Kill the Mother!

by Michael Mallory

  “Has something happened to our mother?” Taylor asked.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “Is she hurt?”

  “Guys, somebody…well, someone shot her.”

  “Dead?” Taylor whispered.

  I nodded. “I’m very, very sorry.”

  The twins looked at each other, then looked back. “It was bound to happen one day,” Burton said.

  I picked up my glass from the table and took a large sip of ice water to see if it would warm up my blood. Maybe they were in shock. I’ve never actually seen anyone in shock, but from the stories I’ve heard, it turns you into a functioning automaton, which is how the boys were acting at present. Of course, that was not far removed from how they acted at most other times.

  “Guys, do you understand what Mr. Beauchamp is saying?” Elena asked.

  “We know what dead means,” Taylor said.

  “It means we’re orphans now.” Burton added.

  “Boo hoo,” Taylor sang, uncaringly.

  “I think I need to go back to the bathroom again,” Burton said.

  “Come on,” Taylor said, and the two of them ran through the restaurant.

  “My god, those poor kids,” Elena moaned, shaking her head. “They’re probably going to fall apart in there.”

  “Maybe that’s what they need,” I said. “I’ll give them a minute or so alone and then go check on them.”

  The waitress came back with my change and chirped her thanks as I laid out a few singles to cover the tip. The twins were now the only things holding us here. I was about to go into the bathroom after them when I finally saw the door open. Taylor came out first, followed by Burton. They both looked serious and glum, but I could not tell if they had been crying. “We want to go home,” Taylor announced when he got to the table.

  “You’re home is still a crime scene,” I told them. “We’ll have to go somewhere else.”

  “Where?” Elena asked.

  The best I could come up with on the spot was to go back to my office. Then I had another idea. Maybe its results would be catastrophic, or maybe it would result in a breakthrough of sorts with at least one of the boys, but I suggested that they split up, just like the police do with suspects, with one of them riding to my office in my car, and the other riding with Elena. The twins were not so much against the idea as puzzled at the notion that anyone would try to separate them. Finally, they agreed—if shrugs in unison can count as agreement—with Taylor coming with me and Burton with Elena. I had already given her my business card with the address, so I simply told her the best freeway exit to take and the nearest cross street to my building, and then headed out.

  Buckled into the front seat, staring straight ahead, Taylor Frost remained still as a statue as I turned off of Vermont onto Los Feliz, heading for the 5 freeway North. “Again, Taylor,” I said, “I’m really sorry about your mom.” He said nothing. Finally, as we were transitioning to the 134 freeway, which would get us to the San Fernando Valley, he asked: “Did you, like, see her?”

  “I’m afraid so. I found her in the bathroom.”

  He grimaced. “She must have hated dying there. She had a thing about the bathroom always being neat and spotless.”

  “Did you get along well with your mom?”

  “Yeah, sorta,” he said. “Sometimes she treated us like babies. She didn’t want us to have friends. I think she was afraid we were going to grow up, and she didn’t really want that.” After that, he went back into his box.

  The picture of Nora Frost was becoming clearer. Whatever names and terms might be used by others to describe her, only represented the symptoms. What fueled the cause was extreme control-freakery, a near mania to dictate the lives of her children, and everybody who came into contact with them. We rode on in silence for a bit longer, and then I tried once more to spark a conversation. “Do you and your brother like being in show business?”

  “It’s okay,” Taylor said, unconvincingly. “It’s what she wanted.”

  Okay, I’ll admit I am not particularly skilled at talking to kids, but this was a situation that might have stymied Art Linkletter. The reason I wanted to split the boys up was in hopes that one of them might reveal information that could be useful in tracking Nora’s killer: recent visitors, perhaps, or neighbors, or maybe the identity of someone the boys had overheard arguing with her on the telephone, anything that might give a lead. But the last thing I wanted was to push him for information in such a way that he backed off and closed up for good. I decided to change the subject. “You know, Taylor, your mom told me about your grandparents.”

  “What about them?” he asked.

  “They were actors.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I like old movies and TV shows, so I’ve seen your grandparents many times. It must be kind of cool to know that you’re the grandson of Steve Cousins and Natalie Strange.”

  “I don’t really remember them that much.”

  “Yeah, I guess you would have been pretty young when they died,” I said, acknowledging another less than productive diversion. I glanced in the rearview mirror to see if Elena’s car was in sight, and couldn’t find it. Hopefully she was good at directions. If not, well, that was why God made the little green cell phones.

  I did not try to get any more information from Taylor until I arrived at my office. Elena’s car was already there, parked at the curb on the side street. Taylor and Burton waved at each other as I drove past to my assigned spot in the tiny parking area in back. The two of them were waiting for us at the front door of the building. “How did you manage to beat me?” I asked Elena.

  “Well, for one thing I didn’t take the Woodman exit like you said, I took the Van Nuys exit,” she said.

  “But that’s back-tracking.”

  “And I also beat you.”

  She’s got you there, sport, Errol Flynn commented in my head. How comforting it was to learn that after three years of coming to this building every day, I didn’t know the best way to get there. I led everybody in and up the stairs to my office. The boys seemed happy to be reunited after twenty-five minutes apart, or at least as happy as they got. “All right,” I began, taking my seat behind my desk, “the first thing we have to do is contact Detective Colfax of the police and let him know that the boys are okay. Where’s my laptop?”

  “Why are you asking us?” the twins said in unison.

  “It was rhetorical, but I need it to look up the number of the Northwest police station.”

  “Can’t you dial 411?” Elena asked.

  “I’m still going to need my laptop eventually,” I said. “I must have left it in my car. Everybody stay here, I’ll be back in a minute.” I got up and dashed into the hall and down the stairs, cautioning to the voices in my head: The first one of you dead celebrity cutups who cracks wise about how smoothly I’m handling this is going to be banished! Right; like I had control over who appeared inside my head and when. Still, the Hollywood Victory Tour remained blissfully quiet.

  I ran out the building’s back door and straight to my Toyota, expecting to find the laptop in the backseat, but not seeing it. I opened the trunk, which contained so much junk that I half expected someday to find Jimmy Hoffa hiding under it all. I rummaged through the junk—books, magazines, DVDs, grocery store cloth bags, a small suitcase with a change of clothes (you just never know), a package of toilet paper (you really never know), a miniature baseball bat that could double as a blackjack if I ever had occasion to press it into use (which, fortunately, I never had), and a bag of peanuts so old even Jumbo wouldn’t have touched them. But no laptop. Sheez! Had I managed to leave it at the pie shop? No, I didn’t have it there. But I did have it when I left for Nora’s house, before all hell broke loose, and I had not used it since.

  I checked the inside of the car again, and found it: it had managed to slide very neatly, and nearly invisibly, under the driver’s seat. Grabbing the device, I headed back inside.

  As I got back
to the open door of my office, I called: “Everybody still there?”

  “Oh yeah, the gang’s all here,” a voice answered. It did not belong to Elena Cates, or either of the twins. I stopped and watched as the form of a man appeared in the doorway. “Hello again, Mr. Beauchamp,” Detective Colfax said, smiling like snake.

  SEVEN

  All right, I’ll admit that I have never seen a snake smile, though some lawyers I’ve known have come close. The discomfiting grin on Colfax’s face was the kind of sneer that should have been accompanied by a tympani roll, like the one that announces impending doom for Wile E. Coyote. I looked up, expecting to see an anvil.

  “Come on in,” Colfax said, inviting me into my own office. Detective Mendoza was there too, making the office a bit crowded.

  “These policemen showed up right after you left,” Elena whispered. Their presence was clearly bothering her.

  “I went down to my car to get my laptop,” I explained.

  Colfax gestured toward the twins. “These two, I take it, are the ones you were so eager to have an Amber Alert issued for? You knew where they were the whole time, didn’t you?”

  “No sir, I did not,” I protested.

  “Then I suppose they showed up at the door selling magazine subscriptions and you invited them in,” Mendoza sneered.

  “Who sells magazines anymore?” Burton asked, guilelessly.

  “That’s just dumb,” Taylor Frost added, never taking his eyes off his game console. Mendoza looked like he wanted to backhand the kid, but Colfax shot him a warning look.

  “Look, Colfax,” I began, “when I talked to you, I did not know where the boys were. Then I found out that Elena, whom I assume you’ve already met, had picked them up this morning and took them to a museum. Nora gave her my phone number at some point, so she called me.”

  “Is that true, ma’am?” Colfax asked, causing Elena to pale.

  Come on, Elena; just like we rehearsed.…

  “Yes, of course,” she said in a hushed voice. “Nora wanted me to apologize to Dave. He had to take the boys home last night in my place, because I couldn’t get away, and that made Nora angry at me, so she made me call and apologize for not being available.”

  “Sounds like her,” Taylor commented.

  I picked up the story: “When she called I told her that something terrible had happened at the house. I suggested we…uh.…”

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave, a wry, jovial voice said in my head. It was Cary Grant.

  “We, uh, what?” Colfax asked.

  I stood there for what seemed like an eternity as the realization that it was not a cartoon anvil, but rather a serious flaw in the story I had fabricated, that was going to come crashing down on my head. I had gotten my story straight with Elena at the restaurant, but at that time the twins had been in the bathroom. If I gave the prevarication that I told everybody to meet me here, Taylor and Burton might wonder why I was omitting our trip to The Pie Place. And if I mentioned that we were all at The Pie Place, Colfax would well wonder why everybody so close to Nora’s house made a special trip out here.

  “Cat got your tongue, Beauchamp?” Mendoza prodded. I looked over at Elena, who simply looked back in confusion. Then I motioned for the detective to follow me out into the hallway, which he did.

  “Detective Colfax, here’s the thing,” I said quietly. “The boys might be suffering from shock. You can see they’re not acting normally.”

  “I had noticed something was wrong with them.”

  If he only knew.

  “I don’t want to keep talking about their mother’s murder in front of them,” I went on. “I’m afraid it might upset them even more. Isn’t there a way we can let them go? They’re safe, after all. Then I’ll be happy to tell you everything.”

  Colfax thought for a moment, then walked back into the office. “Ma’am, do the boys have any place to go?”

  “I can take them home with me,” she replied. “They can stay there, at least temporarily.”

  “Isn’t there any other family?”

  “They have an aunt who lives in San Pedro. Nora’s sister.”

  “Nora’s sister?” I shouted, and all eyes turned toward me. “Um, I mean, how can that be? Nora told me she was adopted. Did the Cousins adopt two daughters?”

  “Who’s cousins?” Colfax asked.

  “Nora’s parents were the Cousins,” I said.

  “So she was inbred?” Mendoza asked.

  “No, Nora was adopted by Steve Cousins and Natalie Strange, no relation,” I said.

  “To who?”

  “To the aunt,” Elena offered.

  “I dunno, third base,” Detective Colfax muttered, raising his arms in frustration, but also raising my estimation of him. Anyone who can quote Abbott and Costello can’t be all bad. “So the vic, Nora Frost,” he went on, “has a sister that was not raised by the cousins.”

  “Nora and her sister were orphaned as toddlers and then adopted by two different couples,” Elena explained. “At least that’s the story I got. A year or so back Nora hired a detective to try and track her sister down, and she found Marcella that way.”

  Congratulations to that detective. Whoever he was, he was better at this game than I was.

  “That’s the sister, Marcella?” Colfax asked.

  “Marcella DeBanzi.”

  “Has anybody notified her yet?”

  “I haven’t spoken with her,” Elena said.

  “I only found out she existed a couple minutes ago,” I added.

  “All right, for the time being, you keep the kids, ma’am,” Colfax said. “No sense getting the courts involved yet. But give the sister a call and let her know what’s happened.”

  “Can we leave now?” Elena asked.

  “Yeah, you can go. But leave me your contact information first, and contact info on the aunt, if you have it.”

  “I think I do,” Elena said, pulling a small address book from her purse and flipping through it until she found the proper page. Then borrowing a pad of paper and pen from my desk, she wrote down her address and phone number, as well as those for the boys’ Aunt Marcella. Ripping the page off of the pad, she handed it to the detective. “Okay?”

  He examined the paper. “Okay. Thank you, Miss Cates.”

  Elena then she collected the boys, who only barely looked from their games, and started for the door. Before she had exited, though, Colfax said: “Oh, before you go, ma’am, what time did you pick the boys up this morning?”

  “About nine-thirty,” Elena said.

  Colfax thought about that for a moment, then nodded, and said, “Fine, thanks. We’ll be in touch.”

  “I’ll call you, Elena,” I said, as she exited the office with the boys. But at the door Burton stopped and turned back. “Is it true that they call you guys ‘dicks’?” he asked.

  “It’s an old expression for a policeman or detective,” I replied, stupidly.

  “Hey, there’s a bunch of real dicks in there!” Burton crowed, before Elena pulled him away and down the hall.

  “Charming family, don’t you think?” I said, once they had gone.

  “If those two brats were mine, I’d sell them into slavery,” Mendoza muttered, and while the young detective had offered me nothing much to like about him, I couldn’t entirely disagree with his assessment of the Brothers Alpha.

  “Okay, Mr. Beauchamp,” Colfax said, “everybody else is gone, so we can talk freely. What was the point of bringing the boys here?”

  Fortunately, the interval between the last time I attempted to answer that question had given me time to think. “When Elena called me,” I began, “I suggested that she bring them here instead of taking them to their house, and risk having them see the body of their mother, which I assumed would be a little traumatic for a couple of twelve-year-olds. I was just about to call you when you showed up.”

  “You weren’t even here when we showed up,” Mendoza spat.

  “I told you, I was gettin
g my laptop out of my car, so I could find the number for the Northeast station so I could call you. I gave you a business card, but you did not give me one.”

  “What I gave you, Beauchamp, was a request that you go down to the station and give an official statement.”

  “Right, but when Elena called, that seemed to take precedence.”

  He glared at me for a few seconds, and then said, “All right. But don’t forget to do it.” Fishing in his pocket, he pulled out a card and handed it to me. “Here. No excuses this time.” I glanced down and read Dane Colfax, Detective II.

  Dane Colfax? Was anybody other than a 1950s leading man using a studio-dictated stage name really called Dane Colfax?

  “I’ll go, I promise. Want me to do it right now?”

  “I have a couple extra questions for you first,” Colfax said. “One concerns an email we found on the victim’s computer, which had been sent to you early this morning.”

  “Nora emailed me the names of certain people to question.”

  “When did you receive it?”

  “Well, it was right after I booted up my laptop, and that was around eleven or so.”

  “That’s when you received it, or when you read it?”

  “When I read it. I didn’t get into the office until then.”

  “Must be nice not to have to get up in the morning,” Mendoza said.

  “If you really want to know the truth, business is a little slow at present, so there’s not much reason for me to come in at the crack of dawn. But if you want, I can check my computer and see when the email actually came into my system.”

  “Please do,” Colfax said.

  I went over to my desk and powered up the attaché-sized device, and checked the email. “It says eight-forty-seven,” I said.