by Jack Bunker
“Or to make sure she wouldn’t change her mind,” Gloria adds.
“Maybe,” says Edsel, “but here’s the thing. We didn’t find any TCAs in the kitchen, except for traces in her teacup. And there were no empty bottles or baggies in the wastebasket or compactor.”
“Maybe she had them in an envelope or a Kleenex,” I suggest, despite knowing they must have already covered this base.
“No.” Edsel shakes his head. Something about the gesture seems odd. Then I realize what it is: no sideburns.
“What about the garbage bins on the street?” asks Gloria.
“We didn’t know about the drugs at the time, and we thought it was a suicide so we didn’t sift the garbage. Besides, why would she interrupt her suicide to dump a pill bottle at the bottom of the driveway instead of throwing it in the wastebasket two feet away?”
“Just because it doesn’t make sense doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” says Gloria. She punches Edsel’s speakerphone and dials nine and then a number. Dumphy answers.
“Hey, Dump. I need you to check with City Sanitation, and if the garbage hasn’t been collected at the gas sucker’s house, get a couple scavengers out there to look for a pill bottle or a baggie or something,” she says.
“You’re kidding, right? You want to put a trash team on a suicide?”
“She had Elavil in her bloodstream.”
“Some unidentified TCA,” says Edsel. Gloria flips him the finger.
“So?” Dumphy doesn’t get it.
“So they didn’t find a pill bottle,” she says. “If there’s none in the garbage, look for baggies, empty capsules, whatever. Catalogue everything. And do it fast before it’s too late.”
“Anything else, Your Majesty?”
“Yeah. Bring me a bottle of Cristal and Johnny Depp.” She hangs up and turns to Edsel. “You have the pix?”
“Right here.” He hands me a printout of four photos taken from different angles of the teacup I saw on the table in front of Ginger. It looks sooty from being dusted for prints. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be looking for.
“You saw the body, Nob. Was she wearing gloves?”
Gloria’s point hits me like a roundhouse kick to the jaw. There are no prints on the cup. Not even the victim’s.
“It’s a homicide,” I say.
“Well done, Watson. Some amateur wiped the prints, and it could have been the victim’s suddenly unestranged sister, aka your new girlfriend.”
TWENTY-THREE
Filtered through the trees that circle the geodesic dome, the morning sun paints a Rorschach pattern on the floor. It looks like a butterfly or Dracula or the outline of a uvula against the back of the throat. Try as I might, I can’t see the corresponding symmetry in the leaves outside. It’s not even nine but the relentless sun has already baked off the morning dew.
Budweiser in hand, Billy Kidd collapses a few feet away from me on the sofa, head drooped back, ponytail crossing his shoulder, eyes staring blankly at the mirrored ball that hangs from the apex of the dome. He wears jeans that some chic couturier has almost shredded to get that thrown-out-of-a-moving-car look. His boots are purple suede with peacock-feather accents. And the latest Brothers CD cover is silk-screened on his lime-green T-shirt—a picture of Billy staring through prison bars with the word “Brothers” above and “In Law” beneath.
“Lord Jesus, give me strength,” he says.
Gloria walks out of the kitchen carrying one of the chrome and red vinyl chairs in order to sit facing Billy. The alternative is a mud-brown wide-waled corduroy beanbag chair, which she avoids for obvious reasons. The place smells like sandalwood incense.
“We can’t say for sure that it wasn’t a suicide,” she says. “But we have some doubts we need to eliminate.”
She wiggles around until she’s comfortable in the chair then asks, “Do you know anyone who might have had a reason to harm Ginger? Maybe an ex-boyfriend? A jealous girlfriend?”
“She ain’t got—” he catches himself using the present tense and chokes up. “Sorry.”
Gloria waits for him to compose himself.
After a moment, he resumes. “She didn’t used to got no friends, really. Of neither sex. Never was much of a social flutterby.”
“What about people at work?”
“Never hung out with nobody from work ’at I knowed about. She’d just go to work and come on home. Pretty much ever day ’cept Wednesday, Dr. Karl day, reg’lar as church. Side from that, she’d just sit round here, stare at the tube.”
Billy pulls off one of his purple boots and lets it drop to the floor. It sounds like an anvil landing.
“Never dated?”
“I ’spect in her line o’ work a date would be somethin’ of a busman’s holiday. Lived like a fuckin’ nun, s’cuse me, Jesus.”
“Don’t you find that a little strange, given the kind of work she did?”
“Ever’body’s strange on this planet. I leave the judgin’ to the Good Lord.”
“You know anyone she might have had a disagreement with?” asks Gloria.
Billy shakes his head and his ponytail slips off his shoulder, swinging over the back of the couch.
“Like I said, she was a loner.”
“I understand she had a falling out with her grandfather.”
“Praise the Lord, she sure as shit hated that crusty old bastard. Guess she got it from her ma.”
“Do you think Nathaniel Strain could have killed Ginger?” I ask. Gloria shoots me a look, like I’m stepping on her punch line.
“I doubts it,” he says. “Nate got him a set of balls the size of black-eyed peas.”
“Cowards are the most likely to panic and kill in a rage,” says Gloria.
“He do get ornery when he drinks, but killing his own flesh ’n’ blood?” Billy shakes his head, expressing doubt.
“It’s hard to believe her killer was in a rage,” I say. “Drugs and gas aren’t exactly spur-of-the-moment weapons.”
Gloria acknowledges this with her eyebrows and a slight tip of her head.
“So you do think she was murdered,” says Billy, his eyes tearing again. “Lordy Infant Jesus, rest her soul. She was a angel. Sweet angel from heaven. I used to lie in bed ever’ night and thank the Lord for the gift of my Lana and our two little girls. My three angels. Now they’s only one of ’em left on God’s green earth.”
Gloria and I exchange a glance and give him a moment to drown his sorrow with a long swig of cold Bud. Gloria shows a hint of her lip-curled smile, and her freckled eyes appear empathetic, but I know she’s a leopard in the bush, measuring her prey before making her move. Billy grabs a Kleenex from the coffee table and blows his nose. Dropping the dirty Kleenex in an empty ashtray, he sits back again and does one of those long slow yoga exhalations.
“What about Sophia?” Gloria continues. “I understand the girls hadn’t gotten along for a while.”
“I couldn’t say one way or t’other how they got along. They never seed each other. But Sofie’s a sweet girl.”
“What happened between them?”
“Reckon it’s my bad. After Lana died I kinda lost myself like ever’body does, you know, gettin’ liquored up, high on weed, shootin’ smack. I reckon y’all know all about it. From the tabloids, I mean.”
“I only read them occasionally,” Gloria says, which is an understatement. She’s in the habit of dropping by the market on her way home every day, unless she’s got plans to eat out. She claims it’s because her schedule is too unpredictable to do a weekly shopping, but I suspect it’s because she needs that time in the checkout line to read about celebrity two-headed babies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The ’bloids pay a healthy chunk of my income.
“Well, let’s just say that my brain was in the ‘off’ position for a decade or so,” says Billy. “Forgive me, Jesus. It was hard on them girls.”
Billy lifts his longneck to pour some beer into his mouth without lifting his head from the
sofa. I marvel at a man who can find refreshment in a morning brewski. I can’t imagine imbibing before brunch time.
“How do you mean?” asks Gloria.
“Like this one time,” he says, his eyes staring at the hanging disco ball as if it were a window to the past. “Ginger stoled Sofie’s diary, and I caught her readin’ it? She was, I don’t know, fifteen? Sixteen? So I took Ginger’s diary from where it was tucked up under her pilla? And figurin’ an eye for an eye, I read it out loud at the dinner table while Ginger set there sobbin’ her eyes out. Lord forgive me, I spewed her most private secrets out on that stained checkered tablecloth. And wouldn’t you know, Sofie picked them secrets up like little switchblade party favors and passed ’em out at school. Poor Ginger comed home in tears ever’ day for weeks, and it was all my fuckin’ doin’.”
Just when he seems to be getting maudlin, he shifts gears and asks, “You know them eighty-nine-dollar Japanese haircut scissors they sell on TV for nineteen ninety-five with a second pair for free?”
I nod unconvincingly, not sure where this infomercial is going. He turns his gaze to Gloria without moving his head. I can see the mirrored ball reflected in his eyes.
“Well, one night, Ginger took one of them scissors and just up and stabbed Sofie right in the back. Punctured a fuckin’ lung.”
TWENTY-FOUR
The first thing I notice is Scuba Barbie. She hangs from the overhead light on a piece of monofilament in her matching hot-pink mask, fins, shorty wetsuit, and dual tanks. Billy Kidd turns on the light, and Barbie casts a large shadow. Batman without the cape.
“Will ya look at the tits on that thang?” says Billy. “Lord have mercy. No wonder she needs two fuckin’ tanks. Always wondered if Ginger’d took to Raggedy Ann instead of Slut Barbie if maybe she’da found some churchier line of work.”
Ginger’s room, about fifteen feet square, feels like a little girl’s fantasy, frozen in time perhaps fifty years ago, long before she was even born. A menagerie of stuffed animals inhabits the canopied bed, surrounding an enormous Winnie the Pooh. Beside the bed is a vanity with a large oval mirror framed by fairy lights. The opposite side of the room has floor-to-ceiling shelves, half of them filled with dolls while the rest hold a diverse selection of children’s books and young-adult romance novels.
The walls are painted pale yellow and topped by a press-on border of princesses and heroines from early Disney films—Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Tinker Bell. I try to picture Ginger, the princess of interactive porn, inhabiting this space. Maybe in some episode of The Twilight Zone.
How could the woman who slept in this child’s sanctum of innocence be a digital nymphomaniac? The neurotic child of rock stars, torn between two completely disparate personalities, two polar-opposite fantasy worlds. It’s as if she’d boarded the train to multiple personality, but got off one stop shy, which may explain the stack of self-help books on the bottom of her nightstand. Topping the stack is Toxic Parents, an abuse primer I used last year for background on a matricide story. I wonder which of Ginger’s parents prompted her to buy it.
“This room is not what I expected,” I say.
“No shit,” says Billy. “As the Lord is my witness, she’da sucked dung from a mule before she’da chucked one of these goddamn dolls. There weren’t no changin’ Gingerworld, no how, no way. Coulda walked in on her twelfth fuckin’ birthday, woulda looked just the same, praise Jesus.”
After questioning Billy, Gloria goes out to spot-check the neighbors who weren’t home when LAPD canvassed earlier. Billy offers to show me Ginger’s room while I wait for Gloria to get back.
“Files are yonder,” he says, pointing to a cardboard banker’s box under an Early American-style desk, once natural knotty pine now painted white with yellow trim.
I pull out the box and flip off the top to see stacks of files. Ginger’s taxes, trust papers, investment reports, and bank statements. The police have already gone through them without finding anything of interest. I pull a few random files and take a look. As my ex-wife will readily attest, I’m no financial whiz, but I’m hoping something will jump out at me.
Billy rummages distractedly through Ginger’s catchall drawer. There’s a ziplock bag half-filled with change, some old barrettes, a cell-phone charger, some matchbooks, a few lipstick tubes. He holds up an eyebrow pencil.
“We had a gig in Hollywood once, left Lana’s stepmom, Lynette, to sit the girls. Ole gal catched her a migraine, went and took her a sleeper, called Nate to take over. By the time we gets home, she done passed out, and Nate has them girls painted all up in raccoon eyes and hooker-red lipstick like some trailer trash on a Saturday night. Lana went right off, bitch-slapped ole Nate right on his ass.” He laughs at the memory. “Fucker didn’t know what hit him.”
I find a journal of trust allocations signed by Cogswell. I wonder how much of the money was actually spent according to its allocation. Was that really a bedroom remodel for Ginger or did Cogswell remodel his kitchen? Camping gear for a school trip or leather pants for Billy? A winter coat or a couple grams of cocaine? New braces or new golf clubs?
The prospect of digging this all out depresses me. If there’s one kind of research I hate, it’s financial. The checking and cross-checking and cross-cross-checking makes me cross-cross-eyed. I decide to turn the task over to Melody.
“This could take a while,” I say. “Mind if I take these home?”
“Whatever greases your mule. Want a brew?”
I’d prefer to get home, but he looks like he could use some company. “Sure.”
I grab the banker’s box and follow him upstairs. He pops open a couple Heine longnecks and hands me one. The financial records sit by the door. He could have refused to give me access without arousing suspicion, but he didn’t hesitate. Does that mean he’s got nothing to hide? Or does it mean he’s already gone through them to remove anything incriminating?
It takes a great deal of skill to cover the tracks of embezzlement. My father was a CPA, a seasoned auditor and a good one, and he couldn’t do it. So how could Billy? He was so bad with money that Lana wouldn’t even let him administer his own daughters’ trusts. That’s why she hired Cogswell. A successful embezzler needs to be methodical, a knack Billy can’t even pronounce. Cogswell, on the other hand, embodies it.
“Do you think Cogswell skimmed from the trusts?” I ask.
“Fuckin’ A. Money don’t just disappear on trees. Ain’t nobody else except that scumbucket la’er.”
His drawl makes it impossible to tell whether he’s saying “lawyer” or “liar,” but in this context it doesn’t make much difference. He seals his lips around his longneck and upends it, draining half the bottle.
“He even contested the will. Tried to get me throwed out as guardian of my own lovin’ daughters. Wanted Nate to do it. So I got me my own la’er to go after his God-damned thievin’ ass. Fucker had him a paper trail tighter’n a second facelift.”
“Why do you think he contested the will? Was he plotting with Nathaniel?”
“I doubt it. Lana had her a clause in there sayin’ anybody what contested was flat cut out.”
“But she wouldn’t leave anything to Nathaniel anyway, would she?”
“She hated his belly for shieldin’ his guts, that’s a God-given fact. But she put Nate in her will just the same, just to make sure he didn’t contest, I reckon. Ain’t much. Hundred bucks a month. But it was enough to keep his trap shut.”
“You’d think he could have made a lot more than that by hooking up with Cogswell,” I say.
“They plays golf, but they ain’t tight. I reckon Nate cheats and Cogswell don’t like it, but Nate’s always making sucker bets so Cogswell keeps him around for chump change.”
“Then why try to give him guardianship of the girls?”
“I expect Cogswell had some kind of dirt on him.”
Billy upends his bottle and finishes it off.
I take my second sip.
“Blackmail?”
“Somethin’ what give him power,” he says. “If Cogswell coulda got Nate watchin’ the money ’stead of me, he coulda skimmed off without needin’ to go to the trouble of bush-sweepin’ his tracks. Thank Jesus he lost the case, not that he didn’t manage to drain them accounts anyways.”
Billy opens Ginger’s jewelry box and absently pokes through it. He holds up a string of pearls and looks at it in the light.
“Any idea what Cogswell might have had over Nate?”
“I’d lay money on that little pussy tail got him booted from Yale. I ’spect Nate’s daddy paid her off to keep the boy’s ass out of slam.”
He drops the pearls back in the box and does some more index-finger prospecting.
“I heard about that. Some townie girl?”
“Not just any townie. She was his history teacher’s young’n.”
Alarm bells ring in my head. “How young?”
“Polanski young. Twelve? Thirteen? Nate was supposed to be babysittin’ her at the time.”
Billy lifts a gold half-heart pendant from the Ginger’s jewelry box. Just like the one Lana wore when she was shot.
TWENTY-FIVE
Gloria sits at her desk, trying to remove a broken hinge screw from her sunglasses with a letter opener, the wrong tool for the job. This does nothing to improve her mood, which was forged this morning by water she discovered on her kitchen floor. She traced it to a drainpipe behind her sink that had been slowly leaking for weeks, ruining the subflooring beneath her cabinets and infusing the walls with the smell of rotting tuna and rancid fat. Gloria is not happy.
I sit in the visitor’s chair, reading aloud from an inventory of Ginger’s garbage.
“Five days’ worth of newspapers—nothing clipped, no sections missing—pizza box, grocery receipt from the Canyon Store. That’s that little neighborhood market halfway up—”
“I know where it is,” she interrupts. “What’s on the receipt?”
The faint blue print on the register tape is hard to read in the dingy light of the office. I hold it at arm’s length. “Dry salami, cheddar cheese, eggs, Slim Jim, apples, Tampax, and beer. Twenty-nine seventy-six.”