Zoe hit the side of her head as Dean said something I couldn't quite hear. I moved toward them stealthily.
"I wish you wouldn't do that," Dean was saying quietly.
"What?" Zoe asked, her eyes flickering as her head swiveled his way.
"Slap yourself like that," Dean answered. "There's no call to hurt yourself."
"Oh, I'm just slaphappy," Zoe answered and laughed. "Get it, slaphappyT
Dean, I thought. If anyone knew who Shayla had been, it had to be Dean. But could I press him in his current state of grief? Should I? Dean's weathered face was more serene than Zoe's. But then Zoe was on steroids, I reminded myself. Still.. .
"Oh, Zoe," Dean murmured. "Please don't be so hard on yourself."
"Dean, you're such a softie," she replied, putting her hand on his arm. "But thanks, my friend. I'll try and cut down on the obligatory self-abuse."
My mind never made itself up. My body did. I walked the last few steps to stand in front of the couple.
"Dean," I announced. "I need to talk to you about Shayla."
"Of course," he agreed, never missing a beat. He must have seen me coming. Zoe hadn't. That much was clear from her little hop and shuffle.
"Lord knows I need to talk more about Shayla," Dean told me. "How about tomorrow?"
It took me a moment to take in Dean's ready assent.
"Thanks," I finally blurted out and turned, leaving Zoe and Dean to talk in relative privacy.
Ivan was back behind his sales counter. And Yvette and Lou Cassell were there with him. Ivan's face didn't show much, but his body was pressed to the wall in the posture of a newly apprehended felon. And Yvette was shaking her little finger in his face while her husband averted his eyes.
"Shut up!" PMP screamed. "Will you shut up, you stooo-pid bird!"
Yvette turned to shake her finger at PMP.
I averted my eyes. This was no time to chortle. And if it
came to a scream-out, I wasn't sure if I'd bet on the bird or Yvette. But I forgot the two of them completely when I saw Wayne walking toward Vince Quadrini, now alone in the circle of teak chairs. Good. Someone needed to speak to the man. But whatever Wayne said, it didn't seem to be what Mr. Quadrini wanted to hear. He shook his head violently and rose from his chair. Then he strode out the door of the Fictional Pleasures bookstore without a goodbye.
Wayne looked at me and shrugged apologetically. I looked back at him across the room and suddenly my mouth felt dry. Wayne hadn't argued with me since this whole thing had begun. He hadn't sighed his martyr's sigh. He hadn't tried to order me to keep out of the action. He hadn't told me how dangerous investigating was. What was wrong with him?
An inner voice of doom provided the answers to all of my questions. And gave my dry mouth a taste of bile to go along with the information. Wayne must have thought we were in trouble if he was going along with this. Really bad trouble.
Wayne didn't say anything to refute the voice of doom on our way out of the store to the Toyota.
All he said was, "Let's go see Ted."
Once we were in the car, I turned the key in the ignition with chilled fingers. Really, really bad trouble?
"Ted agreed to talk to us," Wayne growled as I pulled out onto the street. "He'll meet us at his house."
"Right," I said, resisting the urge to salute. "He lives in San Ricardo, doesn't he?"
Wayne nodded and we rode in silence for a while.
"Wayne?" I finally asked quietly. "Do you think we're ... we're in trouble?"
"She called out your name, Kate," he answered, his voice soft, but agitated. "I'd like to be able to handle this on my own," he added, his voice growing louder. "But I know there
is no way, damn it, no way, I can stop you. There never is. I—"
He stopped suddenly, as if shocked by his own vehemence. I could imagine why. His voice was closer to a shout than I'd heard for a very long time. I wanted to tell him to yell some more, to get it out of his system, but one glance at his burning red face told me he was already ashamed of his display. Then I felt like wailing, the way Vince Quadrini had. I wasn't sure why. Maybe for all the pain and anger and hurt that Wayne kept stored inside. But I didn't do any of that.
"Right,"" I said instead, controlling my own voice, and took the on-ramp to the highway that would lead us to Ted Brown's house.
Actually, Ted Brown's house was half a duplex, a very rundown duplex, at least on his side. Ted was already parked in front, just climbing out of an ancient VW bus when we got there.
My heart hiccupped at the sight. Was he the one who'd been following us? I shook my head. Impossible. His bus was a dirty blue-gray, not red. And it certainly hadn't been repainted recently. It probably hadn't even been washed in years.
Ted Brown shot his hand out in front of him, in an abrupt pantomime of welcome. There were no flowers along the path to his door, just dirt and encroaching weeds. But I stepped up quickly, afraid his welcome might dry up as completely as the patch where his lawn must have once been. As Wayne and I hurried toward Ted's peeling front door, I wondered what the occupant of the other side of the duplex thought of Ted's yard. A ruler could have marked the line between the two halves of property, the neighbor's green and growing lawn shorn to a perfect inch and bordered by flowering shrubs.
"Wasn't expecting company," Ted mumbled morosely as
he opened his door. Smells of old cooking and old dust drifted into my nostrils. I stifled a sneeze and stepped in, adjusting my eyes to the relative darkness inside.
Ted flipped a switch, drizzling the room in a 25-watt glow. He might as well have left it off. The inside of his home was a lot like his yard, only the dirt inside was littered with paper instead of weeds. Mounds and mounds of paper. I could just make out the lone chair, table, and word processor buried underneath. The only decoration was on the mantelpiece, along with a dead spider and an accumulation of dust that threatened to incite my nose to another sneeze. The decoration was a framed photo of a former Ted, his long face and heavily lidded eyes looking cheery as he wrapped his arm around a short, plump blond woman and a brown-haired little boy.
I walked toward the photo without thinking, holding my breath to keep from inhaling the musty air.
"Can't offer you a seat," Ted told us. He jerked out a laugh. "Unless you'd like to stack up some rejected manuscripts. They oughta be good for something."
I picked up the photo from the mantelpiece and stared. The photo seemed to be the one thing in the room that wasn't dusty. I wondered how long ago it'd been taken. Ted had changed—
"My former family," he barked. My hand jumped. I replaced the photo before I dropped it. "Dead son. Ex-wife. Any more questions?"
Oh God, now I remembered what Lou had said. The son who'd died young like Lou's brother. I didn't have any more questions. And I probably couldn't have asked them anyway. My larynx was paralyzed. And not by dust, by chagrin. Why had I picked up the picture? I would have slapped my head like Zoe, if I could have moved.
"Wanted to ask about Shayla Greenfree, actually," Wayne
put in quietly, stepping my way crabwise and reaching for my hand.
I grasped it gratefully, wondering who was comforted more by the loving touch in this arid landscape.
Ted threw back his head, almost dislodging the cowboy hat he wore over his long pony tail. He jerked out another laugh and grimaced.
"Shayla, so you want to know about Shayla?" He paused, and the departing grimace left his face somber. And thoughtful. "In a word—no, make that two words—she was a ruthless bitch. I suppose I should be able to characterize her more eloquently, especially since the witch is dead—ding-dong, et cetera—but that's all that comes to mind at the moment."
"Why 'ruthless'?" Wayne prodded.
"You didn't ask why 'bitch,'" Ted commented. "Someone else must have been talking about the woman, right? Ruthless? Is it ruthless to steal someone else's idea and rewrite it from a 'woman's perspective'? Is it ruthless to promote the idea as your o
wn?"
"The alien left on earth who uses his psychic skills to track down—" I began, my larynx working again.
"Or hers," Ted broke in. "Don't forget her psychic skills. Shayla certainly didn't. She took my idea and ran with it."
"And made a fortune," Wayne added.
Ted looked up as if surprised to be joined in his complaint.
"Ever ask her if she'd copied you?" Wayne inquired.
"Once," Ted replied, his long face split by that bitter grimace again. "She claimed she'd never read my lousy stuff. Only she didn't actually say 'lousy'. She just ever-so-politely implied it. She was a survivor, that one. Somehow, everything she touched turned to gold. Everything I touched turned to mold."
I sniffed the air. The mold wasn't just rhetorical. I took a careful breath. At least it didn't smell like skunk.
"Did you hate Shayla?" I asked. I felt Wayne's warm hand tighten around mine and realized it was cold in this room as well as dark. Hospitality by the Addams Family. There were probably headless roses in the next room.
"Huh!" Ted snorted. "'Did you hate her enough to kill her?'" he mimicked in a falsetto. "You sound just like Yvette Cassell, our nosy little leprechaun lady."
"Yvette!" I objected. Then I really felt Wayne's hand tighten. I simmered silently. How could this man compare me to Yvette?
"Who do you think killed Shayla?" Wayne asked quietly.
And as he asked, I realized Ted hadn't answered my question. Or probably Yvette's either. His derision had its uses.
"Well," he answered, rolling his eyes upward. "Yvette's nuts . .."
I opened my mouth to object, then closed it again. Why did I want to defend Yvette? Just because Ted had compared the two of us?
"And that woman who works for Ivan, Marcia something-or-other, she's mean and nasty," he went on. "But if I were writing it, I wouldn't use either of them as the murderer. Too obvious. Yvette, jealous and nutty as a health food casserole. Marcia, mean and hiding something. Now, Quadrini, though, he'd make a good murderer. The perfect elderly gentleman. Wealthy, one of the privileged few. So what's he hiding beneath his pinstriped veneer? And Dean, so sincere, so eager to please .. ."
Ted took a pen out of his pocket, picked up a sheet of paper at random, and started making notes on the back as he ripped the cast of Fictional Pleasures to pieces with his sharp tongue. Was he going to make a book out of this? If he did, I just hoped it would sell better than his earlier ones.
By the time we'd left Ted Brown's duplex, I felt raw from
the acid of his words. And my head ached from the combination of paper, dust, dirt, and mold. Did brilliance go hand in hand with cruelty? I shook my head. I knew other writers, other artists, who weren't cruel. Who were in fact, unusually kind and compassionate. But Ted had a mean mouth on him, that was for sure. And he hadn't included himself in his scathing appraisal of the suspects. Though he'd certainly included me. And Wayne. He hadn't given us any really useful information either, for that matter. At least as far as I could tell. I was still sorting out the fact from the vitriol as we got in the Toyota and drove away.
I was on the highway, halfway back to Tarn Valley, before I could even talk again. Somehow the drive away from Ted's duplex had felt more like an escape. I could smell the scent of his dark house on my clothing.
"Do you think that's what a visit with Oscar Wilde would have been like?" I asked Wayne. "Or Dorothy Parker?"
"No," Wayne concluded after a couple more miles. "There's a difference between true wit and plain vicious-ness."
He paused again and added, "Not that I'd like to give the theory a test, for all of my love of Oscar Wilde's words."
I settled back in my seat as I drove, cherished beliefs about Oscar Wilde in place. A man like Ted Brown couldn't have written The Ballad of Reading Gaol That I was sure of. Or, I suddenly realized, Shayla Greenfree's Beth Questra series. Maybe that was the real source of Ted's bitterness. She had taken his idea, yes. But worse, she'd improved on it.
"So, what did we get out of—" I began.
"Pull off the road, Kate," Wayne ordered suddenly.
"Whuh?" I said, but an instant later I pulled over into an emergency lane as ordered.
Wayne leapt from the Toyota and ran back toward the car that pulled over behind us. It was a kelly-green Volkswagen bug.
qi i n f
;f)ut the person who emerged from the Volkswagen bug was not the trench-coated, bulky figure I'd expected.
This person was tiny, no bigger than a child, with curly red, Little Orphan Annie hair. Was it Little Orphan Annie in the flesh? My mind was still fuddled by the sudden order to pull off the road. But Wayne's wasn't.
"Take off the wig," he commanded the small figure, as a truck roared by us in a noxious cloud of exhaust.
Our follower nonchalantly complied with Wayne's command, pulling the red curls from her head and throwing them into the still open door of her VW bug with an easy toss.
"Ah, shi-shick," she said, putting her little hands on her little hips. "I thought you guys wouldn't notice . .."
The tiny person under the wig was, of course, Yvette Cas-sell. The air whooshed out of my lungs with the realization. I wondered why I hadn't recognized her immediately, wig
and all. Who else would drive a kelly-green Volkswagen bug but a leprechaun?
What was it that Ted had said? "Nutty as a health food casserole." Maybe Ted was more observant than I'd given him credit for. Because it was nutty to follow us around. Especially to pull off the road after us, when she could have sped away, with us none the wiser.
"So, what'd you find out from Ted, huh?" Yvette went on, raising her voice to compete with a motorcycle whizzing past. "Some fuddin' character, huh?"
"Forget Ted!" I told her, glad that the noisy, not to mention smelly, vehicles passing by gave me an excuse to raise my voice too. "Why were you—"
But as usual, Yvette interrupted without answering.
"I'm having a meeting at my house tomorrow—brunch, eleven," she shouted. "Bring something if you want to."
"You followed us from Ted's to invite us to brunch?" I shouted back angrily. "Come on—"
But Yvette was already back in her Volkswagen before I could finish my sentence, and back into traffic before I could close my mouth.
"Holy shick, Batman," I mimicked, once Wayne and I were safe inside the Toyota again.
But Wayne wasn't laughing. And neither was I, really. For all her silliness, Yvette was as elusive as the Loch Ness monster. And her interruptions were as effective a deterrent to interrogation as Ted's derision. She was strange, that was for sure. But strange enough to commit murder?
At least Ingrid was missing when Wayne and I ventured into our home, though her belongings were still scattered around our living room. And my answering machine was blinking at me.
Oddly enough, the first message was from Winona Eads.
"Urn," she mumbled as the tape ran. "I guess you could come over this evening, if that's okay. I guess."
Wayne and I looked at each other. Was this important? Did Winona know something?
I played the second message impatiently, expecting a Jest Gifts blast. But the voice wasn't from Jest Gifts.
"Perkin Vonburstig here again," it said. "I will try to reach you again later."
Damn, I never had found out who Vonburstig was. In fact, I'd totally forgotten about him. I tried his number as Wayne waited patiently by my side. But all I got was his android answering machine. I banged the receiver down mid-syllable.
"I'm calling Ivan!" I announced angrily. "It's time to find out who this Vonburstig guy is."
"Wait," Wayne put in, his hand out and blocking the phone.
"Wait?" I shot back. "Wait for what?"
Then it dawned on me. Wayne didn't trust Ivan. Ivan, his own friend. That was the other reason he was going along with this investigation. That was part of the really bad trouble for him.
"Oh, sweetie," I murmured and opened my arms. He hesitated, then
allowed himself to be comforted. For a time, I felt I was larger than this six-foot-plus man as I held him as close to me as I could, stroking his bent back as I did.
"Not very macho," he growled a while later, straightening up out of my arms.
"I know," I told him. "I never liked macho."
So we decided to deal with Vonburstig without Ivan as an intermediary, whatever it was that Vonburstig wanted. And we decided to visit Winona. As soon as possible. Wayne had to call La Fete a L'Oiel to arrange his own replacement for the evening again. And I shot the stacks of Jest Gifts paperwork on my desk a glance. A very short glance. Then I returned Winona's call.
"Would you like us to bring some food?" I asked her once
I got her on the phone. It was close to dinnertime, and I for one was hungry.
"Urn, I guess so," she murmured, but I heard a hint of eagerness in that murmur. "Maybe enough for Johnny too?"
"Johnny?" I asked, surprised. Was that her boyfriend? Somehow I hadn't imagined her with a boyfriend.
"My son," she answered, no longer murmuring. In fact, her voice had an edge now. Of hostility? Defiance? I had difficulty with nuances on the phone. Or face to face, for that matter.
"Oh sure," I came back, hoping she hadn't noticed my moment of internal ping-pong. I erased the curiosity from my voice. "What would you guys like?"
"Oh, whatever you think, I guess," she told me, her voice soft again, wistful. That nuance I could hear. "I've heard Japanese is good," she finally added.
So we stopped and got Japanese take-out: miso soup, udon noodles, veggie tempura, California avocado sushi and agedashi tofu. For starters. I didn't know how old her son was or how much he could eat. And I wanted plenty of food to ply his mother's tongue.
Winona had an apartment in the cheap end of Morris. Morris was the cheap end of Marin County in the first place, not as poor as the Tenderloin of San Francisco by any means, but still not a place you'd want to be alone at night either.
Death hits the fan Page 9