X Dames: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 3)

by J. J. Henderson

“So the thing about Bobby is he’s really sexist in the crassest way, he’ll talk about women totally in terms of their bodies, tits and ass, right to your face, but once he’s decided he likes you and you’re up to snuff in the brain department, he’s completely loyal and reliable and a good friend. And he already respects you because of your book and because I told him he’d better or I’d walk.”

  “Oooh, you toughie.”

  “Hey, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

  After another five minutes of crawling up Lincoln through the thickest tangle of low-rent signage that Lucy had seen since Times Square cleaned up its act, they swung a left onto Breezeway Ave. Two blocks later Terry stopped the car in front of an anonymous-looking mint-green two-story apartment building on the south side of the street, with the number 637 written in 1960s-era script on the wall. “There it is, Luce,” Teresa said. “Apartment 117, on the ground floor. Home, sweet home for the next however many months.”

  “637 Breezeway, number 117,” Lucy said. “Sounds pretty good.”

  “There’s a nice little pool in the courtyard, no drug addicts or hookers, and the two grand a month gets you access to the laundry room as well,” Terry said.

  “Such a deal.”

  “Venice is very desirable.”

  “I thought you said it was two blocks from the beach,” Lucy said. “This is more like six, right?”

  “Sorry about that. The first place fell through. There was a rent-controlled tenant leaving after 25 years and at the last minute this girl paid him five grand to marry her so she could move in with him before he left, and take over the apartment. She’s paying two hundred a month so she’ll make her money back in saved rent in no time.”

  “God, it sounds like a real estate hustle right out of Manhattan.”

  “I guess. Hey, let’s get your stuff inside. We should take turns with suitcases so we don’t leave things unattended. After we unload I’ll introduce you to the landlord.”

  “Landlord? He’s on premises?”

  “Yeah, he lives here. The owner/manager.” She dropped her voice. “His ex- is a friend of mine. That’s how I found the place. He’s like a fifty-year old would-be artist, has two apartments here, one for his studio, one to live in. The work is ridiculous, these purple flower paintings that look like—well, you’ll see, since his studio is next door to your apartment. Plus he’s got a twenty year-old girlfriend. Younger than both his daughters.”

  “Ugh,” said Lucy. “A dirty old middle-aged man.”

  “They’re everywhere,” Teresa said as she grabbed a suitcase, went to the building’s metal gate, and pushed a buzzer. “Fueled by Viagra and pornography, the aging dregs of the sexual revolution.” She shook her head. “To get to your place you turn right and head around the pool. You’re in back on the right. I’ll be back in a sec,” she said, pushing open the gate when the buzzer sounded.

  Lucy busied herself getting the stuff out of the car. Claud, emerging from his stupor, had a look around. The sunshine felt warm and soothing, the air carried a salty tang, and Lucy spotted two avocado trees and three orange trees within hailing distance. This was looking, well, not bad. Teresa swung the gate open. “Come on in, Luce, and check out your new pad.” As Lucy swung by her, lugging a pair of suitcases, Terry dropped her voice and went on, “Mr. Manager—his name’s Dan Hobgood—is at work in his studio. In a purple haze. His bimbo’s by the pool.”

  Lucy turned right and followed a terrazo breezeway alongside the building, with the pool hidden behind shrubbery and a second-story breezeway overhead. She turned at the corner, following alongside the building. To her left, she spotted a girl in an itsy bitsy bikini bottom lying by the pool, a 1950s vintage freeform beauty. The girl lay topless on her belly on a lounger, greased and roasting in the sun. Ahead, the sliding glass doors on two adjacent apartments were open. Out of one emerged a man of fifty who looked forty, barefoot in jeans and a t-shirt, with dyed white-blonde hair and pale green eyes. “Hi, you must be Lucy Ripken. I’m Dan Hobgood. The manager. Let me help you with that.” He took a suitcase. He was good-looking, tanned, well-built, five-ten, with a practiced, friendly smile that exposed perfect white teeth. He glanced poolside, then gave Lucy an appraising look. “Welcome to 637. Me and my brother and sister own the place. And six other buildings in the neighborhood. I have two daughters that share an apartment upstairs. Mariah and Marcia. They’re cool kids but now and then they get a little partied up, but don’t worry. They won’t burn down the building or steal your shit. So your friend Teresa says you’re planning to stay at least six months. That right?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve got a TV job, you know? They cancel the show—” she shrugged.

  “Right, right,” he said, nodding, still grinning. “The Industry. Well, you’ve got a six month lease—or at least Schamberg Productions does.”

  “No problem.” Lucy glanced into his apartment studio. Propped against the walls, the five paintings she could see were each four by six feet, and each worked the same motif: forests of huge, luridly-glowing yellow and purple flowers and butterflies. A half-finished sixth occupied an easel in the middle of the room. “Intense colors there.”

  “You like ‘em?” he said. “I’m working on this gallery to give me a show, but so far it’s like, if you aren’t connected in the art scene nobody takes you seriously.”

  “Hey, I’m from New York, it’s the same there,” she said. “It’s all about who you know.” She smiled. “Well, I gotta get my stuff and get moved in.”

  “Right. Here’s your place,” he said, leading her to the next apartment. They entered through sliding glass doors. The living room was semi-furnished with a couch, chair, TV and table, featureless but pleasant, well-lit by natural light reflecting off the pool and courtyard. The minimally-equipped little kitchen was separated from a small dining area by a counter with a pair of stools. A door led to a bathroom, another to a bedroom. She lugged the suitcase into the bedroom. Another pair of sliding glass doors, a good-sized closet, a comfy-looking queen size bed, a desk and chair. All in all, she thought as she threw the suitcase on the bed and went back into the living room, not too shabby. Terry had done all right by her.

  “You need anything let me know,” Hobgood said, after handing over a set of keys and quickly walking her through the locks, switches, house rules, etc. “I’m two doors down, on the other side of my studio.”

  “Yeah, okay, thanks,” Lucy said. He disappeared into the studio. Fifteen minutes later she and Teresa had everything unloaded. They made a plan for the evening and Teresa drove off. Almost immediately the world’s largest automobile pulled into the vacated parking space, with a pair of glam-looking, sunglasses-wearing girls in the front seat and a pair of surfboards sticking up out of the back seat. And so Lucy met Marcia and Mariah, Dan Hobgood’s 23- and 21-year old daughters, and their 1965 electric blue Cadillac convertible, named Flash. They were both surfers and the older one, Marcia, was a painter, “Just like my dad,” she said with a smirk. “Only better,” she added.

  “Way better,” her sister chimed in. They were both really cute, having expertly mined the endlessly trendy vein of surf-chick style for their mismatching hipster beach babe looks—with a little Goth thrown in, in that both had dyed their long straight hair deep black. Lucy liked them immediately. “But then,” Mariah lowered her voice, “Dad can’t paint his way out of a sack.”

  “And everybody knows it but him,” Marcia said. “It’s kind of sad.”

  “I’ll have to check out your work,” Lucy said. “I know a couple of gallery people in New York.”

  “That would be awesome,” Marcia said. “I’d love to get a show in New York.”

  So would just about every artist in the world, Lucy thought but didn’t say. The girl had no idea. “Come up anytime,” Marcia went on. They got out of the car. “We’re in 221.”

  “For sure,” Lucy said.

  She also met Alison, no last name offered, Dan’s 20-year old gir
lfriend, who had perfect, remodeled breasts, and had come from Scottsdale, Arizona on a tennis scholarship to UCLA, only after a year she dropped out because she got offered a ten- second bit on a cable channel sitcom pilot, which launched her into her true calling. The ten seconds were axed before the pilot hit the air and the show was axed the day after the pilot hit the air, but Alison was on her way to a storied Hollywood Life. When Lucy told her that she was working as a writer on a new reality show called the X Dames, Alison went from friendly to fawning in a microsecond, sending Lucy scurrying into her new home. She closed the doors, drew the drapes, took a deep breath, and sat down on the couch, which smelled vaguely of salt and anonymous sexual sweat.

  She pulled her cell phone out, wanting to call someone in New York, but there was no one in particular she wanted to talk to except Harold, whose warnings about LA life had begun to ring in her ears. Harold, however, was in Florida and had asked her not to call him for a couple of days because, as he had so pompously put it, he didn’t want her to undermine his sense of belief in his mission.

  So there was nothing to do but unpack, which she did for an hour. By then the hour approached five pm, and after walking the dog around the neighborhood briefly—she decided to save the first beach walk for the early morning—she had to take a shower and decide WHAT TO WEAR to her first X Dames meeting. Even if it was just a get-to-know-you dinner.

  By six pm Lucy, in a little black dress, and Teresa, in a little red dress, had secured themselves a spot in one of the world’s most scenic traffic jams, the one that migrated up the Pacific Coast Highway every weekday afternoon from three-thirty to six-thirty, between the last stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway and the Malibu Colony, several slow-moving miles to the north. They crawled along the edge of the Pacific, waves beating against golden sunset-hued sand a hundred yards to their left, stop-and-go creeping with the herd of wealthy strivers hauling their Bentleys and Porsches north to multi-million dollar cribs on LA’s Platinum Coast. Teresa held forth on the cultural scenery. Among the manses just north of the Santa Monica Pier was Peter Lawford’s, where JFK used to dally with assorted Hollywood babes procured by Lawford; and also the one where William Randolph Hearst kept Marion Davies prior to building his castle up at San Simeon. In not-so-rapid succession they passed Santa Monica Canyon; the prone-to-sliding cliffs edging the Pacific Palisades, where half the players in The Industry lived; the unglamorous terminus of glamorous Sunset Boulevard; Topanga Canyon, land of the ancient hippies; and finally, still short of Malibu, where the other half of the players lived, they took a quick right turn out of the crawl and within seconds they were into unbuilt, unpopulated, preternaturally green Tuna Canyon, climbing upwards into the Santa Monica Mountains.

  “So enough about movie stars and pretty scenery,” Lucy said, waving at the hills and the oak trees and the deepening violet sky. The sun had set just as they turned off the PCH. “What about you? Are you—you’re not into something with this Bobby, are you?”

  “Schamberg? God no,” Teresa said. “He’s fucking crazy. Not my type.” She stopped short, and shot Lucy a pained look as they rounded another bend in the road.

  “So—come on, Ter, what’s the story?”

  “You ever hear of a man named Paxton Whitehall?”

  “Paxton Whitehall? No. Who is he, a member of the House of Lords?”

  “No, no. I guess his name’s kind of stuffy, isn’t it? But no, he’s just a guy who grew up in Oklahoma, then came out here years ago. A lot of years ago, actually. He was instrumental in getting the LA art world off its ass and into gear about forty years back.”

  “Teresa, how old is this guy?”

  “He told me he was sixty-two but if he was, then he was already a successful art dealer when he was fifteen, according to the bio.”

  “So he’s older?”

  “I think seventy.”

  “You’re dating a seventy-year-old guy?”

  “I was. Then—” she slowed. “Check this view out,” she said, pulling off at a turn-out and stopping. They climbed out of the car and went to the edge. The whole of Santa Monica Bay, rimmed in lights from Malibu down to the tip of Palos Verde, stretched away before them. The dark silhouette of Catalina Island sat on the horizon.

  “Wow, it’s gorgeous,” said Lucy. She turned and looked up towards the hills above them. “How much farther up’s the house?”

  “Oh, maybe five or six minutes,” said Teresa. “Anyways, Luce, Paxton and I had an—unusual relationship. I mean, it wasn’t exactly like we were lovers, but—we spent a lot of time together. Look, it was weird, okay? He had a thing for—he was always trying to get me to watch him have sex with young men. It was—“

  “That sounds creepy, Teresa,” Lucy said.

  “I know, I know. But we had such a wonderful empathy, and I thought that part of his life was—completely separate from the world he and I shared. Which was the art world, the cultural world, that he helped shape in southern California for forty years. He was an amazing man, Lucy. An accomplished pianist, fluent in seven languages, profoundly educated in art history, a real Old World gentleman, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, of all the wiggy places, but still a complete and thorough-going Modernist, avant-gardist, totally in tune with what’s up today. The perfect man, only—in any case, he finally talked me into, you know, watching. He said it was important to him. God knows why.” She stopped. The silence was undermined by the white noise of the highway, a mile below them, and the warm breeze sighing through the sagebrush all around.

  “So what happened?”

  “I agreed to watch, and I did, and Pax had a stroke.”

  “While he was—“

  “Yes. Humping this guy.”

  “Jesus. Did he—“

  “Die? No. But the man—boy, really, he was only nineteen—kind of panicked and threw Pax off. Pax fell on the floor, and had some kind of seizure. I let the boy get dressed and run for it while I called nine one one. I didn’t see any reason to—”

  “So is he OK? Paxton I mean.”

  “No, he got all fucked up. His brain was shot.” She looked at Lucy. “I was in love with this old queen, Lucy, and I—I can’t believe how stupid I was.” Lucy had never seen Teresa even close to tears, but her eyes were shining now. “When the EMS guys showed up I had to say that I was having sex with him when it happened, to cover for him since he was one of the last of the great closet queers, he’d been married for forty years ‘til his wife died last year—but then they found some DNA that was neither mine nor his, and—let’s just say it got really complicated really fast and then he had another stroke and died, and all the complications went away because his daughter got all the money. Unbeknownst to me Paxton apparently had told her that he was going to change his will and put me in it in place of her. So she naturally felt kind of vindictive towards me. She had been the one pushing for this investigation but all she really wanted was to make sure she got the money, and if she had to get me thrown in jail to accomplish that she was ready to do so. Since he hadn’t changed the will yet, when he died she laid off, and the cops did too. They didn’t give a fuck, really.” She cried for a moment.

  “God, that’s awful, Teresa.”

  “So that’s my love story for this year. Pretty sick, eh?”

  “Doesn’t sound like much fun, I have to say.” Lucy managed a small smile.

  “It was right after that I decided to take Bobby up on his X Dames offer. After all, Paxton and Milton Schamberg had been the best of friends.

  “But that’s way more than enough about me,” Teresa said, suddenly resolute. “Let’s get our butts up this mountain and see what our Bobby boy has to say, Lucy.”

  With that they jumped back into the car, and Teresa spun them around a few more hairpin turns, then abruptly whipped a left onto a dirt road marked with a bright blue mailbox sculpted into the shape of a breaking wave. As darkness fell Teresa inched her way down the dirt road in first gear. Good idea: Lucy couldn’t help but notice, on her right
, about a foot from the edge of the road, meaning about two feet from the front right wheel of the car, the unfenced hillside fell away steeply down, down, at least five hundred feet down to the dark bottom of a dark canyon.

  Thirty seconds later they swung around a small hill and there it was: with lights ablaze, what appeared to be a flying saucer from a 1960s science fiction movie, poised on the edge of the cliff overlooking a cosmically panoramic view of Santa Monica Bay and the Pacific Ocean and much of Los Angeles. A small fleet of pricey cars was parked by the saucer, and high hedges obscured assorted outdoors areas on both sides. “Oh my God,” Lucy said, awestruck by the scene. She’d seen this house in a magazine more than once, but the real thing was simply stunning, a vision straight from, well, a movie.

  “Welcome to Moonship Mountain,” Teresa said. “Where the rich got weird and the weird got rich.”

  “What do you mean?” Lucy said as they parked and got out of the car.

  “Not much. It’s really nothing more than another expensive and eccentric Malibu movie pad at this point.” Teresa answered wistfully as they stood side-by-side, gazing at the spaceship. “With a stranger history than most. And of course one of the oddest architectural pedigrees you’ll ever find. Milton’s brother-in-law designed it. He was one of the original acid test participants, back when Ken Kesey and Tim Leary showed up with the first LSD. This was like 1965. He died young like his sister, certain that he was of alien origin. Or from the lost continent of Atlantis at least.” She laughed sardonically. “Basically I just know way too much about what went on in this house back in the day.” She reached out, took Lucy’s hand, and squeezed it. “Thanks for asking about Paxton,” she said softly. “I hadn’t told a soul what happened until just now.” The door flew open, and a figure draped in some sort of robe appeared in the doorway, a backlit silhouette. “Get ready for the song and dance, Luce. Looks like the Bobster’s in full party mode.”

  Striding at them as they headed towards him, he emerged from backlighting and Lucy got a good look: circling fifty, broad handsome Mediterranean face with full lips and high cheekbones, wavy dark hair, small gold hoop earring on the left. Over a gym-fit six foot two or so body he wore black pants, a white blousy shirt, and a black velvet robe which struck Lucy as a serious affectation. He looked as if he aspired to the style of a wealthy pirate. And had always been wealthy. “Hey Terry, so glad you could make it.” He quickly shifted his attention to Lucy, with an intense once-over glance and a pair of actively flaring nostrils. Yes, I would fuck you if you’d let me, said the nostrils. She was supposed to be honored. She was not. “And you have to be the one and only Lucy Ripken.” He took both her hands. “You look even better than Terry said you would.” His dark eyes were intense, full of yearning; comic book yearning, Lucy decided. The guy was a clown. A perpetual adolescent. She knew the type.