seventeen
AS WE EXITED THE INTERSTATE, WE BEGAN TO SEE the multimillion-dollar homes dotting the cedar-and-oak covered limestone hills to our right. Trudy and I went over the plan for the tenth time. We were zipping along in her bubble-gum blue Miata convertible because she said that my “old” truck would stand out in this new-money neighborhood, drawing unwanted attention. Mine was the vehicle of a maid or a construction worker, she said. They really got eyeballed. Her little Miata wasn’t a Mercedes, but it might pass for a car one of the poorer residents might buy his children, who, in my opinion, probably deserved more eyeballing than the abovementioned categories, but I wasn’t going to split hairs with Trude. She was doing me a favor.
Trudy had come up with the perfect way to get past the guard gates. She’d called an interior design customer of hers on the excuse that she’d been to an antiques auction preview and thought a piece there would be ideal for them. She just wanted to make sure it fit before she bid on it. Once we measured, we could go on to Ricardo’s house.
“The only hitch is, Reyn,” Trudy explained, “you have to act like you’re my assistant.”
Humph. “Can’t I just be a friend along for the ride?”
“Um, no. These people are picky about who they let into their home.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have an assistant.”
“Xylophones and Xeroxes, Reyn, why do you have to worry everything to death? They don’t know I don’t have an assistant. I did this house three years ago and have come up in the world since then.”
“How on earth do you remember their décor three years later? Aren’t they going to be suspicious? How are you going to explain seeing some antique and placing it only in their house?”
Trudy shot me a sidelong look that made me nervous. “Their décor is, um, unique. You’ll see. You’ll never forget it, either.”
I doubted that. Décor really wasn’t something that stuck with me, no matter how expensive it was. We turned at the massive stone marker announcing “The Dominion,” passed the expensively verdant golf course with its palatial country club, and neared the guard gate. The waiting line was five deep. We crept along.
“What do they ask for, a complete financial statement before they let you in? The measurements of everyone in the vehicle?”
“Well, if that were the case, it might have helped get us in quicker if you’d agreed to stop at Victoria’s Secret on the way,” she pointed out, looking askance at my chest hidden beneath the ruby rayon. “If they find out you buy your underwear at Dora’s Discount Deals, they probably won’t let us in.”
She grinned. I groused. Finally, she pulled up to the guard’s podium standing in front of a control room that looked like it might pilot the starship Enterprise.
“We’re going to the Strake home.”
The guard shook her stern head. “I don’t think so.”
Trudy’s mouth dropped open. “What? They called ahead, I’m sure of it.”
The guard pointed at someone in the control room, who dialed a phone. “Mr. George Strait did not call us today about anyone visiting.”
“George Strait lives here?” I blurted out. Normally, I am very cool when it comes to men, with two exceptions: country-western singers and bull riders. I lust after them with no shame. I just hoped I wasn’t salivating.
Trudy waved me silent, throwing me an aggravated look.
“I said,” Trudy enunciated each letter carefully, “Strake, with a k, as in kill.”
The guard’s eyebrows flew up under her bangs. Oh, great, Trude. It was my turn to glare. Between the two of us, we were certainly slipping in unnoticed.
The guard on the phone was turning bright red, apologizing into the receiver to George, I assume. A third guard stepped out of the control room with a clipboard and nodded once.
The guard at the podium was writing down our license-plate number.
“Do you know your way?” she asked.
“Yes,” Trudy began.
I cut her off. “Actually, she’s terrible at directions. If you could just give them to me once, I’ll make sure she doesn’t get lost.”
I was sure the guards didn’t want anyone wandering around lost inside the gates, making the high-priced residents nervous. The guard explained how to get there. She asked for Trudy’s driver’s license and said she could have it back when we left. As we wound our way up the hill, we argued about whether it was my George comment or her kill comment that warranted holding her driver’s license hostage. At any rate, if anything went amiss in the Dominion that day, we were toast.
“Next time, we’re driving your truck,” Trudy muttered.
She pulled up the driveway of a three-story house that looked about a mile high. It was stucco, and it was painted black. Okay, so maybe I would remember some of their décor. As we got out and walked toward the front door, a little white truck with an amber light on the roof and “Security” lettered on the doors passed slowly on the street. I hoped it wouldn’t wait for us. We didn’t have a plan for getting to Ricardo’s house under Rent-a-Cop surveillance. Smoothing down her neon mini-dress, Trudy rang the doorbell. I expected Morticia to answer, but instead, a very ordinary-looking middleaged brunette wearing forty-thousand-dollar diamond earrings greeted us. Her dyed sienna hair was cut to chin length in the latest star style with long, eyelid-dusting bangs. Those bangs told me this woman was bold, liked to make a statement, and thought of herself as sexy. Boy, I was about to find out how right I was.
Mrs. Strake and Trude air-kissed. That phenomenon still amazes me. I can never get my smooch and my cheek approach timed just right. I end up either puckering up right in someone’s face, which sends them reeling backward in abject terror, or actually making contact with their cheek, which, of course, is the biggest no-no because the whole idea behind the air-kissing business is not to touch.
I stuck my hand out so Mrs. Strake and I could shake as Trudy introduced us. That’s when I caught sight of the sculpture in the cavernous foyer. It was a life-size bronze pair of nudes—a man and a woman in the most unusual sexual position I have ever seen. Could she really get her leg up like that and her hands there while he was doing that to her? I cocked my head to the side. It looked like it might hurt unless one was a professional contortionist. Lucinda Strake was trying to peel her fingers away from our shake. Oops. I’d been a little distracted. Trudy stabbed a fingernail into the small of my back as we stepped into the foyer. I guess I needed to take this all in stride like the lackey I was pretending to be. Perhaps erotica was décor number 403 taught in interior design school. We passed a mirror. I took a step back. Its frame was wooden, carved with monkeys with very human-looking faces in a hundred different sexual positions. At least, I thought there were a hundred. I didn’t have time to count.
Trudy caught my elbow with her talons and dragged me along with her.
“I still haven’t found anything just right for this space, Trudy,” Lucinda was saying as we neared the double doors to the dining room. Our host kept glancing at me suspiciously. Could it have been my mouth dropping open with each bizarre piece of erotica we encountered? As we passed the dining room, I tried to slow down to fully take in the ten-foot-by-sixteen-foot oil painting on the wall, but Trudy hustled me along so fast all I caught was a flash of tangled legs and bare fanny.
We got to a small room at the end of the hall that I suppose one would refer to as a lounge. Wallpapered in a deep crimson velvety fabric, it had a half dozen of those one-sided lounging chairs that reminded me of Roman orgies and a small built-in bar. The glass table in the center was held up by a metal labyrinth of bodies I resisted looking too closely at. I’d just gotten my mouth to stay closed, after all.
Lucinda and Trudy were standing at an open space on the wall next to the bar, discussing the antique piece in question, which existed only in Trudy’s imagination. I glanced at the highball glasses reflected in the mirror behind the bar. I caught sight of a penis and a pair of breasts. What they were doing, I don’t know. I looked away and tried not to imagine what her dinner guests did on those lounging chairs, sipping out of those glasses.
I couldn’t believe my good Catholic friend was behind all this. Wait till I told Mama Tru. On second thought, I thought I’d save it to hold over Trude’s head as potential blackmail material the next time she pissed me off. The thought of blackmail sobered me up. I hadn’t had time to mull over Ricardo’s potential dealmaking. I wouldn’t have bet he’d be so underhanded and dirty, but I wouldn’t have bet he’d be murdered, either.
“This massage table is in very good condition,” Trudy was telling Lucinda. “Eighteenth-century Thai. Apparently, it’s straight out of Bangkok.”
“As long as it fits, you can go as high as forty-two thousand,” Lucinda Strake said.
I coughed. That was the annual salary of one of the richest natives of my hometown. Trudy glared. I cleared my throat.
“Allergies,” I explained with a weak smile.
Trudy snapped her fingers and held open her hand. I wondered if she wanted a low five, then I remembered she’d handed me a tape measure in the car. I took it out of the pocket of my blouse, trying not to smack it into her hand too hard. I was supposed to be subservient. She snapped it open, pulled out a bit of the metal tape, then zinged it shut. What was this? Checking to make sure I hadn’t tampered with the numbers on the inch markers? She dropped it into my hands with her thumb and index finger, then pointed at the wall. Grrr. I scuttled as best as my pride would let me over to the wall and measured the height and width of the space, calling out the numbers, which she entered into her PalmPilot. She hmm ed and sighed as she reviewed data on the tiny screen, tapping the little wand against the side thoughtfully. Lucinda, her hands clasped in front of her chest, was holding her breath. She blew it out suddenly.
“Okay, go to fifty thousand if you need to.”
Wow, I didn’t know Trude was this good. She’d built the suspense so high without saying a word that the lady was about to hand her a blank check. She even had me on edge, and I knew the piece wasn’t going to fit because it didn’t exist.
“I’m sorry, Lucinda.” Trudy finally shook her head sadly. “This piece is just not going to work.”
“Oh, no.” Lucinda looked like she would cry.
Trudy patted her on the shoulder as we walked back into the hall. “I’ll keep looking.”
“With all this talk, now I’m eager to have this space filled. We’ll double your fee if you find something before the month’s out.”
“I’ll find something,” Trudy promised as she ushered me out the front door.
“She won’t say anything,” Lucinda said with another glance at me. “Will she?”
I bristled. Trudy stuck another fingernail into my back and twisted. “Would I hire someone indiscreet?”
Lucinda smiled gratefully, and I smiled back, teeth clenched. Trudy, feeling I was going to tell her client where to go, quickly air-kissed her and dragged me to the car. I was so mad I almost forgot to look for the security truck. It was gone.
We started down the street and stopped just short of the intersecting street that would take us to Ricardo’s house. Trudy edged the little sports car in front of a thick mountain laurel tree, which would hide the car from the house we were parked in front of. First, she put up the top so we could squeeze into our exercise wear. It involved a lot of grunting, groaning, swearing (only on my part), and looking up and down the street for cars. And just to make my day complete, as Trudy and I were maneuvering the cramped space and trying not to put each others eyes out, I heard a loud rip. Of course it came from my jeans, not hers, which were left without a crotch. Good thing I didn’t need them anymore.
Just as we’d planned, Trudy popped the hood. I got out, glanced around to make sure no one was looking, lifted the hood, pulled the cable loose from the carburetor, and let it hang. I eased the hood shut. Now, if anyone asked us what we were doing there, we could say we had car trouble. And my sister Pecan said all those months chasing Hervey Keil my junior year were a waste of time. She thought I was only watching his butt every time he bent over the hood. Wait till I told her it enhanced my investigative technique.
I cocked my head north, and we started out. I wished we were there already, not so much because I thought someone would stop us on our nefarious mission but because I was wearing spandex. This was Trudy’s idea. She said the only way we wouldn’t be noticed walking in the Dominion was if we were power-walking in overpriced exercise wear. Since I don’t own any, I stuffed my tree-trunk legs (I refer to them as “muscular” in public just to show I don’t have a self-esteem issue) into a pair of Miss Exquisite Hams’ skintight leggings. The fact that she got to wear the black ones and I got the fuchsia just proves life’s not fair.
The road to Ricardo’s house rose at a sixty-degree angle in front of us. As we huffed and puffed our way up, several cars passed, everyone doing double takes—the men at Trudy’s legs, the women at my bravery for wearing pink spandex. Finally, we approached Ricardo’s house, which seemed a lot closer to the intersection when we were driving, and I was surprised to see it looking the same. The first time I’d seen it, the nondescript rock one-story hidden among the oaks had surprised me. His ultra-modern salons screamed so for attention I’d assumed his home would, too. But the better I got to know Ricardo, the more it made sense—the salons were PR, his home was his private enclave. I looked both ways before we power-walked down the driveway and slipped behind the cover of a sago palm to the front door.
Trudy had extracted from Crandall the jewel that the police had deactivated the alarm system so they could come and go during the investigation. If she hadn’t done that, I would’ve had to drag Gerald into the whole deal, and that wouldn’t have been pretty. He broke out in a cold sweat if Ricardo’s bank account didn’t reconcile by ten cents. What would breaking and entering do to him? I popped my heel out of my shoe, recovered the key from my instep, and fit it into the lock. Holding my breath, I turned it, trying not to imagine the alarm going off and me trying to run away through the woods behind in shiny fuchsia. Scary.
Silence greeted us as I eased the door open. We both let out our air and stepped over the threshold. I could see everything was as I remembered, except for the sprinkling of fingerprint dust on every surface. I resisted the impulse to clean it up.
“Don’t touch anything,” I told Trudy. What kind of criminal was I to have forgotten gloves? “We need to find something to wear on our hands so we don’t get fingerprints everywhere.”
Every hairstylist uses thin rubber gloves to apply chemicals. As a rule, we are vain about our hands for good reason. Our customers look at our hands while we do their hair, and no one wants someone with nasty-looking fingers going through their precious locks. That’s why most of us use gloves for other chores, such as washing dishes and cleaning house. Ricardo’s hands were the most beautiful I’d ever seen on a man. He had to have a box of gloves here somewhere.
It struck me as we tiptoed from the foyer to the kitchen that this looked like a model home, and, in fact, he may have bought it as one, furnished and all. He agonized over every small detail in each salon, but at his home, I doubted he agonized over anything. The greasy dust covered the emerald-green marble countertops and an island big enough to house my entire kitchen. I’d bet he had rarely cooked in there. The pantry, whose door I opened using a kitchen towel, held a bare minimum—a box of crackers, a can of salmon, ultra-virgin olive oil, a can of Rotel tomatoes, a box of Grape-Nuts. No pudding. None was to be found in the refrigerator, either, which held a few vegetables, fruit, and a package of gouda cheese. I got lucky under the sink, where I found not pudding but the box of gloves. I handed two to Trudy and snapped on a pair myself.
We moved from room to room, whispering. Why we whispered, I don’t know, since the nearest home was a half-acre away. Still, our stealthy mission seemed to call for it.
“You know, it doesn’t seem lived in,” Trudy observed.
“Yes, the décor is vanilla, but even the worst décor gets a personality from its owner. I don’t feel anything here. No personal photos are out. Even the art on the walls is motel bland. I wonder if Zorita could feel anything if we brought her through here?”
“Zorita would feel the presence of greenbacks if he had any hidden away.”
“You’re so callous, Reyn. Speaking of green, you need to remember the green aura she saw around you. I’ve been reading up on auras, and that’s a real warning sign that you’re going to get hurt.”
“I’ve already been hurt. My back. Your husband tried to cripple me.”
Trudy shook her head at my aura ignorance. “I’m going to hate to have to say I told you so.”
I moved to the final bedroom, which Ricardo used as an office. Only it didn’t much look like he used it. Of course, the space where the computer had been was empty, the police no doubt having taken it for evidence. Damn, I wished I could see if he had any files that referred to any of the ten names in my pocket. Except for the fingerprint dust, the desk was pristine clean, with not even a scrap of paper or a stray pen. The drawers were perfectly organized with office supplies.
Disappointed, I closed the last drawer and turned away. I guessed this was a big waste of time. Scythe and his crew had swept out anything that was potentially useful. I moved back to the master bedroom and went through the bathroom drawers and cabinets. No revelations there, beyond the fact that he preferred Rembrandt toothpaste and Charmin toilet paper. A weird-looking brush sat next to a pile of fingerprint dust. The handle read “SAPD”. It looked like one of the evidence techs had forgotten it.
Determined to find something, anything, I went to his walk-in closet and began searching the pockets of the pants hanging there. I looked around. If anyplace in the house showed Ricardo’s personality, it was here. The clotheshorse owned a six-figure wardrobe.
I could hear Trudy opening and shutting drawers in the bathroom. “Where do you think he kept his condoms?”
“Who says he needed any?”
“Come on, Reyn. Every single man should have some. Modern Sex magazine says that the percentage of men who contract a disease from sex is—”
I stuck my head out of the closet. “Trude, how many magazine subscriptions do you have?”
She jutted her chin in the air. “None of your business. Besides, I’m just trying to help.”
I went back to my search. At slacks number twenty-one, I found a business card from a Mexican food restaurant on the near west side, with “3/tacos $1.99 before 10:30 a.m. ” written on the back. Probably not the case breaker, but I slipped it into my shoe anyway. Never know when one might get the munchies.
The alarm pad on the wall beeped. The alarm was deactivated, but it still announced when a door or a window was breached. Uh-oh. I grabbed Trudy and dragged her into the closet, closing the door softly and switching off the lights.
“Do you think it’s the killer?” Trudy whispered.
Holding my finger to my lips, I shook my head hard. No, I did not think it was the killer, although he or she was better than the alternative. The alternative being the police. I had a momentary flash of hope that it was Gerald. But then I remembered I had his key. Damn.
In the pitch dark, I searched my visual memory for the best places for us to hide should whoever it was open the closet door. I shoved Trudy into the corner behind a long alpaca coat. Her skinny black legs would blend into the shadows. My pink ones were an issue, though. Eye-catching, to say the least. Listening for the intruder, I slid two plastic storage bins off the top shelf, put them against the wall behind the shirts, and stood on them, crouched in a semifetal position. Uh-oh.
“Ack,” I moaned.
“What?” Trudy whispered.
“Shut up,” I said through clenched teeth. “It’s just my back. I don’t know how long I can hold this.”
As I began to catalogue every nerve in my lower lumbar region, we heard voices. A man and a woman passed the closet door, grousing about detectives.
“They can leave doors to vics’ houses unlocked, and they don’t get any heat, but we leave one small tool and get an ass chewing. Is that fair?” the man said.
“Crime scene is what solves the case, and they get all the credit,” the woman agreed. “Their heads are so big it’s amazing they fit through the doors every morning.”
Thank the good Lord for professional jealousy and office politics. I heard them pick up the forgotten dusting brush and walk back out, passing the closet door again.
“Whose the worst, d’ya think? That Scythe?”
I nearly fell off my perch, I was nodding so hard.
“Oh, no,” she said. “He can be a little brusque, and some things he says come out wrong, but he’s just really driven to solve cases. And every now and then, he can be so charming. One time, before you started, he brought flowers to all the women in our department and the receptionist on his floor.”
Huh?
“Aw, he’d just dumped his last Flavor of the Week and was looking for a new one.”
“You’re just jealous because girls don’t swoon over you like they do him.”
“Yeah, they swoon, and even before they’re done fainting, Scythe’s through with them and, bash, they hit the ground.”
“You should be grateful he leaves something for you to pick up.”
“Hey! I’m not that bad!” the man shouted after her. The front door opened and shut.
We waited what seemed like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes. It wasn’t long enough to be safe but, damn, my back was killing me. I unfolded myself from my position of torture and opened the closet door. Trudy left the alpaca with a good-bye pet.
“You shouldn’t listen to that guy about Scythe”
“Yeah, I’m sure I want to be his flavor of this week.”
We’d turned the corner, and Trudy started to argue, but instead, she looked at the wall, then at me and back again. “Something’s not right. That wall is a little too thick. There’s not enough room in the closet to account for the design on this side. Let’s go back in and check it.”
I never guessed that a Watson with an interior design degree would be the one to break the case, but she was. When we went back into the closet, I pulled the Prada lavender silk shirt back from the wall on the fat side, and there was a framed photo of a handsome teenager, his black hair moussed into spikes.
“He looks familiar somehow,” Trudy murmured.
I wasn’t distracted by the kid but by the fact that it was the only framed photo in the house, and it was against a wall that Trudy said was too fat. I carefully took the photo off its hanger, but the wall was blank. No secret door. Not even a safe that we probably couldn’t have cracked. I knocked all along the wall, but all sounded the same. It sounded like Sheetrock, and it felt like a piece of it dropped in my stomach.
“I guess I was wrong.” Trudy sighed. “Sometimes contractors make mistakes and then cover it up. The owners never catch it.”
Reluctantly, I went to replace the photo. As I ran my hand along the back of the frame to line up the nail with the hanger, my fingers caught something square on the back of the frame. I turned it over. A flat magnet was taped there. I peeled it off and stared at it, wishing it could talk.
The whole purpose of a magnet was to meet another magnet. I held it flat against the wall, starting as high as I could reach and working down in grid fashion. On my last pass, next to the baseboard, I heard a crack and felt the magnet pull. Slowly, I drew the magnet off the wall, and a one-foot-by-one-foot piece of the wall came with it.