by Nancy Bush
“She aborted the child?”
“Well, some doctor said she’d had a miscarriage. Who knows? But I guess that’s why nothin’ came of the rumor. Miscarriages are kinda sad, and nobody wanted to feel sorry for someone as pretty and successful as Denise Scott. Her sleepin’ around on that film-king’s son. That’s what people want to know about.” He eyed Connor thoughtfully. “Did Candy tell you none of this?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Well, what’d she tell ya, then?”
Connor sighed. His interview with Candy Daniels Whorton had left him feeling unsettled and a little depressed. There were so many lost people in the world, the flotsam and jetsam of society whom the rest of the world treated with unconscious disdain and barely concealed sneers.
Candy’s obesity was her least attractive feature and her most obvious one. She’d waddled away from the door, set the .38 on the cluttered counter, shoving dishes aside to make room for it, then sunk onto the couch, indicating a vinyl kitchen chair for Connor.
He could see some kind of dried red sauce stuck to the chair’s back but he took a seat nevertheless.
She eyed him carefully. “Want a cigarette?”
“No, thanks.”
“Sheriff said you’d want to talk to me. I’ve been kind of expecting you.” She lit her own cigarette and filthy gray smoke added to the general air of debris and neglect.
“Thomas Daniels was your father?”
“Yep.”
“He was a carpenter.”
“He was good with his hands,” she said with a smirk. “He’d go out on the job and spend more time with the wives than he needed to. Got hisself beat up a few times, too, but not enough to stop him. I was eleven when Mom kicked him out for good.”
“And then he married Nina Scott?”
“Moved in before the papers was even filed.” Candy shrugged. “I was glad. Good riddance.”
Connor wondered if that were really true, but he let it go for the moment. “Did you ever meet your stepsisters?”
“The three angels.” Her tone was derisive. “I knew of ’em, but they came from somewhere else. Their mom divorced their dad and came to Wagon Wheel. I think they were from southern Oregon, somewhere like Medford or Roseburg. They was only here for about three years.” Candy heaved a sigh and picked tobacco off her teeth from her unfiltered cigarette. “Nina was pretty. Dad went right for her and she was dumb enough to go for him.” She laughed without humor.
“You told Sheriff Dempsey that you thought one of the sisters killed your father.”
“Now, I didn’t say it quite like that,” she corrected. “All I said was they had a lot of reason to hate him, that’s all.”
“Yeah?”
She sent him a look through the smoke, her eyes glimmering with hidden thoughts. “He was always puttin’ his hands up their skirts.” She shrugged. “It was all over town.”
Connor absorbed that. Candy’s reputation as a virtuous woman wasn’t exactly stellar. Her mind seemed to run on one track, and he suspected he was hearing what she hoped was the truth more than what she actually knew.
“How old were these sisters when Thomas lived alone with them?”
“High school age. The twins were oldest and the younger one, Hayley, was about a sophomore, I think. They all just disappeared at the same time.”
“Where was the mother?”
“Oh, she died. She was kinda sorry-seemin’. Just kinda wasted away.”
“You never went to school with the girls?”
“Uh-uh. I was younger. They were real pretty but kept to themselves, mostly. Who woulda thunk Denise would become a movie star.” A poignant bitterness touched her face. For a moment Connor could see her own extraordinary beauty, a beauty lost to fat and her own hard spent years.
“I’ve got pictures,” she offered, a bit reluctantly, “if you’d like to see.”
She waddled over to a scarred wooden end table and shook open a drawer. Inside was a cheap, but surprisingly clean, scrapbook. A bit shyly, she handed it to Connor and he opened it to find newspaper clippings yellowing with age. They were mostly of Denise, covering her film career, but Candy had pasted in all three girls’ school pictures as well.
Blond, blue-eyed, white teeth—the family resemblance was strong. But there was something remarkably joyless in the photos.
“They don’t look happy,” he remarked.
“They had my father livin’ with ’em.”
“You don’t think your father’s death was an accident?”
“Like he bashed in his head and stuffed himself in that culvert? Who’re you kiddin’, mister!”
“Maybe some jealous husband caught up with him.”
She looked at him again and he sensed that same impression of secrets inside her.
Or maybe, since she was deemed to be something of the local town whore, it was her idea of a come-on.
“Why even bother lookin’ for his killer?” Candy asked. “My dad was a piece of garbage. We’re all better off without him, believe you me.”
“A human life was ended,” he said, trying it out on her.
“He was garbage,” she repeated flatly. “And somebody finally dumped him.”
Connor had traveled over the same ground about six different ways with her, but she didn’t have much more to reveal. She knew nothing of Hayley and the other twin, whom Candy said was named Dinah.
In the end, his impression was that she just wanted to be deemed important, and that this was an elaborate way to see her name in the paper connected to the Scott sisters. She had no real interest in justice. Candy firmly believed Thomas Daniels deserved to die and he’d finally met up with destiny.
When he left her, she’d made a halfhearted attempt to get him to spend the night, then seemed almost relieved when he declined. Her last words were “It ain’t loaded,” as if he’d asked about the gun.
Now he looked at Dempsey who, despite his comment about her being a “sad case” clearly didn’t feel anything for Candy but mild contempt.
“Is there anyone else around who could tell me more about the Scott sisters?”
Dempsey’s sharp eyes glittered. “So you do think one of ’em did it.”
“I have no idea,” Connor answered truthfully. “I don’t even know why I’m continuing with this.”
“I’ll tell ya why.” Gus had stuffed the other two doughnuts in his mouth and eaten them as quickly as the first. Now he licked his thumb and set about picking up crumbs. “Because you don’t know what on God’s green earth you’re gonna do with the rest of your life and this here puzzle is as good a pastime as any until you figure it out.”
Connor didn’t respond.
Dempsey slid the notebook across the table. “Everybody knows a little bit. You can practically go right through the town and learn a little somethin’ about each girl. But nobody knows much.”
Connor accepted the notebook reluctantly, feeling he was on the threshold of something he really didn’t want to discover. With a grimace, he muttered, “I’ve got time to kill.”
“Maybe I should deputize you,” Gus said thoughtfully.
“Just have my back.”
The taxi swept along the smog-shrouded freeway, keeping up with the rest of the traffic as it ferried Denise from the airport to Carolyn’s posh home. The Mercedes was in Brent McCaffey’s capable hands; it would be shipped back tomorrow by truck.
Exhaustion weighed down her eyelids and made her shoulders ache. She was afraid to think too hard. She hadn’t known what to do with McCaffey, though he’d been understanding enough to take his Cactus Condom and vamoose in good humor. She could just imagine the happy bastard posting on Twitter about his night.
I just slept with #Denise Scott!
Yeah. Great. Another brilliant move.
Denise grimaced, glad the cabbie was sensitive enough to her mood to keep his mouth shut as they sped through the gray twilight.
She didn’t want to go back to Carolyn’s, b
ut where else was she supposed to go? She had no home to speak of. She was a vagabond. A lost soul.
I am used up, she thought wearily. Completely, utterly used up.
Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think. Fist your hand and push the poisons out. Outward, into the black space of nothingness.
“Goddammit, Denise,” she bit out, tears forming in the corners of her eyes. It wasn’t working. Nothing worked anymore.
The cabbie glanced into the rearview mirror. Made eye contact.
Denise tucked her arms close and huddled inside her sweater. She wasn’t up to facing Carolyn, but she had no choice. Laying her head back against the seat cushion, she felt her body go limp. Her bones melted.
She let the tears flow.
Thirty minutes later she paid the fare and started up the long walkway to Carolyn’s front door. The distance had never seemed this long but now the curving flagstones seemed to stretch into eternity, each of her footsteps so heavy, it took superhuman strength just to lift her ankles.
At the door Denise inhaled a deep, shaking breath. Her finger trembled as she pressed the bell. Chimes tolled inside like warning bells.
Exhaustion was closing her inside a cottony web. Swaying on her feet, Denise awaited her doom. Measured footsteps sounded, muffled against Carolyn’s Aubusson carpet. A pause. Someone was peering through the peephole at her.
The door suddenly opened. Denise swallowed. It was Peter. He of the oiled and lubed penis. Mr. Hawaiian Tropic in the naked flesh. At least that was Denise’s first impression, until she realized he wore a pair of black swim trunks.
“Well, hey!” he declared on a note of discovery. “Good to see you.”
All of Denise’s reserves failed her at that moment. She was crashing. As if she’d been on drugs. She stood silently, eyes huge, her vulnerability so raw that even she knew it must be visible on her face. Peter stepped forward and pulled her into his scuzzy arms, and she didn’t have the will to resist.
“Where’s Carolyn?” she choked out.
“She’s here somewhere. Hey, you look bummed. Come on in and have a drink or something.”
He walked her to the solarium and helped her onto a bright green lounge chair. Denise closed her eyes. Felt her mouth tremble uncontrollably.
“Could you call . . . Dr. Hayden Stone . . . ? Ask Carolyn to call him . . . please . . .”
“Hey, okay. You want a snort of coke first?”
With a long, desperate shudder, Denise lapsed into exhausted unconsciousness.
Chapter Six
Connor made short work of Gus’s notebook. People were willing to talk but there was no new information, just more innuendo and the general consensus that the kid in Seattle had fathered a child, which one of the sisters had aborted. The crowd favored Denise Scott; she was the most memorable. But amazingly enough, over half the people Connor questioned did not know she was the same Denise Scott as the movie star. The phrase he heard time and again was “Well, that just can’t be.”
The good citizens of Wagon Wheel could not fit the two halves together. Denise Scott of the movies was too perfect to be the small-town girl from the poor family with the revolting Thomas Daniels as a stepfather. Oh, yes, Connor heard a lot about Daniels. He was something of a celebrity in his own right. Fast with the women, mean as sin, and the man voted most likely to come to a “bad end.”
“Bad blood,” the elderly woman who’d lived closest to the Daniels place at the time the Scott girls were under Thomas Daniels’s care told Connor. Her home was about a mile from Daniels’s. “Born ugly and stayed that way all his life. Nearly beat his first wife to death, from all accounts, and took a swing or two at the second, I don’t wonder. Those girls musta seen a lot. Felt it, too. He shoulda been done-in a long time before he finally got it.”
The more Connor delved into Daniels’s life, the more he felt he was sinking in quicksand. It was a no-win case. Thomas Daniels was a thoroughly hated man, and he’d earned that reputation through all his violent forty years. Even the women he’d slept with—those who would admit to it, anyway—were heartily sorry they’d ever had anything to do with him.
No one admitted to killing him, but they were all glad he was dead.
And though they weren’t as eager to express their opinions on whom the killer might be, Connor learned that they all believed one of the Scott girls had taken his life.
So it was time to go back to L.A. to interview Denise Scott and see where that led him. And it was probably time to piece together a bit of his own life.
The road led to Hollywood.
He packed his few belongings into the bag he’d brought to his sister’s house. She eyed him thoughtfully as he stood by the door, saying his good-byes.
“You’re going to put one of those girls in jail.” She tried to sound noncommittal but couldn’t quite manage it.
“I hope to learn the truth.”
“You’re going to ruin her life for the sake of avenging Thomas Daniels.”
This was a side to his sister he’d never seen. It irked Connor, especially since she expressed feelings inside himself he was trying very hard to ignore. “Murder is against the law. If I ever thought of going back, I’d have to believe I would uphold the law. That would be my job.”
“So this is some kind of test for you?”
Talk about your nagging conscience. Slinging his bag over his shoulder, he thrust open the screen door and walked onto the wooden porch, breathing in a hint of dust-choked late-September air.
“Uncle Jack!”
His nephew, Matt, flagged him down. With him was his friend and perennial sidekick, Mikey Watters. They pounced on Connor as if he were a special find of extraordinary significance.
“Where ya going?” Matt demanded, alarmed by his stuffed red bag.
“I’m heading back to Los Angeles.”
“What about old man Daniels? What about who killed him?”
Connor crossed to his rental car and tossed the bag into the backseat. Matt and Mikey trailed after him like lost puppies. “I’m still working on it.”
“You gonna find that actress lady?” Matt’s brow was furrowed.
“Certainly do my best.”
“He got what was coming to him,” Matt stated bluntly. “He was a . . . bastard.”
Connor threw the boy a sidelong look, amused to see Matt’s ears turn red with embarrassment. “He sure didn’t win any popularity contests in Wagon Wheel.”
“You think he deserved it?” Mikey piped in. His stubborn cowlick stuck straight off the back of his head.
Tricky stuff, dealing with such a malleable, young mind. “No one deserves to be murdered, no matter what his own crimes are. But certain people go through life aiming to make trouble and hurt others. Those people often die violently themselves.”
Mikey nodded solemnly. “What goes around comes around.”
The words took Connor by surprise, mostly because they came out of such a young mouth. “That’s right.”
Matt, intuiting that Mikey had somehow got a leg up on him, quickly jumped in, “His mom says that all the time! He’s just a big dope.”
“Shut up!”
“You shut up!” Matt glared at his friend. Four small hands balled into fists.
“I’m going to need you guys to help me,” Connor broke in before this skirmish escalated into World War III. “Someone needs to report what’s going on back here in Wagon Wheel to me. Think you could keep a notebook or something? Call me once in a while?”
The ruse worked so well, Connor felt a tweak of conscience over tricking them. They both swore to keep excellent records and instantly started arguing about who would have control of the notes and who would get to talk first when they placed the call. They also both swore they needed their own cell phones, a perennial complaint to their parents.
The squeak of the screen door announced Connor’s sister, Mary. She stood on the porch, a slight frown marring her pretty face. He could read her like a book: she hoped
he failed in his mission.
With a last wave he turned the car westward and began the two and a half hour drive to the Portland airport.
“Are you deaf, or just plain dumb?” Jason demanded, jerking Hayley back to the present. She was staring at the pile of menus in her hands but seeing a far different vision.
“You’re so clever with words,” she told him.
“Got a problem with work, Hayley? Those people over there are going to walk out if you don’t wait on them, and if they do, you’re history.”
“Management by tyranny,” she muttered as she stuffed the menus under one arm, pasted on a bright smile, and headed for the booth at the end.
The couple was in their late twenties. The woman didn’t crack a smile as she watched Hayley approach. Her companion’s gaze skimmed over her without interest and he said, “We’ve been waiting quite a while.”
“I’m sorry,” Hayley replied vacantly, pretending not to have a brain in her head.
“How’s the mushroom soup?” the woman asked, her voice so perfectly snooty that Hayley instantly memorized its intonation.
“The soup is superb,” she answered in the same tone. “A delicate mushroom flavor with just the hint of sherry. Our chef adds bay leaf and, when the moon is right, a pinch of nutmeg. It’s to die for.”
The couple looked at her blankly, unsure whether she was putting them on or whether she was serious.
“I’ll have the garden salad,” the woman said frostily.
“Yes, make that two,” her companion added, clearing his throat.
“Could I interest you in some wine or mineral water?”
They conferred and decided to both indulge in a domestic chardonnay.
“Excellent choice,” Hayley observed. “Very plebeian.”
“What did she say?” the woman asked when she thought Hayley was out of earshot.
“She recommended the wine,” he hissed back, leaving Hayley to fight a fit of laughter.
“So they didn’t leave,” Jason greeted her as she wrote down their order.
“They also think we’ve got a chef at this one-star restaurant.”