We pulled up in the circular drive and parked behind the beige Rolls Royce we’d seen at the hotel.
“That’s strange,” Reba said.
“What?”
“She wasn’t home when I called, so what’s the car doing here?”
“Maybe she just got back,” Terry said.
Reba shrugged, her shoulder bones knifing through the silk fabric of her blouse. She rang the bell.
No answer.
“Hmmm,” Reba said, ringing again. “The maid’s always here. Wonder what’s taking her so long.”
We heard a noise. The now-familiar sound of claws on the tile floor, scrambling to the front door to greet whatever human happened to appear. Dinner guest, UPS guy, Ed McMahon with a big friggin’ check. They were all equally exciting to a certain class of creature.
“Does she have a dog?” I said.
Reba shuddered. “If you want to call it that. Little monster.”
Do you see a pattern emerging here? I asked Terry telepathically.
“What? A rat dog, like Paquito?” Terry asked.
“A wiener dog?” I said. Whatever it was, it sounded small.
“An abomination. One of those with the smashed-in faces and bulging eyes. You know, like a Chinese statue.”
“Oh, a pug.”
“Well, I guess we’ll have to come back later,” Reba said, “although it seems strange that the maid wouldn’t be here.”
I looked around the side of the house. “Should we go around to the back and look for the chauffeur?”
Terry elbowed us aside in a huff. “Does anybody ever think of the obvious?” She reached out and tried the door handle—it was unlocked—and the door swung open.
The smell hit us with the force of an A-bomb.
It was unmistakable: the sickening-sweet rot of human flesh.
Someone was very dead in there.
Terry slammed the door. Reba gagged, tears springing into her eyes. She brought her handkerchief to her face, and I suddenly became afraid for her. Would this be too much of a shock, coming right on the heels of Lenore’s death?
“I . . . I . . . can’t,” she choked.
We took her arms and guided her back to the Mercedes. Terry lowered her into the front seat, turning on the engine to blow air-conditioning into Reba’s bloodless face.
“We’ve got to go back,” I said to Terry.
“I know! We left the dog in there!”
“Yeah, but we need to go in and see who’s . . . who’s—”
“Smelling.”
But how could we go back in? How could we plunge headlong into that hateful odor?
I looked at Reba, who was fanning herself in the front seat. “Do you have any perfume on you?” I asked her.
She nodded and pulled a small bottle of Chanel No. 5 out of her bag. She didn’t have a clean handkerchief, so she handed us each a kid glove. We doused the gloves and held them against our noses as we made our way back up the drive.
Terry pushed open the front door again and we saw the tiny creature, wagging its curly pig tail. He was about a foot long. A solid, barrel-chested stump of a thing, with a black velvety mug that looked like it had collided with an anvil. His lips curled up in a smile and he panted heavily, a thick pink tongue lolling out of his mouth. He seemed very happy to see some live humans, diving forward to snuffle at our feet.
I held the glove against my nose and mouth and bent down to scoop the little guy up. He squealed, wriggling around in my arms like a greased hog. But I held on to him, couldn’t let him run out into the street and be squashed by an oncoming Jaguar. It seemed awful to take him back into that house, but he’d apparently adjusted to the gaseous vileness of the corpse, and had already mourned his mistress, who’d perished days ago.
He would have to come with us.
We stepped over the threshold into the front entry hall, and immediately began to sweat bullets. Someone had turned the thermostat up full blast. It had to be eighty degrees inside.
Although I’d never been there before, the interior of Suzie Magnuson’s home looked like a dead ringer for the White House. It was elegant and stuffy and classic in the extreme, with nothing that spoke of the century just past—no deco items from the Jazz era, no atomic designs from the fifties, no psychedelic vinyl from the sixties, to say nothing of the forty years since then. It was pure nineteenth century, all the way. Hand-painted china was displayed in a mahogany hutch, chairs and couch were nondescript early American, paintings on the walls depicted English hunting scenes or poetic American vistas. There was leather and chintz and spotless eggshell plush-pile carpeting, but no paintings by modern artists. Nothing even remotely avant-garde.
We followed our instincts, since our noses were otherwise engaged, and went up the stairs to the second floor. We found Suzie Magnuson in the bedroom, splayed on the bed. We took one look and stepped back, repulsed by the bloated monstrosity.
Suzie’s head was still wrapped in bandages. Her face was purple, spotted with black bruises. She wore white silk culottes and a maroon dressing gown that was tied loosely with a sash. One hand was draped over her breast, the manicure done in a deep eggplant color that was almost a perfect match for her skin.
Suzie’s other hand clutched a brown medical vial with several pills spilling out of the top. On her cherrywood bedside table was another assortment of pill bottles and a half-drunk glass of water.
And there on the floor beside the bed was the gift basket from the Dauphine. The cellophane had been ripped open, the little goodies and gold netting tossed aside. But something remained in the bottom of the basket, nestled in the shreds of brightly colored paper.
Terry stuck her hand into the perfumed glove and, pinching her nostrils with the other hand, reached down into the basket. She retrieved another brown vial, flipping the lid to look inside. Then she rattled it under my nose.
It was full of green and black capsules.
It was two hours, a lot of blinking lights, officers with questions, various crime-scene techs, and a coroner’s van later. Terry and I had been shunted aside as soon as we gave our statements, but continued to loiter on the front lawn. Terry was hopping up and down, trying to get the attention of anyone who exited the house in order to wrest more information out of them.
A uniformed officer walked out the front door on the way to his patrol car, still wearing a face mask.
“What happens to the dog?” Terry asked him, holding the pug up for maximum heartbreak effect.
The policeman pulled off his mask and gave the dog a sympathetic scratch. “Oh, he’ll go to the pound, I guess.”
“Can we keep her?” I asked, because by then we’d determined that it was a she. Her anatomy was our first clue, but her dog tag confirmed it. Her name was Muffy. “We’re friends of the . . . deceased.”
“Sure,” the officer said. “You’ll have to sign a receipt.”
Aunt Reba was long gone. She’d given a statement to one of the first officers on the scene, then Terry drove her home in the Mercedes and brought our motorcycle back to Suzie’s. Reba’d given the police as much information as she could manage in her anguished state: Marital status of the victim, widowed. Known relatives, none. A maid named Phoebe and a chauffeur named John. As for their descriptions, she’d never taken stock of their personal features, and could only offer that they were both white, average height, middle-aged.
That narrowed it down.
She thought they were a married couple, but couldn’t swear to it. She thought it was possible that the two of them were “shacking up” in the garage apartment that served as their home.
The deputy coroner came out the front door, followed by two attendants pushing a gurney that bore Suzie’s tiny, body bag–encased form. He supervised the loading of the gurney onto the coroner’s van.
Terry approached him, looking distraught. “We’re friends of the family,” she said again.
“I’m sorry,” he said as the doors were slammed on the van. “Y
ou’re the ones who found the body?”
She nodded gravely. “Did she die of an overdose? There were all kinds of pills lying around—”
He shook his head. “Sorry, miss. Can’t discuss the case,” he said, before making his way across the lawn to his car.
“Shit, got nothing from him,” Terry said, watching him get into the driver’s seat.
Suddenly we both noticed a man in a beautifully tailored suit exiting a black BMW at the curb. He was in his fifties or sixties, distinguished-looking, with an exquisite head of silver hair. He hailed the coroner, who rolled down his window to talk to him. I figured he might be someone closely connected to Suzie, or just someone with enough authority to get the death doctor’s attention.
They conferred for a few moments, and then the distinguished man walked straight up to the front door of the house where he was admitted by a uniformed officer.
“Huh, who was that?” Terry wondered.
I shrugged, watching as the van pulled out of the drive and made its way down the street, passing another group of officers. Then someone in the group caught my eye. I smiled and punched Terry in the shoulder.
“Maybe we could get more information from your friend over there,” I suggested, pointing to the female cop from the coffee shop. She stood with her hands on her round hips, deep in conversation with another officer on the other side of the street. They were part of the group assigned to keep away gawkers, yelling occasionally to a curious motorist, Everything’s fine. Nothing to see here! before waving them on.
“Huh!” Terry said. “What a coincidence.”
“Did you get her name?”
She looked sideways, searching her memory. “Uh, yeah. It’s Officer Lott, like Trent.”
“How about her first name?”
“Dinah. Like Shore. That’s how we got on our discussion of female singers. And golf.”
It took me a second, then I shrieked, “Oh my God! Her parents named her Dinah Lott? And she didn’t change it?”
Terry gave me a contemptuous look. “I can’t believe this reaction from someone who’s put up with Are you two twins? her whole life. I think it shows character that she didn’t change her name.”
I looked over Terry’s shoulder and saw the cop facing our way. I waved to her and she started walking toward us.
“Did she see us?” Terry said.
“Yep. Here she comes. Friendly Officer Eats-a-Bunch.”
“Kerry, shut up or I swear to God—”
She shoved the dog at me, then turned around and flashed a smile at the cop. Dinah pulled off her mirrored sunglasses as she approached, and I could now see that she had lovely brown eyes and rather delicate, feminine features. But she walked with a strange cowboy swagger—hands tensed at her sides, as if she was ready to whip out a pair of six-shooters at any second.
“Hey girls,” Dinah said. “What are you doing here?”
“Just walking the dog,” Terry said, pointing to Muffy.
“Another one?” Dinah attempted to pet Muffy on the head, but got a handful of dog slobber instead. “What you got against real dogs?”
“Real dogs?” Terry said, an edge to her voice.
Dinah was unaware that she’d offended. “I got a German shepherd named Helga. Maybe we could get them together for a playdate some time. Of course, I can’t guarantee that my Helga wouldn’t eat your little pooches’ lunches,” she chuckled, topping it off with a convulsive “Huh-yuk.”
I could see Terry’s eyes bugging with the onset of an outburst. Before she could give the armed woman with a badge a lecture on breed sensitivity, I jumped in to save the situation.
“We’ll take a rain check on that, thanks,” I said to Dinah. “So, um, we’re friends of Mrs. Magnuson’s. Can you tell us what happened here? No one else will.”
Dinah shrugged and hitched up her belt. “Haven’t heard yet. All I know, it’s a ten fifty-five—coroner’s case. No idea if she died of natural causes, or what.”
“Well, we’re pretty sure it wasn’t natural causes,” Terry said. “Unless you call overdosing natural.”
Dinah’s eyes widened. “Huh. This is turning out to be an interesting call. Sounds like you already know quite a bit.”
“We found her,” I said. “We came over to visit with our Aunt Reba, walked in and encountered . . . the smell.”
“And the body,” Terry said.
“Was she expecting you?” Dinah studied me intently, causing a rush of adrenaline to flood my bloodstream, as if I were suddenly the prime suspect in a murder.
“Uh, no,” I said casually. “We were just passing by, thought we’d drop in.”
Dinah nodded, one eye narrowed. “Hmmm.”
Terry and I started backing up. “Well, we’d probably better let you do your job,” I said. “Do you mind if we call you later? Get the update?”
“Sure, but I can’t promise I’ll be able to tell you anything about an ongoing investigation.”
“Oh,” Terry said. She did her best to look crestfallen and fluttered her eyelashes at Dinah just a tad.
“Tell you what,” Dinah said, apparently moved by this feminine display of disappointment. “I can’t talk about it on my watch, but if you want to meet for a beer later, maybe I could give you some info, strictly on the QT.”
“Great!” I said. “Where and when?”
“How about Barney’s Beanery? Nine o’clock.”
Barney’s Beanery was a joint on Santa Monica Boulevard that served chili burgers and beers and boasted a couple of ratty pool tables. And cottage fries, I remembered. They served cottage fries. The thought set my mouth to watering.
Terry gave Dinah a confused look, and I suddenly realized why. Barney’s was in West Hollywood, a notoriously gay city that was incorporated back in the eighties. There’d been a problem a couple of years back, accusations that Barney’s discriminated against gay patrons, so most of them—including Terry—avoided it like the plague.
Oh well, I decided. That was probably ancient history.
“We’ll be there,” I said, smiling. “And the beer’s on us.”
“Later.” Dinah winked at us and headed back toward her cohorts in the street, still with that strange, rolling gait. If she’d been bowlegged, I could have understood. But there was no light breaking between those thighs. Whatever, I thought. We all have our little pretensions. If she wanted to walk like she was the Law West of the Pecos, it was nothing to me.
“You could have been a little nicer to her,” I said to Terry when Dinah was out of earshot.
Terry rolled her eyes at me. “Get out.”
“Come on, play your cards right and she could be an excellent source for us, not to mention a hot date for you.”
“I’m not playing anything with that woman! She’s a cop, and she walks like a cowpoke. And did you hear that laugh?” she said, mimicking Dinah: “Huh-yuk!”
Methought she was protesting too much. “Want to borrow some makeup?”
“Pimp!”
“Skag!”
“Snluggg!” Muffy chimed in.
Terry looked at the dog, who was happily snorting all over the sleeve of my jacket. “So, what do you think? Have we acquired another dog?”
“She’d be good company for Paquito,” I said, nodding. “And this way, you can have one, too.”
Her eyes nearly popped out of her head. “Oh, so you’re claiming Paquito? Who died and left you in charge of him?”
“Lenore.”
“You know what I meant!”
“Well, I don’t see why we can’t share him,” I said. “We’re grown-ups, aren’t we?”
“Yeah . . .” Terry said skeptically.
“She’s kind of cute, too, isn’t she?” I scratched beneath Muffy’s chin.
“Adorable.”
“Good,” I said, shoving the pug at Terry. “You take her and I’ll take Paquito.”
She grabbed the orphaned dog around her solid little middle and huffed off toward the bike.
“You get any more grown- up, we’re gonna have to potty-train you soon,” she said, trying to zip Muffy up in her jacket. But the jacket was too small or Muffy was too big. When I got to the bike, Terry thrust her back at me.
“She was your idea. You hold her.”
I was about to hop on the bike, when a vintage blue Renault pulled up to the curb in front of us. The driver beeped lightly on his horn, waving his arm out the window, then clambered out of the car and came toward us with quick little steps.
He was around thirty. Pleasant-looking, if forgettable. Thinning brown hair, average height, dressed in neatly pressed khakis, golf shirt, and white running shoes. Mr. Normal.
“Hey, is that Mrs. Magnuson’s dog?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Who are you?”
He pulled a business card out of his wallet. “Sidney Lefler. Nice to meet you.”
I handed him the dog and took off my helmet, reading his card. He was an investigator with Whitechapel Mutual.
“I’m Kerry McAfee.” I handed him one of our cards. “My sister, Terry. You know Mrs. Magnuson?”
“We’re her insurers. I came as soon as I heard.”
“That was fast,” Terry said. “I don’t think they’ve even notified her next of kin, and the insurance company got a call?”
He stammered, embarrassed. “I’m, uh, kind of a police radio junkie. I was in the neighborhood checking on another account and I heard the call, recognized the address.”
“Oh,” I said. “So you know.”
“Yeah, how’d it happen?” he said, handing Muffy back to me.
“Looks like a drug overdose.”
“That’s terrible.” He tried to look deeply affected, but his head kept jerking toward the house, like he was dying to get a look at the corpse.
“They’ve taken away the body,” I said, dashing any voyeuristic hopes he may have had.
“Wow, first the break-in, and now this,” he said, blowing out a little whistle.
“What break-in?” Terry said.
“Mrs. Magnuson had a burglary a few weeks ago. Closer to a month, actually.”
“Really?” I looked at Terry. “Was anything stolen?”
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 13