by April Hill
Matt nodded. “I know.”
Great conversation, right? He’s had been plenty of time to dash out and buy me a bunch of apologetic roses, or a weepy card, but neither of these was in sight, and the torrent of tortured contrition I had expected to hear from Matt wasn’t materializing.
So, with no remorse coming from his side of the court, I tried playing the guilt card. Still sniffling, I got up from the couch, turned around, and lifted the tail of my muumuu. Matt looked, and for one fleeting second, I thought I saw a small wince cross his face. Still no apology, though. But there was still no apology. Actually, the son of a bitch seemed more interested in my adorable garment than my injured feelings, let alone my flaming hindquarters.
And then, he slapped his forehead, and jumped up.
“That’s it!” he shouted. “It’s that damned, ugly dress! That’s what’s been bugging me!”
Chapter Ten
“You were right all along,” Matt explained. “The killer was after Carlotta, not you.” I took a few seconds to savor the moment, even though I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. Since this whole mess began, this was the first time I’d been told that I was right about anything. And if my ass hadn’t been throbbing, and my nose running, I might have shown a little more enthusiasm about what Matt was trying to tell me.
“This is the way I think it probably went down,” Matt continued, walking back and forth across Carlotta’s living room as he talked. “When you heard the rake thing rumble down the beach, you came out on the deck, wearing one of those muumuus. Phelps looked back and saw you, there, and just assumed it was Carlotta, whom he knew. With the deck light on, there’s no way in hell he could have missed seeing that thing, even a quarter of a mile away.”
He was referring to my charming sleeping garment, of course. It’s true. Carlotta’s taste in clothing ran the gamut from vivid to gaudy, and often crossed the line into bizarre and unearthly. She always regarded her colorful wardrobe as her trademark, and a lot of her attire virtually glowed in the dark. Sadly, it now seemed that her fashion choices had helped to mark her for death.
“When he saw someone come outside, Phelps got worried, “ Matt went on, excited now. “He knew that Carlotta could recognize him from that defunct bar you read about in the newspaper article—the Big Kahuna. The old guy, the Kahuna? His name was Floyd Beavers, and we know that he was one of Carlotta’s surfing pals from the sixties. When Beavers got down on his luck, Carlotta not only decorated the place—she financed it. The records show that Phelps tended bar there for a couple of years, and according to his rap sheet, he dipped his fat fingers in the Big Kahuna’s till whenever he ran short of cash. Beavers was too nice a guy to press charges the second time. He just fired Phelps, instead, and guess what? Eight days later, the bar was gutted by a fire. The coroner’s final report concluded that Floyd Beavers died of smoke inhalation— but it also noted that the back door—where the body was found—might have been locked from the outside.”
“Might have been?”
“The lock was too badly damaged to be sure, but it looked suspicious enough to keep the
question of purposeful homicide open.”
I took a moment to digest all this. “All right, but I still don’t get why Phelps killed Gabe, if he did. And why would he then take the risk of dumping the body back at Encantada, where he might be seen. Was seen, as it turned out—not by Carlotta, but by me?”
Matt shook his head. “I can’t prove anything, yet, but I can make a pretty good guess. Sit down and tell me everything you know about this movie couple—Monica Howard and Luke Thatcher.”
I laughed a bit bitterly and rubbed my backside. “I’m always willing to be helpful, Detective, but is sitting down absolutely necessary?”
Matt smiled. “You have my permission to stand, if it’s more comfortable.”
“Your kindness is underwhelming. Anyway, I don’t know much. As Benjamin Franklin always said, all I know about Monica Howard is what I read in the funny papers.”
“That was Will Rogers,” Matt corrected me. “Not Benjamin Franklin.”
“Whatever. All I know is that when I was living at Gabe’s, the two of them hung out with him for a while, but then the relationship seemed to cool. Knowing Gabe, he probably tried to hit them up for a loan. You could go and talk to them. They should be moved in by now, unless they’ve opted for Malibu, instead, after the recent mayhem at lovely Encantada Cove.”
Matt grinned. “You know what? That’s a damned good idea.” Wow! That was twice in one day that he’d told me I was right about something.
Ten minutes later, Matt had arranged to meet the beautiful couple at their new beach house at Encantada Cove. He started for the door, with me right behind him, trying to be invisible.
“I’ll sit in the car,” I said when he pushed me back inside. “I promise!”
“You promised me the last time,” he reminded me. “At Yarnell’s.”
“I had to pee,” I grumbled. “Is that a crime, now?”
He hesitated. “You promise you’ll stay in the car?”
I crossed my heart. “Absolutely. I can’t stand either one of them.”
Matt smiled, but reached back and patted my rear end affectionately. “You know the penalty for breaking another promise, right?”
Yeah, like I could forget.
By the time we drove through the gates at Encantada Cove, the rain that had been threatening all day finally broke. A rare California summer rain, and very welcome. As it always was at this time of year, everything was parched and brown. Matt parked the car in the alley, just behind a slumpstone wall with a wrought iron gate. He got out, motioned for me to stay where I was, and rang the bell that was nestled in its own cute little nook in the wall. A few moments later, the gate swung open and Matt disappeared inside the Howard-Thatcher compound. I leaned back in the seat and prepared to pass the time by reading the owner’s manual for the police car Matt was driving while his Cherokee was at the body shop. (It’s amazing how much damage one pair of oversized breasts can do to a vehicle, dropped from a sufficient height.)
I was really enjoying the section about the car’s airbag system when I looked up and noticed a familiar little blue sports car parked further up the alley, just beyond Carlotta’s driveway. I yelped with glee and stuck the manual back in the glove compartment. Barry was home, and the rat hadn’t even called me! I jumped out of the car in the pouring rain, and was halfway to his back entrance when I looked again, and realized that the car wasn’t Barry’s after all. Damn! I started back, and then glanced through the narrow walkway between Barry’s and Carlotta’s. At first, the thing in the water looked like a mass of seaweed—the kind we call Mermaid’s Purse– torn up by the wind and the surf, probably. When I looked a second time, though, I caught my breath with wonder, almost certain that the dark shadow in the water was a shark—no more than twenty-five feet off the beach! I hurried down the path between the two houses, kicked off my shoes, and dashed out onto the beach, wishing for a pair of binoculars. I had never seen a real shark in the flesh, so close.
I still hadn’t. Maybe two seconds after I reached the water’s edge, I heard an all too familiar voice start to scream from somewhere behind me. Regina, at her most shrill, and in Regina’s seemingly endless shrieking, you could almost hear the inflated price of real estate at beautiful Encantada Cove hitting rock bottom.
Twenty five feet off the beach, bobbing face-down on the incoming breakers and drifting steadily in my direction, was a ponderous, hugely bloated nude body, and even from this distance, I knew instantly who it was—or had been. Roy Phelps.
At that moment, I head someone calling my name, and turned to see Matt running down the beach from Monica Howard’s. When he arrived, he stood next to me in the rain, swearing.
“Shit! Not again!”
“It’s Phelps,” I murmured.
“Are you sure?”
I nodded dumbly. “I’m sure.” I was shiverin
g, so Matt put his arms around me and pulled me close. And then, before he could even open it and use it to call for help, his cell phone began ringing. Only it didn’t actually ring. For reasons beyond my limited understanding of technology, the damned thing was playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
Matt listened to the caller, and as he listened, I could see the color drain from his face. The call ended, and Matt dialed the police for help before turning to me.
“We’ve been invited back to Oceanside—to Simon Yarnell’s.”
“Who has?” I stammered, still in shock. We had moved back up the beach a few feet and turned away from the water, but I knew that Phelps’ body would wash up on the sand within minutes.
“We have. You, and me. Together. Mr. Yarnell made that very clear. He wants to see us both—at the same time.”
“But … But, why? And what about…” I closed my eyes and pointed behind me, to where the swollen corpse of Roy Phelps was about to tumble up onto the sand. “What does Yarnell want?”
Matt pulled me even tighter against him. “He wanted to know if Mr. Phelps had come ashore yet.”
I tried to faint, but Matt slipped an arm around my waist and lowered me to the sand, then knelt down next to me.
* * * *
“My daughter was born beautiful,” Simon Yarnell was saying. “She was the most beautiful infant I’d ever seen. Since her mother wasn’t the least inclined to waste her time with being a mother, I paid her a great deal of money to simply disappear and leave the child to me.”
In the end, it was almost anticlimactic, the way everything ended so abruptly. Matt had figured out most of it, except for the exact motive. And now, Matt and I were sitting on Simon Yarnell’s glass-enclosed terrace, watching the rain stream down the tall windows and listening while the man confessed to ordering Gabe’s murder. He didn’t sound the least remorseful as he spoke, or even embarrassed—just tired.
“I raised Pamela entirely by myself, you know, but I saw to it that she had the best of everything. She rewarded me by being as loving a daughter as any man could ever imagine. As she grew older, though, it became increasingly apparent that my hopes for her future had been too optimistic. I could see that Pamela would never succeed academically, nor did she show any discernible talent—for anything, and please believe me when I tell you that every creative avenue was explored relentlessly.”
Several times during Yarnell’s monologue, Matt tried to interrupt, but Yarnell simply ignored him, and continued. Finally, after Matt pointed out that the police were on their way, Yarnell paused, and smiled.
“I must ask you to be patient, Lieutenant, and I assure you that our patience will be rewarded. When I have finished, you’ll have a complete confession, and I will sign whatever documents you wish. All I ask in return for this feather in your professional cap is that you hear me out.”
Matt nodded, and continued taking notes.
“When she came to me, wanting to be an actress, I was appalled,” Yarnell went on. “She appeared to be determined to follow in the woefully misguided footsteps of her mother—an equally untalented young woman whose only worthwhile achievement in life had been in giving birth to Pamela. And so, I became a film producer. I financed the first of three films, each of which starred my daughter, and each of which was infinitely worse than the one preceding it. All of these cinematic atrocities made a good deal of money, of course. I have many friends, and they have many friends. Just when it seemed that Pamela’s misbegotten film career was going to leave me a poor man, she fell in love with that mewling non-entity, Luke Thatcher. The man’s only talent seemed to be in removing his shirt and baring his hairless chest to mobs of screaming teenagers, but since Pamela wanted him, I purchased him for her, as I had purchased everything else she had ever wanted.
“Next, Pamela wanted to be on television, which came as a great relief, actually. Television’s artistic standards are not only lower, but the production costs were considerably easier to bear. Additionally, I found it less expensive to bribe people in the television industry than I had their counterparts in the motion picture industry. A proper vehicle was soon found to showcase Pamela’s limited talents. And so on with the music business, and the publishing business, etc. Pamela is a darling girl, but as you can see, she’s been a rather expensive one.
“With all of what I have told you, I’m sure you’ll understand that when this creature, Tannhauser, approached me with his disgusting video tapes of my daughter, I had little choice but to eliminate him. The tapes were vile—unspeakable. Pamela had apparently become infatuated with Tannhauser, and subjected herself to every manner of base and loathsome sexual humiliation—in the company of her worthless husband. Tannhauser secretly recorded these activities in that dungeon of his, and offered them to me—at a very fair price, actually.
“I had Mr. Phelps and another gentleman in my employ deal with Mr. Tannhauser, and leave him on the beach while Pamela was away in Europe—for the edification of that scumbag, Thatcher. I am still unsure of what his part in all of this was, but the fact remains that he did nothing at all to protect my daughter from her sexual excesses, and for that, I will never forgive him. I have financed his career for years, but I assure you that Mr. Thatcher has seen his very last Oscar. Or his very last role, for that matter.
“I apologize for the death of your landlady, Miss Parker. Phelps was an idiot, and clumsy. I asked him to make Tannhauser’s demise extremely unpleasant, and to deposit the remains discreetly, in a place where they would make—a statement, shall we say? I did not ask the fat fool to complicate things in the way he did.”
“So, you got rid of him?” Matt demanded.
Again, Yarnell smiled. This time, though, his beady eyes almost twinkled.
“He was—as they say—terminated. I pay my employees extraordinarily well, and in return for that, I expect excellent service. When Mr. Phelps did not perform his duties to my satisfaction, I did as any other large employer would do, under similar circumstances. I referred his case to our—to our Human Resources department.”
Finally, Yarnell sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I hope that answers your questions, Lieutenant O’Connor. “
“What about the other man?” Matt asked. “Phelps’ accomplice?”
“Ah, yes. Well, now. I’m afraid that gentleman has also been released.”
Matt shook his head. “Is he dead?”
“That depends upon how well he swims, I’m afraid. After he did away with Mr. Phelps, he suffered an unfortunate fall.”
“A fall?”
“From a helicopter, rather a long way out at sea, as I understand it.”
At this juncture, the sirens of several police cars put an end to Mr. Yarnell’s chilling business discourse. The Orange County police had arrived. Yarnell seemed to have little interest in his approaching arrest, though. “Before you go, Miss Parker, I’d like to show you something, if you don’t mind.” When he reached for my arm, Matt stepped between us.
Yarnell sighed. “Please, Lieutenant, I have nothing but the highest regard for Miss Parker. So high that I declined to prosecute when she defaced my favorite painting—in my own home.”
Matt and I exchanged glances, and when I assured him that I was fine, I followed Yarnell into the library, with Matt right behind us. As we approached the fake Corot, I began to get a little shaky.
“This lovely little Corot was a gift from Pamela, on my seventieth birthday,” he explained. “It’s my most prized possession. Do you like it?”
“Mr. Yarnell,” I began, “I need to tell you something…”
“That you are the artist?” he asked. I gulped again.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I didn’t…”
“You should be sorry,” he said coldly, training his beady shark’s eyes on me. “It’s dreadful. One of the very worst fakes I’ve seen in my entire life. Detective O’Connor, I hope that you will see to it that Miss Parker is severely punished for creating this scandalously inept
painting.”
I was stammering, but not getting much out of my mouth. Yes, believe it or not, I was speechless.
“It was the first sign I had of this Tannhauser person’s true character,” Yarnell continued. “Pamela was so happy when she gave it to me—so pleased with the excellent deal she had gotten from her dear friend Mr. Tannhauser. Only eighty-two thousand dollars! My money, of course, though poor Pamela had no way of knowing that. I didn’t know who the artist was, but when I saw you purposely damage it that day, I realized. I hope you will confine yourself to better things, in the future, Miss Parker. Art is one of the noblest pursuits of mankind, wouldn’t you agree?”
Minutes afterward, Simon Yarnell was led from his palatial home, in handcuffs. I drove back to Los Angeles alone, while Matt stayed in Oceanside, to arrange for Yarnell’s transfer.
It was over.
* * * *
When things calmed down, Matt and I left Benjamin with Barry, who had returned from Florida just in time to babysit while we took off on what started out to be a short vacation. We drove north to San Francisco, stayed a couple of days, and then kept going, with no apparent destination. I had never seen Matt so relaxed, and since I was unemployed with no other plans, I loved every minute. We crossed into Washington and followed the coast, stopping when and where we wanted.
Everything went wonderfully until Matt began yet another discussion of my plans for the future, which were—in a word—zero. The only intelligent thing I could think to do with my life was to get another job at another frame shop. With a BFA, that was about the only thing I saw myself as qualified for. Matt disagreed, and the more we discussed it, and the further he pushed it, the madder I got. We took a cabin overlooking the ocean—a wildly romantic setting—and spent the entire night and the following morning arguing about the same thing. At which point, I got in a snit, took the car, and drove into the nearby town, where I found a great big Kmart. I went inside and filled out an application, then took the completed application back to the cabin and taped it to Matt’s pillow with a note. “Congratulate me. I start on Wednesday. $7.50 an hour, no medical benefits, but a really nice twenty percent employee discount. Welcome to the world of the screw-up and the failure.”