“You were flirting with that cop,” I whispered to Terry.
“Was not.”
“Were so. You went all woogly-woggly when she showed you her gun.”
“Oh give me a break.”
“And you were discussing lesbian singers. Is that some kind of code, like fishes in the sand or something?”
“Oh, so they’re lesbian singers. Not first-class lyricists, not kick-ass rockers. You have to categorize them according to their sexual preference, Reverend Falwell?”
“I’m only saying—”
“I hate the word ‘lesbian,’ ” Terry fumed, swiping her ATM card in the machine.
“I hate the word ‘vagina,’ ” Marge said, shrugging, “but what’re ya gonna do?”
We pulled off of Beverly Boulevard into the parking garage of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, scoring a motorcycle parking space on the first level. I stuck Paquito into the bottom of the backpack and attempted to camouflage him with the beanbag toys.
“It’s just for a minute, honey,” I assured him as I closed the flap.
Terry swung him up on her back, and then we headed for the double glass doors at the rear entrance.
A black guard sat behind the inside counter. “Hello, ladies. Can I help you?”
“We’re here to visit Lenore Richling,” I said.
He consulted his computer, found Lenore’s name, and confirmed that she was allowed visitors. “Room 509. You can take the elevator there.”
We thanked him and started toward the elevator, but he grabbed Terry’s arm. “I’ll need to check your bag,” he said, pointing to the backpack.
“Oh, uh, sure,” she said, looking at me sideways. Then she flipped it open nonchalantly. “It’s just Beanie Babies, that’s all. Got a Princess Di one, even. It’s worth a lot of money. Got a little crown on its head and everything . . .” She started to close the flap again.
“Just a second,” the guard said. He grabbed the pack and peered in. “Uh-huh,” he said, thrusting his enormous mitt right down in the middle of the beanies and fishing around. Then he grabbed something and pulled it out butt-first. Something tan-colored and squirming.
“Is this it? This don’t look like Di, to me. More like the Taco Bell dog on a bad hair day. I wasn’t aware they were making Taco Bell dog beanies. This is one of a kind. I’ll have to add him to my collection.”
Busted. Time for the sympathy angle.
“We’ve gotta take him to see Aunt Lenore,” Terry said, a tear pooling in the corner of her eye. “She’s dying and this may be her last chance to say good-bye to the little guy.”
Paquito licked the guard’s hand and whimpered, right on cue.
“It would mean the world to her,” I said. “Please?”
The guard gave us a wise look, then gently placed Paquito back on top of the Beanies. “You get caught, don’t tell anyone what door you came in.”
“Our lips are sealed!” I said, and we hurried over to the elevators before he could change his mind.
We were greeted at the fifth-floor duty station by a plump nurse with red hair who smiled warmly at us. Natural redheads are members of an unofficial club—like-minded souls who were tortured for our differences as kids, developing great personalities or serial killer tendencies as a result.
“Hey, great hair,” Terry said.
“Back at ya,” the nurse said.
“We’re here to see Mrs. Richling in 509. Is she awake?”
“Yeah, I think so. The police just left.”
We kept smiling.
“The police? Surely she’s not in trouble with the fashion police again, is she?” I turned to Terry. “I told her not to wear heels with shorts, didn’t I?”
“Ha ha,” Terry said.
“Seriously, um, why were the police here?” I asked oh-so-casually.
“No idea.” The nurse shrugged and went back to her work.
We wandered down the hallway, dread slowing our steps. “They must have identified Mario’s body,” I said in what was supposed to be a whisper but may have come out as more of a shriek.
An old man passed by in a wheelchair, pushed by a young orderly with spiky hair whose jaw was working a wad of gum like a lump of pink pizza dough. The old man’s watery eyes lingered on my face as if trying to place it from an episode of America’s Most Wanted. Then he looked at Terry and said, “Hmmm.”
“We’re not on the lam or anything, honest,” she said sweetly.
“Hmmm,” he said again. The orderly winked at us and popped a bubble as they continued down the hallway.
“I think he heard us,” I whispered when they had past.
“They can’t hear you if you don’t say anything.”
“This is making me nervous. I talk when I get nervous.”
“Well, shut your hole,” she said, “or I’ll stuff Princess Di in it.”
We slipped into Lenore’s room and found her alone. The police had gone and no staff were present. She had a large lump of gauze taped to the side of her face and bands of adhesive circling her head. If she had looked bad before the accident, now she was positively gruesome.
“Girlsssth,” Lenore slurred, doped out of her mind. “C’mere.”
She crooked a finger and we went to her bedside. This was not an occasion for one-two punches, I thought, feeling very sorry for her in spite of myself.
“Were they able to save your ear?” I asked gently.
Lenore’s head wobbled back and forth, and she poked her tongue out of her lips, trying to wet them without success. I grabbed the plastic cup of water by the side of the bed and put the straw to her mouth. She craned her neck forward and sipped, a little water dribbling onto her hospital gown, then she leaned back and closed her eyes with a sigh.
“What are you going to do?” I said.
“Thsssue.”
“Can they do anything for you at all?”
“Prosssthetic ear.”
“That thsssucks,” I said. “I mean, that’s too bad.”
Terry rolled her eyes at me. “Lenore, why were the police here? Was it about Mario?”
Lenore cracked open her eyelids. “What about Mario?”
“We didn’t tell you last night because you were preoccupied with the ear thing,” I said, “but there was some trouble at Tatiana’s yesterday—”
“What kind of trouble?” Fear had crept into Lenore’s voice.
“Mario was shot,” Terry said.
“What?”
“Killed.”
“Eee-eh-h-h.” Lenore covered her face and made a high-pitched keening noise like a fruit bat on the wing. It was hard to tell whether she was weeping or emitting sonar distress signals.
“Lenore, you haven’t told us everything about this situation, have you?” I said. She shook her head and sniffed up tears.
“Well, you’d better come clean with us,” Terry said. “We’re getting in deeper than we bargained for.”
Lenore looked up at us, pleading. “Girlssth. I need you to do thssomething for me. It’ssth vitally important.” She gripped the safety bar on the side of the bed, her knuckles going white.
“Sure. Anything,” I said, suckered by her distressed condition.
Terry kicked me in the calf. Apparently she was not similarly moved by Lenore’s plight.
“Find Tatiana,” Lenore said, gasping as if each breath might be her last. “Find her and . . . tell her . . . I don’t have it.”
Terry squinted at her. “Have what?”
“I . . . I can’t tell you that.” Lenore cast her tearful eyes to the curtained window.
“Okay,” Terry said. “Who does have it? Just in case she wants to know.”
“No one hassth it. It’ssth gone. Completely gone. Tell her that. Tell her to tell him.”
“Who?” Terry shouted. “Look, if you don’t tell us what this is about, we’re through with you, Lenore. Do you understand?”
Lenore rolled her head back and forth on the pillow. “Oh, the horror . . . the
horror,” she moaned, covering her face with her hands again.
Great. Now she was totally freaked out.
Even knowing that Lenore was about as trustworthy as a snake, I wanted to reassure her, to tell her we would help. But in order to do that, we needed more information. I had to drag her out of her despair and get her talking again.
I know what she needs! I thought. Something cheery. Something life-affirming . . . a visit from Mr. Good Feelings.
I took Paquito out of the backpack and brought him over to the bed. He smiled down at Lenore, panting. “Look who’s he-e-e-re,” I sang.
Lenore opened her eyes and screamed.
Okay. Maybe she wasn’t completely over the ear incident.
I rethought the situation immediately and stuffed Paquito back in the bag just as the red-haired nurse appeared in the door. Terry and I spun around to meet her startled gaze.
“What happened?” she said, rushing over to check Lenore’s pulse. Lenore’s head lolled to one side, her tongue protruding from the parched lips.
“I don’t know,” I said innocently. “We were just here talking, and suddenly she screamed and passed out.”
The nurse narrowed her eyes at me, and I sensed we’d used up all our red-haired capital with her. “You’d better leave,” she said. “And I don’t think you should come back.”
Terry and I started for the door as Lenore muttered something in her semiconscious state.
“Pah . . . lahv,” she moaned. “Pah . . . lahv.”
What was she trying to say?
Paquito . . . love?
Was she trying to tell him she still loved him? That in her drugged state she had mistaken him for a hostile life-form from another planet?
Or was it Pavlov?
What exactly was going on between Lenore and the enigmatic Russian woman?
When we got to the parking lot, I tried to suss things out.
“Okay, the police were there for some reason, and it wasn’t to tell her about Mario’s death, so what could it have been?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Terry said, firing up the engine. “I vote we shitcan this case.”
“But we agreed to talk to Tatiana.”
“You agreed, I didn’t. Listen, I don’t like this. Lenore’s up to no good. Obviously she took something that belongs to somebody else—”
“Yeah, and she thinks they might kill her for it.”
Her eyebrows went up. “So?”
“So it would be pretty bad for business if one of our clients, who’s also Reba’s best friend, got snuffed on our watch.”
“Our watch? We’re not her keepers!”
“No, but we may be the only thing standing between her and some kind of danger.”
She sighed. “Dammit Ker, we’re PIs. Not avenging angels.”
“Look, we still have her money. It obligates us to her. Let’s take a quick run by Tatiana’s and see if she’s there. Then we can deliver the message and be done with the whole thing.”
“But—”
“But nothing! I say we’re going and that’s that.”
Terry answered by revving the bike at full throttle, rattling the concrete pillars of the garage.
She hated it when I pulled rank, but I was her boss. Also, I’d been born a minute and thirty seconds earlier, and age has its privileges.
She pulled out of the garage and back onto the street, and then we headed out past the Beverly Center shopping mall in the direction of Hollywood.
We rolled past Tatiana’s apartment like rubberneckers who’d heard about the murder on TV. The apartment was still sealed up with crime-scene tape. Tatiana had not returned.
Terry pulled up next to the curb a few houses down.
“She’s not there,” I said.
“Would you be? You know, she may even be the killer, and Lenore’s sending us right into her clutches.”
“But she said she wanted Tatiana to tell him. So he’s the dangerous one.”
She threw up her hands. “Okay, so how do we find her?”
“I think our best bet is to go by Trotsky’s. See if anybody there can put us in touch with her.”
“Now?”
“Later tonight. It doesn’t get hopping until dinnertime.”
“What do we do until then?”
I pondered this a second. “Lenore said she didn’t have ‘it’ anymore. That means she had it at one time.”
“Yeah?”
“So let’s go talk to Rini. Maybe we can get her to tell us what this mystery object is.”
“Your wish is my frigging command,” Terry said, laying down tracks to Lenore’s mansion.
As soon as we pulled around the corner onto Rexford we heard it—“La Cucaracha” blaring on a car horn loud enough to start a rock slide on Pacific Coast Highway ten miles away. We parked directly behind a lime-green gas guzzler with hydraulic shocks that might have been a GTO when it came off the assembly line in the 1970s, but had been transformed into one badass eyesore of a lowrider. The cholo version of Pimp My Ride.
It was covered chockablock with well-endowed girls showing lots of titty, surrounded by sparkles and squiggles and other swirly hallucinogenic designs. Dice hung from the rearview mirror, a hula girl shook her booty in the back window, and the Virgin Mary sat in holy contemplation on the dashboard. Long brass horns affixed to the sides of the car blasted another impatient stanza of “La Cucaracha.” The driver, a Latino in his twenties with a lightning bolt of black hair on the back of his bald head, bopped in time to a salsa beat coming from the nuclear-powered stereo.
Terry switched off the engine and turned to me. “Rini’s boyfriend?”
I shrugged and we started up the walk just as Rini came out the front door. She had an orange duffel bag slung over her shoulder, and she was pushing a perambulator down the sloping walk. She spotted us and stopped cold, releasing the baby buggy in her surprise.
The pram barreled down the walk, making a rapid squeaking noise as it went. Terry catapulted herself toward it and caught it before it crashed into the side of the car. The driver jumped out of his door and screamed at Rini over the hood.
“Coño! You want to kill your own nephew?”
“Sorry . . . sorry!” Rini ran to the infant, who gurgled happily and reached for her with plump little hands, blissfully unaware that he’d come that close to baby whiplash. “Estás okay, mi’jo?”
“Hey, Rini,” I said. “Where are you going? Looks like you’re skipping out on Lenore.”
She looked up at me with a pitiful face. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I can’t take it no more.”
“What can’t you take anymore?” I said.
Lightning Bolt advanced on us and Rini glanced in his direction with unmistakable fear. We wouldn’t get any information out of her now.
“Can’t talk. Gotta go.” She hustled the perambulator over to the man, who was short but wide, almost a doublewide, with the pleasant demeanor of a pit bull on steroids.
“You’re not coming back?” Terry called.
Rini shook her head. “She can clean up that shit herself!”
“What shit?”
“Whaddayou want?” the man roared at us.
Terry held up the backpack with Paquito, who was bleary from a road nap. He blinked his big brown eyes against the sunlight and yawned, displaying fangs that looked like they belonged on a catfish. “We’re dog-sitting for Mrs. Richling. The little guy’s sick. We need to take him to the vet and we don’t know who that is. Does she have some phone numbers on the refrigerator or anything?”
Rini hastily dug into the pocket of her stretch jeans and pulled out a gold key chain. She tossed it to Terry.
“She’s got some files in the office and numbers next to the kitchen phone. You’ll give her back the keys? I was gonna mail them to her.”
“Sure,” Terry said. “Thanks.”
The man grabbed the baby, which looked like a bundled-up summer squash in his massive arms, then buckled it into
a child seat in the back. I saw that the interior of the car was covered from ceiling to floor in purple fake fur.
“Irina! Vámanos!”
Rini hurried to the car, stuffing the duffel onto the floor before jumping in the passenger side.
“Hey, is the burglar alarm activated?” Terry asked.
“No!”
Rini slammed the door and the lowrider took off, screaming down Rexford Drive with a lethal slipstream of hydrocarbons.
Terry shrugged and turned to me. “Vámanos.”
We unlocked the door to Lenore’s manse and pushed it open. The house felt abandoned.
No, it was trashed.
The raw silk cushions of the rose-colored couches were slashed. Chairs upended, their sapphire-blue upholstery shredded. Drawers and their contents strewn everywhere. Oriental rugs were ripped from the floor and tossed against the walls. And everywhere you looked, on every surface—black fingerprint dust.
Terry gaped at the mess. “What the hell? Did Rini do this?”
“I don’t think so. She wouldn’t have stopped to talk to us.” I pointed to the dust. “Besides, the police have been here.”
“So that’s why the cops were at the hospital? To report a burglary to Lenore?”
“Guess so.” I shook my head, looking around. “Could this woman’s life get any worse? What’s next, an IRS audit?”
“Let’s figure out what happened here,” Terry said, pacing the floor as she did the nervous lip-gloss thing, stroking her bottom lip over and over with it. “Rini was gone when the house was robbed, and she called the police when she got back?”
“I think it’s more likely someone else saw it in progress, like a neighbor, and called the police. Then Rini came back to a house crawling with cops and wigged out.”
“Lenore was afraid Mario was going to break in, remember? She said so at the hotel.”
“Yeah, but we’re pretty sure he was in no position to. So who else might have done it?”
Her eyes popped. “Maybe someone who was after whatever-it-is? The thing Lenore claims she doesn’t have?”
“Could be. Let’s have a look around.”
We took Paquito out of the pack and set him on the floor, expecting him to take off like a shot on his home turf. But he stood on the tile floor and looked up at us in confusion.
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 8