“So it was a suicide, not a murder,” I said, my voice threatening to crack.
“If you drive someone to take their own life, that is murder!” she declared. “Mrs. Cousins would never have done something like that on her own. She would never have risked condemning her soul to eternal suffering if Nora had not driven her to it! At her funeral Nora came up to me. I tried to get away, but I could not. She said: ‘That.…’ I cannot use the word she called her mother, ‘…died of an accidental overdose, and if you ever say it wasn’t, your life won’t be worth a refried bean.’ That was how she said it. I never saw or spoke to her again. Now she’s dead and I’m.…”
Katy Gutiérrez totally broke down then and began weeping in her chair, while I sat by stupidly and tried to think of something to do or say. Before I could, though, I heard the sound of the front door opening. “Hi, Mom, it’s me,” a voice said, and a moment later one of the most muscular men I have ever seen walked into the room. He appeared to be about thirty and he had the kind of muscled arms that threatened to burst through the sleeves of his shirt, like a young Schwarzenegger. I recognized him from the pictures on the wall as Rafael Gutiérrez, though the school photos obviously gave no indication as to his physique, or perhaps it developed later. He looked at his sobbing mother and then turned his gaze toward me. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “Who are you?” He approached me in a semi-threatening manner, and I rose from the couch and held my hands in front of me.
“You must be Rafael,” I said, lamely. Good job, kid, Bogie sneered.
“I know who I am, I asked you who you are,” Rafael Gutiérrez said.
“Rafael, it is all right,” Katy said through her sobs. “This man was asking me questions about Natalie.”
“Did you get the answers your came for?” Rafael asked me.
“Um, I guess I did.”
“Then, um, I guess you can leave this house and stop bothering my mother.”
Even though his mother was mildly protesting, I was not about to argue with a guy who looked like he could juggle three professional wrestlers at one time. “A pleasure meeting you, Mrs. Gutiérrez,” I said on the way out.
“Goodbye,” she called.
“Mom, you can’t just let people come in here like that,” I heard right before I closed the door behind me. I couldn’t really blame the guy for being a good son and wanting to protect his mother, and I doubt I would have gleaned any more information from her had he not cut the interview short. But what I had learned did not make me feel any better about this case, nor was I feeling any warmer and fuzzier about my one-time client, who had now transitioned from being a garden-variety B.O.W. to a possibly homicidal psychopath.
I headed back to the office, not having anything better to do. When I got there the light on my phone machine was blinking, which reminded me to unplug my cell phone from the charger and stick it back in my pocket. I punched the playback button, hoping for a nice, normal, boring divorce or skip trace gig; instead I the voice of Alan Kleinbach, saying: “Hey, I saw that car again, and I got the license number you were asking about.” He proceeded to read it off on the machine, and I wrote it down. Then he said: “But y’know, there’s something weird about all this. You’re gonna love this, man, ‘cause I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that car befo—” His voice then was cut off by my machine.
“Aw, sheez!” I said, jabbing the button again, knowing it would make no difference. Kleinbach’s voice cut off in exactly the same spot. At least I had the license number, though there was little I could do to follow it up personally. I had never bothered to subscribe to the DMV database. Fortunately, I knew several people who had. Digging through my Rolodex, I finally found the number of a man from whom I had taken private investigation classes through USC extension, and punched in his number. When I finally got him on the line, I said: “Hi, Walt, it’s Dave Beauchamp.”
“Dave…oh, right. Hi, Dave,” Walt Westermann said. “What can I do for you?”
Without going into detail, I read off the license number the Kleinbach had phoned in and asked him to run it through the DMV database.
“You really need to spring for one yourself, you know,” Walt said.
“I know.” I didn’t mention that for the first time in a long time, I could actually afford to do so. But I needed the information now.
Unfortunately, Walt couldn’t do it right now, but he promised to do the run at the first opportunity and get back to me. After a little more small talk, and profuse thanks, I hung up.
I sat and thought about this mess for a long time. Then I muttered, “It’s the boys, it has to be the boys. They are the key to this whole thing, but how and why?”
Maybe they know something worth murdering for? Bogart’s voice intoned inside my brain.
“Okay, but what?”
Don’t ask me, I’ve been dead for a long time.
Great. Thanks.
Robert Mitchum took over: Try using your own damned brain. Who knows, you might like the experience.
“I’ve been trying!” I said in desperation. “I don’t know where to go from here!”
Check out the house, Mitch replied.
“What house?”
Nora’s house.
“Oh, yeah, right,” I muttered. I was going to break into the house of a recently murdered woman, my client, cross and potentially corrupt a crime scene, and run the very good risk of landing myself into more trouble that it would be possible to get out of in one lifetime? Was I really going to do that?
Yes, Dave, you are, a new voice said. You’re going to do it for me. It wasn’t Bogie, Mitchum, or any of the other regulars.
It was Marcy DeBanzi.
Yes, I would do it for her. Of course, I would. And if I happened to be caught inside Nora Frost’s house, snooping around a crime scene, I could always use Hollywood on Parade inside my head as the groundwork for an insanity defense.
I turned the lights off in my apartment and left, but I had not even gotten down the street before I began reconsidering the wisdom of this move. Was I truly going to break into a crime scene? Sometimes a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, Bogie said, but that was easy for him to say. He was dead.
As I headed in the direction of Nora’s house in Hollywood I tried to come up with a logical explanation for my presence should I be seen or, worse, discovered by the police. Pretending to be a delivery boy wasn’t going to work, nor was professed ignorance of the law. Were I a television detective, I would have a disguise kit and wardrobe at my disposal from which I could have made myself look like a perfect replica of Alan Kleinbach, should I be spotted.
Stopped for a light on Ventura Boulevard, my focus wandered over the curbside, where I saw that rarest of objects in today’s world: a public pay telephone. That was it! As soon as the light changed I pulled through and parked at the curb in the red. I didn’t expect to be here long enough for it to be a problem. I ran to the phone and picked up the receiver with a handkerchief, put in two quarters, and dialed my office number. When the machine picked up, I waited, and then in a high-pitched whisper I said: “Mr. Beauchamp, I have to see you. I’ve found something at Nora Frost’s house. Meet me there, inside.” Then I hung up. That would be my insurance policy if I was caught. Sure, if the cops really wanted to, they could run a trace on the tape and probably figure out that it came from a payphone within a couple miles of my office. If they really wanted to, they could run a voice print on the recording and prove it was my voice. But my hope was that they would have bigger things to worry about.
Traffic was with me, and once I got to Nora’s place I was gratified to see no fleet of police vehicles out front. There was still a yellow crime scene tape across the front door, but I wasn’t planning on using the front door. Parking a couple blocks away, I got out of the car and started to walk down the street like I belonged there. It wasn’t quite magic hour—that time of the afternoon that filmmakers love, when the shadows are long and the natural lighting gold-tinged and
evocative—but it was close. As casually as I could force myself to appear, I went up the driveway beside the house to the garage in back. Once there I took a quick look around and then vaulted over the short brick fence that enclosed the backyard. Even though there were trees on each side which cut down the visibility to neighbors, I felt particularly naked standing there and more than particularly foolish. You don’t take chances, sonny, you don’t get anything, I heard. Thanks, Mitch. I hope you’ll be a character witness for me from the great beyond if I get caught.
Going to the back door of the house, I pulled out my wallet and withdrew my homemade lock pick—a six-penny finishing nail, bent into an “L,” with the head flattened just so. It’s a trick that an old guy who was once a hotel dick showed me, and it’s astonishing how well this works once you know exactly how to pound the head. It took a few seconds of wiggling the nail, but I managed to spring the lock, and unless there was a security chain on top, I was in.
There wasn’t; I was.
I certainly knew better than to turn a light on inside, so I pulled out my keychain that had that little flashlight hooked on it. Up to this point in my career, this had been my most useful tool in my investigator kit, since I had never actually had cause before now to use the lock pick on a case. I was in the kitchen, and even though the smell of death permeated the place, it was not enough to overcome the reeking trash, which clearly had not been taken out since before Nora was killed. Taking care with each step, I slowly moved into the dining room, which was free of crime scene markers. From here I could see the bathroom door, which was sealed like King Tut’s tomb with yellow tape and plastic sheets. There was no reason for me to go in there, thankfully.
The last time I had been here, when Nora was alive and the twins were drinking sodas in the kitchen; she had gone upstairs to her bedroom and retrieved the would-be threatening letter from the place in which she kept it locked up. If her bedroom was where she kept important papers, those papers might give me some sort of clue what was going on in this case.
You sure about that? Bogie’s voice asked.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I whispered. “Go away.”
I crept over to the staircase and started up, trying desperately not to think about Martin Balsam in Psycho, who in similar circumstances met “Mother,” wielding a butcher knife, at the top of the stairs. Once I had safely reached the landing, I approached the room I had earlier decided had to be the twins’ and noticed a glow coming out of it. Peering in, I saw that a computer had been left on, its screen radiating a faint light. Either they left in a hurry and forgot to turn it off, or they intended to be back soon and didn’t bother. Neither option was very comforting.
The room next to this one was a combination guest bedroom and storage room, with boxes stacked everywhere. Across the hall was a bathroom and next to it another large bedroom, this one with all the accoutrements of a female inhabitant: Nora’s room. The last time I had been up here, snooping, I had not really bothered to examine the contents of the room, because I was looking to see if the twins were anywhere in the house. Now I was able to study the furnishings: a bed, unmade; a dresser and a chair; and an old-style vanity with a round mirror, and lots of makeup items on top. Did she keep her important papers in a safe? I wondered. The classic image of the wall safe hidden behind a painting was pretty much a Hollywood invention, but sometimes people kept small safes inside of a closet. Going to the large walk-in, I opened the door and examined the contents. There were plenty of dresses and outfits, and an unholy number of shoes, but nothing that looked like a metal safe. Turning back, I realized that the only other logical place in the room to keep something under lock and key was the vanity. Approaching it, I noticed an electrical cord coming out of one of the drawers, and upon carefully opening it with a handkerchief, saw it was connected to a hair drier. I opened the other drawers and found nothing much, until coming to the bottom one, which was locked. “Mm-hmm,” I muttered absently, pulling out my lock pick and sticking it in the drawer lock, which was almost too small for it…almost. After a few seconds, the lock tripped and I was able to open the drawer. What I saw took my breath away.
There were at least a dozen banded stacks of hundred dollar bills in there, totaling, by my estimate, about fifty thousand dollars. All anyone would have to was reach in and grab one…or two…and nobody would ever know.
I knelt there, staring at all that money, waiting for a voice to tell me what to do, but none of my regulars seemed to want to volunteer. I was on my own for this one. I’m almost ashamed to admit that I was actually licking my lips looking at all those graven images of Ben Franklin. Maybe that was why I decided to leave each and every one of them where they were, no matter what my financial situation was.
Kid, you’re all right, Bogie told me, as I remembered to exhale. But I continued to examine the stack of cash and soon realized that there was something underneath all the bills. Carefully picking the wads up with the handkerchief, I set them on the carpeted floor beside the drawer, and discovered there wasn’t quite as much I had assumed. Maybe only twenty grand or so. Underneath was a large envelope labeled San Gabriel, which I carefully opened. It contained a series of invoices from a place called San Gabriel Valley Private Hospital in Sierra Madre. I could find no specifics as to the charges, though each monthly invoice was for an amount on one or the other side of four-thousand dollars. Could Nora have been paying off a facelift on the installment plan? “Oh, no,” I uttered, as an even sicker idea struck me. Earlier pictures of the boys were identical, but now they aren’t. Had Nora forced the kids to undergo plastic surgery so they wouldn’t look alike?
We don’t use the T word, I remembered her telling me. It’s demeaning to them as individuals. Was she actually crazy enough to force them to undergo surgery so that they could look more like individuals? An even grimmer speculation was that she had forced only Ricky/Burton to have the surgery so the boys would be no longer identical, and Burton could not ruin Taylor’s career. Maybe that was why their own father did not recognize them.
While speculation may be great, it proves nothing, so I kept looking. Also in the secret drawer was an envelope with the return address for Pacific Investigations in Brentwood, an outfit with which I was familiar. They specialized in cases for celebrities and people who wanted not only the very best, but the quietest. Rumor had it that operatives from Pacific had been employed by the O.J. Simpson “dream team” of high-powered lawyers to track down witnesses to the murders and encourage the people to sell their stories to tabloid publications, all but ensuring that this would destroy their credibility as potential witnesses in the actual trial. In any event, Pacific Investigations (PI…get it?) was the firm one called for maximum results at a cost that was no object, which fit in with Nora’s M.O. Elena Cates had said Nora hired a detective to find Marcy, so this was probably their report. But examination of the envelope argued against that, since it was addressed not to Nora, but to “Lt. Randall Frost.”
Nora’s husband.
Opening the envelope, I pulled out the papers inside with my knuckles and read the one on top, which was addressed to Lt. Randall C. Frost:
Dear Lt. Frost,
As per your instructions we placed a tail on Mrs. Nora Frost, regarding the matter that you initially communicated to us. After spending some fifty (50) man-hours on the assignment, I feel that I can report back to you with extreme confidence that nothing in your wife’s actions as witnessed by us supports your concerns. In short, Lt. Frost, our best operatives have failed to uncover any evidence that your wife is engaged in any extra-marital relationships.
So the military hero suspected that Nora was playing squigillum with someone else. Trouble in paradise. The letter continued:
I feel, therefore in fairness to all parties involved, that we should agree between us to terminate the contract dated August 23, 2007. Should our accounts reveal that we have not utilized your entire retainer, a refund check will be issued to you.
I hope this
missive is satisfactory.
Sincerely,
Alexander McCarthar
President, Pacific Investigations
There was something that bothered me about this letter. It was the phrase all parties involved. I know I’m not the best or savviest PI in the greater L.A. area, but if I’m hired by a client, I work for the client, and don’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether my investigation is going to step on the toes of investigatee. Maybe it was simply semantics, but using the words all parties involved implied that the object of the investigation—Nora—was included in this discussion to drop the matter. I put the letter back inside its envelope and set it down, and then reached for the next document in the drawer. This one was a letter from Pacific Investigations, but without an envelope. It proved to be the cover letter for a contract, addressed to Nora, spelling out the details of the work to be undertaken in the quest to find her missing sister.
Paperclipped to the bottom of the cover letter was the handwritten note: Nora—The other matter of which we spoke, your husband’s arrangement with us, it has been taken care of. AM.
Alexander McCarthar. So Nora had been playing, or paying, the investigators to drop the case against her. Lieutenant Frost is happy that his worst fears are not confirmed, and Pacific Investigations gets paid twice. Nice. I put the contract down with the cash and the other envelope. Next in the drawer was a manila folder containing photos. Most of them were of a happy looking young couple with two small blond children. The man appeared to be Lt. Frost, though it was a little hard to tell, since unlike his official military photo, he was smiling. But who was the woman? Several photos later, a strong possibility suggested itself: Frost was Nora’s second husband, so it was highly possible that Nora was Frost’s second wife, and the woman in the pictures was his first wife. But there were kids in the pictures, too. As I studied the photos more carefully, I developed chills. “Oh my god,” I whispered. The two blond kids were boys, the same size, presumably the same age, but not identical.
Kill the Mother! Page 19