She pulled the pistol out of her pocket, leaned forward between us and gestured with it. Actually seeing the pistol for the first time drove home the seriousness of this to us. I saw small beads of perspiration form on Lila’s top lip.
I turned the car right, trying to stay cool-headed, but my heart pounded.
Have I brought all this on Mom and me by coming down here? Have I sent Mrs. Wyler over the edge? It’s obvious to me the woman is becoming more unglued by the minute. We have to try to keep her as calm as possible. If we do, maybe nobody will get hurt.
My mother said in as natural a voice as she could manage, “I don’t understand any of this, Yvette. If you killed Portor, I’m sure you had a very good reason. I know you loved him. You can talk to me. We’re friends.” Lila turned a sympathetic face toward her friend.
“Turn around and face the front, Lila,” Mrs. Wyler said coldly. “Don’t make me shoot you right now. I will, you know. If you’re so interested, I’ll tell you all you need to know when we get to where we’re going. There will be plenty of time to talk then.”
“Where are we going, Mrs. Wyler?” I asked, trying to keep the fear out of my voice.
“We’re going to the Dutch Windmill up the road. You know, the one that’s nearly completed, with the vanes. You’re going to park on the side of the road where I tell you. Now drive.”
I drove slowly toward the two windmills sitting about three-quarters of a mile apart and taller than anything else on this stretch of the Great Highway. I had been reading a lot of newspaper reports recently about the north and the south windmills, named The Dutch and Murphy windmills, both considered an important part of San Francisco’s history.
Four to five stories high, they had originally been constructed in 1902 to pump water for Golden Gate Park’s irrigation system by using the wind from the ocean. About ten years later, unfortunately for them, electricity came along.
With the windmills no longer performing a primary function, their maintenance was neglected, and they eventually ceased to operate.
The Dutch Windmill had been renovated twice and looked pretty good from the outside. It had no innards, from what I understood, but the Restoration Committee of Golden
Gate Park moved on to the south windmill, which had never had any work at all, to bring it up to a similar state. Both windmills would be worked on internally at the same time within the next few years. These thoughts raced through my mind, as we did the short drive to our destination. Was one of these Dutch behemoths going to be the last place on earth my mother and I saw?
I dropped my right hand from the wheel, feeling the time was right to get my revolver. I opened the handbag and reached inside, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible.
“Give me that!” screamed Mrs. Wyler as she snatched my purse from over the top of the backrest. I’ve watched you clutching that bag to you. You’ve got a gun in there, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t. I was going to get some more Tylenol. My head is aching,” I answered quietly.
My mother’s old friend sounded out of control. Her hands shook so much I feared the pistol might go off accidentally. If she was having a nervous breakdown right in front of us, I didn’t want anybody to get shot because of it. Lila looked at me. I tried to smile reassuringly, but nothing much gets by Mom. She knows a bad situation when she sees one.
“Never mind the stupid pill,” Mrs. Wyler retorted as she rolled down her window and threw my bag into a shrub nearby.
“Hey! What’s the matter with you? You didn’t have to throw my handbag away. It’s a Kate Spade. I’m going to go back and get it!” It was a long shot, but she was so nutty, I thought she might let me.
I felt the barrel pressed against the side of my head. “Just drive the car, can’t you?”
“Leave her alone, Yvette,” my mother said. “She’s not well. Don’t hurt her. She’ll behave.”
“Both of you just shut up. Stop talking. I mean it. Pull off the road here,” she demanded, gesturing to a spot a little north of the turnoff to the street that actually went by the windmill.
As I pulled over, I had a terrifying thought that maybe my cell phone might not be working, like before. I started to pray to the Energizer Bunny, hoping it was one of his batteries I was using.
“We’re going to take that path leading to the windmill. See it? It’s more private. Now get out of the car, both of you.” Mrs. Wyler pointed to a narrow dirt path barely wide enough for one person. It cut through the small brush and sparsely limbed trees that fought the constant wind and salt air for survival.
We moved toward the path as Mrs. Wyler began talking. “Portor and I used to come here when we were young and in love. Portor lived nearby with his parents. That was before he took over my father’s business. You remember those days, Lila. It was our freshman year at Stanford. Sometimes he and I would make love inside the windmill before they sealed it off. If only my mother had known what we were doing,” she said, her voice softening momentarily by the memory.
It took on the hard edge again. “Keep walking on this path and hurry up. There’s a door on the other side of the windmill. As one of the trustees, I have a key to it. Nobody will think to look for you there, at least, not until after all the work gets done on the south windmill. That won’t be for two years.”
As if answering my thoughts about whether or not I brought this on by my rushing up to the zoo, she continued, “I wanted you to come with me today, Lila, because I thought you suspected me.”
“Suspected you? I never…” Lila began.
“I couldn’t tell anymore,” Mrs. Wyler interrupted. “I didn’t know if I was becoming paranoid or....It’s just that I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept since it happened. I...I can’t think anymore, either.”
“I never thought it was you for an instant,” Lila answered in a tight voice, as she tripped over a root on the footpath. “Why would I?”
Mrs. Wyler’s tone became more matter-of-fact. “Well, I couldn’t live with the idea one day you might. Or you either, Liana. I’ll have to get out of the country sooner than I thought,” she said, more to herself than to us. “Thirty million dollars goes a long way in a third-world country. At least I’ve got that.”
I almost said thirty million goes a long way in our country, Toots, but I thought better of it. Both Mom and I remained silent and exchanged glances.
“Why did I shoot him, you asked?” Mrs. Wyler’s voice broke into our morbid thoughts. “You know he was cheating on me. I found that out after I asked you to have Liana follow him. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. I loved him so much.” Her voice choked up, and she stopped speaking for a moment.
We came to a clearing. A light rain had started, blown sideways by the harsh and persistent wind. The weather was ghastly. I could see why there were no other living beings around, except for a couple of wet birds hunkered down in a tree.
Ahead of us, possibly a hundred yards more, stood the three- to four-story high windmill, shingled in brown-stained wooden slats. Midway up, a circular deck wrapped itself around the structure. Jutting out above the deck and facing toward the sea, were the skeleton vanes, beautiful and useless, made of latticed strips of timber. No longer covered with the canvas that acted as sails against the wind, they were a silent testimony to the benign indifference of progress.
I had forgotten how grand and imposing this windmill was, as we began to trudge around to the other side. I noted that windows, large and small, had been mortared in with brick to prevent anyone from getting in — or maybe in our case — from getting out. When we got to the front of the windmill, iron double doors still looked functional, even thought they were covered with a thin coat of rust. A large padlock secured them, and Mrs. Wyler drew out a matching key from her pocket. My heart began to pound. I was scared to death. Not just for me, but for my mother. I had to think of something.
We can’t just die like this, I thought. We can’t.
Mrs. Wyler began talking again in a
faraway voice. “After Lila gave me the report about the warehouse in San Francisco, I had to go see it for myself. I mean, I thought I knew everything about our lives. Portor and I were one, united, two parts of a team, PY.”
“What was he doing there, I kept asking myself? And what else didn’t I know about him? When he called and gave me some cock and bull story about a meeting after work, I knew he was going to the warehouse. I drove as fast as I could and beat him there by about fifteen minutes. I took my father’s pearl handled pistol with me. I wasn’t sure what I would do with it. Maybe I wanted to scare him. Maybe I wanted to show him how serious I was.” She stopped walking and so did we. Mother and daughter turned around to face the woman, as she continued speaking in a monotonous, cracked voice, a faraway look in her eye.
“I hid in one of the cages, the one with the boxes of shoes, waiting for him to come. When he showed up, he went into the small office. I followed him and stayed outside near the window hoping I could hear something. Well, I heard something, all right. He called this woman, this Grace Wong, on the phone. I didn’t even have to be close by. His voice echoed in that awful building. He was so needy, so loud, so vulgar! I couldn’t hear her side of the conversation, but I heard enough. I learned about the illegal immigrants and how he was forcing her to have...to have...sex with him in exchange for her family’s freedom. He practically begged her to sleep with him one more time. He didn’t care she loathed him; he said as much. He said he’d think about bringing over another one of her brothers, if she would.”
Mrs. Wyler’s face became distorted and tears ran down her cheeks. “I thought to myself, ‘Who is this man? Who is this horrible person who would do all these awful things to people and then come home to me and crawl in my bed?’ I was mortified.”
Lila opened her mouth to speak. but Mrs. Wyler’s ranting went on. “After he hung up, I stepped inside the office and waited for him to see me. I thought he would be ashamed or guilty.” Her eyes took on a frightened look.
“Yvette,” said Lila, “you were out of your mind with horror and grief. No one can blame you for…”
“Shut up, can’t you?” Mrs. Wyler screamed, aiming the quivering pistol at my mother’s chest. “Can’t you see I’m trying to explain this to you? Why I had to do it? Don’t interrupt me,” Mrs. Wyler blubbered a little more and waved the derringer back and forth between the two of us.
“He was angry at me. Can you believe it? He was angry at me for following him.” Mrs. Wyler’s entire body trembled as she said this. “He told me he was glad I knew, and if I didn’t like it, I could clear out! I took the gun out and showed it to him. He laughed. He laughed at me and started coming toward me, daring me to shoot him. I didn’t know what to do, so I turned and ran out of the warehouse. I didn’t know where
I was going. I couldn’t see anything; it was raining so hard. I couldn’t stay inside with him. I just couldn’t. I was disgusted.”
During this diatribe, I tried to put more distance between Mom and me, as surreptitiously as possible. Unfortunately, the less coherent Mrs. Wyler became, the closer Lila was instinctively drawn to my side.
“He followed me, trying to make me listen to him. I could barely see him for the downpour, but I could hear him. Then he grabbed me and slapped me across the face.” Her hand went to her cheek in remembrance. “That’s when I shot him. Three times. I would have fired more, but it ran out of shells or something. Anyway, it stopped going off, and then he fell down. He had the most surprised look on his face.” Yvette laughed softly and began to sob again.
“I tried to get back into the warehouse, but the door was locked. I ran and ran in the rain until I couldn’t run any more. Somehow, later that night, I found my car and drove home.” Her eyes were clouded over with grief and tears, but she still managed to keep both of us in her sight.
“Why don’t you tell us about Captain Chen, Mrs. Wyler? Tell us why you killed him,” I said. Mom stared at me with horror written all over her face. I looked at her and nodded. “She shot him last night, Mom.”
“Oh, my God,” Lila said in a hoarse voice. “You killed someone else?”
“I had to, Lila. Don’t you see?’ Yvette looked pleadingly at her old friend. “He called Portor from the ship that night. Portor told him he couldn’t talk because I was there. Chen figured everything out. He was blackmailing me for the money in the Cayman Islands. That’s all I had. He wanted everything, everything!”
She covered her eyes with her free hand for a moment and during that time, I reached out and pushed my mother away. Lila threw me a stunned glance. Mrs. Wyler stopped sobbing and focused on me. She tightened her grip on the pistol, aiming it at my face.
“What are you doing?” she said between clenched teeth.
“Nothing, Mrs. Wyler. Nothing,” I said, as innocently as I could, given the circumstances. “I was just trying to get my mother away from some poison oak, that’s all.
“I don’t trust you. What are you up to? I’ve never liked you, Liana, never. That’s why it didn’t bother me knowing you might be there that night. I thought, ‘well, if she shows up and sees me, I’ll just shoot her, too,’” she added in a half cocky, half-crazed tone.
I could see a mixture of shock and outrage come over my mother’s face. “Why, you bitch,” Mom shouted in a very unladylike fashion. Practically spewing fire, Lila lunged at her.
With a look of astonishment, Mrs. Wyler turned her attention to the oncoming woman. It was the split second I needed. I stepped forward between them and twisted my body to put the bulk of my weight onto my left leg. My right leg flew up in the air with the force and height needed to knock the pistol from the woman’s hand. I was a little out of condition, and I heard a snap, crackle, and pop as I executed the move, but I did it perfectly, if I must say so myself.
The derringer soared over Mrs. Wyler’s head and into nearby brush. Now I shifted my weight from my left leg to the right, as my body returned to the ground and centered. Turning slightly, I kicked my left foot into the woman’s stomach with all my body weight behind it. It felt so good. With a loud grunt, Mrs. Wyler involuntarily doubled over in pain. She hit the ground almost in a fetal position, rolled over several times, and lay very still. I automatically went into my third defense position, until I realized Mrs. Wyler would not be getting up any time soon.
For a moment, Lila stared at me and then at the woman lying on the ground. “Oh, thank God, Liana.” She ran to my side. “Are you all right? I can’t believe it. She was going to kill us! What’s that noise?” Lila’s last remark referred to the muffled sounds coming from my pants. I reached inside my sweats and retrieved the phone.
“Richard, are you still there? No, we’re fine. We’re fine. Ow!” I pulled the phone away from my ear, as Richard began yelling full throttle. I handed it over to our mother. Let her deal with him.
I wanted to concentrate on the woman on the ground, who was beginning to moan. There was no telling what Mrs. Wyler would do once she came around, and I didn’t want to take any chances. I reached over and tugged at the long, off-white, cashmere scarf Mom wore around the collar of her coat. She was so busy trying to soothe Richard, she didn’t even notice I’d taken it off her.
Pushing the barely conscious Mrs. Wyler over on her stomach, I tied her hands behind her back with the scarf. Then I went to retrieve the pistol. The derringer had landed under some leaves, and it took me a moment to locate it. I made one of my mental notes to go get my bag containing my own revolver, as soon as I stopped shaking. When I returned, Lila was sitting primly on Mrs. Wyler’s back, no longer talking on the phone.
“My God, what a day. Be careful with that thing, Liana,” Lila said looking at the small pistol in my hand. “Well, everything’s going to be fine. Richard had Victoria call the police on the hotel phone about ten minutes ago, so they should be here any second. He also taped the entire confession over the phone. Isn’t he a bright boy with all his equipment and everything?” she asked proudly.
&nb
sp; “Yes, he is, Mom,” I answered. I stared down at the two women, one face down in the dirt with a designer scarf around her wrists and the other sitting lady-like, ankles crossed, on top of her. I felt a little weak in the knees and wished there was a soft chair close at hand. I compromised by crouching down and rocking back and forth on my heels. My head and back were grateful.
Lila continued with her own thoughts, “And my goodness, Liana. Is that the sort of thing they teach you in the self-defense class?” My mother looked at me with open awe. “I am very impressed. You must teach me to do that sometime. How’s your head? Is that pill working yet, dear?”
I burst out laughing. My mother’s unruffled nature, which sometimes drives me mad, comes in handy most of the time. Lila is a survivor; there is no doubt about that. Maybe someday I’d learn to be one myself.
“Mom, do you think you can handle Mrs. Wyler for a few minutes?” I stood and shook my legs out. “I would really like to walk back and get my handbag. It has my revolver in it, and I don’t want that falling into someone else’s hands. There’s no telling what they would do with it.”
“Are you sure you’re up to it, Liana? Maybe you should go sit in the car and rest,” my mother asked anxiously.
“It’s only a block or two back and, besides, Kate Spade handbags do not grow on trees. I’m fine,” I reassured her as she gave me a worried look. “I’m concerned about Mrs. Wyler, though. Do you want this derringer to hold on her in case she tries anything?”
Lila brandished a club shaped tree limb, which had been languishing in her right hand and gone unnoticed by me. “Not to worry, dear. The only sport I was good at in high school was softball. I’ve hit many home runs in my time.” She looked down at Mrs. Wyler who lay motionless and softly sobbing into the ground. “I don’t think there will be a problem, but if there is, I can handle it.”
Chapter Nineteen
Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries Boxed Set: Books 1-3 (The Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries) Page 21