A Shadow in the Water

by April Hill

  “This Howard woman is pretty, then?”

  I sniffed. “Well, only of you like your women perfect. Which you don’t, right? Be very careful about how you answer that last question, Lieutenant.”

  Matt was thinking. “Is it possible this Monica was cheating on the samurai guy?”

  “With Gabe? Not unless she was deaf, dumb, and blind. Have you ever really looked at Luke Thatcher?”

  Matt grinned. “He’s not my type.”

  I sighed. “I know. You like yours chubby.”

  Matt smacked my own chubby bottom just a little too hard to be funny.

  I pursued my idea, for what it was worth. “So, you don’t think it’s a coincidence that she came to a party dressed like that? Monica, I mean? “

  “Don’t ask me. I’ve never been to a vampire barbecue, or had my living room set on fire. You told me once that Tannhauser did a lot of that kind of photography—bondage, and all that? He made his living as a photographer, so maybe …”

  “Like hell, he did. You know what it costs to keep up a house like Gabe’s? No, the studio at the house was nothing but starlet bait. I assumed you visited the wine velvet master suite, upstairs? Well, that’s where the master did his best work, or so I’ve been told.”

  Suddenly, Matt stood up. “Get your shoes on. We’re going to take a little ride.”

  “Where?”

  “To Tannhauser’s beach house. I want to see if we missed anything. You know your way around. This time, you can be the tour guide.”

  Gabe’s house had always reminded me of an insurance office—flat, rectangular, modern and sterile. It’s entirely glass on three sides, and in the summer, even with the AC on, the front rooms were like an oven. If Gabe hadn’t gotten murdered first, the electric bills alone would probably have finished him off. Back then, I spent a lot of time with a bottle of Windex, wiping off the smudges and fingerprints and the seagull droppings. Now, as we drove up and parked, the house just looked ugly, empty, and covered with salt spray and seagull poop.

  “Just walk around for a while, “ Matt said, once we got inside the house, “and tell me anything you remember that might be important. Who came here and how often, what they talked about, looked like—anything that comes to mind that seems relevant.”

  I walked around the house for over an hour, then sat on the ugly black couch with no arms and looked around the living room. It hadn’t changed much, except for an enormous flat-screen TV over the fireplace, and what looked like a new Dolby sound system. While Matt poked around in the shelves again, I played with the remote, but it was too complicated for me to figure out.

  “I wish I had my copy of Lawrence of Arabia,” I said. “Trust Gabe to buy the biggest TV screen in the state when he couldn’t even pay the electric bill.”

  “Next time we drop by, I’ll bring popcorn, and a copy of The Searchers,” Matt suggested. “One of John Wayne’s best.”

  “But no one in The Searchers gets spanked, dear,” I said sweetly. “Try Donovan’s Reef. It’s right up your alley.” I got up and started for the bathroom, and noticed something missing. “So, you guys took all the tapes?”

  Matt looked up from what he was doing. “What tapes?”

  I pointed to the glass cabinets underneath the TV. “All of Gabe’s videotapes. He had a million of them. He was always talking about transferring the older stuff to DVD, but he never got around to doing it.”

  Matt came over, knelt down, and opened the glass doors. “What kind of videotapes? Movies?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. He kept them locked up, though, so my best guess is that they were porn.”

  “Did you notice the titles?”

  “All of them were in the same black plastic cases. I never saw any titles, but knowing Gabe, they sure as hell weren’t Mary Poppins and Bambi. Maybe he tossed them all. I haven’t been here for almost a year, remember.”

  Matt touched a finger to the dust on the black wood shelves. “Removed recently, it looks like. You can still see where the boxes were.”

  I shrugged. “So, he was a rotten housekeeper. I was a hard act to follow—as a housekeeper, I mean.” I added the last remark quickly, aware of the possible implications of my dumb joke.

  “Do you mind talking about him?” Matt asked softly. “If you don’t want me to get personal, babe, just tell me.”

  I sighed, and waved my hand. “What the hell. Ask what you want. There’s not a lot that you don’t already know. There was nothing romantic, that’s for sure. Gabe didn’t waste his time and talents on plump nobodies like me. I was definitely the dead last item on his ‘B’ List—what Gabe called ‘mercy fuck material’.”

  “Knock it off,” Matt said firmly. “Unless you’d rather start paying the price for a few of those victimless art forgeries you’ve already confessed to.”

  I laughed. “Never mind. Besides, I’m okay with it. Gabe is like the dumb jock you swooned for in high school, who ends up working as a grocery bagger. I have matured, Lieutenant.”

  Matt smiled, and pulled me closer to kiss me. “Good.”

  “Anyway,” I went on. “The number of women who trooped through here was amazing—not just a lot of glitzy bimbos, either. Gabe took a lot of fairly well-known ladies up to that master suite of his.”

  “The pictures I’ve seen don’t make him look like a matinee idol,” Matt suggested.

  I rolled my eyes. “Let’s just say that his looks weren’t his ‘biggest’ asset.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Like I said before. Absolutely enormous,” I explained, blushing like crazy. “But as Cosmopolitan assures me in every issue, size isn’t everything.”

  Matt chuckled. “I’m deciding whether to take that as a compliment, or an insult.”

  “From what I could make out, Gabe couldn’t—or didn’t—perform real well, if at all.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Well,” I said, adding a sigh. “In my own experience, which is admittedly not extensive, he struck out 100% of the time. Of course, I’m not in the same league as Monica Howard, so I’m always willing to assume the blame when I fail to excite a member of the opposite sex.”

  “Keep it up, and you’re going to get your ass walloped by a member of the opposite sex,” Matt warned, and since he looked like he meant it, I conceded the point, and agreed that I am an object of endless desire.

  “Okay,” I said. “I cannot tell a lie. You’re right. No man has ever been immune to my allure. Anyway, the rumor was that my experience with Gabe wasn’t unique.”

  Matt looked puzzled. “Then, why …?”

  I shook my head, as bewildered as he was. “Maybe he had connections I didn’t know about. Are you sure he wasn’t dealing drugs?”

  “We checked him out pretty thoroughly. If he was dealing, he did a damned good job of staying under the radar.”

  “Being subtle wasn’t exactly Gabe’s style,” I said. “Hey! I know! What about blackmail?”

  Matt nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, but blackmailing who, and about what? You said there were some well-known women hanging around?”

  “Yeah, all the time.”

  “Like who?”

  I thought for a moment. “Monica Howard, for one.”

  “I thought she was the property of this samurai guy—Thatcher?”

  “Well, there was another rumor going around—from some very reliable sources. A rumor that suggested that what Luke Thatcher really needed was a kind of prop wife—for awards ceremonies and photo ops.”

  “Thatcher is gay?”

  “More like neutral. The same sources seem to think that Luke is so totally infatuated with himself that he doesn’t have time for anyone else—of either sex. But, I still don’t see why he’d want to kill Gabe, do you?”

  “Unlikely.” He glanced at his watch. “Are you ready to head home? Benjamin’s probably peed on everything in the place by now.”

  I nodded. “Let’s go. I’m getting a bad
case of the creeps. Can we please stop at Carlotta’s? Just for a few minutes, I swear. I still have stuff to bring home … back to your place, I mean.”

  Matt smiled. “I like that word home better. But right now, I need to get back to the office, to see what’s turned up on the forensics front. And while I’m there, I want to run this Monica Howard’s name past a few people. Maybe Luke Thatcher, as well. Something keeps popping up at the back of my mind, somewhere, but I can’t seem to pin it down. I promise we’ll get to Carlotta’s tomorrow, fill the back of the car, and take everything over to my place—home.”

  We had been “home” all of five minutes when Matt’s partner called with a change of plans. Matt hung up the phone and gave me the bad news. A. He and Dan had to drive down to San Diego to see the San Diego police about another case. B. No, I couldn’t go with him. And C. He’d be back late tomorrow, so stop whining, lock the doors, and don’t leave the condo—period. I followed him around while he packed a small bag, begging to go along, but all I got for my trouble was a very nice kiss and a firm swat on the butt. Ten minutes later, Matt was on his way to San Diego, and I was facing a boring evening of TV with Benjamin—and sleeping with him, into the bargain.

  While exploring the kitchen, looking for something unhealthy to eat, I found Matt’s extra set of car keys, just lying there on the counter, in plain sight. I would have liked to believe that it was a sign that he had begun to trust me, but I knew better. In the rush to leave, he’d simply forgotten his keys. So, there I was, impaled on the horns of a moral dilemma. I could do the right thing, and stay at home, as I’d been told, or do the wrong thing, by doing a little sleuthing on my own— at Carlotta’s. You can probably guess which horn I chose.

  When I got to Carlotta’s, there were no cops in sight, so I parked the car in the alley and began lugging boxes of my junk from the house to the car. I stacked my boxes alongside Matt’s Cherokee, opened the rear hatch, and then went back inside to double check for anything I might have forgotten. After the police had finished what they needed to do at the house, Oovie was planning to come for Carlotta’s things, and put the house up for sale, but he’d already told me to take anything of hers that I could use, or felt sentimental about. There wasn’t much, though. Carlotta had been a world class pack-rat and hoarder, but everything she’d hoarded was basically worthless. I wandered sort of aimlessly through the house, picking up this and that, looking for some sort of small memento to take with me back to Matt’s place—home.

  Carlotta had never been a fan of the Martha Stewart look in decorating, and her dusty bedroom was a mind-boggling collection of chipped knick-knacks, crudely framed photographs, and piles of old magazines and dated news clippings. With every available surface in the room spoken for she’d begun taping and tacking stuff to the walls. A room-sized, floor to ceiling bulletin board, covered with fifty years or more of vintage Carlottiana. I moved slowly around the room, looking at nothing in particular, but simply astonished by the sheer volume of what she’d felt worth keeping.

  And that’s how I found the faded news clipping with a photograph of Carlotta and the fat guy—the man I’d seen on the beach the night of Gabe’s murder. The paper was stained and brittle, but the image was clear, and unmistakable. It was the same guy, and way too big a coincidence.

  I am something of an expert on fatness, you see, since I fear that it may loom large in my future if I don’t get myself under control very soon and begin avoiding chocolate éclairs for breakfast. I tend to notice people of size, whereas to just about everyone else, the fat are invisible. The guy in the picture wasn’t so much fat as big. Really big. If that famous overweight football player was a “Refrigerator,” this guy was a damned Winnebago! I had only seen him from the back, of course, but there was something about the guy in the picture that caught my eye. His stance, his shoulders, the size and shape of his head. (Like a pumpkin, sort of—wider than it was tall.) And the way his right shoulder dipped slightly lower than his left. He had these really short arms, like they’d been tacked onto the wrong person. And he was bald. I hadn’t remembered that detail until now, but the guy on the beach had looked bald, too. What the guy in the photo really looked like was a Sumo wrestler—without the little ponytail.

  I pulled the clipping from the wall and took it to the window, where the light was better. It was badly faded, but I could still make out the caption under the picture. “Big Kahuna’s to Re-Open Next Month.”

  From the story accompanying the photo, I learned that Big Kahuna’s was a bar and a surfers’ hangout a few miles from here, on the coast highway. It had apparently gone under back in the eighties, following a long and colorful history of annoying the shit out of its neighbors. In the photo, Carlotta was handing over a check to a wrinkled, emaciated old guy with a tan so dark he looked like he’d been carved out of mahogany—the fabled “Big Kahuna,” presumably. She was wearing one of her more alarming flowered muumuus and a floppy straw hat that read “Rosarito Beach.” The sumo wrestler was standing behind a bar made out of an old wooden surfboard and a couple of rusted fenders from what I took to be a ‘57 Chevy—the surfer’s dream ride. The bar was festooned with plastic sharks, coconut shell monkeys with googlie eyes, flattened beer cans, and—of course—the ubiquitous hubcaps that were Carlotta’s trademark. With my heart beating so hard I swear I could hear it, I grabbed the sumo wrestler’s photo, along with everything else that seemed useful, and dashed back to the car.

  I want it clearly understood that most of what happened next was Matt’s fault. If he had not run off to San Diego on some totally unrelated matter, and if he had accompanied me to Carlotta’s as he promised, and if he had hidden his car keys in a more secure place, I would not have gotten in the car and gone looking for the sumo wrestler. Which I did.

  There was no listing in the phone book for The Big Kahuna’s, which wasn’t all that surprising. The newspaper clipping was old, and even after its refurbishing, the place in the photo didn’t look like it was destined to make it into the Zagat guide. I did, however, find a listing for a bar called Boobies at the same address mentioned in the article. When I arrived at that address, however, I found a note on the door, advising potential customers that Boobies’ had moved—to a new location four miles down the highway. A quick right turn at the light, the note went on, and two hundred yards further along—next door to the Sanitation Department. My investigation was turning into a scavenger hunt.

  The bar was not quite as high in tone as Big Kahuna’s, and had slightly less eye-appeal than the sewage treatment plant next door, with which it shared a view of a scummy irrigation ditch. The owners of Boobies had tried to make their establishment visible from the highway— and presumably more appealing—with the addition of a revolving neon sign. Atop a tall metal pole at the far edge of an unpaved parking lot, they had installed a truly remarkable piece of advertising folk art— a gigantic illuminated sculpture in the shape of a set of mammoth female breasts. (Is there such a thing an “F” cup?) The revolving chest emitted an unhealthy grinding noise as it turned, and each stupendous breast was tipped with a monstrously engorged pink and red nipple that blinked on and off. The effect was mesmerizing, but probably detracted from the sign’s value as a work of genuine American folk art.

  The small lot was dark, and shadowy, but I noticed three scarred pick-ups and six or seven motorcycles parked near the front entrance. I parked directly under the groaning sign, and said a small prayer as I locked the car that it would still be there when I emerged, along with its battery, tires and rims, hubcaps, and its CD player. The cheeks of my rear end clenched at the prospect of what lay in store for them if this little outing were discovered, let alone if Matt’s Cherokee went missing.

  It was dark inside the bar, mercifully, and the single air-conditioning unit on the wall dripped and droned, but it kept the place like a meat-locker, which was good, in view of the clientele. Boobies appeared to be a hillbilly biker bar, if there was such a thing, and the first olfactory i
mpression upon entering was of male sweat and motor oil. A Confederate flag the size of a king-sized sheet hung over the bar, and no two pieces of the rickety furniture matched. It was the kind of place I imagined the Aryan Nation would its annual potluck supper and rummage sale. Another problem. Half the men inside looked like sumo wrestlers—heavily tattooed sumo wrestlers with waist-length hair in braids or ponytails. The women looked exactly like the men, but with more tattoos. If my suspect was here at Boobies, I’d never find him just by looking.

  So, I sat down at the bar and ordered a beer. Bar tenders know everything, right?

  Three beers later and a large Scotch later, I was feeling a little woozy, and hadn’t found out anything except that beer and Scotch together upsets my stomach. This detective business wasn’t as easy as it looked, and after an hour with no sightings, I gave up. Still, I thought as I made my way back to the car, nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? I was vastly relieved to see that the Cherokee had been neither stolen, nor dismantled. When I got in and started the engine, though, and for reasons I can’t explain, the car didn’t go forward as I ordered it to. It went backward, instead, and lodged one front wheel in a muddy rut. I shook my head to clear it, and tried again, pushing the accelerator hard.

  The car lurched backward and struck something—the tall steel pole holding up Boobies’ revolving advertising sign, as it turned out. Relieved that the Cherokee’s sturdy rear bumper had probably sustained no damage, I put the gear shift into drive, once more, making very sure I had done it properly this time. Matt is the kind of guy who is ultra-careful with his vehicle, and I couldn’t afford even one telltale scratch, let alone a noticeable dent. I have never been sprawled over the hood of a car like a dead deer to be spanked until I howled for mercy, but I could certainly foresee such a thing happening. I was still thinking about that possibility when I heard a loud creaking noise coming from somewhere, and quickly checked to be sure I had released the emergency brake. I had. I breathed a second sigh of relief, and glanced at my watch. It read 11:34—a moment that will live in infamy. It was at precisely at 11:34 p.m. that the gigantic, blinking breasts labeled Boobies came crashing down on the roof of Matt’s car.