by Lia Matera
“All right,” I interrupted my aunt. “All right, I’ll come.”
Kirsten was dead, and someone had tried to kill Gleason. But that didn’t necessarily absolve them of Lennart’s murder. Maybe, in some way I didn’t understand, it even proved they’d done it. There was no harm in making Gleason squirm a while longer. God knows, he’d made me—
I hung up quickly. What I did, I did for Lennart Strindberg. Not for me. Jesus. Not for me.
Sandy whispered in my ear, “Sit down, honey. You look a little shook up.”
I hadn’t heard him come up behind me. My shoulders knotted when he touched his lips to my neck. Afraid of my friends, unsure of my enemies—
I wheeled around, pushing him away. “Damn that shallow, stupid woman! I hate my aunt! I’ve always hated her! She used to go around telling people she’d taken my mother’s place. Saying what a big responsibility it was. Which meant she came over twice a week with a bakery coffee cake. And she didn’t like me to play with Hal when we were kids. You know why? She wanted him to play with the hotshot boys, the doctors’ sons. To be a big macho sports hero. Which he was, for a while.” And I’d only just stopped disliking him for it. “She even bought him a red Fiat Spider when he was sixteen. Had a reporter come over and take pictures of Uncle Henry handing him the keys. That’s when it finally got to Hal. He used to leave the car in the driveway and walk everywhere. Did you know he turned down Princeton to go to the local junior college? That’s why he didn’t get a student deferment.”
“An embarrassment of riches?” Sandy blinked his sleepy eyes at me. “Wish I’d had that problem.”
I started up the stairs.
“What time are we going to the party?” he asked gently.
We. I stared down at him. “Did I mention it to you?”
He nodded. “You told me to bring a tux.” He looked disconcertingly relaxed. Familiar. The same as ever.
I wanted to ask him why he’d come to town a day early. Why he’d lied about it. Who he’d been talking to on the phone last night. But I remembered his dripping anorak, his thirty-eight caliber Detective Special: two things in common with the man who’d shot at me.
And the first rule of cross-examination is, Don’t ask a question unless you already know the answer. I couldn’t risk a wrong answer. Not when we were alone.
“You don’t have to come,” I suggested cautiously.
Sandy pushed a pale cascade of hair off his forehead and shrugged. “Shame to waste the tux.”
I visualized the soft leather suitcase he’d carried out of the airport. He certainly hadn’t packed a tuxedo in there. Was he trying to maneuver me into asking if he’d flown in early, with baggage I hadn’t seen? Trying to smoke an accusation out of me, trying to find out how much I already knew?
“Okay,” I said, turning away.
I went upstairs and locked my bedroom door. I heard Sandy go out. I took a shower and put on my green silk dress.
When I went back downstairs, Sandy was in black tie, straightening his cummerbund. He looked me over. “My favorite dress,” he commented appreciatively.
And I answered truthfully. “That’s why I brought it.”
It took us a few minutes to get to my car. The crowd of reporters had thinned, but the few who persisted (none of the San Francisco crowd, just local stations and a couple from Oregon) insisted on getting some dull footage of my scowling face. They filmed the Mercedes pulling away from the curb.
“Turn the corner here, would you, Laura? I want to get my car. Case I decide to leave early.”
I followed Sandy’s directions to the Mustang, wondering why he’d parked so far from my house. Wondering if it had anything to do with the policeman who’d inquired about it at the airport.
Sandy followed me to my aunt and uncle’s house, so I didn’t have a chance to do anything about the gun that was (I assumed) still jammed into the springs under my seat. I’d have to ditch the damned thing as soon as I could. Somewhere safe, this time.
I slid into a parking place near the mayor’s fake chalet, and I let Sandy go scout out his own parking place.
The porch was flooded with light from mock sconces on either side of the double door, and every lamp in the house was burning, spilling light into the redwoods and rhododendrons flanking the house. My car was in a pocket of darkness between the house and the street lamp across the street. I could hear car doors slamming, up and down the block.
Middle-aged couples, most of them stuffed into unstylish dress clothes, walked past me on their way to the party, the women trying to protect their hairdos from the wind.
Discreetly parked in front of the house was the unmarked police car in which I’d traveled to the Lucky Logger the morning before.
I watched Sandy saunter toward my car. The tuxedo was perfect on his long, lean body, and black flattered his sand-colored hair and pale skin.
I climbed out of the car and reluctantly took his arm. He fastened his hand over mine.
On the walkway we encountered Judy Britt, looking better than usual in navy crepe. “Laura! You came!”
I always assume I’m on the record, when I talk to a reporter. “Nothing can bring back Kirsten Strindberg or Wallace Bean, so I put my feelings aside to honor a longstanding commitment.” Pompous and empty—let her print it.
My papa came out to greet us. He bowed to Judy Britt and shook Sandy’s hand, eyeing him coolly. Me, he drew inside to kiss, pet, and admire extravagantly. All the while, I worried about the dents and scratches I’d discovered on the bumper of his Lincoln.
My aunt looked disdainfully at my gown and said, “A fitted bodice—what an old-fashioned touch.” She wore a sparkly paisley tube of a dress with a short chiffon cape that made her look like she was about to get her hair done.
I introduced her to Sandy, and her smile went from forced to flirtatious. She stood a trifle too close to him and began asking him questions. I heard Sandy tell her that he was a computer operator, that he’d come to town to install my computer system. My aunt laughed as though she thought nothing could be more charming and amusing than installing computer systems.
I looked around the high-ceilinged room. My aunt had moved her furniture (the city’s furniture, I should say) to accommodate a crowd, and she’d stocked gold-clothed tables with ice chests, bottles, and glasses for mix-it-yourself bars. There were thirty or forty people in the room already. Middle- and retirement-aged couples, mostly. A few people my age, some with familiar faces—inevitable in a town with only one high school. Several guests had noted my entrance, and I smiled vaguely at them. Junior college students cum caterers passed through the crowd with trays of hors d’oeuvres.
I spotted Hal across the room, leaning against the wall, staring at me. He wore a dark suit that had probably fit him once; now it was tight across the chest, loose at the waist.
I’d expected him to phone me after he found my note. Schoolgirlish of me, I supposed.
He straightened slowly, standing away from the wall. His eyes glittered, and his half smile was contemptuous. He turned away.
I abandoned Sandy to my aunt and went to the nearest makeshift bar. I poured myself a vodka martini, without the vermouth. I stood alone, drinking it. A lot of people gawked, no one approached. Maybe the murders had left them tongue-tied; maybe it was my “celebrity.” I doubted it would last long.
It didn’t. A short, stout woman with a topknot and pointy glasses (“Mrs. Oriellini; you remember me, dear!”) dug a veiny claw into my silk sleeve. “You were married to that boy who got run over day before yesterday, weren’t you? I remember seeing your wedding picture in the paper. You had a short dress on, so I thought you must have eloped.” She tilted her head inquiringly.
I smiled, trying to rotate my wrist out of her grasp. I ended up refilling my glass one-handed.
“Then I remember seeing in the paper in the legal
notices that you got divorced from him.” Mrs. Oriellini squinted, tapping her orange mouth with a dinner-ringed finger. “And there was that business about your car, too.”
“My car?” I wished my aunt had invested a few bucks in decent vodka.
Mrs. Oriellini leaned toward me, slopping part of her cocktail onto the carpet. “That boy who got gassed because of the policeman’s son.”
I was beginning to feel the first martini. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Sure you do, honey. His name was Hamburg, or Frankfurt, something like that. No, no, Strongberg—that’s it. Leonard Strongberg.” She nodded, her stiffly sprayed topknot bobbing.
“I wasn’t here then.” I yanked my arm away. “Please excuse me, I should—”
“Oh, well,” she commiserated. “I guess you didn’t want your car back after that.”
“No.” I turned to leave.
“Even if you went and got it repaired, you’d worry it would do that again.”
She had me, damn her. I turned back. “Do what?”
“Leak that gas. Carbon dioxide.”
“Monoxide,” I corrected automatically. “But I heard—” I couldn’t bring myself to say his name, “I heard that he ran a hose from the muffler into the car.”
The woman’s eyes sparkled and her double chin became pronounced as she tucked her head down and whispered, “Well, someone did. But they found that crack under the car—in the manifest, I think it’s called. It was letting poison carbon gas right in through the heater. Didn’t you know?”
“It’s been so long. Was there … some trouble about it?”
“Well, there certainly should have been! But being as he was a policeman’s boy, they dropped the whole thing. Let him go sign up for the army.”
I felt my fingers sink into her soft flesh of her arm. “When you say ‘someone’ ran a hose from the muffler—”
“The policeman, if you ask me!” Her tone was thrilled and confidential. “That boy of his had got in trouble for the very same thing a few months before that. No one got hurt that time, but the gas made the poor lady fall asleep and run right off the road. Lucky it happened near the dunes. If she’d been up in the redwoods …” Mrs. Oriellini shook her head darkly.
I dropped the old gossip’s arm and stepped back, colliding with a wizened gynecologist who had a reputation for letting his buddies know if their daughters weren’t virgins. I’d had a screaming fit when my aunt suggested Papa send me to him for “a checkup.” Now, I had some kind of conversation with him, about San Francisco restaurants, I think. I also met his wife. She wanted to know if I’d ever heard of an L.A. lawyer who was suing them.
A crowd began to gather around me, and I clicked into automatic pilot, shaking hands, hearing modest success stories from schoolmates I didn’t remember, assuring family friends that I found the “Old Town” renovation charming.
But I was thinking about Captain Loftus. When I’d met him, I’d recognized the surname. He’d mentioned his son John, but that didn’t account for it—I hadn’t thought of John in years. No, I remembered now that I’d run across the name in a newspaper article accompanying Lennart’s obituary. Something about “Police Sergeant Emmanuel Loftus” discovering Lennart’s body.
I noticed Mrs. Oriellini standing with Hillsdale High’s ancient and fascistic principal. She winked a shrewd, myopic eye at me.
If Lennart Strindberg had been parked near the jetty in the Volkswagen—waiting to meet someone, perhaps?—he’d certainly have kept the engine running and the car heater on. It was freezing cold out there, always.
Maybe Captain Loftus (Sergeant Loftus, then) had happened upon Lennart, dead from exhaust fumes pumped in through the heater. His son John had recently repaired the Volkswagen; maybe the sergeant had known that. Maybe he’d worried that history had repeated itself, that his son had again failed to spot a deadly crack in the exhaust manifold. Maybe the sergeant had run a length of hose from the tailpipe to the front window. That way, even if the police did examine the car and find the leak, they wouldn’t attribute Lennart’s death to it. Not when there was evidence Lennart had killed himself.
Maybe Loftus had forced his son into the army to squelch inquiry into the inadequate car repair. If so, he’d done John no favor. It’s a short jail sentence for involuntary manslaughter. Vietnam had been a death sentence.
But one thing still rankled. How the hell had Lennart managed to drive my car all the way out to the jetty?
And if he’d been sitting there running the car heater, for whom had he been waiting?
The possibility that occurred to me was chilling, it was so damn cold-blooded.
26
My aunt had buttonholed Sandy again. She made fluttery gestures with her hands and looked at him in a bright, party sort of way, blithering endlessly. Sandy bent closer to listen, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a drink. He smiled halfheartedly.
As often as we’d talked about Lennart’s death, Sandy had never mentioned a police examination of the VW; he’d never mentioned a carbon monoxide leak in the exhaust system. Was it something even a good detective might not discover, fourteen years after the fact? Or just one more thing Sander Arkelett had chosen not to tell me?
I’d poured out my whole tale of woe to him, reopened all the wounds. I’d allied myself with him, strategically, emotionally, and physically. What the hell was he playing at?
A voice beside me murmured, “He’s a big hit with my mother.”
“Hal!” I blinked myself back to here-and-now. “Nice of you to say hello.”
“You make a terrific couple,” he continued. “Sophisticated, elegant.” He watched Sandy shake a green olive out of his glass and into his mouth. “I suppose he explained why he flew into town a day early?”
“I didn’t ask.”
A flicker of a frown disturbed my cousin’s impassivity. “You trust him,” he concluded.
I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. “You do, apparently.”
“Meaning what?”
“You saw my note, didn’t you?”
He hesitated, then admitted, “I saw it.”
My aunt glanced our way. “Henry!” she called, irritation bristling in her tone. She slipped her arm through Sandy’s, obliging him to escort her to our corner of the room. “You might exert yourself to mingle a little bit, instead of standing here bothering Laura.”
Hal did not kiss the cheek his mother offered.
Her lips pursed crossly. Then she laughed her artificial laugh. “I suppose the local boys seem quite dull compared to your friends, eh, Laura?” She winked coquettishly at Sandy.
Sandy casually draped his free arm around my shoulder. He nodded to Hal. “Good to see you again.”
My aunt yanked Hal’s lapel. It didn’t make his suit fit any better. “You’ve met my son?”
“Sure,” Sandy smiled. “We were out at Hal’s place yesterday.”
My aunt’s penciled-on brows failed to disguise a frown that would have looked much like Hal’s if nature had been allowed to take its course.
She observed to Sandy, “This is Henry’s home, of course.” She emphasized the name Henry. “And a lot of trouble he’d save the city, too, if he’d stop this camping-out nonsense.”
Hal’s mouth pinched into an angry line.
But my aunt did not let up. “The police have to send a patrol car out there two or three times a day to make sure he hasn’t started a fire with his lanterns. The only reason they don’t kick him right out of there like they would anyone else is that he’s our son.” Her voice was rich with irony as she admitted the relationship.
Hal took a step backward, looking as though he’d just seen something loathsome. Then he shook his head and turned away. I watched him thread his way through the crowd, ignoring latecomers’ attempts to greet him as he escaped
through the front door.
Sandy broke the uncomfortable silence. “Where’s Mayor Di Palma tonight, ma’am? I’ve been wanting to pay my respects.”
If Sandy meant to reduce tensions, he’d taken the wrong approach. My aunt flushed, her head trembling on its short neck. “He’s ill,” she said brusquely. “If you’ll excuse me, I must speak to the caterer.”
We watched her stalk into the dining room.
“One big happy family,” Sandy said dryly. Then he added, “No offense!”
“I’ve had it, Sandy. I’m leaving.”
Two mink-stoled matrons on our right glowered their disapproval. I heard one whisper, “Too good for us now.”
I set what remained of my drink onto a gilded occasional table, purposely ignoring the coaster. When I looked up, Emmanuel Loftus was approaching. Where the hell had he come from?
Sandy’s arm slipped from my shoulder. By the time the captain greeted me, Sandy was halfway to the dining room.
“You’re looking very pretty tonight, Miss Di Palma.” The captain ran a finger under his starched collar. “Often as I wear these monkey suits, always wish I was off duck-hunting, instead.” Say what he might, there was no suggestion of the hick about him. He presented a trim and very tidy figure in navy wool and a red silk tie. “I think it’s fine you took the trouble to come—all things considered. It’s the kind of gesture means a lot to a person’s family.”
Family. I supposed a good father would manufacture evidence to keep his son out of trouble. I’d smashed up my bumper to protect my papa.
“Can I get you another drink, Miss Di Palma? Sometimes all this fatted-calf stuff … it kinda makes you remember why you went away in the first place.”
Apparently Loftus had observed our family conference.
I let him bring me another drink. Straight vodka. Something else he’d observed, in the course of the evening.
“Is this business or pleasure for you, Captain?”