by Nancy Bush
We left The Face loaded down with packages. I was amazed, based on how small the product sizes were, how full Violet’s shopping bags were. I offered to carry a couple and though they weren’t heavy, the bags bumped my hips and shins all the way to store number two, which was a fancy-schmancy furniture store called Interiors Italianate. I sat down on a tufted lounge that was situated on a raised dais by the entry, Violet’s bags flanking me. I had the presence of mind to remove my jacket first and hang it on the wrought-iron rack nearby. Other coats were already on the rack, so I figured I wasn’t committing some major faux pas. In this, apparently, I was wrong as a wiry gentleman in wire-rim glasses, a white-cuffed and collared shirt and a taupe sweater looked ready to scream, stamp and phone the authorities if I did not get off the furniture.
Violet interceded with a smooth “She’s with me.” The salesman sent me a look that was full of pleading, as if he expected me to wipe my feet on their expensive material, but then let me be. I thought about lying down on the lounge, staring at the ceiling and singing “That’s Amore” but decided to act like a grown-up and merely waited dolefully like the long-suffering pack mule I was.
We made a trip to the parking structure to off-load our bags, stopping at a lingerie shop on the way that Violet insisted on entering. I was so over shopping that I groaned aloud and refused to pass the threshold. She practically pushed me inside and then wouldn’t leave until I tried on a push-up bra to go with my new dress. She wanted to buy it for me, but I put my foot down, though the price of that piece of lingerie nearly caused me a coronary. I put another foot down when she insisted I purchase some thong underwear. Puhh…leeze…like I would be caught dead with a piece of material dividing my butt cheeks. I settled for some basic bikini underwear that was on sale and demure by comparison.
We left in a kind of annoyed huff with each other. I felt I’d been very patient throughout our shopping trip, and it must have shown on my face because once Violet slammed the trunk on her Mercedes, she turned to me and said, “Jesus, you’re a pain in the ass.”
“Why do you keep trying to buy me things?” I demanded.
“God knows. I keep thinking we’re friends, or something.”
“We can’t be friends.”
“Why not? Because of Dwayne? Come on, Jane. We’re way past that now, aren’t we?”
I wasn’t as convinced as she was, apparently. “It’s not because of Dwayne,” I retorted.
“Then what?” She leaned against the side of her car, arms crossed.
“I don’t know.”
“Jane…”
I held up my palms to get her to stop. I don’t know what it is about her that drives me so insane. In some weird way I’d like to believe it is because of Dwayne. That at least would be uncomplicated, even understandable, maybe. But it’s more about Violet herself. And me. I have this sense that something bad could happen to me if I hang around her too much.
“What do you want to know about me and Roland that I haven’t already said?” she asked on a sigh.
“Tell me more about the fight.”
“What’s to tell?” She pressed her lips together. “He wanted out, okay? He said he wanted to stop, and we’d barely gotten back together. I mean, I could count the times we’d been together and I was so happy. I just—” She shook her head and took a moment. “Maybe I just wanted to be in love. Maybe I put all that on Roland too soon and he panicked. I don’t know. But we went to bed that night okay with each other. It was the next morning—Gigi’s wedding day—that things really went bad.”
“What happened?”
A car drove slowly past us, looking for a spot. The driver gazed at us hopefully but we ignored him. Beyond the concrete edge of the lot the skies opened up and rain poured down, a deafening curtain. Both Violet and I paused, staring into the deluge as a mist of precipitation whisked in and dampened our faces.
“I don’t really know. He’d come home from the rehearsal dinner in a foul mood. Really mad at Renee about bringing this guy who wasn’t invited. He’d driven Renee up from Santa Monica, so I guess she figured he’d earned a spot. Dumb. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Gigi and Melinda both mentioned him.”
“I just wanted him to stop thinking about the whole thing. I mean, who cared, really? In a matter of hours Gigi was going to be married. So Renee infuriated him. So what?”
“You argued about it?”
“I just wanted to get past it. Roland had a drink. I tried to talk him into bed. He said something about sleeping on the couch. We had a fight. I almost left, and then we eventually did go to bed together.” She smiled fleetingly. “And it was really sweet. I wished I’d known then that it was our last night together. I would have tried harder to be…less selfish. I wanted to make plans and he wasn’t interested. I think he was thinking of breaking up with me. I don’t know.” She ran her hands through her hair, holding the ends at her nape and closing her eyes.
“Did he say something, or do something, that gave you that idea?”
“Not really. Not that night. Everything seemed okay again, but then the next morning he was brusque. Distracted.”
“Did something happen?”
She thought about it and shook her head. “No.”
“Anything at all. Maybe something that didn’t have anything to do with you. He came home upset with Renee, and you had a fight,” I repeated.
“More like a spat. A couple of comments and that was it,” she corrected.
“Then you went to bed together and you thought everything was all right.”
She nodded.
“Then what happened?”
“He just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. The phone started ringing. All that wedding stuff started. He didn’t want to get in the tux. I actually laid it on the bed for him but he was so touchy. You know, being the supportive girlfriend behind the scenes isn’t my forte,” Violet remarked candidly. “But I was doing a hell of a job.”
“So, then…?”
“We got dressed and went downstairs. I was getting ready to go home and leave him to it, but Roland hadn’t put his coat on. He was in the pants and shirt, and he was…oh, I don’t know…a pain in the ass, if you want to know the truth. He wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t say what was wrong. I tried to be all fun and bubbly and act like I didn’t notice. I joked that he could call me at the reception and maybe I could sneak in for a while, and he about bit my head off. I was getting fed up by this time.”
“What time was it?”
Violet shrugged. “Ten-thirty? Eleven? I don’t know. It was early. Roland was supposed to be at the Cahill Winery for pictures at two. He was going to leave around one. I told all this to the police.”
“I’m just trying to get the timeline down for myself. So, what happened between you and him between eleven and one?”
“Nothing. We stopped talking. He’d made a toast to Gigi the night before, apparently, and he was planning to say something more at the reception. He said he wanted to go finish writing his speech, and he walked outside to the garden beyond the solarium. I stayed in the kitchen, but I kind of kept peeking at him. His back was to me. He was on the phone. There wasn’t a lot of writing going on.”
“You know who he was talking to?”
“No. But I heard him say something about Melinda. I was really trying to eavesdrop but he caught me, and that’s when we really started fighting. I wanted to know what he’d said about Melinda. At first he wouldn’t answer. Told me it was none of my business, to which I said, ‘Oh no. I have a stake in this!’ and I demanded to know what was going on with him and Melinda.” She looked down at the ground and I saw color creep up her neck. Violet was usually in such perfect control that it sent a frisson down my spine. “We said some pretty terrible things to each other,” she admitted. “Things I wish I could take back. Roland was absolutely furious. He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me up against the wall. I couldn’t believe it! He told me to stay out of his business. Said he ha
d things to work out with Melinda. Said he’d misjudged her. But he was roaring this at me! Shaking me.” The memory brought tears to Violet’s eyes, which she dashed away in fury. “The tray was right there. On that Asian buffet in the hallway. I grabbed it and slammed it against his head.” She pressed her knuckles to her lips and said around them, “I hurt him, but it wasn’t half as much as he hurt me. He grabbed his head and yelled at me to get the fuck out of his house. So I left.”
Her narrative cut off abruptly. We stood quietly, listening to the rain. After a moment I stirred myself. “What time was that?”
“Noon, maybe?”
“How much of this did you tell the police?”
“As little as possible. I said I’d stopped by in the morning, that we had a fight about the fact I wasn’t invited to the wedding.” Her lips pulled into a bitter smile. “I can’t believe we were breaking up over Melinda.”
“But she knew about you and Roland.”
“Suspected, not knew,” Violet corrected.
“Maybe that’s motive enough,” I suggested.
“Who? Melinda? No way. Melinda would never kill Roland. He was her meal ticket.”
“She doesn’t act like it.”
“She had a chance to come out okay in a divorce settlement, but death? Uh-uh. The estate went to Gigi and Sean, almost entirely. She signed a prenup. Roland said so. Besides, she was at the wedding when he died, wasn’t she? As much as I’d love to blame this on Melinda, I don’t see how she could be in two places at the same time.”
I nodded. The same thoughts had occurred to me. Like Larrabee suggested, I kept trying to think up some other motive for Roland’s death.
“Well, who else, then?” I asked Violet.
She shrugged. “Some disgruntled patient?”
“But he was talking about Melinda on the phone.”
“Talking about her…I don’t know. Her name was mentioned, that’s all. And he said something like ‘your day’ll come’ or ‘you’ve got it coming’ or ‘today’s the day.’” Violet made a dismissive gesture. “Maybe he was talking about the wedding, and I got it screwed up.”
“It sounds like a threat.”
“Maybe,” she said, cocking her head as if she was thinking that over.
Watching her, I recalled Melinda’s comment about how I should look into Violet’s past. I’d dismissed it, mostly because I knew the basics of Violet’s history. I’d thought Melinda was just being snarky. But could something else have cropped up? Something about Violet that she still wasn’t willing to share? And could this all be an act? A means to push me in another direction?
“And afterward, that’s when things got physical,” I said.
“We’d never fought like that before,” she said. “I was stunned when he shoved me against the wall. It just wasn’t like him.” She searched through her purse for her keys. “It’s just depressing to go over this. I really thought Roland and I had a chance. I wanted to remarry him. It sounds ridiculous now, but I fell in love with him. When we got married the first time, I don’t know…I didn’t really feel that way about him. I liked him. Sure. He was nice to me and I wanted out of L.A. I was not thrilled about his kids, and they were not thrilled about me, but it wasn’t terrible. I even helped Gigi with birth control when she needed it. At fourteen! Trust me, that girl would have been pregnant before she hit high school if I hadn’t intervened. And the drugs and alcohol? Roland may have had his problems, but drug abuse runs in that family. Look at Sean, and Gigi sure took her turn around that block when she was younger. So Roland and I split up. Too many forces dragging us down back then.” She shook her head at the irony of it all. “But now was our time. It was just us. Somebody killed him, Jane, but it wasn’t me.”
For the first time I thought Violet looked her age. Every minute of it.
“Okay,” I said after a long moment.
She gazed at me uncertainly.
“I get that you loved him.”
Violet exhaled as if she’d been holding her breath for eons. “The Dwayne thing got in the way of you believing me before.”
That was true, but I didn’t feel like confirming it.
“Maybe it was those Wedding Bandits,” she said. “Maybe they came to rob the place after I left, but Roland was still there and got in the way. Maybe…they hit him with something, too?”
My skin rippled as if a cold breeze swept over me. Maybe she was trying to lead me in another direction.
Something niggled at my brain. Another thought that swam just out of reach. I tried hard to catch it, but it seemed to leap away at the last moment, a teasing sprite I was going to have to ignore for now and hope it would draw near enough some time in the future for me to grab.
A different issue occurred to me. “You didn’t go to the memorial service?”
Violet was opening her driver’s door. “Oh, I went, though I know they all wished I wouldn’t. I came late and stayed toward the back, but it wasn’t really the way I wanted to say good-bye, so I left early.” She looked at me over the roof of her car, her smile ironic. “I drank a toast to him by myself. To what might have been.”
I nodded.
“Jane?”
“Yeah?”
“Find who killed him. Please.”
I nodded again and climbed in my Volvo. As I drove toward the parking lot exit I watched her in my rearview mirror. She took a long time to thread her key in the lock. Sometimes it’s weird how people age in an instant. Vitality one moment and then poof. Father Time swings his scythe and hourglass and knocks them hard on the head.
I thought maybe it was a good thing she’d damn near bought out The Face.
CHAPTER TEN
I drove straight to Dwayne’s and we stood side by side just inside the sliding glass door to his dock. The slider was tightly shut for once, as the rain continued unabated. Balanced lightly on his crutches, his binoculars hanging from one hand, Dwayne silently watched the deluge while I recounted the gist of my latest interview with Violet.
When I was finished he digested the information for a bit, then said, “So, now what do you think about our client?”
“She’s been lying to us. Okay, omitting. Amounts to the same thing.”
“Think you squeezed her dry?”
“Pretty damn close.”
Dwayne nodded thoughtfully. I waited for further instructions, but he just kept staring out at the weather. I was feeling frustrated and stymied all over again and asked myself once more if I was really cut out for this business.
“Who do you think called Roland that morning?” Dwayne asked finally.
“Someone involved in the wedding?”
“Roland was talking about Melinda during the call, so it wasn’t her. When you talked to Gigi, did she say she’d called him?”
“No…she must have been having mimosas about that time, and getting her hair and makeup done,” I recalled. “With Deenie and Melinda.”
“Doesn’t sound like she’d take a break to call dear old dad,” Dwayne said. “It was after the phone call, or calls, that Roland was upset.”
“Yes, but Violet said he was distracted and they were having trouble the night before, too.”
“But not like after the phone calls. That’s when things got physical.”
“True.”
“Somebody set him off. Whoever called Roland gave him some information that sent him over the edge, enough for him to push Violet against the wall.”
“Do you think he was mad at Violet?” I asked. “Or he was just enraged and she was there to take the brunt?”
“Could be either. We know that after Roland talked on the phone he and Violet got into a fight, and she hit him with the first available object, the silver tray.”
“She says it was the first time they fought physically.” When Dwayne didn’t immediately respond, I asked, “You’re not convinced Violet’s telling the truth anymore?”
“I don’t think she killed Roland, but I don’t think she’s giving
us the complete truth, either. Was Roland going back to Melinda? Was he breaking up with Violet? Were he and Violet getting back together? There’s no way of knowing. I’m not even sure Violet really knows. We’ve got to stick with the facts. And the fact is Roland took at least one call that precipitated the fight with Violet.”
“Roland’s cell phone,” I said suddenly. “The police must have confiscated it. You think Larrabee might tell us about those calls?”
“Not unless it suits his purposes.”
“What do you think we should do?”