“And he did,” Hammond said.
“No, he didn’t, I tell you. I swear it. Not then, at least, not when he was with me. He had his orgasm, an especially violent one, let me tell you, like to blew me off the bed, and when it happened, his hands let go of the plastic bag. As soon as they did, I snatched it off his head. But he wasn’t dead, I assure you. He was happy, laughing. He was a sweet boy, really.”
For a moment, Vega looked wistful, remembering. “Afterward, we took a shower together and I… I gave him some money, and I left him there and went back to the pool. That was, what, three days ago, four? I never saw him again. I was stunned when I heard he had been murdered. And heartbroken, to be honest.”
Tom was unimpressed with the professed heartbreak. “How much did you pay him?” he asked.
“Well, I gave him two hundred dollars before I left him that day.”
Stanley saw Frederick’s eyebrows slide upward. Two hundred was well below what he’d suggested previously that the young men got from their clients.
“But we always treated the money as if it were a gift,” Vega said in an offended voice. “He never put it so crassly as to suggest that I pay him for the pleasure of his company.”
“That’s putting a fine line on it.”
“Look, I don’t care what you think,” Vega said, growing belligerent. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Just for the record,” Tom said, “where were you on the night of the fifth? The night Barry Palmer was murdered?”
“Where I am most evenings. Right here. At the bar, I mean, or by the pool.” He looked at Frederick. “You can vouch for that, surely?”
Frederick looked at him without expression. “Not really. I get so used to seeing certain faces, it’s impossible for me to say whether it was this night or another.”
“I think maybe we’re going to have to take you down to the station after all,” Hammond said. “This is too big a deal to just ignore.”
Vega was indignant. “I can’t imagine why. I told you everything. Jeff was alive when I parted company with him.”
“He’s dead now. And you were the last person to see him alive.”
“But no, that isn’t so. I wasn’t the last to see him alive. Someone else saw him after I did.”
“And who was that?”
“Why, whoever killed him, of course.” Vega looked pleased with his rejoinder.
Hammond’s cell phone rang. He barked into it, listened for a minute, and put it back in his pocket.
“The damnedest thing,” he said to Tom. “We’ve tracked down a mother for Barry Palmer. She lives in Los Angeles, but she’s on her way into town, driving, should be here in about twenty minutes. Let’s go meet her.” To Vega, he said, “Look, I’m not going to charge you with anything now….”
“That’s a wise decision,” Vega said coolly. “You haven’t a single shred of evidence, and I would indeed have an attorney present before I said anything more to you. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Loud and clear. Now you hear me,” Hammond said. “We have you tied to a murder victim. If you know anything more than you’ve told us….”
“Maybe I do.” Vega had a coy smile on his face. “But that’ll wait until I’ve talked to my attorney.”
“Come on,” Hammond said to Tom and Stanley. “I want to meet the grieving mother.” And to Vega, as they were going out, he said, “Don’t plan any out of town trips for a few days, Hernando. We’ll talk some more.”
“With my attorney present.”
“You can invite the Pope to sit in if you want. I’ve got three murders to solve, and I—”
“Three?”
“A security guard here,” Hammond said. “He—”
“Mario?” Vega’s face had gone ashen. “You don’t mean Mario, surely.”
“I do,” Hammond said quietly. “Why? Do you know him?”
“I… no, only casually. From coming in and out,” Vega stammered. “I just… I was surprised is all. I hadn’t heard….” His voice trailed off.
Watching him, Stanley wondered if his surprise on hearing about Mario had been genuine. It had looked it… but Vega struck him as a wily old bird.
“And, Hernando,” Frederick said, “if I may just suggest, about the taping… if you were to share that information….”
“I’d spoil my own fun,” Vega said. “I already thought of that. Don’t worry, I’ll keep my mouth shut.” Frederick looked greatly relieved. “But,” Vega added, shaking a finger at him, “I don’t expect to pay for any more rooms either. For anything, far as that goes. Here on in, I’m on the house.”
“So be it,” Frederick said wearily.
Chapter Twenty-One
THERE WERE two women waiting for them when they arrived at the police station. Sandy at the desk said, “That’s Detective Hammond there,” as they came in the door. One of the women, a frumpy-looking blonde, hurried to meet them. She had been crying. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and she clenched the shreds of a tissue in one hand.
“I’m Dorothy Palmer,” she said, “Barry’s mother. And this”—she indicated the other woman, who had followed her across the lobby—“is my friend Elizabeth Whiting.”
Tom and Stanley exchanged uh-oh glances.
“Detective,” Elizabeth Whiting said, “we’ve heard about Barry, that he was bitten by a snake, but my son and Barry were the best of friends, and now my son is missing. I’ve been trying to call him for two days with no luck. Do you think there is any connection with what happened to Barry?”
“Let me guess,” Hammond said. “Your son’s name is Jeff?”
Elizabeth Whiting was a brunette, tall and chesty. Probably her complexion was dark, but just now it had an ashen quality. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days. At Hammond’s question, she lifted a multi-ringed hand to her bosom and choked back a sob.
“He’s dead, too, isn’t he?” she said in a small voice. Hammond nodded.
“Oh, Liz,” Dorothy Palmer said, and the two women embraced, crying together. “It’s so unreal,” Dorothy said over Elizabeth’s shoulder. “Those two boys, they’ve always done everything together. We used to say it was like they were joined at the hip. And now they’ve gone and died together. It’s as if it was fated.”
“Ladies,” Hammond said, “your sons didn’t just die. And it wasn’t a snake bite. They were murdered.” Both women gaped at him, startled out of their crying.
“But why on earth would anyone do that?” Elizabeth said in a choking voice. “They were such good boys. Perfect sons. And now….” She began to sob again.
EVEN WITH Hammond’s detective partner out, the homicide office was crowded. He directed the two women to the wooden chairs, and Tom and Stanley took the ones from the other desk. By this time, the mothers had managed to regain their composure. Hammond pushed a box of tissues toward them.
“You couldn’t ask for two better sons,” Dorothy Palmer said, taking a tissue and honking her nose loudly into it. “I know mothers always say that about their boys, but in this case it’s the truth. My husband walked out on me five years ago. He found himself some bimbo, twenty years old, and just left without a word. We haven’t heard from him since.”
“The bastard,” Elizabeth Whiting muttered.
“You can say that again.” Dorothy blew her nose louder than before and paused to think where she had been. “So, I got a job as a checkout clerk at a grocery store, but you know what that pays. Barry went to work to support us. From the time he was fifteen, he was the man of the house. And then, when Elizabeth’s husband passed—”
“She’s putting it politely,” Elizabeth Whiting said in an angry voice. “He didn’t just pass on. He killed himself.”
“How?” Tom asked. “If you don’t mind telling us.”
She blinked back tears. “No, no I don’t mind.” She took a moment to compose herself. “He… he hung himself, in the garage. The worst of it is Jeff was the one who found him. I don’t think he ever quite go
t over the shock of that.”
She shook her head and stared down at the floor for a moment. “Well, anyway, because it was suicide, the insurance company wouldn’t pay off. So, like Dorothy and Barry, we were strapped too. And Dorothy had the bright idea that we move in with them and pool our resources. It seemed the best solution, and the boys had always been good friends. Things were tough for a while, really tough, but we were surviving. And then Barry came in one day to tell us someone had offered him a job here, in Palm Springs. At some resort. I’m not sure exactly what kind of job—I think he was a waiter. Was that right?”
She looked at Hammond, who avoided her eyes. “Something like that,” he said.
If she got the message in his evasion, she ignored it. Maybe, Stanley thought, she knew—or suspected—the truth, but no one corrected her.
“Well, anyway,” she said after a pause, “he said Jeff could get a job, too, so Jeff joined him. They got paid pretty well it seemed. Of course, we hated to see them go, but we couldn’t very well say no, could we? And they both sent their money home. Every week like clockwork, we’d get these money orders. And things did get better for Dorothy and me.”
“I even put aside enough to buy us a car,” Dorothy said. “That’s how we drove down here today. It isn’t anything grand, an old Datsun station wagon, but it runs good, and it makes everything so much easier. I don’t know how well you know Los Angeles, but getting around without a car is a challenge. Just getting to the supermarket is difficult.”
“So, as I said before,” Elizabeth said, wrapping up her narrative, “you couldn’t ask for two better sons. It’s unbelievable that anyone would want to kill either of them, let alone both. Everybody loved those boys.”
Which, Stanley thought, was true enough. Certainly the rich old queens at the Inn had been fond of them. And someone, maybe one of those old queens, had loved them overmuch. Loved one or both of them enough to kill. Deadly love indeed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“I GUESS we need to rethink our opinion of those two young men,” Stanley said. “Granted, they were nothing more than high-class hookers, but their hearts were in the right places, I’d say.”
“Maybe. It’s their dicks got them into trouble,” Tom said.
“So often the case, wouldn’t you say? I think their mothers were right; they certainly started out as good guys. To take care of their mothers, they traded the only things they had of value—their youth and their beauty. And I don’t think either of them thought of themselves as hookers, not at the beginning anyway. But, you know, good and bad have a way of becoming established routines.”
“What starts out to be just a temporary thing becomes the usual, you mean.”
“Yes. It’s like the stuff on the outside seeps inside. You wear a mask long enough, it becomes the face.”
Tom’s cell phone rang. To his surprise, the caller identified himself as Hernando Vega.
“I’d like to talk to you,” he said. “Not at the Inn, please. Maybe you could come by my house?”
“It’s late,” Tom said.
“Not even eleven. And you need to hear what I’ve got to say.” He gave careful directions, which Tom repeated for Stanley.
“Maybe,” Stanley said when they were on their way, “he’s going to confess.”
The address Vega had directed them to was something of a surprise. The neighborhood was nice enough, if not as grand as some in Palm Springs, but the house itself was nothing more than a stucco-covered cottage dropped like a poor relation on a street of expensive-looking homes. It was not, like Nakamura’s house, that the exterior was plain. It was downright dowdy, not much more impressive than the one in which Barry Palmer had lived.
“Doesn’t look like the home base of one of the power movers in town,” Stanley said as they approached the front door. It was in need of a paint job.
Almost the first thing Hernando Vega did, however, when he opened the door to them, was to shoot down any ideas they might have of his admitting to the murders. “I didn’t ask you here to make some kind of confession, if that’s what you’re hoping for,” he said, standing in the doorway. “I didn’t kill anybody, and nobody’s going to make me say I did.”
“Just so you understand, we’re not police officers,” Tom said. “We’re private detectives with absolutely no jurisdiction in this case. Which means whatever you want to tell us is okay. It’s not official, and we can keep everything off the record.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Vega said. “What I’m going to tell you can be shared with anyone you like. The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. Come in, please.”
Like the exterior of the house, the inside was plain to the point of being cheap. He led the way into a sparsely furnished living room—a television atop a wooden table, a worn suede sofa, and two corduroy-covered chairs. A large spotted cat came from behind the sofa to greet him.
“Oh,” Stanley said, “a desert lynx.”
“You know cats?” Vega asked him, surprised.
“Not a lot.” Stanley knelt down to pet the cat. “But I know a beauty when I see one.”
“You can pick her up,” Vega said. “That’s Sheena. She loves people. They’re a wonderful pet breed, the desert lynx. In some ways they’re more like a dog, really, than a cat. She comes when I call her name, which most cats won’t do, and she likes to play fetch.”
“Sheena, Sheena,” Stanley crooned, “you’re the queen of the jungle, aren’t you?” The cat came gladly into Stanley’s arm and began to purr as he cuddled her.
“So,” Tom said, bringing them back to business, “about that security guard, Mario. The way you reacted when you heard he’d been murdered, I’d say you had more than a casual acquaintance with him, didn’t you?”
“I knew him, yes.”
“Intimately?”
Vega looked at him for a long moment. “I’m not going to answer that,” he said. “That wasn’t what I invited you here to discuss.”
“Fair enough. What did you want to talk about?”
“I wanted to inform you….” Vega hesitated briefly before he blurted out, “I’ve found Jesus. I stopped by the Baptist church tonight, on my way home. It happened all at once. An epiphany, I think they call it. I stood before the cross, and it was like this sheet of white light just descended on me, and I knew I was saved.”
Tom was rendered briefly speechless. He and Stanley exchanged glances.
“Well, whatever works for you,” Tom said. “But I don’t know why you thought it was important to tell us that.”
“But don’t you see,” Vega said, spreading his hands, “it means I’m innocent. The pastor was there. We prayed together, and he said it means I’ve been washed in the blood. I couldn’t possibly be a murderer.”
“I hate to break this news to you,” Tom said, “but there’s never been any shortage of murderers in the Christian religion. Or any other, for that matter.”
Vega looked disappointed by their response to his announcement.
“And does this newfound religion mean you won’t be patronizing the Winter Beach Inn in the future?” Stanley asked.
Vega’s face registered his surprise. “Why on earth would you think that?” he asked. “What’s one thing got to do with the other? Besides, you heard Frederick. In the future, I won’t be paying for anything. I’d be crazy to pass that up.”
THE SECURITY office was dark when they arrived back at the Inn, the gate open. Tom drove to the back lot, away from the fancier cars of the clientele. They made their way around the building to the side entrance. Although it was late, the pool area was still crowded.
“But everyone seems particularly subdued, don’t they?” Stanley said.
“I imagine a string of murders could dampen your spirits,” Tom said. “I’m surprised everybody’s still hanging around.”
“Not too surprising. The stud muffins are here, and where the stud muffins play….”
Tom’s cell phone rang. He answered it an
d recognized Hammond’s voice. “I got the ladies installed in a motel room, on the city’s tab,” he said. “Seems like the least we can do.”
“Tough on them,” Tom said.
“Definitely. But that’s not why I called you. I wanted you to know I just heard from Doc Murphy.”
“And?”
“He tells me that the Mario guy had a lot of cat hair on his clothes. Seems like it’s a rare kind of cat hair too.”
“Let me make a guess,” Tom said. “The hair is from a desert lynx cat.”
That was met with a pause. “Jesus,” Hammond said finally, “how did you know that?”
“We’ve just been to visit Hernando Vega,” Tom said. “And he’s got a very friendly pussy.”
“Rumor has it—”
“A desert lynx cat.”
“Damn. I thought Hernando was hiding something. So, we’ve definitely got the dead security guard tied to Vega.”
“There’s more too. Vega has found Jesus.”
“Ah. Well shit, then, that sure scratches him off my list of suspects,” Hammond said.
“ONLY, I don’t take Vega for our killer,” Stanley said when Tom had shared the latest with him. They had gone into the club for a drink. It, too, was booming, the bars lined with lithe young bodies, the dance floor crowded.
“How do you figure? We know this Mario guy was spending time at Vega’s house. The cat hair proves that.”
“Yes, but that’s no surprise,” Stanley said. “For starters, Vega is a cheapskate. Frederick as much as told us early on that the starting rate for these boys is five hundred a pop, and Vega told us he gave Jeff Whiting two hundred. Which strikes me as the bargain of the month. Why Jeff went along with it, who can say, but Vega isn’t dumb. He had to know he was getting a steal. And look at how he lives. He’s a rich man and powerful locally, but his home is nothing to brag about. It didn’t look all that much nicer than the one Barry Palmer lived in.”
A Deadly Kind of Love Page 14