Murder Never Forgets

by Diana O'Hehir

“I also knew about her background in Del Oro County and how much she hated her uncle.

  “Mrs. Dexter had been a resident of the Manor for only four years,” Mrs. La Salle says. “I don’t think she moved in with those ideas about the oil and buying the place. I think that plan crept up on her. But, then, she always kept it a secret about knowing Dr. Kittredge. So maybe she was planning something from the beginning.”

  “Or was ashamed of knowing him.” I’m remembering the look on her face when she said Patrick had been a little Mexican child on their ranch.

  Before she came in to the Manor, Mrs. Dexter lived with her ninety-year-old mother in a California town named Modesto. Mrs. Dexter was a tax accountant with an office in the Modesto mall. I tell Mrs. La Salle that, yes, I can picture all this. Modesto is one of those hot, dry, dusty places where you understand that someone could quietly lose track of their personality.

  “What about Kittredge?” I ask.

  “Well, what about him?”

  “I always suspected him of something, but just the same I was surprised it was this bad. After all, he’s a doctor. He had a life.”

  “He’s an unsuccessful doctor. And a fraud. He wasn’t who he pretended to be: Patrick Kittredge, the Irish man-about-town. He had to play a role all the time. He was angry, and Louise would know how to work on that. She probably promised him the earth. A clinic in Switzerland.”

  I sigh.

  “Don’t brood about it,” Mrs. La Salle says. “There’s nothing you or anybody else could have done.

  “Here, we’ve got another half-martini for each of us.”

  Something I really like about Mrs. La Salle is that she gives you martinis instead of tea.

  He isn’t a new chef any longer but that is still what everyone calls him. His name is Wayne Lee, and he turns out to be Chinese, that is, a Californian of Chinese ancestry, and six-foot-four and quite handsome, with sturdy athletic shoulders, which helped him in catching Mrs. Goliard. He was a student at Santa Cruz, in Human Relations, like me. But we don’t talk about that at first. What we talk about is my aunt Crystal, whom he knew, “Well, hey, a little bit. She came around and talked to me a couple of times and left me some books. She’s your dad’s sister, right?

  “Great old lady,” he says. “Awesome. Lots of spirit. Ordered everybody around. I like that in an old person, makes them seem younger, y’know?” He shifts when he says this and moves a shoulder forward; he was on the basketball team at Santa Cruz, and he has that basketball player’s gracefulness.

  Aunt Crystal must have been really bored here before she began her fatal research into oil. What she wanted with Wayne was some shreds and memories of California Chinese history, which Wayne, although he’s California Chinese, didn’t know anything about. But he offered to write to his great-grandfather, a patriarch who still lives in Locke, a crumbling Chinese town in the California Delta.

  “I loved it that she got so excited about that stuff,” Wayne says. “Made me feel guilty for losing track of it. But she had that buzz, y’know? That real aliveness? You got a bit of it, too. Must run in the family.”

  Wayne asks me to come bodysurfing with him. “I’ll coach you,” he promises. “And maybe borrow a wet suit some place. Terrific exercise. And it’s real easy.”

  So I go bodysurfing, and it isn’t that easy, but Wayne is a good companion. It turns out to be one of those exercises where it feels very good when you stop. He gets me into running, too.

  “This will ruin your shoes,” I tell Mrs. La Salle. “It’ll wreck your stockings.”

  “My shoes were ruined ten minutes ago. I had to do this.”

  We’re on our way up to examine the assay hole that Rob and I thought was a well.

  Mrs. La Salle has been actively curious about all aspects of our murder story, and especially about Daddy’s and my involvement in it. I remember that she used to write a gossip column for a San Francisco magazine and suspect her now of planning a book-length true-crime exposé of our Manor murders. The San Francisco Chronicle features the Manor murders on the front page at least three times a week: “How Death Stalked the Retirement Colony.”

  I hope she won’t get too curious about my father and his account of the woman on the beach. So far, the Chronicle hasn’t caught on to that at all. The Manor Murders are just two murders, as far as the Chronicle is concerned.

  “Your shoes are handsome,” Susie tells Mrs. La Salle. “And a restorative shade of green. But perhaps not perfect for hiking.”

  “God, no,” says Mrs. La Salle. To my surprise she and Susie like each other. Susie thinks Mrs. La Salle is beautiful and smart and fashionable; she tells her so. “Did you have Botox injections?” she asks.

  Mrs. La Salle says, “No, but I plan to. Will you?”

  Susie agrees, well, maybe. “There’s an Indian tribe somewhere—I read about them. Botox resembles a naturally occurring substance, you know.”

  Susie isn’t a fast uphill climber because she keeps getting distracted by nature. “Look at the shape of this,” she says with each interesting clump of something brown, speckled, or striped. So she admires the manzanita shapes and pulls off pieces of bark and says they would make a lovely red dye, as she puffs lackadaisically along behind, catching her hair and letting the blackberry thorns pull at her long print skirt.

  “Robbie is a great deal better,” she announces forcefully into the air. “He is fighting his way through to wellness. And it is all owing to Carla.”

  “Surgery helped some,” Mrs. La Salle says mildly. She suspects about Wayne and me and understands the subtext of Susie’s pronouncement. Robbie and Carly are the ideal couple. They are made for each other. No one should get between them.

  Behind us is my father. He’s behind only because he finds so many interesting things to step into and investigate. He’s still perfectly spry and shows no bad symptoms from our active two months here. Of our visit to Conestoga, Homeland, and environs, he seems to remember only that he slept in the grass. “Which was frightening,” he admits. “Now, why would that be frightening? But Carla found me. She always does.”

  “I believe,” he says now, “we are on our way to Dark Lake.”

  I wonder why he decided the assay hole was Dark Lake. Maybe it reminds him of some place he knew early in his relationship with my mother, when they were in love. Well, they must have been in love once, mustn’t they? People don’t marry each other without being in love, do they? I think about this sometimes.

  “I have found,” he says, holding up a tiny, architecturally defined mouse skull, “an archaeological specimen.”

  “A skull is an ultimate,” Mrs. La Salle says. “I have an artist friend who made an exhibit of ultimates.”

  Mrs. La Salle and I have talked about her friendship with my father. “I could see it in your face,” she says. “You thought I had weird designs. Predatory woman fastens on senile old millionaire. Well, it’s hard to talk about, but I knew perfectly well he wasn’t a millionaire. Fact is, I’m doing reparation of sorts; my brother died with Alzheimer’s, and I wasn’t good about it. Not at all. He was so young, I took it personally. So now I work it out, paying up a little, with your dad. Susie would understand.”

  I tell her I understand, too. I don’t add that I thought of an explanation like that and then dismissed it because I couldn’t picture her in the penitent role. And I still don’t, exactly. But I believe her.

  “Your father is a very sweet man,” she tells me.

  I reach for her hand and call her, “Daphne.” You see how far this experience has moved me along life’s treadmill; I’m calling Mrs. La Salle by her first name sometimes.

  Another reason why I’ve gotten closer to her is that she’s all that remains of the trio. Mrs. Cohen has left the Manor. “I truly found every minute of it interesting,” she says. “And now I am managing my emphysema much, much better and am able to return to the world. Oh, how I will miss all of you.”

  Kittredge and Mrs. Dexter are being prosecuted fo
r Mona’s murder, for which the sheriff must have good evidence. He just looks bored and satisfied when I ask him about it, and when I ask about Mrs. Sisal’s murder, he chews gum. Maybe I wiped off too many fingerprints around her office.

  I tell Sheriff Hawthorne maybe I never thanked him for saving my life. “Well, I’m doing it now. I’ll think of you when I’m eighty. And that was pretty deft of you, arriving in the so-called ultimate nick of time. How’d you manage it?”

  We’re in a hall of the Manor. The sheriff leans against a wall and does more gum-chewing. “How did I get there so ex-pe-ditiously? Well, it was partly your friend Mrs. Cohen, who is nowhere near as dumb as she looks. She was worried about you; you talked on the phone, remember? But mostly, I’d been stickin’ close to both you and Mrs. Dexter ever since you had your bunny rabbit incident.”

  “Bunny rabbit?” I have a moment of confusion and then realize he’s talking about the hare, the poor little skinned Lepus townsendii. This man has a weird sense of humor.

  “Yep. Because your boss, Belle, found this dried stinkin’ rabbit skin in Mrs. Dexter’s apartment. Seemed a bit off to me. I kept an eye on her after that.”

  “So you followed us, were behind us the whole time.”

  “Summa the time.” He gives me the And that’s all you’re going to get stare.

  But before he goes I try to pump him about Mona. “I mean, she came to me for help.”

  He regards me slit-eyed. “Help? Sweetpea, you couldn’t have helped that little lady. She had the victim’s personality package: devious, deceitful, dumb, a druggie. Scares easy. The sort that changes sides. And telegraphs when she’s gonna do it. The other conspirators tend to catch on, right?”

  I try to read his face. Does he mean Mona came to him with information? I can’t read anything; all that Juicy Fruit action interferes.

  Nobody mentions Aunt Crystal. The evidence about her being the net-woman is all in Daddy’s head, and I think the sheriff suspects that Aunt Crystal is truly disappeared and that her going was arranged by Kittredge and La Salle, with Mona involved some way, but the one time I talk about it with him, he just shrugs and looks at me and says, “You think you can prove that? Wanna put your dad on the stand?”

  And Belle has started proceedings to buy the Manor. Belle is another of those people who acts bored when you ask them questions. “Well, you’re right, I didn’t use to have any money,” she says. “But now I do. You remember Mr. Rice?”

  Of course I remember Mr. Rice, who locked his door with four different locks and told me I had really tried to help him.

  “Well, him and me got married.

  “It’s a marriage of convenience,” she says, probably in answer to what she sees in my face. “The convenience for me is money and for him is care. Real professional care. It’s a bargain on both sides. We’ll both keep it, and now I’m rich.

  “An’ I always thought I could run this place a lot better than most of the lamebrains that were trying.”

  Belle is going to completely revise the Permanent Care Policy. Clients will be able to buy out any time they want.

  “Such a ridiculous idea,” Susie says. “Oil . . . in these beautiful woods. They should leave things alone. Oil never helped anyone.” She is panting hard.

  That was pretty much Belle’s attitude when she first learned the story. At first, she seemed to blame me and to think I had caused all these complications. And then she did a complete about-face and decided I was the heroine of the hour who had saved everyone’s life. This was all happening when Rob was at his sickest, so it got very peculiar and tense.

  “Come on, hup, two, three, four,” I say ridiculously at Susie. “Avant. Forward. Chin up. We’re almost there.”

  When we arrive at the oil shaft we establish ourselves on the platform around it. Say what you will, the place still looks like a well, a well out of a Thomas Kinkade painting, one of those village wells with a hat-shaped structure over it. What’s missing is the village and the romantic smoke from the pollution-making green twig fires.

  Daddy finally comes bouncing up with a newly discovered artifact: a computer ink cartridge. I don’t know why people have to abandon their junk among the redwood leaves.

  Mrs. La Salle lies on her stomach and tries to peer into the assay hole. “So, there is oil down there?”

  “There was some. And deep down. It’s not really a gusher.”

  Susie pulls one of her scarves up around her. She has surprised me by getting self-conscious about her fat neck. “The goddess is with us and around us and will not like more digging.”

  “What’s going to happen?” Mrs. La Salle asks.

  Belle has been keeping me briefed on this. “They’re fighting. The Board is divided, and the ecology people have gotten into it. Mrs. Dexter wouldn’t have had an easy time.”

  “She would have kept it quiet until later. She would have bought the Manor and waited and handed out some bribes. She was basically smart, but her craziness was growing and growing.”

  Mrs. La Salle says she saw the craziness only once. She had knocked on Mrs. Dexter’s door and thought she heard someone tell her to come in. “Anyway, I just opened the door—it was hard for her to get to it with the walker. So I came in, and it took me a minute to understand. I just stood there.”

  I tell her, “Yes?”

  “She was all dressed up. In costume. I thought of that roadhouse in The Sopranos.”

  “The go-go bar?”

  “Except she was more—well, teenage beauty contest. A low-cut velvet top with spangles. Pleated gold miniskirt.

  “No walker. And the miniskirt short enough to show her ass.” She delivers the word ass clearly, without undue emphasis. “Louise is an old lady. Older than me. She was bare under the mini, and half bent over with her flesh hanging down in folds.

  “She’d been cutting something up. She had a big pair of scissors, and the floor was littered with scraps of paper.

  “She turned around and looked at me, and then she went right back to what she was doing . . . cutting something up. Photographs, it looked like. And scattering the pieces. After a couple of minutes I just left.

  “And, do you know, the next day when she saw me in the dining room, she didn’t seem embarrassed at all. She smiled and said, ‘So, you walked in on my ritual. Rituals are necessary, don’t you agree?’

  “She was just like normal, leaning on her walker.”

  I take a minute to think about this story, which I can see very clearly and still not see. I tell Mrs. La Salle that I’m still not used to the idea of the evil Mrs. Dexter.

  “A lot of readjustment,” she agrees. “Roads going off over the horizon. What will you and Edward do now? Sooner or later I’ll move on. But maybe you should stay. Remain at the Manor.”

  Mrs. La Salle means not just that my father should stay on, but that I should do so, also. Belle has offered me a job, an actual job, with actual pay, as her assistant.

  One of the many things I hate about that idea is I would feel like I was here waiting for Aunt Crystal. Going by that beach and checking to see if she has surfaced, all wrapped up in her gold net.

  Actually, I hope she never floats back to us, but remains out in the tide, free and uncatalogued, grinding herself into the ocean floor, one with coral, barnacles, lighted jellyfish.

  Thank God Susie runs out of steam at this point in order to peer down into the assay hole and say, “Now who would think that was oil? That evil substance. It all looks so sweet.”

  I haven’t told Susie and Mrs. La Salle of the latest development about Wayne Lee being a figure in my life lately, although Mrs. La S. has kind of guessed. Maybe Wayne will be an important figure, but I’m not sure.

  I don’t want a sensible, feminist lecture from somebody the age of my grandmother, if I still had a grandmother, about thinking through my own needs and evaluating a man as calmly as I would evaluate a new car—it’s Mrs. La Salle who would talk that way. Nor speeches from Susie, sad regretful monolog
ues about the goddess and Robbie’s love for me and Susie’s love for me and oh, Carly, I hate to criticize but how could you even think of somebody else after all you and Rob have meant to each other . . . When you and Rob could be set up so charmingly here . . .

  I don’t want to tell Susie that the charmingness of that arrangement is part of what I find depressing.

  Wayne is funny and sensible and very athletic. Maybe too athletic; he knocks on my door every morning at six for me to go on a three-mile run. That is, I run, and he runs ahead, saying, “Come on, Carl, you can do it, you know you can. Just pick up your feet, one after the other, forget about the pain. Look at me, this way.”

  He has a very good smile and a lot of healthy Susie-type interests except that he likes a caffeine-enhanced fruit drink in the A.M., right after he gets up. He runs again in the evening and does exercises at night. He isn’t the slightest bit dependent on me.

  The Habitat man was totally dependent and needy, and that’s what got me into trouble. Because part of me wants to be needed.

  Rob needs me some, but he also likes to be the caretaker and to manage things. And Wayne, as far as I can tell . . . well, I haven’t entirely decided. I think maybe Wayne needs admiration, but I’m not sure.

  I am still figuring him out. The healthy running is great, like an offshore breeze across your life. Especially when your life has been burdened with stagnant miasmas, to quote some poet or other. But when I confided to Belle about Wayne, she said, “The boy scout stuff is okay for about a week. Then it starts to drag.”

  Belle has been around, and a person feels like listening to her.

  My most recent opinion is that nothing lasts very long except for my affection for my father. And no jobs or boyfriends or murders or world events will get in the way of that.

  But I’m also smart enough to know that my dad won’t last forever.

  Lately, he’s taken to staring out his window and quoting scraps of Egyptian poetry at the scenery, or maybe to the mermaid, whom he can see beyond the bushes in the oval. “Don’t feel sadness,” he says. And, “Please love your life and live it now.”