Palm Springs Noir

by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

I said, “Edison asked me here tonight. This had to be an accident. Why would I …?”

  “Then why didn’t you report it? You were leaving.”

  Clark blurted, “I knew it.” He had moved over to the print racks and held up one of the plastic sleeves, empty. “The Hockney. It’s missing. It’s worth more than this clown makes in a year—”

  “Two years,” I assured him. “Or three.”

  “—and just yesterday, he practically creamed over it.”

  Turning to Friendly, I spread my jacket open. “If I took it, where is it? Wanna frisk me?”

  “The car,” said Clark, rushing out of the house with Friendly at his heels.

  I took my time. In the courtyard, Clark had flung open the doors and trunk of my car, making a frantic search, while Friendly assisted with her flashlight. I watched calmly as they trashed it, secure in the knowledge there was nothing to find.

  “See?” said Clark. “I told you.” And he withdrew the Hockney from underneath the Camry’s passenger seat.

  And Friendly was cuffing me and phoning it in and calling for backup and dreaming of salvaging her tattered career.

  And I regretted that I had been so easily mesmerized by Clark’s tight little body.

  And I recalled that morning, when I came in from the pool deck, after talking to Friendly, while Clark was inside, fussing with prints, and I wondered why the front door was open.

  And through the wind, I heard the first distant wail of sirens.

  And now I said, “Yes, indeed. This old house has state-of-the-art electronics. Surveillance in every room. Up under the eaves too.” I pointed vaguely toward the deep, dark recesses of the roof. “Back at the office, we can just scan through all the video. We’ll see Clark planting the ‘evidence’ this morning. Then we’ll see him again, later, killing his husband.”

  Clark froze, dropping the Hockney as the first cold spits of rain arrived on the wind. He hadn’t planned on video—lying would be futile. With a convulsive heave, he said, “Edison was right. I couldn’t leave, and he would never divorce me. We were stuck.”

  “Till death do you part,” I said. “And I’ll bet you’re his heir.”

  Clark looked blindly into the rain. Beaten by the truth, he muttered, “There was … no other way.”

  Friendly released one of my cuffs and clamped it to one of Clark’s wrists, saying, “We’ll sort this out quick enough.” The sirens grew louder. A gust of wind grabbed the soggy Hockney from the gravel and tumbled it through the courtyard, sending it over the embankment.

  I laughed, saying to Clark, “You idiot. There’s no surveillance. At Sunny Junket, we have a measure of respect for our guests.”

  Slowly, Clark’s gaze pivoted to Friendly. With renewed fire, he stared into her eyes. “Some of our wealthier clients value their privacy and prefer cash transactions. I have forty thousand in the house. That could go a long way in the fight to get your daughter back. It’s yours—tonight—if you forget what you heard.”

  Jazz Friendly, the ex-cop who’d accused me of fucking up her life, now studied my face while telling Clark, “But I’m not the only one who heard it.”

  Clark reminded her, “You’ve got a gun. Use it. Self-defense—if you say he tried to grab it. Case closed.”

  Her eyes darted from mine to Clark’s and back to mine.

  Clark smiled. “Just do it.”

  Sirens screamed nearby.

  THE WATER HOLDS YOU STILL

  BY BARBARA DEMARCO-BARRETT

  Twin Palms

  The landline rang after midnight. It had to be my mother down in Palm Springs. She was the reason I kept the line.

  I picked up. “Hi, Mom.”

  “There was a noise,” she said.

  I stood my brush in a jar of water. Red paint escaped the bristles, a blood cloud. I took the phone outside, the curly black cord stretched taut as a tightrope. Ferns along the patio were wet with night mist, common here on the Central Coast.

  “Houses settle at night and make noises,” I said.

  A few months ago, she began calling me about noises at night and the calls were coming more often.

  A puff of breath and the faint strain of music—Sinatra. “Mood Indigo.” She’d become obsessed with him, more so since my stepfather Jerry died.

  “A coyote was outside by the pool,” she said. “It was sniffing the water.”

  “Maybe it’s bored,” I said. “No little dogs around to eat.”

  “Greta, that’s not funny.”

  “You’re keeping Joey Bishop in, right?” He was her little red Pomeranian.

  “He’s in.” Her voice dropped an octave. “My sapphire ring is missing. Your brother was here. Every time he stops by, something else goes missing.”

  “Are you sure?” Out on the highway red and blue lights whirled by.

  “Last week it was my diamond earrings. I was going to give those to you.”

  I took it personally. My brother knew they would be mine someday. “I’ve always loved those earrings. Has anyone other than Ben been around?”

  “Repair people. Pool cleaner. Gardener. I can’t keep track.”

  “So, it could be anyone.”

  “Do you think your brother’s gambling again?” she asked. “People go to those pawn shops up on Palm Canyon and over in Cathedral City to sell things they steal. Or they sell them on Clubslist.”

  “You mean Craigslist.”

  “Make fun.”

  “Look, Mom,” I said, “if Ben’s stealing from you, call the police. Turn him in.”

  “I can’t. He’s my son.”

  “It will only get worse.” I was afraid for my mother, brother, and me. Families weren’t supposed to be like this. Sons didn’t steal from their mothers. But she’d complained before so there must have been some truth to his thieving. “You’d be doing him a favor.”

  “He’ll stop coming to see me. Then who will I have?”

  “You have me.” I felt like that little girl again, competing with my brother for her love. Ours was a complicated relationship. Mothers and daughters and sons—oh my. She had that old-world Italian thing going: sons were gods, daughters … were what?

  “You’re so far away,” she said.

  “I’m not that far away, only four, maybe five hours. Come stay with me for a while.”

  “I don’t drive anymore. My eyes.”

  “Then I’ll come there.”

  We made plans for me to go down in three days and hung up. Back in the studio, I studied my many unfinished canvases propped against the walls. I’d never get another gallery show if I didn’t finish already. I had done well at my first show but how could it ever happen like that again? What if I was a one-hit wonder? And was that better than becoming a follow-up failure? When Daniel and I broke up—I found out on Instagram, of all places, that he’d cheated on me with an ex-girlfriend—my confidence was rocked. Faulty female intuition. The dick-head. I lost my motivation and my creative ideas turned to mush.

  By the weekend, I’d made little progress on my painting, but I had to visit my mother.

  On Friday morning I threw a few things into a suitcase—changes of clothes, sarong, bathing suit—bagged a bottle of wine, got into my Mini, and headed south, Amy Winehouse crooning “Back to Black.”

  Past Redlands on Interstate 10, the land yawned open. The hills were curvy, a smooth velveteen. A freight train passed alongside the freeway. Blades of wind generators lackadaisically spun.

  I took the exit for Highway 111 and ten minutes later the lunar landscape gave way to Palm Springs’s green lawns and lush landscaping fed by a humongous underground lake.

  Palm Canyon Drive runs through downtown and even though it was August, pedestrians milled about. My desert city no longer cleared out during the searing summer months. I liked it better back when tumbleweeds rolled down the streets as the theme song from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly played in my head.

  At the stoplight near Rocky’s Pawn Shop I called my brother
and left a voice mail. Just beyond the Ace Hotel I hung a right and turned into Twin Palms, named for the two palm trees planted in front of each midcentury marvel. My father had bought one of the original homes and Mom had lived here through three husbands. I pulled into the curving driveway and made a mental note to ask her where her car was.

  From the outside, the house looked the same: the butterfly design—sleek angular lines spread open like wings, high windows with broad panes of glass, chartreuse front door.

  As I made my way up the front walk, things began to look awry. Empty vegetable and dog food cans littered either side of the cement path as if someone had pitched them out the front door instead of into the trash. And why hadn’t Ben picked them up? Was he losing it too?

  I rang the doorbell. Through the walls, a vague chime. I shifted from foot to foot, knocking, ringing the doorbell, and waiting. It took awhile for my mother to respond and when she did, she opened the door a crack.

  “Who are you?” she said, peering out.

  “I’m your daughter, remember me?” I replied, partly indignant. Still, I was freaking out inside. “C’mon, open up.”

  “You look different,” she said, and pulled the door open.

  “I cut my hair.” I reached up, touched the ends that I’d dyed blue.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  My hair had been long until last month when I kicked out Little Dick. “I needed a change,” I said.

  “What the hell is with the turquoise?”

  I dropped my bags in my old bedroom, which had hardly changed, put the wine in the fridge, and joined her in the kitchen. Joey Bishop spun as he barked. Yappy dogs can drive anyone right over the edge. Maybe this was what had happened to her; it was the dog’s fault. I leaned down to pet his head. He growled, then snapped at me. I jumped back.

  “He likes to protect me,” she said.

  “Not from your son, apparently,” I mumbled.

  “What did you say?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  The inside of the house wasn’t exactly a shambles, but something was off. The big plate-glass windows were smudged at the bottom from Joey Bishop’s snout. Big antiques were missing—the carved Chinese table my father had bought when I was twelve. A bronze mirror that hung opposite the front door, supposedly from the Tang dynasty. Then there were the missing Eames coffee table and Slim Aarons photographs.

  End tables and built-in shelves were bare of artifacts she’d collected over the years from her trips to Europe and Asia and they were dusty, except for circles and squares that were varying levels of clean, the chalk outline equivalent of missing items.

  A yellowing pile of Desert Sun newspapers as tall as a toddler stood by the sliders. I ran my fingers up the side. “You going to read all these?”

  “I’ll get to them,” she said, and trundled to her midcentury stereo cabinet. Hanging on the wall behind it were dozens of framed photos, mostly of Ben and me, but also of the Palm Springs celeb set she once hung out with. She set the needle of the turntable down on vinyl. There was Sinatra again, singing “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” from his saddest album.

  I poured wine into a mug with that Marilyn Monroe flying skirt image. After that long drive, I deserved a drink. It was five o’clock somewhere, right? I took my cup and wandered about the house, noting all that was missing or just plain wrong. I threw away an empty plastic milk carton on the floor by her nightstand. On the wall where a Slim Aarons photo once hung, the paint was a shade lighter.

  “Where is it?” I said, pointing.

  “Where is what?”

  “My favorite photo of the Kaufmann house.”

  “That’s been gone a long time.”

  “It was here the last time I visited. Four months.”

  “Seems like longer,” she said. “Ask your brother.”

  “When does Ben come by? His voice mail was full.”

  “He comes over every night to swim. His new religion. What do you want for dinner?” She threw open the fridge to reveal a dismal collection of milk, condiments, wilted iceberg lettuce, and not much else.

  “Let’s go to the store.”

  “You go,” she said, and handed me her checkbook. “Take one, unless you need more.”

  “You shouldn’t be handing out checks like Halloween candy.”

  “You’re my daughter,” she said. “If I can’t trust you, who can I trust?”

  “Do you say the same thing to Ben?”

  “He’s my son,” she said.

  When I returned with groceries, I set them on the bench outside the front door, picked up the tin cans and threw them out, then carried the bags inside. Mom was on the sofa paging through a Palm Springs Life. Out by the pool the first man in some time I wanted to be close enough to smell was skimming the water, sweeping leaves, bugs, and crud into a net. He wore khaki board shorts, a neon-yellow rash guard like what surfers wear, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. He looked to be pure muscle, calves striated like rocks carved by river currents. He moved fluidly, as if to his own soundtrack, and swished the pool sifter back and forth.

  “That’s Ernesto,” my mother said without looking up from the magazine.

  I put away the frozen foods and went out to introduce myself.

  He was tall with eyes the color of kiwi fruit. He said he had tended the pool three times a week for the last two months.

  “That’s a lot, isn’t it?” I said.

  “It’s what the man wants,” he said.

  “What man? My brother?”

  “Ben, he said his name was.”

  So, the house can go to hell, but the pool needs to be pristine. Interesting.

  “And you are?” he asked.

  “Greta,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you. I’ll leave you to your work.” I turned toward the house.

  “Que bonita,” he said softly, perhaps to himself.

  “What?”

  Rather shyly, he said, “You’re much more beautiful than your picture.”

  I felt flustered, then dizzy, then smitten. It happened so fast, like I had just been hit with the flu. “How’d you see my photo?”

  “Your mother asked me to look at her stereo. Sound wasn’t coming out. Your photos were on the wall above it.”

  “Do you want a drink?” Was I hitting on him or had he just hit on me?

  “A cerveza would be nice. So hot.” He wiped a red bandanna across his forehead.

  “I don’t think there’s beer, but I’ll check. I have wine.”

  “Whatever you like, I like,” he said.

  I stumbled on my way inside. What is this? I wanted him, and that he might want me was enough to turn any whisper of the idea into a roar of demand.

  I poured more wine into my mug and into one that read PALM SPRINGS with a palm tree, and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows that took up the entire back of the house. Ernesto scooped water from the pool into a vial and squeezed in a chemical. Capped the bottle, gave it a shake, then dipped it in litmus paper. He was young; his face and body were absent of history. When I was eighteen, I wanted wrinkles so I’d be taken more seriously. Imagine. Now, closer to forty than thirty, I lapped up his attention like a neglected kitten.

  In my old room I changed into my two-piece. Dust bunnies hugged corners. This wasn’t like my mother. She used to keep a pristine home, vacuumed as if it were her part-time job.

  I carried the wine out to the pool and handed Ernesto one. We awkwardly thunked mugs.

  “Sí, muy hermosa,” he said, looking me up and down as I approached in my two-piece. It wasn’t like me to find a man I’d just met, my mother’s pool cleaner at that, so instantly compelling. But after my lying Little Dick boyfriend—he’d even proposed!—I was game. I needed an ego boost, and fast.

  Plus, this thing with Ernesto, whatever it was, would distract me from my growing concern over my mother and brother. A tryst while I was here would be sublime.

  I laid a towel over the lounge chair and sat down. He took t
he chair beside me and we made chitchat. He told me about his mother, a green-eyed blonde from Los Angeles who lost the part to Bo Derek in that awful movie Bolero, but got a walk-on part and met his father, also an aspiring actor. I was only half listening as I felt a gnawing animal attraction.

  I asked him how he came to be a pool cleaner in Palm Springs. It was time to leave LA, he said, and shook his head. He didn’t offer more and I didn’t ask. I didn’t care.

  I must have been nervous because I downed that wine like a ginger shot. I jumped up, padded inside, and grabbed the bottle.

  When I sat back down, I said, “I’m curious. Have you seen my brother doing anything strange?”

  “Strange?”

  “Things are missing from the house.”

  He pondered this and said, “One day as I was arriving, he was putting a black table into his car. He asked me for help.”

  “Was it carved?”

  “With dragons,” he said.

  The Chinese table.

  “Another time he carried out a cardboard box with frames.”

  That Slim Aarons print.

  Ernesto’s cell phone pinged with an incoming text. He looked at his phone and said, “Filter emergency.”

  Huh? Who has filter emergencies in the late afternoon?

  I got up with him. He went to shake my hand, or maybe kiss it, when I pulled him into a hug.

  “How old are you?” I said, looking for a reason to stay away.

  “What’s age?” he responded, and gave me his card: a little graphic of a diving board with his contact info.

  “Call me if you want to talk,” he said, and with that, he pulled his trolley with bottles and hoses and disappeared through the side gate.

  I went inside and changed. I vacuumed and cleaned the house. An hour later Ben showed up. My handsome little brother was losing his hair and had teeth in need of white strips. We side-hugged. I followed him outside. The sun had moved behind San Jacinto Peak, turning the sky a sulky violet.

  He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and offered me one. I shook my head. I’d stopped smoking and didn’t want to start up again. My brother’s hands trembled slightly as he lit one for himself.

  “I’m worried about Mom,” I said. “She called the other night about a noise. She’s getting worse.”