The blond agent across the aisle caught my eye and smiled.
“What happened to Kathleen?” I asked.
“She went out to lunch. You just missed her. Is there something I can help you with?”
“Gee, I hope so. I picked up some tickets a little while ago and now I can’t find the itinerary she tucked in the envelope. Is there any way you could run me a copy real quick? I’m in a hurry and I really can’t afford to wait until she gets back.”
“Sure, no problem. What’s the name?”
“Justine Crispin,” I said.
I found the nearest public phone and dialed Sis’s motel room again. “Catch this,” I said. “At four o’clock, Justine takes off for Los Angeles. From there, she flies to Mexico City.”
“Well, that little shit.”
“It gets worse. It’s one-way.”
“I knew it! I just knew she was up to no good. Where is she now?”
“Getting her hair done. She went to the bank first and cashed a big check—”
“I bet it was the insurance.”
“That’d be my guess.”
“She’s got all that money on her?”
“Well, no. She stopped by the trailer first and then went and picked up her plane ticket. I think she intends to stop by the cemetery and put a wreath on Marge’s grave….”
“I can’t stand this. I just can’t stand it. She’s going to take all that money and make a mockery of Marge’s death.”
“Hey, Sis, come on. If Justine’s listed as the beneficiary, there’s nothing you can do.”
“That’s what you think. I’ll make her pay for this, I swear to God I will!” Sis slammed the phone down.
I could feel my heart sink. Uh-oh. I tried to think whether I’d mentioned the name of the beauty salon. I had visions of Sis descending on Justine with a tommy gun. I loitered uneasily outside the shop, watching traffic in both directions. There was no sign of Sis. Maybe she was going to wait until Justine went out to the gravesite before she mowed her down.
At two-fifteen, Justine came out of the beauty shop and passed me on the street. She was nearly unrecognizable. Her hair had been cut and permed and it fell in soft curls around her freshly made-up face. The beautician had found ways to bring out her eyes, subtly heightening her coloring with a touch of blusher on her cheeks. She looked like a million bucks—or a hundred thousand, at any rate. She was in a jaunty mood, paying more attention to her own reflection in the passing store windows than she was to me, hovering half a block behind.
She returned to the parking lot and retrieved her Pinto, easing into the flow of traffic as it moved up State. I tucked in a few cars back, all the while scanning for some sign of Sis. I couldn’t imagine what she’d try to do, but as mad as she was, I had to guess she had some scheme in the works.
Fifteen minutes later, we were turning into the trailer park, Justine leading while I lollygagged along behind. I had already used up the money Sis had authorized, but by this time I had my own stake in the outcome. For all I knew, I was going to end up protecting Justine from an assassination attempt. She stopped by the trailer just long enough to load her bags in the car and then she drove out to the Santa Teresa Memorial Park, which was out by the airport.
The cemetery was deserted, a sunny field of gravestones among flowering shrubs. When the road forked, I watched Justine wind up the lane to the right while I headed left, keeping an eye on her car, which I could see across a wide patch of grass. She parked and got out, carrying the wreath to an oblong depression in the ground where a temporary marker had been set, awaiting the permanent monument. She rested the wreath against the marker and stood there looking down. She seemed awfully exposed and I couldn’t help but wish she’d duck down some to grieve. Sis was probably crouched somewhere with a knife between her teeth, ready to leap out and stab Justine in the neck.
Respects paid, Justine got back into her car and drove to the airport where she checked in for her flight. By now, I was feeling baffled. She had less than an hour before her plane was scheduled to depart and there was still no sign of Sis. If there was going to be a showdown, it was bound to happen soon. I ambled into the gift shop and inserted myself between the wall and a book rack, watching Justine through windows nearly obscured by a display of Santa Teresa T-shirts. She sat on a bench and calmly read a paperback.
What was going on here?
Sis Dunaway had seemed hell-bent on avenging Marge’s death, but where was she? Had she gone to the cops? I kept one eye on the clock and one eye on Justine. Whatever Sis was up to, she had better do it quick. Finally, mere minutes before the flight was due to be called, I left the newsstand, crossed the gate area, and took a seat beside Justine. “Hi,” I said, “Nice permanent. Looks good.”
She glanced at me and then did a classic double take. “What are you doing here?”
“Keeping an eye on you.”
“What for?”
“I thought someone should see you off. I suspect your Aunt Sis is en route, so I decided to keep you company until she gets here.”
“Aunt Sis?” she said, incredulously.
“I gotta warn you, she’s not convinced your mother had a heart attack.”
“What are you talking about? Aunt Sis is dead.”
I could feel myself smirk. “Yeah, sure. Since when?”
“Five years ago.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit. An aneurysm burst and she dropped in her tracks.”
“Come on,” I scoffed.
“It’s the truth,” she said emphatically. By that time, she’d recovered her composure and she went on the offensive. “Where’s my money? You said you’d write a check for six hundred bucks.”
“Completely dead?” I asked.
The loudspeaker came on. “May I have your attention, please. United Flight 3440 for Los Angeles is now ready for boarding at Gate Five. Please have your boarding pass available and prepare for security check.”
Justine began to gather up her belongings. I’d been wondering how she was going to get all that cash through the security checkpoint, but one look at her lumpy waistline and it was obvious she’d strapped on a money belt. She picked up her carry-on, her shoulder bag, her jacket, and her paperback and clopped, in spike heels, over to the line of waiting passengers.
I followed, befuddled, reviewing the entire sequence of events. It had all happened today. Within hours. It wasn’t like I was suffering brain damage or memory loss. And I hadn’t seen a ghost. Sis had come to my office and laid out the whole tale about Marge and Justine. She’d told me all about their relationship, Justine’s history as a con, the way the two women tried to outdo each other, the insurance, Marge’s death. How could a murder have gotten past Dr. Yee? Unless the woman wasn’t murdered, I thought suddenly.
Oh.
Once I saw it in that light, it was obvious.
Justine got in line between a young man with a duffel bag and a woman toting a cranky baby. There was some delay up ahead while the ticket agent got set. The line started to move and Justine advanced a step with me right beside her.
“I understand you and your mother had quite a competitive relationship.”
“What’s it to you,” she said. She kept her eyes averted, facing dead ahead, willing the line to move so she could get away from me.
“I understand you were always trying to get the better of each other.”
“What’s your point?” she said, annoyed.
I shrugged. “I figure you read the article about the unidentified dead woman in the welfare hotel. You went out to the morgue and claimed the body as your mom’s. The two of you agreed to split the insurance money, but your mother got worried about a double cross, which is exactly what this is.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The l
ine moved up again and I stayed right next to her. “She hired me to keep an eye on you, so when I realized you were leaving town, I called her and told her what was going on. She really hit the roof and I thought she’d charge right out, but so far there’s been no sign of her….”
Justine showed her ticket to the agent and he motioned her on. She moved through the metal detector without setting it off.
I gave the agent a smile. “Saying good-bye to a friend,” I said, and passed through the wooden arch right after she did. She was picking up the pace, anxious to reach the plane.
I was still talking, nearly jogging to keep up with her. “I couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t trying to stop you and then I realized what she must have done—”
“Get away from me. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“She took the money, Justine. There’s probably nothing in the belt but old papers. She had plenty of time to make the switch while you were getting your hair done.”
“Ha, ha,” she said sarcastically. “Tell me another one.”
I stopped in my tracks. “All right. That’s all I’m gonna say. I just didn’t want you to reach Mexico City and find yourself flat broke.”
“Blow it out your buns,” she hissed. She showed her boarding pass to the woman at the gate and passed on through. I could hear her spike heels tip-tapping out of ear range.
I reversed myself, walked back through the gate area and out to the walled exterior courtyard, where I could see the planes through a windbreak of protective glass. Justine crossed the tarmac to the waiting plane, her shoulders set. I didn’t think she’d heard me, but then I saw her hand stray to her waist. She walked a few more steps and then halted, dumping her belongings in a pile at her feet. She pulled her shirt up and checked the money belt. At that distance, I saw her mouth open, but it took a second for the shrieks of outrage to reach me.
Ah, well, I thought. Sometimes a mother’s love is like a poison that leaves no trace. You bop along through life, thinking you’ve got it made, and next thing you know, you’re dead.
DETECTIVE: ANDREA DARLING
DISCARDS
Faye Kellerman
AS A PRACTICING ORTHODOX JEW, Faye Marder Kellerman (1952– ) has brought the doctrine and practice of her faith into many of her bestselling novels about Rina Lazarus, also an Orthodox Jew, and Los Angeles Police Department Sergeant Peter Decker, an ethnic Jew raised as a Southern Baptist by his adoptive parents who embraces Judaism when he falls in love with Rina, a widow with two children when they meet in their first adventure, The Ritual Bath (1986).
Kellerman suffers from dyslexia, so she disliked reading and English classes, receiving a B.A. in theoretical mathematics from UCLA, followed by a doctorate in dental surgery. Her plans to practice dentistry were derailed when she became pregnant with her first child, Jesse (who has gone on to be a bestselling writer like his mother and father, Jonathan Kellerman), and then had three more. Having a career that allowed her to stay home led her to write about her imaginary friends, as she has described it.
Of Kellerman’s more than thirty novels, more than twenty are police procedurals featuring Decker and Lazarus, many of which deal with Jewish themes. The series was enhanced for readers by the love affair that quickly bloomed between the two characters, eventually resulting in their somehow inevitable marriage.
Among her non-series books are two cowritten with her husband, Double Homicide (2004) and Capital Crimes (2006), and The Quality of Mercy (1989), a historical novel that is remarkably similar to the movie Shakespeare in Love (1998), resulting in her filing a plagiarism suit in Federal Court in 1999.
“Discards” was originally published in A Woman’s Eye, edited by Sara Paretsky (New York, Delacorte, 1991); it was first collected in The Garden of Eden and Other Criminal Delights by Faye Kellerman (New York, Warner, 2006).
Discards
FAYE KELLERMAN
BECAUSE HE’D HUNG AROUND long enough, Malibu Mike wasn’t considered a bum but a fixture. All of us locals had known him, had accustomed ourselves to his stale smell, his impromptu orations and wild hand gesticulations. Malibu preaching from his spot—a bus bench next to a garbage bin, perfect for foraging. With a man that weatherbeaten, it had been hard to assign him an age, but the police had estimated he’d been between seventy and ninety when he died—a decent stay on the planet.
Originally they’d thought Malibu had died from exposure. The winter has been a chilly one, a new arctic front eating through the god-awful myth that Southern California is bathed in continual sunshine. Winds churned the tides gray-green, charcoal clouds blanketed the shoreline. The night before last had been cruel. But Malibu had been protected under layers and layers of clothing—a barrier that kept his body insulated from the low of forty degrees.
Malibu had always dressed in layers even when the mercury grazed the hundred-degree mark. That fact was driven home when the obituary in the Malibu Crier announced his weight as 126. I’d always thought of him as chunky, but now I realized it had been the clothes.
I put down the newspaper and turned up the knob on my kerosene heater. Rubbing my hands together, I looked out the window of my trailer. Although it was gray, rain wasn’t part of the forecast and that was good. My roof was still pocked with leaks that I was planning to fix today. But then the phone rang. I didn’t recognize the woman’s voice on the other end, but she must have heard about me from someone I knew a long time ago. She asked for Detective Darling.
“Former detective,” I corrected her. “This is Andrea Darling. Who am I talking to?”
A throat cleared. She sounded in the range of middle-aged to elderly. “Well, you don’t know me personally. I am a friend of Greta Berstat.”
A pause allowing me to acknowledge recognition. She was going to wait a long time.
“Greta Berstat,” she repeated. “You were the detective on her burglary? You found the men who had taken her sterling flatware and the candlesticks and the tea set?”
The bell went off and I remembered Greta Berstat. When I’d been with LAPD, my primary detail was grand theft auto. Greta’s case had come my way during a brief rotation through burglary.
“Greta gave you my phone number?” I inquired.
“Not exactly,” the woman explained. “You see, I’m a local resident and I found your name in the Malibu Directory—the one put out by the Chamber of Commerce? You were listed under Investigation right between Interior Design and Jewelers.”
I laughed to myself. “What can I do for you, Ms….”
“Mrs. Pollack,” the woman answered. “Deirdre Pollack. Greta was over at my house when I was looking through the phone book. When she saw your name, her eyes grew wide and my-oh-my did she sing your praises, Detective Darling.”
I didn’t correct her this time. “Glad to have made a fan. How can I help you, Mrs. Pollack?”
“Deirdre, please.”
“Deirdre it is. What’s up?”
Deirdre hemmed and hawed. Finally, she said, “Well, I have a little bit of a problem.”
I said, “Does this problem have a story behind it?”
“I’m afraid it does.”
“Perhaps it would be best if we met in person?”
“Yes, perhaps it would be best.”
“Give me your address,” I said. “If you’re local, I can probably make it down within the hour.”
“An hour?” Deirdre said. “Well, that would be simply lovely!”
* * *
—
From Deirdre’s living room I had a one-eighty-degree view of the coastline. The tides ripped relentlessly away at the rocks ninety feet below. You could hear the surf even this far up, the steady whoosh of water advancing and retreating. Deirdre’s estate took up three landscaped acres, but the house, instead of being centered on the property, was perched on the edge of the bluff. She’d furnished the p
lace warmly—plants and overstuffed chairs and lots of maritime knickknacks.
I settled into a chintz wing chair; Deirdre was positioned opposite me on a loveseat. She insisted on making me a cup of coffee, and while she did I took a moment to observe her.
She must have been in her late seventies, her face scored with hundreds of wrinkles. She was short with a loose turkey wattle under her chin, her cheeks were heavily rouged, her thin lips painted bright red. She had flaming red hair and false eyelashes that hooded blue eyes turned milky from cataracts. She had a tentative manner, yet her voice was firm and pleasant. Her smile seemed genuine even if her teeth weren’t. She wore a pink suit, a white blouse, and orthopedic shoes.
“You’re a lot younger than I expected,” Deirdre said, handing me a china cup.
I smiled and sipped. I’m thirty-eight and have been told I look a lot younger. But to a woman Deirdre’s age, thirty-eight still could be younger than expected.
“Are you married, Detective?” Deirdre asked.
“Not at the moment.” I smiled.
“I was married for forty-seven years.” Deirdre sighed. “Mr. Pollack passed away six years ago. I miss him.”
“I’m sure you do.” I put my cup down. “Children?”
“Two. A boy and a girl. Both are doing well. They visit quite often.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “So…you live by yourself.”
“Well, yes and no,” she answered. “I sleep alone but I have daily help. One woman for weekdays, another for weekends.”
I looked around the house. We seemed to be alone and it was ten o’clock Tuesday morning. “Your helper didn’t show up today?”
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 149