s alleged guardian angels and anyone responsible for her death. I hated the phantom car that cut her off, and I loathed the tour bus driver.

In the past, I had always turned to drinking as an escape; after her death, my drinking got ten times worse. My employer, with a heavy heart, eventually fired me.

I next described my utter neglect of my little boy, who was suddenly without his mother, and now without a father, too. My neglect for him led to more drinking. I was trying to kill myself, I knew it. I couldn’t stand the pain of living. I couldn’t stand the fact that I would never, ever see my wife again.

“You said
accidents
, Mr. Spinoza,” she said quietly, calmly, leading me along gently, expertly.

I took a deep breath and plunged forward, describing the night I was to take my son to a birthday party in the Hollywood Hills. It had been the sixth month anniversary of my wife’s accident, and I had taken it pretty hard. I was so drunk that I don’t even remember driving along the twisty Mulholland Drive. My memory only begins when my car veered off the road and down into the trees several dozens of feet below. I had been ejected, but my son hadn’t been so lucky. I was so badly hurt and drunk that I was incapable of piecing together what had just happened. It was then that I felt the fire behind me...and heard the strangled cries. I remember turning around on my hands and knees, in the dirt and bushes, as blood poured from a head wound, and seeing my son through the windshield.

Still strapped in his seatbelt.

As the fire engulfed him.

We were silent a long, long time. I was aware of the clock ticking behind me. It just might have been the loudest clock I’d ever heard. In fact, it was nearly driving me nuts. I forced myself to calm down as I wiped the tears away.

Without her prompting, I went on to describe the year I had spent in jail for vehicular manslaughter. And my life these past two years, sober and alone and hurting unlike anything I thought was possible.

It was then that Dr. Vivian came to life. She stood from her chair and walked carefully around her oversized desk and sat down in front of me in a client chair. She was a professional. That much was obvious. I saw all the degrees on her walls as proof.

But she was also human, and she leaned forward and gave me the biggest hug I’d ever been given and the tears flowed. Hers and mine.

Finally, she pulled back, wiping her cheeks, and said, “I’ll deny I ever did that, but if anyone ever needed a hug, Mr. Spinoza, it was you. See you next week.”

Chapter Ten

I was having lunch with Roxi at the Electric Lotus.

She made me promise not to talk about any corpses, cemeteries or grave robbers. So instead I told her a little about my first therapy session, leaving out the hug. Roxi approved of anything that would help me move forward. Why she stuck it out with me, I’m still not sure. Certainly not for the laughs and giggles. One thing about shy people, we’re great listeners, and when I was done recounting my early afternoon session, Roxi launched into a long story about a pitch-meeting she was going to have with Paramount Studios. I listened and nodded in all the right places, but all I could think about was the interior of the coffin, and the compressed cushion where I was certain someone had been knocking.

Perhaps even knocking long and hard.

* * *

The house was immaculate.

It was a mini-mansion, as I would describe it, with Doric columns out front and marble floors in the entry way and a winding staircase that led to the second floor. The older lady who greeted me for our appointment did not smile at me. When people don’t smile at me, I get more nervous. Words are harder to find and the sweat breaks out all over. Sometimes stammering ensues, too.

James Bond I’m not.

“Have a seat, Mr. Spinoza,” said the woman. “Would you like something to drink?”

I said I was fine.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“
No, thank you,” I said in a strangled whisper.

She frowned and sat across from me and I fought my nerves and pressed forward. I had a job to do, after all. It was my mantra. In fact that mantra—
I have a job to do
—had gotten me through many personal harrowing experiences. Harrowing, that is, for me.

I have a job to do,
I thought again and again.

I raised my voice. “As you know, I’m here to talk about your daughter.”

She merely nodded. Her name was Elizabeth Perkins, and she was the mother of Evelyn Drake, whose body was presently missing. The family, I knew, was wealthy. How and why they were wealthy, I didn’t know. Perhaps old Hollywood money. An investor or a producer or something. Anyway, Mrs. Perkins was wearing white slacks and a red blouse that highlighted her trim figure. She was probably in her sixties. Her scowling face made her look older.

“
Has anyone contacted you about your daughter’s... missing remains?” I asked.

“
Other than the police, no. Only Detective Hammer and now you.” Her jawline tightened. “May I ask your interest in this case, Mr. Spinoza?”

“
I’m working with the boy, her biological son.”

She made no indication that she heard me. No nod. No frown. Nothing. She said, “I was under the impression that the boy is a runaway.”

“He ran away from an abusive situation and is now in a better situation.”

I was all too aware that she was his biological grandmother. That fact did not seem to please her. “Better situation, how?”

“He’s living with an aunt and uncle.”

She made a noncommittal noise in the back of her throat. I pressed forward, so uncomfortable I could barely think straight. “Has anyone unofficial contacted you, Mrs. Perkins?”

“Unofficial in what way?”

I took a deep breath, calmed myself.
I have a job to do. I have a job to do.
“Has anyone tried to blackmail you with your daughter’s remains?”

“
I don’t understand the question.”

Breathe, breathe. “Has anyone demanded money for the return of your daughter’s body?”

She raised her hand to her face and looked away and the tears sprang from her eyes. The change was so sudden that I sat there, surprised. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I had just asked a mother, who’s daughter had been murdered a few years earlier, if a body snatcher had tried to ransom her daughter’s remains.

Jesus.

A sick world. A sick question. A question I had to ask.

She was shaking her head and her steely facade had crumbled completely. She kept shaking her head even while I sat there, uncomfortable, regretting my decision to come, but needing answers, nonetheless.

“No,” she finally said. “I’ve heard from no one. Do people really do that?”

“
It’s possible. It happened to Charlie Chaplin’s family.”

She wept harder and covered her face and I heard movement from upstairs, although I saw no one at the time. I asked her if she had ever been contacted by the cemetery. If there had ever been any indication of a grave plot mix-up. The questions were difficult and painful for both of us, and all the while I kept hearing creaking above me. Someone was pacing up there, listening.

Mrs. Perkins was beyond speech. She just kept shaking her head at each question and finally I decided to leave. I apologized for causing her pain and left my card on the coffee table.

And as I turned to leave, I involuntarily gasped. From upstairs a young woman was looking down at me. Peering over the bannister from around a corner that led, I assumed, to a hallway. The woman had a strong resemblance to Evelyn Drake, but she was younger by many years. Her sister, I thought. Or perhaps a cousin. I blinked, and she blinked, and then she turned away, disappearing into the shadows.

I let myself out.

Chapter Eleven

I was sitting in a Starbucks with a new friend of mine, the old detective, Aaron King.

I had met Aaron recently through another acquaintance of mine, Jim Knighthorse, a character who worked out of Orange County. All three of us had been brought along on a case involving a missing girl, led by another Orange County detective, a young woman named Samantha Moon. Four detectives working one case, and we did eventually find the girl, with Aaron King and Samantha Moon seeing the case through to the end.

Samantha Moon was someone I thought about often. Beautiful, perky, but shrouded in a mystery. Something haunted her. What it was, I doubt I would ever know. Aaron King and I talked a little about the case of the missing girl, and about Samantha Moon and her own possible secrets, but Aaron was keeping quiet about her. My instincts told me that he knew something he wasn’t revealing. At least, not yet.

I switched the subject to my case at hand. I needed another investigator to bounce some ideas off of, especially now that I had recently been faxed the autopsy report. A report that had been disturbing in more ways than one. I would have picked Hammer to speak with, but Hammer was fairly closed-minded. I needed someone with an open mind.

A very open mind.

After all, I was beginning to think that something very, very strange was going on here.

Aaron King seemed enigmatic himself. The old guy was good looking enough, and projected a confidence that I completely lacked. He sat across from me in a wobbly outdoor chair, drinking a hot coffee, black. No frills. I decided that Aaron King looked like someone I knew, but I couldn’t place him. Not now. And, really, I didn’t care.

I caught him up to date on the case, keeping to the facts. And next caught him up on the autopsy report Hammer had faxed to me just that afternoon. A report that included the method of death: multiple stabbings.

Aaron cringed as if he’s burned his tongue. “He was a bastard, for sure. They have him on Death Row?”

“Yes.”

“
Good.”

I nodded and next brought up a peculiar aspect of the slaying. “He had used a silver knife.”

King’s eyes narrowed. “A strange metal for a knife.”

“
It was a silver
butter
knife.”

“
So he grabs the first weapon he sees.”

I nodded. “Maybe. Except the knife was in the upstairs bedside drawer.”

“Helluva place to keep a butter knife.”

“
Lots of people keep weapons by their beds.”

“
But a butter knife?” asked King.

“
Maybe the man liked toast in bed.”

King shook his head. Glendale Boulevard was thick with cars and exhaust. The exhaust wafted over us. It was a sad testament to our city living that neither of us coughed nor waved it away. King said, “Did the husband ever give a confession?”

“He never spoke to the police. In fact, he never spoke to anyone.”

“
So we’ll never know why he kept a butter knife in his upper drawer next to his bed.”

“
Probably not.”

“
And yet he stabbed her...how many times?”

“
Seventy-two times.”

King whistled. “That’s rage.”

“By the time the police arrived, she had been drained of most of her blood.”

“
I would think so.” King shivered and looked sick. I didn’t blame him.

“
The husband then staged the scene to make it look like a break in.”

“
Dumb ass.”

I nodded. “He was arrested within the week.”

King set his drink down. In fact, he even pushed it away. “So what’s your concerns, Spinoza?”

I took a deep breath and wondered how much I should tell him. I finally decided that I needed to bounce some thoughts off of someone, some slightly disturbing thoughts, and the enigmatic old guy seemed about as good a choice as anyone.