Kill the Mother!

by Michael Mallory

  “Yes sir. I made the 911 call.”

  “I’m Detective Colfax out of Northeast station,” he said. “Show me the body, then we need to talk.” I nodded. Re-entering the house, I led Colfax and three uniforms to the bathroom. “You didn’t touch or move anything, did you, Mr. Beauchamp?”

  “I touched only doors and knobs,” I said. “I searched the house to see if Nora’s sons are here, and they aren’t.”

  “All right, wait out there somewhere.” I went back into the Brothers Alpha shrine room and stood around while the various police officers covered the house with strips of yellow tape and started searching every surface and corner like bloodhounds. Eventually Colfax came back out, though on his way to me he was stopped by a young Hispanic officer also in plain clothes. “The M.E. can’t make it here for at least an hour,” he said.

  Colfax jabbed a thumb toward the bathroom behind him. “I don’t think she’s going anywhere. Mr. Beauchamp, come outside with me.” I followed the detective back out onto the front lawn. Colfax pulled a battered notepad from his hip pocket and took a pen from his jacket. “Okay, sir, so you’re a rent-a-cop that the decedent hired.”

  “Um, I’m a private investigator, detective,” I said, fishing out a business card and handing it to him. “Rent-a-cops are usually security guards.”

  “What were you supposed to be investigating?”

  I filled him in on the case, so far as I knew it. There was no reason for me to hold anything back, since my client was lying dead in the other room.

  “You saw her just last night,” Colfax said.

  “I left around six-ish, maybe.”

  “And the boys were here then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “That’s what’s worrying me. I don’t know where they are. Nora’s car is out front, and they can’t drive on their own.”

  “You think someone has them?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not impossible.”

  “It’s also not impossible that they ran to a neighbor’s house when they saw someone coming in to kill their mother. Hey, Hector,” he called, and the young plain clothes officer I had noticed earlier came trotting up. “Mr. Beauchamp, this is my partner, Detective Mendoza.” The younger man nodded in my direction. “Mr. Beauchamp is a private investigator,” Colfax added, and instantly Mendoza’s eyes widened and I got the distinct feeling that he was trying to will me to turn into stone. “Hector, take a couple men and check each house up and down the street. See if you can find two twelve-year-old boys.” Turning back to me, Colfax asked: “What are their names again?”

  “Taylor and Burton Frost. They’re twins, but not identical. Dark blonde hair…why am I describing them? Just look anywhere. This place is practically wallpapered with their pictures.”

  “Okay, pick your men and get going,” Colfax ordered, and Mendoza sprinted away. “A detective already,” Colfax mused, watching him go. “They make ’em younger every year.”

  “Are you sure you shouldn’t put out an Amber Alert?” I asked.

  “Those come from the Highway Patrol, and you can only put one out once an abduction has officially been reported. Are you officially reporting an abduction?”

  “No. I mean, I just don’t know.”

  “Then let’s see what the house checks turn up before getting the CHP involved.”

  Behind Colfax and the hubbub of activity at the house I could see Mendoza and two uniformed officers going up and down the street, knocking on the doors of neighboring houses. Colfax was saying something but I didn’t get it. “I’m sorry, what was that?” I asked.

  “You never told me why you came over here this afternoon,” he said.

  “I wanted to talk to Nora. Confront her, I guess you could say.”

  “Oh, confront her.”

  “Yes, confront her, detective, but not murder her. If I was the one responsible for this, do you really think I’d call 911 and then stay here until the police showed up?”

  “Do you know how often I hear that excuse? What were you planning to confront her over?”

  I took the threatening letter out of my pocket and handed it to him. “This.”

  Colfax read it, then turned it over and scanned the back. “This is the threat you mentioned? The reason she hired you?”

  “Yes, and I followed some of the leads she gave me, but after a while I started to get a little suspicious.”

  “Of what?”

  “That this letter might be nothing more than a hoax, one that Nora herself fabricated. That’s what I wanted to confront her about.”

  “What would lead you to suspect that?” Colfax asked.

  I told him how none of the “suspects” seemed to know the first names of the twins, and how adamant Nora was that her sons not find out about this letter. “She claimed she was protecting them from the knowledge of the threat, but I think she might have been protected them from the knowledge that she was pulling a cynical hoax.”

  “But why would she do such a thing? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It does if the driving force of life is turning your children into celebrities. Once word got out that the boys were being threatened, particularly if she could point the finger at another stage mother, the press would eat it up like starving wolves. The boys would go from obscurity to the lead story on Access Hollywood overnight. Within a week, everyone in the country would know the Brothers Alpha. At the same time, all the women named on this list, her competition, as it were, would all be put on the defensive, forced to protest their innocence.”

  Colfax checked his notepad. “Alpha?” he said. “I thought their name was Frost.”

  “It is, but their billing is the Brothers Alpha. It’s a stage name.”

  “I take it you never found out if this letter was legit or not.”

  “No, I can’t prove anything either way. At this point, the only way to prove or disprove its legitimacy is to wait and see it the boys’ bodies turn up someplace dismembered.”

  “No, we can do better than that,” Colfax said, flagging down another uniformed officer and handing him the letter. “Take this and see if you can find matching paper and a black sharpie somewhere in the house. Better yet, see if there are any handwriting samples that look like they’re from the victim, and not the kids.” When the officer was gone, he turned back to me. “Okay, let’s say that you’re right, and the woman did send this to herself to generate publicity. How does that square with the fact that she’s dead in there and her two sons are missing?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I…have…no…idea,” he repeated as he wrote on his pad, a move I strongly suspected was a sarcastic comment. He pounded the period onto the paper, then folded up the pad and replaced it in his pocket. “All right, Mr. Beauchamp, thank you for your help. Now, here’s the way it is going to play from here. I have to wait for the M.E., which might take awhile. You, on the other hand, are free to go do whatever it is that you do. But I will need you to go down to the station to fill out and sign an official statement. Sooner, rather than later. In fact, as soon as you leave here would be good.”

  “Is that an order, detective?”

  “A suggestion. You know where the Northwest division stationhouse is located?”

  “Of course,” I lied. The truth was, I hadn’t a clue where it was, but having been unable to figure out that I could compare the writing on the letter to a sample of Nora’s penmanship, I did not want to compound my incompetence in front of him.

  “Good, be there within the hour. And I hope I don’t really have to give you the usual rap about not leaving town and all that, do I?”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Detective Colfax smiled…sort of. “Let me offer you some professional advice, then,” he said. “If I need anything further from you, I will come to you. I have your card, I know where to find you. But from here on out, that’s the only time I want to see you. I don’t want you interfering with our i
nvestigation. Got it?”

  “I can’t even contact you if I have new information?”

  “Are you holding anything back from me?”

  “No.”

  “Then there’s no reason you would have new information, right?”

  “Um, well—”

  “Case closed, Beauchamp. We’ll take it from here.”

  “I guess I don’t have a client anymore, anyway,” I shrugged.

  “Exactly,” he said, cheerfully. “Now get out of here and go file your report at the station.”

  I got out of there, grateful that Detective Colfax had not noticed that I hadn’t actually agreed in so many words to stay out of the investigation. All I had said was I didn’t have a client anymore, which I didn’t. But I felt that I still had at least a few more thousand dollars worth of work to do before I could let the matter drop. If nothing else, I had to find out what had happened to the twins.

  I walked over to my car, only to discover that it had been parked in by one of the black-and-whites. I strode back to find Colfax, to get the cruiser moved, but Mendez and the two uniforms that had been canvassing the block, looking for the boys, beat me to him. “Nobody on this side of the street has seen the kids,” said one of the officers, a young African-American whose muscular arms could probably tear an iPad in half.

  “No one on the other side, either,” declared the other uniform, a fifty-ish guy with a graying moustache and the beginnings of a paunch. “But I’ll tell you one thing. Nora Frost was not very popular with her neighbors.”

  “Swell. More suspects.” Colfax then noticed me. “Mr. Beauchamp, why are you still here?”

  “I’d like to leave, but I’m parked in,” I said. “Can you get someone to move one of your cruisers?”

  “Let him out,” he instructed the two officers, then turned and walked away. It took a few minutes, but they finally cleared a path for me out of the driveway. I waved pleasantly at the officers as I pulled onto the street. Halfway down the block, though, I was nearly hit by an oncoming car that seemed to have suddenly lost control. I slammed on the brakes and the other driver did the same, screeching the rust-colored Taurus to a halt so violently the car turned sideways. A young, pretty woman jumped out of the driver’s seat with a horrified look on her face. I likewise got out. “Excuse me, ma’am, but I need to—”

  “My god, what are all these police cars doing here?” she demanded, ignoring the fact that she had nearly caused an accident. “Has something happened to Nora?”

  I rushed over to her. “Are you a friend of Nora Frost’s?” I asked.

  “I’m Elena Cates, I work for her. Who are you?”

  “I work for her too, sort of. My name is Dave Beauchamp, I’m a private investigator.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “You may have to brace yourself.”

  “Tell me what’s happened!”

  “Nora is dead,” I said, quietly. “She’s been murdered.”

  Immediately the woman became still. “Oh my god,” she muttered, barely audibly. Another car was coming up behind her and tooting the horn. “What am I going to do now?” she asked.

  “How about getting back into the car and pulling over so the street isn’t blocked?” I offered. Of course, by now there was a car coming up behind me as well.

  “I mean about them? What am I going to do with them?” She pointed into the back seat where, sitting perfectly placidly and oblivious to the armada of police cars just up ahead of them, sat the Brothers Alpha, both totally enrapt in their hand-held gaming consoles.

  SIX

  Twenty minutes later Elena Cates, the boys and me were all seated in a booth at The Pie Place, which was about a mile or so from Nora’s house, on Vermont Avenue. I was having the banana crème, Elena was poking at a slice of strawberry, but shockingly, the twins said they weren’t hungry. Maybe everything I’d been told about adolescent boys being bottomless pits was wrong, or maybe they were just too caught up in their palm-sized video games to worry about something as inconsequential as food.

  Elena was the woman whose unavailability the night before had set Nora off. I learned that she had picked them up about ten this morning to take them to an art museum, at which time Nora Frost had been very much alive, and that was about all I was able to get out of her so far…that, and the fact that she did not do well under difficult or stressful situations. In fact, it was Elena’s growing hysteria back on the street that caused me to take her by the shoulders and give her a mild shake, then instruct her to get back in her car and follow me to the pie restaurant.

  So here we sat: she the color of paper, mechanically chewing a piece of pie, me wondering how much trouble I was going to be in if Colfax found out I had intercepted important witnesses, and the boys totally oblivious to everything except getting Deathmaster Bob to Level Six. We had not even told the twins about their mother yet.

  The tense silence was all but drowning out the noise and activity of the busy restaurant, but then the boys broke it by announcing they had to go to the bathroom. Both said it in unison: I guess that’s the sort of thing that happens at the same time for twins. Once they were gone from the booth, Elena said urgently: “We have to tell them.”

  “You’re right,” I said, “though I haven’t yet come up with the best opening for saying, ‘Oh, by the way, kids, your mom was shot to death.’ How do you think they’ll react?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve been helping out with them for more than a year, and in that time I’ve never noticed much emotion of any kind. I think it might have something to do with the death of their dad. Nora turned him into a war hero to the point where Taylor and Burton are discouraged from thinking about him as a real person. Maybe this will make the dam break, or maybe they’ll just retreat further into themselves.”

  “Or those games. But there’s only one way to find out. Do you want to be the one to tell them?”

  “Honestly, no.” she said.

  “I guess that leaves me, then,” I said.

  “You are the one who found Nora.”

  “Right.”

  Being relieved of the unpleasant duty of informing her charges that their mother was dead seemed to improve Elena’s appetite. She shoveled a large piece of the strawberry pie into her mouth, and then said: “What will happen next, after you tell them?”

  “I’ll have to let the police know where they are. Otherwise they cops will keep searching for them.”

  “Maybe you should take them back to the house.”

  “No, because the police will still be there.”

  “So?”

  “So I’d really rather not have to explain to them that I intercepted you and the boys not far from the crime scene and whisked you away.”

  “Couldn’t you say we all ran into each other here at the restaurant?”

  “That would be too radio show.”

  “Too what?”

  Sometimes I forget that not everyone is into vintage movies, television and radio shows. In old radio shows of the 1940s, particularly the comedy shows, it was common to have script shortcuts in which two celebrities simply run into each other on the street, at the track, even on the moon, if that’s where the show was set. Why, look who’s here…it’s Sonny Tufts! Bob Hope’s voice echoed through my head. But real life—particularly that part of real life that involves policemen—hates those kinds of coincidences, and I could see how any attempt by me to tell Detective Colfax that, out of the entirety of greater Los Angeles, I just happened to go into a restaurant and run into Taylor and Burton Frost, would likely result in my arrest. But rather than try to explain all of that to Elena, I simply said: “What I mean is it’s too contrived.”

  “What are you going to say, then?” she asked, not unreasonably.

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll think of something.”

  Make it good, said the ever-helpful Bogie in my head.

  I had a sudden flash. “How about this: we’ll all go back to my office and I’ll call
Detective Colfax from there. I’ll tell him you called me and that you had the boys the whole time, and that they’re perfectly safe.”

  “Okay, but why would I call you?” she asked. “Until a half-hour ago, I didn’t even know you.”

  “Right. Well…you called because Nora gave you my number and told you to call.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  I leaned back in the booth and sighed. This was the same person who less than a minute ago was arguing that I should say I just ran into the missing twins in a pie shop. “How about this: Nora was angry that you weren’t available to take the boys home last night, which meant I had to do it. So I’ll say she forced you to call me and apologize for inconveniencing me.”

  She thought for a moment and then said, “Yeah, that sounds like something Nora would do.”

  “That’s the story, then.” I noticed that her face took on a worried expression. “Elena, trust me, the police will buy the story as long as we keep it consistent.”

  “That’s not what’s bothering me. The last time I ever spoke to Nora she was screaming at me for not being able to drop everything and come running anytime she snapped her fingers. At the time I was thinking how I never wanted to hear that voice again. Now I won’t. I feel like this is my fault, somehow.”

  “Don’t be silly, it’s not your fault. Unless you’re the one who killed her.”

  The worried expression morphed into one of shock. “Of course not!”

  Across the restaurant I saw the twins emerging from the bathroom. “Remember, Elena, Nora gave you my number and told you to call.”

  Right as the boys arrived at the table, the waitress appeared to ask if there was anything else. “Can we just go home now?” Burton asked.

  “Well, no,” I said. “Not yet.” To the waitress I added: “But we’ll have the check, please.” She pulled it out from her apron and dropped it on the table, with one of those practiced “tip-me-good-now” smiles and waited while I pulled out a twenty. Taking the money, she bustled away to get my change. Turning back to the twins, I said: “Taylor, Burton, I have something to tell you, something that’s going to be very hard for you to accept. There’s no good way to say it, I’m afraid.”