by Susan Kandel
Susan Kandel
A Cece Caruso Mystery
Not a Girl Detective
To Kyra and Maud,
who are small but stealthy
Contents
1
When I couldn’t tell the rain from my tears I…
2
I’m the sort of person who’s always looking for signs.
3
Most people don’t find out about Carroll Avenue until they…
4
What the hell did you do to him?” The voice…
5
Things can go from bad to worse faster than you…
6
We couldn’t see Bridget. Her entire body was obscured by…
7
At any hour, in any time zone, by any stretch…
8
And speaking of Nancy Drew’s long-suffering beau, Ned, why do…
9
We spent the morning at a number of thrift stores,…
10
Edgar Edwards’s pool turned out to be an excellent place…
11
The Eames chairs in Edgar’s living room were unrelenting. I…
12
The next few days Gambino and I were all about…
13
Andrew was persuasive, but no match for me. I was…
14
The gathering on Carroll Avenue was under way by the…
15
Gambino and I looked at each other across the breakfast…
16
What took you guys so long?” asked Lael, studying her…
17
Asher Farrell did not have a Rottweiler. What he did…
18
He won’t be in until eleven,” explained the girl with…
19
I came home loaded down with supplies. Post-it notes in…
20
Say cheese!” The flash went off in Mitchell’s face.
21
Maybe it was better to do things in reverse chronological…
22
It was almost eight P.M. Gambino would be here any…
23
The phone rang at 2:11 A.M. Startled, I reached over…
24
What are you doing here at this ungodly hour?” asked…
25
I sat there for almost two hours. Back and forth…
26
You’ve got freckles.”
27
The thing about mind-bombs is they generate an awful lot…
28
A minute later there was a soft knock at the…
29
Turned out I got Mitchell’s fingerprints instead, which wasn’t entirely…
30
Perhaps it was naive to expect Detective King to welcome…
31
With the midweek discount, the room only cost me $159…
32
I was on my way out when I noticed a…
33
I drove home too fast and threw open the front…
34
It was early Thursday morning, around eight. I was parked…
35
I froze in place.
36
Let’s go over the whole thing again,” Lael said.
37
A registered package was waiting for me the next day…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Susan Kandel
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
When I couldn’t tell the rain from my tears I knew it was time to pull over. I laid my arms across the steering wheel and choked back a sob. I had gone through the first four stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression. Now I was stuck on stage five—damning the mechanic. But what good was that going to do? My Toyota Camry was dying. Not peacefully but spectacularly, with great plumes of smoke emanating from the rear and strange wails coming out of the air-conditioning vents.
Yesterday, the tape deck shredded Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits. The day before, the cup holder snapped off in my hands, sending Diet Coke all over my favorite beaded sweater. Hell, if I had known it was going to end like this, I would’ve leased a Jaguar in the first place.
If only I were the cheerful sort, like my best friend Lael. It’s unseemly how cheerful Lael is. That’s all I’ll say. Or conniving, like my second best friend, Bridget, who knows just what to say when, and to whom. Scary. Or better yet, the resourceful type, like teenage supersleuth Nancy Drew. I spent my entire youth idolizing that girl. I’m pushing forty now, but some fantasies die hard.
If only I were Nancy Drew.
I’d pull some Vaseline out of my handbag and fix those windshield wipers lickety-split. I’d solve the mystery of the air-conditioning vents with my superior knowledge of dehumidification, say. And if I couldn’t get the car to stop smoking by any other means, I’d ask my daddy to buy me a new one. A pretty blue roadster to match my pretty blue eyes.
Self-recrimination has long been a favorite pastime. I could keep it going forever, but I had someplace to be. I opened the car door and stepped directly into a puddle. Damn. With my raincoat pulled up over my head, I waded around back and stared at the exhaust pipe in wonder. How could it betray me? Vexed, I gave it a kick. It belched, evil thing. Then it occurred to me that it could explode any second—the whole car, I mean. These things do happen. But I was such a sodden mess I probably wasn’t combustible. And they say it never rains in Southern California.
I fished my cell phone out of my purse and was about to call for a tow when I realized the bookstore I was heading to was only a few blocks away. I decided to make a run for it. That would be the end of my spike-heeled boots, of course, but they were already halfway to kingdom come. Maybe I could claim them as a business expense. I’d been taking a more aggressive approach to tax deductions lately. My accountant’s thinking was that I made so little money they’d never in a million years bother auditing me. I wasn’t sure that was sound reasoning, but Mr. Keshigian had managed to keep all his gangster relations out of the hands of the IRS, so I could hardly question his expertise. And god forbid he should fix me up with one of-the cousins again.
Dodging the mud puddles, I sprinted down Melrose Avenue. No one sipping organic coffee at the Bodhisattva Café today. What a neighborhood. On sunny days you could drop your car with the Bodhisattva’s valet, pick up a soy latte to go, and in the space of a single city block have your palm read, buy a New Age tome, get your colon cleaned, and take a ceramics class—not necessarily in that order. It wasn’t my thing. I grew up in New Jersey. I live for synthetics.
Frederick A. Dalthorp Rare Books and Bindery was just around the corner, and talk about synthetic. It had fake gothic spires poking into the sky, stained-glass windows, turrets. No serving wenches, however. Too bad. I could’ve used a tankard of ale right about then. Nope, just the Dalthorp twins. They’d inherited the business from their father, Frederick, a smooth operator who’d sweet-talked the building out of some morticians who’d been there since the thirties. The Dalthorps were cousins of my purported boyfriend, Peter Gambino. A few weekends ago we’d had brunch together and they’d made a big to-do over Gambino’s mocha chip pancakes, which I found impossible to stomach myself. But those girls were clearly addicted to sugar. They were eating marzipan at their desks when I pushed open the massive wooden door.
“Heave ho!” I said.
“For god’s sake, don’t spray the books!” yelled Dena, the older of the two by seventeen minutes and accustomed to milking every one of them.
“What do you think I am, a Saint Bernard?”
“Oh, Cece,” murmured Victoria, Dena’s more politic s
ister, “look at your turtleneck! It shrank in the rain!” She handed me a wad of paper towels.
“It’s cropped,” I explained, drying off. “It’s supposed to be that way. It matches my cropped toreador pants.”
“Good god,” said Dena. Dena did not appreciate fashion. She was wearing a shapeless woolen sweater, a longish kilt, and brogues. Perfect for stomping through the heather.
Victoria gave me a sympathetic look. “I’m sure you looked lovely.”
“Thank you,” I said, crushed by her use of the past tense.
“The seventies, right?”
“The fifties, actually. Gina Lollabrigida goes beatnik?”
I was used to being misunderstood. My mother, a rummage-sale diva, never met a pot holder she couldn’t love. Or a TV tray table not worth saving. She’d happily plunk down five dollars for a moribund blender, ten dollars for a card table with three legs. Yet she was unable to figure out why I’d want to wear old clothes. Worse yet, somebody else’s old clothes.
“So what’s this about Nancy Drew?” Dena asked.
The chitchat was over.
“Cece’s writing a book about Nancy Drew!” Victoria exclaimed. “Remember how much we loved Nancy Drew when we were kids? Twisted candles flickering at midnight! Bloodcurdling screams and secret passageways! But we didn’t have an attic,” she said, sighing. “Nobody in L.A. does. And how could we be detectives without a musty attic to explore?”
“There are plenty of mysteries to solve around this moldering old relic,” Dena snapped. “Like why the pipes are always backed up. And where my favorite coffee mug went. Why don’t you solve them?”
Thank god I had brothers. They just slugged you.
I slid into a leather club chair. “Actually, my book isn’t exactly about Nancy Drew. It’s a biography of Carolyn Keene, the author of the series.”
“There is no Carolyn Keene,” Dena said with a smirk.
“Technically, that’s true.”
“Dena was the one who told me there was no Santa Claus,” Victoria whispered.
“A number of different people wrote the Nancy Drew books,” I continued, “based on detailed outlines they were given by the publishing syndicate that originated the character. The Stratemeyer Syndicate was an actual writing mill. They put out the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, dozens of children’s series. Anyway, the real identities of the writers they hired were unknown for decades. Everybody took oaths of secrecy. It was pretty cloak-and-dagger. Carolyn Keene was just a made-up name.”
“So you’re writing a biography of a pseudonym?” Victoria asked.
It did sound perverse when you put it that way.
“Look, why don’t we show Cece what we’ve got, okay?”
“Good idea, Dena. I don’t want to keep you.” There’s your sister’s ego to crush and marzipan bananas to finish and it’s already four in the afternoon.
She pointed me toward a rickety glass-fronted bookcase in the corner of the room. “We don’t usually handle children’s books. We had a beautiful first edition of Robinson Crusoe that sat here collecting dust for years.”
“Well, you did scare off that buyer from Baltimore, remember?”
Dena glared at her twin. “He was a big phony.”
“Was not.”
“Was too.”
As they continued bickering, I opened the cabinet and reached for the white dust jacket. I ran my finger over the familiar emblem on the spine, a tiny silhouette of the blond sleuth from River Heights, looking through a magnifying glass, a scarf thrown jauntily around her neck. The girl could definitely wear clothes.
The Mystery of the Ivory Charm. If I remembered correctly, The Mystery of the Ivory Charm featured a strange woman who was trying to deny a rajah his throne. She could go into a hypnotic trance at the drop of a hat, but Nancy saw through her, of course.
I pulled the book off the shelf and turned to the front cover. There she was, Nancy Drew, looking typically surreptitious. She was inside an old shed, sneaking some yellowed documents out of a coffeepot and trying not to get caught. The bad guy was just outside the open door. You knew he was the bad guy because he was going after a mangy hound dog with his leather whip. In Nancy Drew books—as in life, I suppose—you can always identify evildoers because they’re the ones who mistreat animals.
Most of the dust jackets I’d seen were tattered, missing bits and pieces. This one was in perfect condition. I ran my fingers over the pages. They felt rough. This was definitely wartime paper, which meant it couldn’t be a first edition. The other tip-off was the silhouette, which didn’t appear on the spines until 1941, with the second printing of number 18, and subsequent reprintings of numbers 1 to 17.
Dating and assigning valuations to these books was tricky. The first Nancy Drew mystery, The Secret of the Old Clock, has been reprinted more than one hundred and fifty times since its original appearance in 1930, with minute variations each time—different paper stocks, boards, endpapers, frontispieces, etc. You’d have to be obsessive-compulsive to keep track of all the details. I’d love to be obsessive-compulsive but I’m too lazy. Still, I was pleased that some of my research had stuck.
“Do you have a buyer already?”
Victoria took the book out of my hands. “Yes, someone local. He wants everything we can get, first edition or not.”
“Sticky fingers!” reprimanded Dena.
“You’ve eaten more candy than I have,” Victoria said with a sniff. She turned toward me. “This would be a great thing to own, wouldn’t it? A piece of American history! The first role model for teenage girls, ever!”
It seemed churlish to mention Joan of Arc.
“Say, Cece, why don’t you deliver it for us?”
“Did you forget to pay the courier service again, Victoria?”
Victoria ignored her sister and started wrapping the book in brown paper. “I bet he’d love to hear about your research. And it would give you a chance to see his collection. It’s amazing. I believe he has the only complete set of Nancy Drew first printings in the world!”
How interesting that it would be a man. “I’d be happy to deliver the book.”
“Hold your horses,” Dena said, squinting at me suspiciously. “Are you bonded?”
This time, it was me who ignored her.
Tucking The Mystery of the Ivory Charm under my coat, I stepped out into paradise. Double rainbows streaked across the sky. A soft wind caressed my cheeks. The Bodhisattva Café was packed, the laughter of hemp-clad sybarites filling the air. It was as if the rainstorm had never happened. As if it were a bad dream some colon hydrotherapy had dissolved. This is why people move to Los Angeles. You can live in a permanent state of denial here. Except when it comes to meter maids. They are the hardiest of all urban tribes and one of them was eyeing my Camry. Once her pen touched paper it would be too late. I ran toward her, screaming at the top of my lungs.
“Back off, sweetie,” she said, putting her pad back into her pocket. “You made it.” Then she shook her tightly coiffed head. “You got enough trouble with those sorry-ass boots.”
I was blessed, I think. But there was only one way to know for sure. I held my breath, got in, and turned the key in the ignition. It wheezed and spat and quaked and shook, but my car was alive. Alive! I knew I should probably drive straight to the dealership on Hollywood Boulevard, but I had so much to take care of, and that would be the end of my day. Once those guys get you in their clutches they just keep on talking. No, I’d take the car home and go to the dealer first thing in the morning. They’d probably need a few days to whip it into shape, which was fine. It gave me a perfect excuse to rent a car for the weekend.
A convertible.
I could see it now.
Me and Lael and Bridget, gunning down the 10 toward Palm Springs, the wind whipping through our big hair. We all had big hair. Maybe we’d put the top up if it got too windy. Wind strips the hair of moisture. I guess we could wear scarves.
The three of us were ta
king a business trip. Well, at least for me it was business. I’d been asked to deliver the keynote address at the annual Nancy Drew fan convention. Some persons in my life had found the very idea amusing. Like my daughter, Annie, and her husband, Vincent, who about choked on their Kombucha mushroom tea when I told them. And a certain Detective Peter Gambino of the LAPD, whom I might have mentioned earlier. But Mr. Keshigian had nodded, pleased. I was to deduct everything.
It was a paycheck, for god’s sake. When you write biographies of dead mystery writers for a living, you need as many of those as you can get. And it would be great publicity for the new book, which was almost finished. But I was nervous. Those fans knew a hell of a lot, and they’d probably love to catch me in a mistake, like not knowing that the spine silhouette for number 24 was missing the scarf. Or that early printings of number 18, The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion, made reference to the forthcoming volume as The Quest of the Telltale Map when it was actually printed as The Quest of the Missing Map.
Fan is short for fanatic.
Bridget was going to take the opportunity to raid the Palm Springs thrift shops, hoping to find a couple of Bob Hope’s wife’s discarded Adolfo suits, maybe something with a mink collar and jeweled buttons. Or a Galanos caftan, very Nancy Reagan on holiday. Bridget owned On the Bias, L.A.’s top vintage clothing shop.
Lael was a master pastry chef and oblivious to clothes, vintage or otherwise, but she didn’t have any gigs until late next week, and her children’s fathers (that would be four for four) were taking the kids for spring break, so she was coming, too.