Des pushed her heavy horn-rimmed glasses back up her nose, frowning. Martine Crockett had a million friends, women who she’d known a lot longer than she’d known Des. Why not confide in one of them? One possibility jumped right out.
Because it was one of them.
“You won’t tell anyone about it, will you?” she asked Des urgently. Now she seemed sorry she’d brought it up.
“Of course not. But what will you do?”
Martine raised her chin, and said, “Oh, I’ve moved on.”
“I see,” said Des, although she flat out didn’t. Moved on meant what-that she’d gotten past it emotionally, taken a lover of her own, loaded up a van with her most precious possessions? God, these Dorset people could be so cryptic sometimes. No one just said what they meant.
Esme moseyed over toward them now, looking sleepy and bored. She was a blond like Martine with flawless porcelain skin and the same good, high cheekbones. Her hair was a wild, frizzy mane of curls that cascaded halfway down her back. To Des, Esme still looked very much like a child. Her heartshaped face bore soft, slightly malleable remnants of baby fat. Her big blue eyes held wide-eyed innocence. And her hands were a girl’s hands, chubby and unblemished by time or work. Esme Crockett was famous for her mouth. It was a pouty, highly erotic mouth with a short, upturned top lip that made her look as if she were in a constant state of sexual rapture. She was also famous for her figure. She was a good deal shorter than Martine, perhaps five feet six, but so ripe and voluptuous that she looked positively illicit in the outfit she had on-a deep Vnecked halter top cropped at the belly to show off her gold navel ring, super-low denim cutoffs slashed way high up on her thighs and cheap rubber flipflops. “Where are they, Mommy?” she demanded petulantly. “How long do we have to wait for them?”
“Hours, sometimes,” Martine answered.
“Sometimes they don’t even show at all,” Des said.
Esme flopped down carelessly next to Des on the pavement, reeking of tequila and sweaty girl. She was highly unkempt, in contrast to her spotless, stay-pressed mother. Her hair was unclean, armpits unshaven, ankles soiled. Des noticed that she also had splotchy bruises around her upper arms, as if someone had grabbed her and squeezed her hard. Also a number of scratches on her neck and shoulders.
“Girl, what happened?” Des asked her, as Bella joined them. “Did you get in a fight?”
Esme immediately reddened. “It’s not what you think.”
“Me, I’m thinking Tito beats the crap out of you,” said Bella, who did not know how to mince words.
“No, never. We just get physical sometimes when we’re, you know. ..”
“Getting physical?” asked Des.
She nodded, glanced awkwardly at her mother, who bristled noticeably.
“I never did understand that,” Bella said flatly. “If Morris ever put a welt on me when we were in the throes of connubial passion he would have found his bags on the front porch in the morning, packed and ready to go.”
“He’d never hurt me,” Esme insisted, a defensive edge creeping into her voice. In the flesh, she didn’t seem nearly as bright or mature as the characters she played on screen. “I bruise easy, that’s all. Honest.”
“I believe you,” said Des, who believed no such thing. Not with Tito Molina’s reputation for violent eruptions.
“I wish they’d get here.” Esme sighed, scratching irritably at a mosquito bite on her thigh. “This waiting thing sucks.”
“Patience is everything in life,” Bella said. “Allow me give you an example. When I was your age I desperately wanted to look like Elizabeth Taylor. Which, God knows, I did not. But guess what?” Bella raised her bunched fist of a face to the sky, preening. “Now I do, see?”
Esme gaped at her blankly. “Not really.”
“Time, tattela,” Bella explained. “It’s the great equalizer.”
“Do you still date men, Bella?”
“When the occasion arises. Lord knows, the men don’t. But you have to be very, very careful when you get to be my age.”
“Careful how?”
“One of Morris’s dearest friends, Velvel, started wooing me last year. Very cultivated man. A renowned mathematician, seventy-four years old. Before I’d so much as let him give me a peck on the cheek I had to, you know, check him out,” Bella said waggling her eyebrows at Esme.
“Wait, check him out how?”
“I made a date to go dancing with him, okay? Waited for a nice slow dance, got out him out there on the floor…”
“And?…”
“I gave him a good hard whack on the leg. That’s when I heard it.”
“Heard what, Bella?” Now Martine was curious, too.
“The slosh,” Bella replied. “You hear a slosh it means the man’s wearing a catheter bag. You don’t want nuttin’ to do with him.”
Esme smiled at her, a smile that lit up her entire face. “Bella, you are the coolest.”
“That’s me, all right, the queen of cool.” Bella stood there staring down the front of Esme’s halter top at her considerable cleavage. “So did you have your boobs done or what?” she asked her bluntly.
“No way. These are all mine. Want to feel them?”
“Not necessary.”
“That whole deal was just Crissie doing what she does,” Esme explained.
“Which is what exactly?” Martine demanded.
“She plants the denial before there’s ever a story.”
“So as to create the story?” asked Des.
Esme nodded. “That way she keeps the tabloids fed and off of our backs.”
“That woman is so crass,” Martine said. “Honestly, I can’t tell if she’s part of the solution or part of the problem.”
“None of it’s real, Mommy. It’s just some tabloid trash about tits.”
“Those are your tits they’re talking about. And I don’t care for it. Or Chrissie.”
“Yeah, I kind of sensed that,” Esme shot back. They had a definite mother-daughter thing going on. “But don’t blame me. Tito’s agent hired her. He had to. That’s how the business is-if we don’t give them something then they just make up stuff about how our marriage is in ruins or whatever. It’s not like we’re real people to them. We’re just characters in some twisted interactive soap opera. They shout things at Tito, you know. To bait him.”
“What things?” asked Des.
“They tell him I’m a slut. That I’m having sex with Ben Affleck or Derek Jeter or Justin Timberlake, anyone. They’re hoping he’ll lose it so they can sell a picture of him attacking them. They try to climb over the wall of our Malibu house. They follow us when we leave. It’s horrible. If the public knew what really went on, they’d freak. But since it’s the press they somehow think it’s all noble and decent.”
“Those people aren’t the press.” Bella sniffed.
“No, they totally are,” Esme insisted.
Des couldn’t disagree. She’d seen the tabloids in action when she’d worked murder investigations. “Do you two keep a bodyguard around?”
“Tito won’t live that way. He wants to keep it real, or at least try. He figures, how can you hold on to your street edge when you live like royalty?”
“You can’t,” Des concurred.
“Besides, Chrissie’s staying in the guesthouse while we’re here, so she keeps them at bay. And the road we’re on is private. The beach association has a gate, and they can’t get past that. Or at least they aren’t supposed to.”
“If they do, let me know,” Des said.
“I would, Des, except Tito’s deathly afraid of the police. He has so many childhood scars.” Esme let out a soft laugh. “But, hey, who doesn’t, right?”
Martine stiffened at this last comment, Des noticed.
“Everyone thinks they know us, but they don’t. Especially Tito. Nobody knows Tito.”
“So tell us something we don’t know about him,” Bella said.
“Seriously?” Esme tossed her h
ead, running her hands through her mane of golden hair. “He’s the most deprived boy I’ve ever met, okay? Growing up, he went without so many things that the rest of us take for granted. Like pets-he’s never, ever had one. I mean, God, he’d never even had a Christmas tree until he met me. You should have seen the joy in his eyes when we decorated our very own tree last Christmas.” Recalling it, tears began to spill out of her own eyesright down her flawless cheeks. “All the things I took for granted growing up. A nice home, friends, parents who I believed I could trust
…”
Des felt that there was something deliberately pointy about the words Esme used to describe her parents. Crouched there beside her on the pavement, Martine definitely seemed ill at ease.
“Tito never knew any of those things. That’s why he’s so out there as an actor. It’s like he’s experiencing everything for the first time.”
Des thought she heard some small movements now in the forsythia bushes out behind the Dumpster. “We better get on that other trap,” she whispered, tiptoeing around to the other cage and grabbing on to the string attached to its door.
Esme joined her. “Here, let me,” she whispered, holding her hand out to Des.
That was when Des noticed the thin white lines on the inside of her wrist. Both wrists, in fact. On-screen, the makeup artists were able to cover them over. But up close and in person Des saw them instantly for what they were. Esme Crockett had tried to slit her wrists at some point in her past. Des found herself wondering what could possibly have driven someone so lovely, gifted, and privileged to want to end her life?
“Shhh, hear them…?” she whispered, clutching the string anxiously.
Des did hear the tiny mewings. And now she could see the two of them coming out of the brush together. They were mixed gray, no more than four or five weeks old.
“Aren’t they the sweetest?”
Des didn’t like the unsteady way they were moving.
“Hi, babies,” Esme cooed as they edged hungrily toward the baited cage, moving closer and closer. “Come get your breakfast… Come on, babies…”
Until they were inside the cage and Esme had yanked the door shut behind them.
“In the house!” Des called out, latching it shut.
Bella and Martine immediately joined them.
“I can’t wait for Tito to see them!” Esme cried excitedly, clapping her hands together with girlish delight. “We’re going to name them Spike and Mike.”
Martine stood there looking down at them in grim silence. So did Bella.
“What, don’t they look like a Spike and a Mike?” Esme asked.
What they looked like, all three rescuers knew only too well, was a pair of very, very sick little kitties. Their eyes were rheumy, their noses caked with pus, coats scabby and oozing with sores. Feline influenza, most likely. It was very common in the summer. If left untreated, it often led to pneumonia.
“They look awfully sick to me, honey,” Martine said gently. “I think we’d better take them to the vet.”
“What do you think, Des?” Esme asked.
“I don’t meant to be your dream killer, but I think you should prepare yourself for the worst.”
Esme let out a gasp of horror. “You mean he might put them to sleep?”
“They’re very sick, tattela.”
“It was real nice of you to alert us,” Des added. “You’ve done them a solid, because they’re so miserable.”
“Mommy, noooo!” Esme threw herself into Martine’s arms, weeping.
“We’ll get you another pair,” Martine promised, hugging her tightly.
“I don’t want another pair! I want Spike and Mike! They’re ours! We found them!” Now Esme released her mother, swiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be such a baby. This is just so sad. And it’s not their fault.”
“Me, I’d like to take a baseball bat to whoever dumped them here,” Bella growled.
“We do everything we can, honey,” Martine said. “We get them neutered. We find homes for as many as we can. But the truth is that there are just too many kittens and not enough people to love them.”
“Now, if you’d like to adopt a couple of good, healthy ones,” Des offered brightly, “we can certainly help you out.”
Esme tilted her head at Des curiously. “You mean you have some at your place?”
“We, uh, happen to have a few.” Twenty-eight at last count. “Come on over, girl. Check’em out.”
“No, no,” Esme said abruptly. “I mean, thanks, but I don’t think so.”
Martine Crockett took her daughter by the hand now and led her back to Martine’s 1967 silver Volkswagon Beetle convertible. They got in and drove off. Des and Bella loaded the cage with the sick kittens into the back of Bella’s Jeep Wrangler with its personalized CATS22 license plate.
“What do you think?” Des asked her.
“I think Dr. Bill will put them down as soon as he lays eyes on them.”
“No, I mean about her.”
“Who, the great Esme Crockett?” Bella let out a hoot of derision. “I think she has the worst BO I ever smelled in my entire life.”
Why did Martine tell her about Dodge’s affair?
Des couldn’t imagine. Being human, she also couldn’t help wondering who the other woman was. She didn’t say anything about it to Bella on the way home-she’d promised Martine she’d keep quiet, and she did. But it was certainly on her mind as they dropped off Spike and Mike with Dr. Bill, knowing full well they’d never see those two helpless kittens again. It was still on her mind when they pulled into her driveway in gloomy silence. She and Bella always felt lousy when a rescue mission turned out sour.
Bella marched straight inside to scrub the kitchen floor and listen to one of her Danny Kaye records, which was what she did when she was blue. Des hung out in the garage for a while with the Pointer Sisters, Mary J. Blige, Bootsy Collins, Master P, Jay-Z and the others that they had rescued. She cooed at each of them, stroking the oneswho’d let her. Some, like Method Man, just hissed. No problem. He’d come around. Des was patient. She made sure they all had food and water, then went upstairs.
Des had bought and renovated a snug little cottage tucked into a hillside high above Uncas Lake. Mostly, she’d bought it for the sunlight. The living room, which she’d turned into her studio, had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the shimmering lake. Her kitchen and dining area were very airy and open, with French doors leading out onto the back deck, which had a teak dining table and chairs, and a dynamite view. The deck practically doubled her living space during warm months. There were three bedrooms, all of them small. The spare room was where Des worked out with twenty-pound dumbbells five mornings a week. Her weight room door was closed currently and there was a steady chorus of meows going on in there. Their five in-house cats were unable to resist the allure of a wet kitchen floor-whenever Bella was in scrub mode she herded them in there.
Des kept a portrait that she’d drawn of Mitch hanging over her bed. She’d drawn it when she was still trying to figure out how she felt about him. He looked very lost and sad in the portrait. He didn’t look nearly so sad now. It was the only sample of her art that was visible anywhere in the house. She did not display her haunting portraits of murder victims that were her life’s work and her way of coping with the horrors of her job. These she kept tucked away in a portfolio.
She did not like to look at them after she’d finished them.
Right now, Des snatched a graphite stick and Strathmore eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch sketch pad from her easel and started across the house with them as Mr. Danny Kaye was busy singing “Madam, I Love Your Crepes Suzette.” Or make that shrieking. Des did not understand that man’s appeal. Apparently, you had to be Jewish, old, and from Brooklyn in order to dig him. Also, possibly, deaf.
“I put your breakfast out on the deck,” Bella called to her from the kitchen floor, where she was on her hands and knees, scrubbing away like
an old-time washerwoman.
“You didn’t have to make me breakfast, Bella.”
“I did so,” Bella shot back, scrubbing, scrubbing. There was a sponge mop, but she wouldn’t go near it. “Otherwise you’ll tromp all over my wet floor with your big feet.”
“They are not big. They’re long.” Twelve and a half double A, to be exact. “Besides, Mitch likes them-especially my toes.”
Bella made a face. “Genug shen!” Which was Yiddish for No mas. “I don’t want to hear these things about you two.”
“Don’t blame me, girl. You’re the one said I should snag me a Jewish gentleman.”
“And did I steer you wrong?”
“Nope. Just don’t tell him that-I don’t want his ego swelling.” Des tilted her head at Bella curiously. “Real, if I stick around long enough will I ever dig Danny Kaye?”
Bella puffed out her cheeks in disgust. “No one appreciates true talent anymore.”
“Oh, is that what you call it?” she said sweetly.
“If you want to put on your Jill Scott, go ahead. It’s your house.”
“It’s our house. And I’m just woofing on you.” Des started out of the kitchen, then stopped. “We can’t save them all, Bella.”
“I know that,” Bella said tightly.
Des went out onto the deck, closing the French doors behind her, and sat down at the table in front of her Grape Nuts, skim milk, and blueberries from Mitch’s garden. It was a drowsy, humid morning. A young couple was paddling a canoe out on the lake, their giddy laughter carrying off the water as if they were right there next to Des. Otherwise, it was quiet enough that she could hear the cicadas whirring.
As she ate, she flipped through her drawing pad, looking at her latest work. Her figure drawing professor at the Dorset Academy of Fine Arts, a brilliant and maddening guru named Peter Weiss, had urged Des to take a complete break from her crime scene portraits this summer and draw nothing but trees, an exercise that he claimed would prove highly beneficial to her. He wouldn’t explain why this was so, merely said, “You’ll find out what I mean.” Leaving Des tosolve the mystery on her own. She’d tried to do what he said. Spent the past six weeks working on trees and trees only.
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