Scot Free

by Catriona McPherson

  “Not exactly décor,” Todd said. “If I tell you this, it’s in the secret vault under the invisible cone, okay?”

  I felt sure I could rise to Todd’s standards of discretion and went out to show him the ensemble and tell him so.

  “Ew,” he said, pointing at my crotch. “Don’t let me see the thong.” I went back to the bathroom. I may have flounced. “I rent two rooms, you see,” Todd called through to me. I let go of a big disappointed breath. The Passionata straps didn’t so much as tremble. “Yeah, I rent two rooms, and Noleen thinks one of them is to run to in code-red bug situations.”

  “Why didn’t you go there yesterday?” I asked, thinking of the tiny spider with the big build-up.

  “I certainly could have,” Todd said. “And then I’d have told Kathi she needed to move rooms. But I needed comfort and you were closer.”

  “Kathi ‘moves rooms’?” I said. “Do Noleen and Kathi actually live in the motel like ordinary guests then?”

  “They do,” said Todd. “I’ve got your word of honor, don’t I? About the vault under the cone?”

  “Cross my heart and spit in my cocoa.”

  “They’ve got an apartment,” said Todd. “Sure they do. Owners’ quarters. But Kathi … Well, she likes things nice.” He stopped talking. Stopped dead.

  “I’m not with you,” I said.

  “She likes to keep the apartment clean,” said Todd. Again he shut his mouth as if he planned never to open it again.

  “So she moves out to a guest room if she needs to give it a good going over?” I said.

  “She did,” said Todd. Then turned Trappist Monk.

  “She did once?” I said. “What does that have to do with your two rooms now, though?”

  “Oh, for the Lord’s sake!” said Todd. He said the next bit faster than a runaway train. “She cleans the apartment and lives in a guest room. Obviously.”

  “And how long has this been going on?” I asked.

  I had my own failings in the area. I’d stayed in my rented hovel through three promotions and pay rises and so I’d missed my chance to be part of Dundee’s property price boom. I just didn’t care enough; couldn’t commit. I looked at big Victorian tenement flats and 1930s maisonettes, ex-council semis in nice areas and refurbed farm-workers’ cottages on the outskirts. Then I thought about the faff of moving and shredded the brochures. I could do up the flat instead. So I bought DIY magazines and recorded make-over shows. Then I shredded them too and cleared the DVR. But halfhearted as I was about the Tay Street flat, at least I lived there.

  “A year. But she needs another guest room to clean while she sleeps in the first one, and Noleen said it was too much lost revenue. It nearly split them. That’s where I come in. I rent a second room as a bolt hole but I promise to tell her if I use it so she can switch again. Now everyone’s happy.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What do you get out of switching rooms?”

  “A happy friend,” said Todd. “This is exactly why I have no time for shrinks. What you call codependence I call being a good person. I get a happy friend and that gives me a happy glow.”

  “And?”

  “Boy, I’d hate to be that cynical,” said Todd. “But okay, okay, if you insist. She has a contact in Costa Rica who sends up insecticide that’s banned in California. She sprays my room, the rooms on either side of my room, the walkway between my room and reception, reception itself, and the parking lot around my car. Okay?”

  “I’d really like to—”

  “We don’t need help,” said Todd. “We don’t need counseling, therapy, SSRIs, hospitalization, electric shock treatment, or a lobotomy.”

  “Aw!” I said. “It’s been months since I got to lobotomise a client. Spoilsport.”

  “What we need,” said Todd, “is a clean room, a spare clean room, and some fly spray worth the name. And we have it. But that is classified information and it’s In. The. Vault.”

  “Under the cone,” I said. “Has Kathi ever explored the origins—”

  “Oh my God!” said Todd. “What did I just say? Kathi is fine. I am fine. Have Roger and Noleen ever explored the origins of why they’re such unsupportive rat bastards to Kathi and me? Why no, I believe they have not. So go and shrink their heads and leave us alone.” He glared at me. “That bra and panties is super cute,” he said. “Try the Klum.”

  ∞

  No one goes into psychology for the money and not even psychologists go into family therapy for two nice cars and skiing every spring. We do it because we want to help, and when we come across people in such dire need as Todd and Kathi it sets us off. Like a beaver when a tap’s running.

  Banned from trying to help a cleptoparasitosis case and a germaphobe who had clearly let her coping mechanism run completely out of control (with her backup room for her backup room, for God’s sake), I redoubled my determination to help someone, if it killed me. I marched back under the railway bridge fixed on Clovis, Barb, and Vi like a death ray. And the contents of the safe, which might explain everything.

  “Is Detective Mike in?” I asked the dispatcher.

  “Detective Mike?” she said. “What is this, Mayberry?”

  I couldn’t answer. People talked a lot about Mayberry. And June Beaver. And some people called Brady, a whole bunch of them. And also a guy by the name of Bob Ross who sounded way creepy. And Julia Child, and Johnny Carson, and Bert and his friend Ernie. Then everyone smiled and stopped arguing.

  “So?” Branston had said, the one time I mentioned it. “Just ask. What’s the problem?” He spoke from his vast experience of exactly one month in Scotland when everyone treated him like a guest and no one talked to him about Weatherfield, Margot Ledbetter, Delia, Parky, or Dangermouse.

  “If the wind changes, you’ll be sorry,” Mike said. The dispatcher had buzzed her. “What is it now?”

  “You know the plane tickets you took into evidence in the Bombaro case?” I said, smoothing my scowl.

  “‘The Bombaro case’?” said Mike. “Are you really trying to help me pick out which murder you’re referring to? This is Cuento, Legacy. Not Miami.”

  “Lexy,” I reminded her and, without showing a hint of it on my face, I filed away the news that she had been checking up on me, looking at the formal spelling of my name.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” said Mike. “I looked up your residency just to dot the i’s. Good poker face, though.”

  I made a mental note never to play it with her. She probably saw that on my face too.

  “Okay then,” I went on. “So the plane tickets you took out of the safe? Where were they for? Mizz Visalia wants to know and she can’t check the receipt because she’s forgotten the combination of the safe. She changed it and the new number’s slipped her mind.”

  Mike gave me a level stare. Her eyebrows looked like two stone mouldings above the darkened window of an abandoned building. Not a twitch in either or a flicker of light below. “Tell her to call us,” she said.

  “Ah. Problem,” I said. “She doesn’t know she’s forgotten the combo. I didn’t want to upset her.”

  “I see.” The intonation matched the flat brows and the dead eyes. “I thought your type went in for facing facts and living in the bombed-out wasteland of your authentic life.”

  “Bombed-out waste … Mike, are you okay?”

  “Peachy,” she said, spitting the word out like grape pips. “And even if I wasn’t, I still wouldn’t share confidential information about an ongoing investigation with someone so heavily involved with one of the susp—Or with anyone. The financial rec—Any items we removed—Anything we did or didn’t do at the Bombar—” She sighed and tried one last time. “Any activities associated in any way with the murder investigation are strictly confidential.”

  “Well done,” I said. “You got there. Visalia didn’t cut the wire, by th
e way.”

  “What wire?” said Mike.

  “Really? No wire? Good to know.”

  “Watch it,” Mike said. She turned away. Then she turned back. “And be careful. Clovis Bombaro pissed someone off, Lexy. Don’t do the same. In fact, stay away from The Oaks altogether.”

  I gulped. “Thank you,” I said and scuttled out. I stopped off at Swiss Sisters for a latte, standing in the drive-in queue between a so-called minivan that looked pretty maxi from this angle and a Saturn that was indeed planet-sized, shuffling forward with my flip-flops sticking to the tarmac and the maxivan’s exhaust fumes baking me all down my front like a kebab on a burst spindle.

  My mind was fizzing. If there was no wire left behind, then how did the cops know about the timer? Because if it was only the timer that put Visalia in the frame for any part of it, it mattered quite a lot that they were right.

  But what I didn’t know about fireworks was pretty much everything. There might be some other tell-tale sign and I’d have to grill an expert to get a clue what it might be. But just the thought of a firework factory was enough to put an extra film of sweat on me.

  And all the pyrotechnicians I knew well enough to speak to out of work hours were probably cold-blooded killers.

  Eleven

  Besides, something Mike had said to me was bothering me. And something I hadn’t said to her was bothering me too. And the two bothersome things seemed connected.

  Visalia had her theory and she was sticking to it, regardless of how outlandishly wackadoodle it might be. And even though it was too crazy by far to tell the cops, it made perfect sense, psychologically speaking. How much safer to lay the blame on a distant stranger, one of the mythic Poggios, than to wonder about someone closer to home.

  How close, was the point. Because Mike hadn’t said stay away from Barb. She hadn’t said stay away from Casa Bombaro, or from the Dolshikovs or from fireworks. No, Detective Mike had said, “Stay away from The Oaks.”

  It stopped me like a stun gun. Like a freeze-ray. I stood staring back at my owl-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror of Room 213. Todd had put in peach lightbulbs and the mirror itself was a vintage beauty, foggy and forgiving. Add the smoothing and plumping effects of the toiletries he had chosen for me and I had never looked better. It distracted me for a moment, but the new thought was too compelling to be quashed for long. The police suspected one of Clovis’s neighbours. One of the residents of The Oaks.

  As I prepared for bed, slipping silkily in between the thread counts in my brand-new posh nightie and pulling the chilled eye mask I had found in the fridge down over my smoothed, plumped, oxygenated face, I planned a day of advanced sleuthing for the morrow.

  I’d definitely visit the closest neighbours under the guise of … something I’d decide later … and I’d find out if Boom Bombaro had an enemy. I’d lean on them like a tired horse. I’d work on them like a Swiss masseuse. And then I’d remember I was Scottish, and can the Raymond Chandler.

  I would even, I thought to myself as I turned over trying not to think about the ten dollars’ worth of night cream I was smearing onto my pillow, gas up Todd’s Land Rover, a task I’d never quite got to grips with in my short career as co-owner of an Acura. If I wasn’t trying to fill before paying I was forgetting which side the cap was on, giving myself carpal-tunnel because I couldn’t remember the hands-free notch, rejoining the freeway blinded by bug splat because I kept forgetting the hands-free notch and never got the chance to clean the windscreen. And none of that was even close to the worst thing I’d done.

  “Green is unleaded and black is diesel,” I said to myself as I was falling asleep. “Diesel is black and unleaded is green. I am competent and purposeful. I will prevail.”

  ∞

  Hoo, the day went wrong fast. I didn’t even make it to the petrol station. I woke to screams, leapt from my bed, and bolted out onto the balcony into the smoke-grey dawn of a day already warm. Roger was just emerging from the room next door in nothing but silk boxers and his wedding ring. Two sleepy tourists in Mickey Mouse pyjamas and LL Bean yard boots—my guess was they were breaking their journey back to Oregon from Disneyland—stumbled out of the room on the other side, and all up and down the balcony, like munchkins when the witch is dead, people were blundering out yawning and scratching. Some of the more obvious tourists had their phones on ready to film whatever mayhem was in the offing, but the long-term residents looked angry rather than alarmed. Della came out of her room below and called up to Roger.

  “You wake Diego, you take him to the playground and push him on the swings.”

  From the room at the far left end, Noleen was bearing down, her face blacker than her most cynical t-shirt slogan, her fists clenched, her feet making the walkway shudder as she pounded along.

  “Kathi!” she bellowed.

  “You push him on the swings, you buy him breakfast at the Red Raccoon … ” said Della.

  “Down here, Nolly,” said a thin young man I had passed a time or two in the parking lot. “Room 106.” Noleen wheeled around and made for the stairs to the ground floor.

  “Two words,” said one of the tourists as she passed them. “Trip. Advisor.” He withdrew into his room and slammed the door. Roger rubbed his hands over his face and hurried after Noleen. I threw my eye mask through my open doorway and hurried after Roger.

  The screaming had started up again. It was a two-note scream, one voice providing a base line of quite lusty yells, lungfuls at a time with short breaks for breathing in, and the other voice adding percussive little squeaks over and over. I wasn’t massively experienced in acute trauma and panic resolution, but it was the squeaker who worried me. The yeller was getting it out of their system and breathing deeply to do so. The squeaker would hyperventilate and keel over if they didn’t calm down soon.

  Noleen was picking over a bunch of keys when I got there.

  “Kathi!” she barked as she jammed wrong key after wrong key into the lock and wrenched them out again. “Pipe down and open up. This is our business. This is our livelihood. You can’t keep doing this.”

  “And you can put a sock in it too, Todd,” Roger added in such a penetrating voice that, doctor or no doctor, I was sure he’d had some dramatic training somewhere along the line.

  At last, Noleen found the right key and threw the door open. Inside, right at the back corner, beyond the bed, Todd and Kathi stood clutching each other, melded together, cheek to cheek to chest to hip to toes, and both were trembling.

  “What the fuck?” said Noleen. I decided she’d had even less (or at least worse) training in acute trauma counselling than I had, and I put a hand out to stay her.

  “Bugs,” said Todd, his voice cracking.

  “Filth,” said Kathi, her voice soft and guttural with disgust.

  I turned to Roger and Noleen and said, “Leave this to me.” Then I closed the door on them.

  “I’ll give you one Tiffany diamond for every bug you show me, Todd,” Roger shouted through the gap as the door was closing.

  “Okay,” I said, in a calm, firm voice. “Where are the bugs?”

  “And filth,” said Kathi.

  “And filth,” I agreed. “Where are they?”

  “Bathroom,” said Todd, pointing a wavering finger.

  I glanced at the bathroom door, which was just to my left side, then came past it towards them.

  “Careful!” said Kathi.

  “Stop and check yourself over,” said Todd.

  “Let’s all sit down,” I suggested.

  Kathi looked at me as if I’d told her to drink from a toilet. “Sit down?” she said. “On the bed? On soft furnishings? In this den of squalor?”

  “With lethal insects everywhere?” Todd added.

  They didn’t sound like the proprietor of said den and her best customer at all.

  There was a little dinette s
et under the front window; a round table and two hard chairs with wooden seats and backs and so nowhere for beasties to hide. I took both chairs over to the back wall and set them down, then returned to the front and hopped up on the table-top.

  “Sit,” I said.

  Todd and Kathi inspected the chairs, paying close attention to where my (presumably plague-ridden) hands had grasped the back rails, then slowly and haltingly they broke out of their embrace and perched side-by-side. Kathi held her feet up off the ground, her thigh muscles quaking with the effort, and it melted my heart to see Todd take hold of them and rest them in his lap.

  “Now then,” I said. “What happened?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” said Kathi.

  “I had to go potty,” said Todd.

  “And then what?” I said.

  “I come to the clean room when I can’t sleep, so I don’t wake Nolly, cleaning our room.”

  “And I can’t go in a dark bathroom,” said Todd. “Obviously. So I come to the clean room where I can put the lights on and then in the morning I tell Kathi it’s not clean anymore and she switches to a new one.” He turned to Kathi. “I would have told you in the morning.”

  “I know. I trust you.”

  “You’re good friends to each other,” I said. “You take great care of each other. And show great kindness.”

  “But?” said Kathi. Todd laughed and squeezed her feet.

  “But,” I said, “you need to learn how to take care—”

  “Of ourselves!” they said in chorus.

  And it was a chorus of three, because of course they were right about what I’d been going to say.

  “This ain’t our first rodeo,” said Kathi.

  “But that’s for another time,” I went on. “For now, I’m going to open the bathroom door. Todd, you’re going to see that there are no bugs in there and, Kathi, you’re going to see a spotlessly clean bathroom sparkling from all your hard work.”