Here Comes the Ride

by Lorena McCourtney

  “The funeral home has already picked it up. If you’ll join me in the office after dinner, we’ll discuss funeral arrangements. Detective Molino will be out in the morning to return Michelle’s personal belongings. He asked that everyone be available so he can, as he put it, ‘clear up a few details.’ ”

  Joe and Phyllis got up from the table a few minutes later and headed for the office. Pam motioned for me to follow. In the office, Pam sat in the swivel chair at the desk. Joe and Phyllis sank onto the leather sofa. I perched on the arm.

  Actually, the funeral discussion didn’t take long. Pam had her hands firmly on the reins, and this meeting was more courtesy than mutual discussion.

  “Michelle will be buried in the plot next to my father, of course,” she said briskly. “The funeral home is offering several options. One is a big service using their facilities, with viewing of the body, enough seating for half of Hollywood, and full fanfare. Cremation is an alternative.”

  Joe and Phyllis exchanged glances. “We don’t favor cremation,” Joe said.

  Pam nodded. “My thought is that we have a simple graveside service for family and close friends only.”

  One of whom, I thought uneasily, was surely the murderer.

  “Michelle might have preferred something more elaborate,” Phyllis suggested in her timid little voice, and I suspected she could be right. A woman planning the wedding of the century might prefer something more along the lines of the funeral of the century too.

  “That’s possible,” Pam agreed. “However, her will”—like a magician pulling his rabbit from the hat, Pam smoothly pulled the blue-covered document from the desk drawer—“doesn’t give any specific instructions, so we’ll just have to do what seems best under the circumstances. The weather is good for a short outdoor service, and I personally would rather not have something that turns into a media event.”

  Neither Joe nor Phyllis offered any differing opinion. They were both staring at the will. I had the impression that at this point they probably wouldn’t object if Pam announced she was stuffing Michelle in the egg-yolk VW and planting her in the backyard. Their attention was riveted on the will. Anticipation? Apprehension?

  And I suddenly realized that this was the reason they’d stayed on. Why they were willing to put up with the awkwardness of accepting their son’s ex-fiancee’s hospitality. Was it to see if Sterling inherited anything, or to find out if the mother/son relationship was revealed?

  “The big funeral would have to wait until at least Monday, but the funeral home can do a simple graveside service Thursday afternoon. So, unless you have objections, that’s what we’ll plan on. They’ll supply a preacher-in-a-can to conduct the service.” Pam picked up the will as if about to tuck it away.

  Not certain exactly what a preacher-in-a-can was, although I assumed it was someone simply generic, I said, “I could talk to the pastor at my church and see if he could do it. He’s a caring and compassionate sort of person. Not too wordy,” I added, in case that mattered.

  “Yes, thank you. I’d appreciate that,” Pam said. She blinked, and I knew she wasn’t as blasé about this as she was trying to pretend.

  “I’ll let you know what he says.”

  “Now, about the will,” she added, as if she were relenting on a point.

  Phyllis surreptitiously slipped her hand into her husband’s.

  Pam opened the blue cover carefully. She smoothed the crinkly pages. She traced a finger down the lines of print. She had, I realized, an unexpected flair for the dramatic. Then she dropped the zinger.

  “It makes,” she said, “a rather startling revelation.”

  Stan Steffan would have supplied a thunder of portentous music if this were one of his productions. Here, all that happened was that Joe’s stomach growled . . . the lasagne at dinner? . . . and a fly buzzed at the window.

  “Sterling doesn’t know,” Phyllis suddenly blurted. “We never told him.”

  The truth, or the tiger-mother still protecting her young? Was she saying that without knowledge of his origins, Sterling would have had no reason to murder Michelle? Or was she willing to go down for him and protect him by confessing to the murder? Or did she actually do it herself?

  Joe apparently wasn’t tied to this agenda, because he said, “But Michelle may have told him. We don’t know.”

  “The will leaves everything to him. Everything,” Pam emphasized. “And if Sterling knew that—” She tapped the blue cover with a stubby fingernail and didn’t mince words. “Maybe he killed her because he wanted her money.”

  Phyllis jumped up. “No, no, no! Sterling would never do that. He’s talented and brilliant. He doesn’t care about money.”

  “I know now that Michelle went to a great deal of trouble to break up my relationship with another man so that I’d marry Sterling,” Pam said. “Michelle’s ethics may have been questionable, but in her own way, I don’t doubt she loved her son. I want to know more.”

  Phyllis flopped back on the sofa. She folded her arms as if she intended to stonewall. Joe squirmed a little, but he started talking.

  “It wasn’t an unusual story. Young, unmarried girl gets pregnant—”

  “Except that Michelle wasn’t about to let an unexpected pregnancy interfere with her plans to be a big movie star!” Phyllis said.

  “And we should be grateful for that, or we’d never have had our son,” Joe snapped with uncharacteristic sharpness. Then he gave his wife’s knee a placating pat.

  “Phyllis has a few distant relatives in the Midwest, but we’d never kept in touch with them. We don’t even know how Michelle got our name back then, but she called us saying she’d won three beauty contests and was coming out to California to get in the movies. And could she stay with us for a while. We both figured the movie thing was some starry-eyed dream, but we said okay. We didn’t want her wandering the streets on her own. But when she arrived—“

  “How old was she then?” Pam interrupted.

  Joe and Phyllis looked at each other. “Only eighteen, I guess.”

  I sneaked in a question. “Was her movie-star name her real name?”

  “No,” Joe said. “She was Miriam Peterson back then. She’d just graduated high school, and when she arrived we could certainly see why she’d won the contests.”

  “She was beautiful,” Phyllis said flatly. “And she knew it.”

  “She’d also gotten some movie contacts through the beauty contests, apparently pretty good ones. We were surprised, but she right away got an agent and picked up parts as an extra, then she got a few speaking lines in a TV sitcom.”

  It all fit. Innocent young girl from Hicktown USA meets big producer with well-worn casting couch. Bingo!

  “Then she found she was pregnant. She didn’t want to delay her career by carrying the baby—”

  “And she sure didn’t want to be stuck raising a baby, which might put a real crimp in her career,” Phyllis threw in.

  “So she was going to get an abortion. But we talked her into having the baby—”

  “Money talked with Michelle,” Phyllis corrected. “We said we wouldn’t pay for an abortion, but we would pay all her expenses to have the baby. We also promised to pay her living expenses for six months after the baby was born. Which we did, plus we gave her everything else we could scrape up. Which included every cent we had saved plus taking out a second mortgage on the house.”

  “But it was worth it, every penny,” Joe said.

  “Then you adopted Sterling when he was born?”

  “Actually . . .” They looked at each other again, as if we’d reached a sticky point here, but finally Joe said, “Michelle went to a hospital in a different town from where we lived. She used Phyllis’s name and identification. So we, Phyllis and I, show as birth parents on the birth certificate. No adoption.”

  “So he’s always been ours,” Phyllis said with more of that tiger-mama fierceness. “She had no right to tell—”

  “We don’t know that she told
him anything,” Joe repeated. “Or that she even intended to. Maybe she planned to let it remain a secret until she died, which she probably didn’t intend to do for decades yet.”

  “So Michelle didn’t keep in touch with you and Sterling over the years?” I asked.

  “What she did was use the money we gave her to buy herself a fancy wardrobe and a jazzy little car, and then she was on her merry way to stardom,” Phyllis said. Even though she obviously loved Sterling fiercely, she seemed more resentful than grateful to the birth mother who’d provided him.

  “We didn’t hear anything from her for several years, but then she started sending toys and money,” Joe said. “We wouldn’t let her spend time alone with Sterling, but she came to the house occasionally as Cousin Michelle. She paid for his education. On a bookkeeper’s salary, we couldn’t afford private school or a prestigious university—”

  “He said he had scholarships,” Pam cut in.

  “He did have scholarships. Very good scholarships,” Phyllis said. “Half a dozen universities wanted him.”

  “But Michelle also arranged for him to receive a considerable amount of other money that just looked like scholarships,” Joe said.

  “Did she want Sterling to know she was his mother?” I asked.

  “She never mentioned it,” Phyllis admitted. “Early on, there was no way she could prove it even if she wanted to, but with the DNA testing they can do now. . .”

  “Are you going to tell him?” Pam asked.

  Phyllis didn’t answer, but Joe said, “If he’s going to inherit everything, there’s no way to keep him from knowing.”

  Phyllis glanced around the office, her expression suddenly brightening as she apparently realized the house was part of Sterling’s inheritance. Redecorating?

  No one else seemed inclined to bring up the subject, so I did. “The father, he was someone she, umm, encountered in the movie industry?”

  I waited expectantly for enough information to identify Stan Steffan as the father, or maybe even his name to drop, but Joe said, “No, she was pregnant before she came out to California, though she didn’t know it. A graduation night party. Some high-school basketball player. A jerk, was how she described him.”

  “She was sure?”

  “She told me once that she kept telling herself she just couldn’t be pregnant and didn’t even go to a doctor until she was past five months along,” Phyllis said.

  “Did she know the Steffans by then?” I asked, still not convinced about the hometown jerk.

  Joe looked puzzled by the question, but he said, “No, it was a year or so later before she got a part in one of his productions. About the same time she got her name legally changed to Michelle DeShea.”

  Well, so much for my dramatic little soap-opera scenario. Which subtracted a couple of motives. Stan Steffan hadn’t killed Michelle to hide some past indiscretion with her, and Mrs. Steffan wasn’t wreaking late vengeance.

  So did all this eliminate the Steffans? And Joe and Phyllis too?

  It lowered their standing on my suspects’ list. But it didn’t eliminate them.

  And there was still the matter of Stan Steffan wanting big bucks from Michelle before he’d give her a part in his movie. I felt there was a strong significance in that, though I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  It seemed doubtful now that Joe and Phyllis had known Michelle was leaving everything to Sterling, which eliminated that motive for murder. Although one of them might still have killed her to prevent Michelle from revealing the truth to Sterling. And whether Sterling did or didn’t already know that truth direct from Michelle was another combustible question.

  Phyllis stood up. “I’m going down to the hot tub.”

  “Good idea,” Joe said.

  They marched out, and Pam and I looked at each other, neither of us with anything decisive to say. Then I remembered the display case of knives I’d shoved under the desk. Still careful not to contaminate anything with fingerprints, I pulled the case out and set it on the desk.

  “Where did this come from?”

  “It was in Michelle’s room. She had this little corner devoted to your father. Shirley knew about it.”

  Pam didn’t ask what I was doing in Michelle’s room. She just nodded as she looked at the exquisitely decorated knives, as if they touched some dim memory from the past. “I think there were more.”

  “Maybe they’re stored away somewhere. Or maybe Michelle sold some. They look like collector’s items. Anyway, it appears to me that two knives are missing from the case.” I pointed out the tiny holes in the white velvet. “So I think you should show this to Detective Molino in the morning.”

  “I’ll do that. Two knives,” she mused uneasily, obviously seeing the same significance Shirley and I had found in that.

  “And Pam . . . watch your back.”

  ***

  I thought I’d go to bed early, but once in my room my cell phone played the hard rock thing my granddaughter had programmed into it. It was Fitz, saying two of their guests had been delayed, so they wouldn’t be sailing until morning.

  I jumped out of bed eagerly. “Oh, good. I have a lot to tell you! I’ll meet you . . . where?”

  “How about if we go in something less conspicuous than the limo? I’ll pick you up in, say, twenty minutes?”

  “I’ll meet you at the gate.”

  I didn’t want the discomfort of being locked out of the house again, so I asked Shirley if there were an extra key I could borrow for the evening.

  She readily supplied one, then added in a conspiratorial whisper, “I think I may be on to something. I’m going to do more ‘cleaning’ in Michelle's bedroom tonight.”

  I hesitated. I wanted to see Fitz, but I was tempted to join Shirley. But Fitz won, and I said, “Good. If it isn’t too late, I’ll talk to you when I get back.”

  “Doesn’t matter how late. Just knock on my door.”

  I wasn’t sneaking out. Yet there was something that seemed deliciously sneaky about grabbing the remote control from the limo so I could get back through the gate later, jumping into Fitz’s car the minute it pulled up, and zooming back down the tree-lined lane.

  Although what we did was decorously un-sneaky. We picked up cappuccinos at a stand and drove down to the city park that overlooked the bay. I told him about someone searching the office and my getting locked out, the discovery of the knife collection, with two knives missing, plus the surprise revelation in Michelle’s will.

  “You’ve been busy. That’s almost as speedy as ol’ Ed Montrose solving cases in a half hour on TV.”

  “Except that nothing is getting solved. There are just more twisty trails and questions.”

  “Especially,” Fitz said thoughtfully, “what the killer plans to do with that second knife. Maybe you could talk Detective Molino into searching the house for it?”

  “Because whoever has it would definitely have some explaining to do.” Yes! Detective Molino wasn’t particularly receptive to suggestions from amateur sleuths, but maybe he’d see value in this one. “Or if he doesn’t want to do it . . .”

  From Fitz’s appalled look, I knew I shouldn’t have been thinking out loud.

  “No,” Fitz said. “No, no, no. You go looking for that knife, and what you may find is the knife, all right. Firmly grasped in someone’s hand and aimed at you.”

  “But—”

  “I think your brain needs a rest from all this detective work,” Fitz said firmly.

  So we went to a movie. Where we ate popcorn and held hands and laughed at the delightfully brainless antics of a young woman falling off a boat, losing her memory, and being rescued by a hunk with a pet alligator on a desert island. Never mind that desert islands don’t tend to come populated with alligators, it was all great fun.

  I went back to the house feeling upbeat. And rather nicely kissed goodnight.

  Yet a thought troubled me as I unlocked the front door, and it had nothing to do with knives or murderers. Fitz
wasn’t anti-God. He’d gone to church with me a few times. He enjoyed the music; he liked the way the pastor enlivened his sermons with funny anecdotes about his own foibles. But neither was he a part of what I’d heard called the “kingdom of believers.”

  I’d had a real encounter with God the night my friend Joella’s baby was born in my limo. I was still stumbling and meandering in my faith, but it was definitely expanding, becoming a stronger and ever-larger part of my life. But when the pastor preached on Jesus saying, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” Fitz had remarked that believing there was only one way to God seemed narrow-minded. He suggested we should be more broadminded and tolerant.

  Tolerance was surely a virtue. I appreciated Fitz’s easy acceptance of people and his tolerance of my shortcomings, including that bane of my life, these jiggly thighs. And yet, if there was only one way to God, through Jesus, then all the tolerance in the world wouldn’t help someone with misguided beliefs make it into an eternal life with God. Was this difference in our thinking sooner or later going to become a barrier?

  I put those thoughts out of my mind for later, and headed for Shirley’s room. Detouring to peer at the digital clock on the kitchen range, I saw that it was almost one-thirty. She’d said anytime, but this was a little late for senior pajama partying, and I couldn’t see any light under her door.

  I tapped anyway, then again, harder, and got no response. If she was sleeping that soundly, I didn’t want to wake her. So, disappointed, I just slipped into my own room and went to bed.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  After being up so late, I slept later than usual in the morning. I thought, when I finally showered and dressed and went out to the kitchen, that I’d find everyone had already breakfasted.

  Instead, people were milling around the kitchen and dining room, looking lost and disoriented. No scent of fresh coffee or baking biscuits. No glasses of juice or pitchers of hot syrup or stack of warmed plates.

  Pam was trying to figure out the big coffeemaker. She’d apparently been out skateboarding already, because the board was leaning by the door to the hallway.