Not So Model Home

CHAPTER 23


What A Load of Fertilizer

Later that afternoon, I decided to go looking for answers myself. First stop: the potting shed in the backyard. I left Ian’s house and walked the expansive lawn toward the back of the eight-car garage. As I neared the shed, I could have sworn someone was there walking behind me. I stopped and turned around quickly but saw no one. Were all these murders creeping me out? Was my mind playing tricks on me?

I entered the unlocked shed and stood there silently, taking it all in. What was I looking for? I wish I knew. Maybe I’d see something that might spur my mind if I saw it. If I were Hercule Poirot, I would start by thinking about what might have happened; then I would reconstruct the steps of the crime. Okay, I didn’t have a French accent, but I could live with that. Everything had been gone over by the police and was back in its proper place, so I was looking at everything that was there the day of the murder. If what I was looking for was there in the first place. One thing at a time.

I looked at everything in the shed and went through the inventory, item by item, taking them down and examining them, then putting them back exactly where I got them. On the top shelf was the gopher poison and a bottle of Malathion. Spotless bottles of poison. Agatha Christie would have loved this. The next shelf down, Miracle-Gro, bonemeal, and two labeled wooden boxes, one containing three pairs of gardening gloves, the other containing three garden trowels. Again, spotless. The gloves looking like they had never touched dirt. Mine, I had to admit, were never this clean. No dirt on them whatsoever. Drake apparently washed them after every use. Just two shelves. On the main potting table, there were just four pots, all containing succulents presumably ready to go out in the yard now that the days were slowly getting cooler. Also, there was a small, four-drawer cabinet filled with twist ties and a pad of paper with a list of more plants under the heading “To Buy.” I looked at the pad to see if there were impressions on the pages below made by previous notes, but nothing was discernible. Under the table on a shelf below was a dented half-gallon paint can to hold paint while painting, two two-gallon paint cans of latex Ralph Lauren paint (I shook them just to make sure there was paint in them), a jar of eight different paintbrushes all so clean you’d think they were never dipped in paint, and finally, toward the back, an opened bag of bonemeal. I hauled the heavy bag to the front, took the five perfectly spaced clothespins off the top, and stuck my hand inside, looking for a gun or something dangerous. I felt plastic toward the bottom, grabbed at it, and pulled out a . . . a baggie with hundreds of dollars in it. Followed by another. And another. And another. No, not hundreds. Thousands. I counted one bag and estimated the amount in the others and came up with a figure of $87,000. Had the cops missed all this? In the bottom of the fifth baggie, there was a key that looked like a safe deposit key. (I know, since I carried one on my key ring.) I put the baggies back, burying them down at the bottom of the bag. On the floor . . . I just couldn’t get over the money. Eighty-seven thousand! And probably much more than that in a safety deposit box in a bank somewhere, all of it, no doubt, belonging to Drake. I imagined Drake was planning his escape from Casa de Ian. Or he was embezzling from Ian, skimming money off the top of his estate. Anyway, not my business. Okay, back to work. On the floor, I pulled out three pots filled with gravel, sand, and the last one, Japanese river rocks. All white. I explored deep inside the pots but came up with nothing.

And those were the contents of the shed. Not much to go on, unless you thought that keeping close to $100,000 in a bag of bonemeal was suspicious. I exited the shed and closed the door behind me. I still swear someone was watching me, eyes peering from somewhere unknown, but after scanning the ficus hedges, the Mediterranean fan palm groves, and the visible upper stories of the various windows that looked down on this part of the yard, I concluded that it was just the heebie-jeebies caused by the fact that a murderer was still stalking around, maybe waiting to strike again. It was natural to feel this way, I told myself.