by Kyra Davis
“Umm…right, well I’ll try to remember that,” I said, as I studied Maria’s number and address. I considered calling her right there from the flower shop, but decided against it. She didn’t have any qualms about barging in on me without notice, so why shouldn’t I extend her the same courtesy?
I left Jason to continue his flirtation with Amelia and stepped out onto the sidewalk. In front of me was one of the wider streets in San Francisco, this one actually built for cars, not carriages. For a few seconds I just stood there, trying to peek inside the windows of the vehicles zooming past me, wondering if even one of those drivers had a life as complicated and convoluted as mine. Eventually my gaze was drawn to the other side of the street.
Standing there, in front of a black Mercedes, was Kane. He was staring at me.
My mouth dropped open, although I had no plans to speak. Kane continued to stand there, impassive, staring at me. What was he doing here? Was he following me?
A big rig rumbled in front of me and as the light at the end of the block turned red it stopped, blocking Kane from my view.
He had to be following me. There was no other explanation. Unless he wanted flowers or a plant from Amelia. Could that be it? Could this really be a coincidence?
The light turned green just as I was making up my mind to cross the street and confront him. But when the big rig moved, Kane wasn’t standing in front of his car anymore.
I stood there in bewildered silence as I watched the Mercedes pull out onto the street and drive away.
Without explanation he had simply moved on. And I could see no other alternative than to do the same.
12
As a little girl I believed in all sorts of ridiculous things like fairy godmothers and functional families.
—The Lighter Side of Death
MARIA RISSO LIVED IN A PENTHOUSE ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE FINANCIAL district. That fact in and of itself surprised me. I knew from my own housing market research that the prices on these places weren’t that much less than many of the city’s nicer houses and it was hard to imagine a location less ethereal than a condo that was marketed as “luxury living for the new millennium.” If the exterior of Maria’s building was any indication, new millennium living was very sterile. Kind of like living in a fancy office complex.
I stepped up to the gate keypad. Maria’s name was printed in small, bold, print letters against a strip of black. I pressed her number into the intercom system. Seconds later I heard Maria’s voice come through the speaker. “Yes?”
“Maria?” I asked uncertainly. “It’s Sophie Katz.”
“Magnum’s girlfriend,” she said coolly.
“Can I come up, Maria?” I asked. “I’ll only stay a minute.”
There was a brief pause before I heard the buzz of the gate being released from its lock. I pushed my way in and took a moment to orient myself. Before me was the courtyard that was only a little better than the exterior of the building itself. Everything was symmetrical and neatly cared for and the grass was so shaped it was practically forbidding, like a misplaced footstep might destroy the landscape’s forced perfection.
When I reached the door of her place Maria was already holding it open. She was wearing a pair of slim-cut Rock & Republic jeans with a Donna Karan button-down top and two large diamond stud earrings. “Magnum told me that I shouldn’t talk to you,” she declared. “He said you were not trained in detective work and that if involved you would mess up the investigation.”
Immediately, my fists clenched. “He shouldn’t have said that,” I said, trying to take the insult in stride.
“Perhaps not, but what do you expect? He’s a man and men are condescending jerks. It’s their nature.” With that, she ushered me in and quickly closed the door behind us, taking care to double lock it before turning her attention back to me. “It seems that today is the day for visitors. Lorna and her son, Zach, just stopped by, as well. A complete surprise. Lorna usually works on Saturdays, but she managed to sneak out. They’re in the study waiting for us now.”
I had to repeat the names before I was able to recall the people they belonged to. This was a major inconvenience. I had been hoping to get some information out of Maria about Enrico and then somehow convince her not to tell Kane about my visit. I hadn’t been sure how I was going to manage all that, but now it was all a lost cause. After all, I couldn’t expect all three people to keep their mouths shut, could I?
These thoughts were clanking around in my mind as I followed Maria up the stairs. Her place was immaculate. But the furniture was no more interesting than the home it was in. Nothing had personality. There were no antiques or anything else that looked to be more than six years old. It didn’t seem to fit the colorful woman walking in front of me. Evidence of her interest in the paranormal was nowhere to be seen.
Not surprisingly, the study was a perfect study of beiges and muted pastels. The whole place acted as a visual sedative.
But breaking up the monotony were Lorna and Zach, two totally incongruous individuals sitting side by side on a tan love seat. Zach no longer had his velvet choker, but he still had the black nails and dyed black spiked hair. His eyes were outlined in dark liner and he kept them firmly pointed toward the floor. Lorna, on the other hand, was wearing chinos again, and this time instead of wearing a pink polo top it was pale blue. She, too, had been looking down at the floor, but when she heard us come in her eyes shot up and met mine. They had all the clarity and fierce focus of an eagle zoning in on its prey.
“Lorna, Zach, you know Sophie, our host from last week,” Maria said. “I’ve hired Sophie’s boyfriend to help me with my…situation. He’s a P.I., like Magnum.”
“Magnum?” Zach asked incredulously. “Like the LifeStyle condoms?”
“Trojan,” I corrected automatically. Maria and Lorna both jerked their heads in my direction looking respectively amused and horrified. “I’m sorry,” I faltered, not entirely sure what I had done that was so wrong, “but Trojan makes Magnums, not LifeStyle.”
The eagle eyes of Lorna were now shooting laser beams at my head. “Of course, abstinence is best,” I added lamely.
“I’m sorry, Sophie,” Lorna said, her voice much more timid than her glare, “But Al and I don’t think we should talk about those kind of things in front of children.”
My gaze lowered to Zach’s Slipknot T-shirt featuring a gagged man who was about to get his head punctured.
“I’m not a child, Mom,” Zach growled. “And I’m the one who brought it up!”
“That’s true, he did!” I said eagerly. Then immediately regretted my words and tried to backtrack. “I mean, actually, it was Maria who brought it up and I was just trying to, um…”
“I was referring to Tom Selleck,” Maria interjected.
Zach shrugged. “I don’t get it. What does Tom Selleck have to do with Magnums?”
“Zach,” Maria said, apparently shocked. “Does your generation really know so little?”
Zach blushed and looked away, undoubtedly thinking he was missing an obvious sexual innuendo. This display of embarrassed innocence seemed to soothe Lorna and the tightness of her smile softened.
“I’m sorry if I snapped before, I’m just protective of my children,” she said. Zach’s blush deepened.
Maria smiled in obvious amusement, but, perhaps out of sympathy for Zach, tactfully changed the subject. “What brings you here today, Sophie? Are you here to offer your support? You see Sophie was with me when I found…” The humor slipped from her voice. You could almost see it falling away, revealing the despair that it had been hiding. “My God,” she whispered, “it’s all too much.”
Lorna reached her hand out to her, but Maria seemed not to see it.
“How can the police think that I could have done this to my Enrico? Don’t they know that I loved him?”
Lorna and Zach seemed to balk at this sudden change of mood, but as far as I was concerned Maria had just given me the opening that I had been looking f
or. I crossed to her side. “It’s not like it was in Magnum,” I said as gently as possible. “It can’t all be wrapped up in an hour, but they will figure it out. All anyone has to do is look at you to see how much you cared for him.”
Maria collapsed into a nondescript beige armchair and offered a soft sob in response.
“Do you think you and Enrico were headed for reconciliation?” I asked.
“You must be joking!” Maria said with a bitter laugh. “Each of the last nine months has represented its own individual circle of hell! Enrico’s refusal to accept my new healthy Californian lifestyle, our arguments, our separation, the lawyers, the fights, being thrown out of my home and forced to reside here in this prefurnished bastion of depression!”
“Oooh, it was prefurnished,” I said, finally understanding. Once again every one took a moment to gape at me. “I just couldn’t figure out the décor here because it didn’t seem to suit your tastes, not that it’s not lovely,” I stammered, “I mean, it’s great, it’s very clean and, um…I really like the use of beige.” I stuffed my hands into my jeans. “Anyway, you were telling us about the nine circles of hell?”
“Ah, what difference does it all make?” she replied. “The police will never understand what everyone here already knows.”
“We know something?” I asked.
“We know this was a death brought on by the supernatural,” Lorna said. “Maria thinks it was a ghost named Jasper Windsor.”
We all turned at the sound of Lorna’s half-whispered words. Zach snorted as if his mother had said something perversely amusing. “Don’t laugh, it’s very serious,” Lorna said, much sharper this time. Zach immediately shrank into himself and resumed his staring contest with the floor.
“You’ve mentioned Jasper Windsor before,” I said, still directing my questions to Maria. “Who is he…or was he…do you use is or was when referring to the identity of a ghost?”
“Was,” Maria said softly. “I don’t know that his name is really Jasper, it’s just what Lorna and I call him, isn’t that right, Lorna?”
Lorna nodded sagely. “If he wants us to know his name, he’ll tell us, don’t you think, Maria?”
“I don’t know what I think anymore,” Maria said with a laugh bordering on hysteria. “Do you remember when we first saw it, Lorna?”
Lorna looked away. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this.”
“Talk about what?” I asked. “What did you see?”
Maria hesitated for a moment and then looked up at Lorna. “Will you make us some espresso? And Zach, perhaps you can help your mother and find us something to taste. I have some almonds and perhaps you could wash off the cherry tomatoes and cut a few pieces of celery. I don’t believe I’ve eaten since breakfast.”
Lorna didn’t looked thrilled by this and Zach didn’t react at all, but they both did as they were told and left Maria and me alone in the beige room. Maria waited until she was sure the other two were out of hearing distance before turning back to me. “I want to trust you,” she said softly. “I would like to make a friend of you. I don’t have many friends anymore. I lost them in the divorce. You expect to lose your stereo, your vacation home, the things. But no one tells you that your friends will be divided up right along with all the other possessions and it seems that Enrico claimed almost every one of them.”
She sighed and looked out the window. The clouds had now completely blocked off the sun, enveloping the city in an early darkness. “Now that he’s dead they still cling to his celebrity,” she went on, “because really that’s what they loved, not the man himself.”
“Is that what you loved?” I asked, only realizing after the words had left me how tactless they were.
“No, but maybe I should have.” Maria ran her thumb over the inside of her fingertips as if stroking an imaginary cloth. “The fame he had was tangible. You can still find evidence of it in the way his murder is being reported, in the way the people still flock to his restaurant. But the man that I loved…he’s just gone. Sometimes I wonder if he ever truly existed at all.”
For a brief second I considered calling Jason. If he thought Dena was existential he would be eating this up with a spoon.
“You and your boyfriend,” Maria continued, “you helped me that night. And then you didn’t let me pay you for your service.”
“Well, you were pretty upset—it didn’t seem right—”
“But others would have taken the money anyway,” Maria insisted. “Only now that I have hired Magnum to do a more detailed investigation will he accept my checks. I want to make a friend of you, Sophie, but how can I trust anyone when the rewards of betrayal are so high?”
“The rewards of betrayal?” I asked. Her vulnerability was touching. It would have been even more touching if she could demonstrate that she knew my boyfriend’s name.
“It’s easy to take something out of context,” Maria explained. “I could say something that you think sounds incriminating and then you could run to the police with it…or to a journalist. Either way I’m sure you would be compensated, if not in money then in some other way. Hurting me is so profitable these days.”
I walked over to the couch Lorna had been sitting in and took her place. Maria was a little dramatic and more than a little flowery in her speech, but underneath all that there was something quite likeable about her. I hadn’t seen that during our first meeting. “I’m not here to hurt you,” I said truthfully. “I’ve never hurt anyone who hasn’t at least tried to hurt me.”
Maria met my eyes and in an instant I knew she had made some kind of decision about me. Lorna came in at that moment with a silver tray filled with four small ceramic espresso cups, and Zach followed her with a bunch of cherry tomatoes in a bowl in one hand and a bag of almonds in the other. I stood up to give them back their seat and went to sit on a cushioned stool that undoubtedly doubled as a footrest.
“The tomatoes are organic,” Zach said as he dropped the food unceremoniously on the coffee table. “They don’t need to be washed.”
“But I made him wash them anyway,” Lorna said quickly. “I’m sorry he didn’t arrange the food on a plate, he’s never been very good at things like that.”
“They’re tomatoes, Mom. You can’t arrange them, they roll.”
Maria smiled distractedly, accepted the espresso and held it daintily in her hand. “Lorna is one of the few people who sided with me when Enrico and I first separated. She came to me at the hotel and she listened to me rant. I did rant for a while, didn’t I, Lorna?”
“You were upset.” Lorna handed an espresso to me and then placed the tray with the two remaining cups next to the tomatoes. “Anyone would have been if they were in your shoes.”
“And then I decided we simply had to drive, do you remember that, Lorna?”
Lorna didn’t answer this time. She took a seat on the couch next to Zach and reached for his hand. He pulled it away.
“I insisted that Lorna come for a ride with me,” Maria explained, “and we drove and we drove…Highway 5, 46, 58…the highways we took read like a locker combination and I wouldn’t stop for anything but gas and water. I wouldn’t stop until there I was in nowhere. And I thought I found nowhere in Topock, Arizona.”
“You drove to Arizona?” I stammered.
“To the border. Topock is a little ghost town. There’s nothing there but abandoned buildings, desert and stars. More stars than you have ever seen in your entire life. I fell in love with that sky. Do you remember, Lorna?”
Lorna was now scratching the back of her arm with the urgency of a dog with fleas. “I didn’t know we were going to Arizona,” she said, more to Zach than to Maria. “If I had known, I would never have gone. Al wouldn’t have let me. He was so mad.”
“But that’s the whole point, Lorna! That night we didn’t answer to men! We only answered to the stars.” Then Maria paused and turned back to the window. “That’s where we found Jasper’s scythe.”
“Jasper’s…wait, are y
ou talking about the murder weapon?” I exclaimed. I turned to Zach to see if he was as confused as I was. Zach was watching Maria intently with something that bore an odd resemblance to respect. Lorna was still scratching.
“We don’t know that it was the same scythe,” Lorna said carefully. “There must be plenty of scythes around…maybe not in San Francisco, but in other places. This one was next to a rusted old belt buckle with the letters JW engraved into it. Maria decided that both things belonged to a man named Jasper Windsor, but we don’t really know that.”
“I made up a whole story about good old Jasper, a ghost story,” Maria said. “Of course, whoever owned those things had to be a ghost, they were so old. It was an awful story, filled with violence and revenge…but maybe I didn’t just make it up. Maybe something was whispering into my subconscious. Maybe Jasper followed me here and he tried to get the revenge that I said I wanted. Maybe I am responsible for Enrico’s death in that way.”
Zach snorted derisively. “You people are high,” he said. “When are you going to get that when someone kicks it, that’s it? In the end the only thing any of us turns into is a feast for the worms.”
Lorna slapped him across the face. The sound echoed through the room as we all watched in stunned silence. “Never!” Lorna said, her voice hoarse with rage. “Never the dead.”
“I’m just saying it how it is, Mom!” Zach shot back, apparently unfazed by her outburst.
Lorna raised her hand again, but stayed it just in time. “You believe, Zach,” she said. “You just don’t like to admit it in front of strangers, but you told me. You told me you’re a believer.”
“I told you I might believe in life after death and you heard what you wanted to hear, just like you always do,” he muttered. His posture was slackening now, turning him once again into a sulker rather than the confronter he had been a moment earlier. Lorna, on the other hand, looked like she was the one who had been slapped. Her breathing was irregular and she was visibly shaking.