I figured once I got there, I’d put on my new Pucci-print bikini, dig myself a hole in the sand, and have daiquiris brought to me by the hundreds, never moving a muscle except for those in my drinking hand, lips, and esophagus for the whole week.
Well, I might make one exception. I might get up and dance the hukilau, for luck.
But wait. I’m getting way ahead of myself.
After I called 911, I gave Lance a stack of towels and told him to apply pressure to his head. Fortunately the bullet hadn’t pierced his skull, but scalp wounds tend to bleed profusely and I worried that Lance might panic from the sight of all that blood. Instead, he held up like a champ.
It turned out that Reba had retained Lance as her bodyguard after we’d fired him, having promised to keep Grizzie at a distance, and he’d reported to work at 7:00 a.m. as requested. And you know what happened after that.
While we were waiting for the paramedics, Lance called his agent to tell her about the incident. She got quite excited, saying that with all the publicity and the scar, his career was going to really take off. He could transition from playing silent good guys keeping watch in the background to playing bad guys with big gnarly scars. And she assured him that there was much more of a market for bad guys than good guys in the movies.
I hurriedly untied the rest of the gang and then located the dogs, who’d been cooped up in the laundry room. I had feared the worst, but there they were, unharmed. They leaped at my shins happily, barking and snorting and wagging their tails. After that, Reba gave me the longest, boniest bird hug I’d ever had from her and Robert grabbed me in a well-cushioned bear grip. Eli wiped tears from his eyes, and Grizzie kept saying, “Well, I’ll be a baboon’s spittoon! What a brave lass ye turned out ta be!”
And Terry? Terry only smiled, but I could read her mind. She was thinking—Fucking A, Ker!
We tied Sidney up with his own extension cord, and when he came to, he helped to put the final pieces of the puzzle into place.
The insurance company had been suspicious of Suzie Magnuson’s theft report from the beginning, so they put Sidney on the case. But as he surveilled Suzie’s house, he developed his own evil agenda. He suspected that she had the Bacon stashed somewhere in her home, and he determined to break in and steal it. He saw his opportunity on the morning the servants moved out. Suzie would be alone, he figured, an old lady easily overtaken. He’d introduce himself as the representative of the insurance company, then force his way in, tie her up, and torture her if necessary to learn the whereabouts of the painting, killing her afterward.
That night, he had set up his video camera on a tripod and taped himself going into the house, secure in the knowledge that he would be unidentifiable at that distance. In this way he’d given himself the perfect alibi.
To his surprise, he found the front door open, and Suzie lying unconscious in her bedroom, the apparent victim of an overdose. Though she was obviously at death’s door, he stabbed her anyway, believing a murder would deflect police attention from his proposed theft.
But the painting was nowhere to be found.
He soon figured out Lenore had it—she had provided the canasta alibi for Suzie when the painting was allegedly stolen. He was waiting for his moment to break into Lenore’s, when Sergei provided him with the perfect opportunity by breaking in first to look for his cuttings.
As Lenore’s lawyer, Binion knew there was nothing left of Lenore’s estate other than what was in the house, so he conspired with Sidney to grab anything of value after she died. Sidney hired a truck to deliver the rugs to Binion, but kept the information about the Bacon to himself. Only he was afraid to leave the premises with it, so he took the portrait of Lenore from the garage, pulled it off the studs and stretched the Bacon underneath it, replacing the staples afterward. He had assumed that no one would want the ghastly portrait and that it would be his for the taking when the unclaimed items were disposed of.
What Sidney hadn’t counted on was Reba taking the portrait for the funeral, much less giving it to Robert to use for a canvas, all of which forced him into this desperate kidnap and murder attempt. After hearing his confession, we took Lenore’s portrait out of its frame, tore the staples out of the canvas, and there he was—Bacon’s Man With a Watch, blithely contemplating his mortality.
The police took Sidney away and Lance was off to the emergency room courtesy of the EMTs, who joked that Reba’s house was becoming a regular stop on their route.
So everything was fairly well wrapped up, except that it appeared we’d never know where Sergei’s purloined flesh had got to.
It wasn’t until the following week that we received the letter and documentation from Gentex Labs. Reba had threatened Hartford, Huntington et al with litigation unless they gave us unfettered access to all of Lenore’s papers, files, and incoming mail. She was the rightful heir, after all.
“Gentex Labs,” Terry mused, ripping into the envelope. “I wonder what this could be? Do you suppose she had some kind of terminal disease, and that’s why she got involved with all the criminal stuff? Maybe she couldn’t pay the medical bills, or she just figured on going out in style.”
“Interesting theory,” I said. “Does it say what she had?”
Terry read the letter frowning, her eyes going wide. Then she whooped and threw the paper into the air and collapsed on the floor, howling with laughter.
“What?” I said, chasing after the paper. “What did she have?”
But Terry just squealed and guffawed, her black baby tee riding up to show her silver belly button ring, her feet pounding the floor.
People sometimes had hysterical reactions to terrible things, I knew. Still, I didn’t think I was going to be half so amused to learn that Lenore was suffering from some horrible illness or other.
But it wasn’t that kind of lab report. It was a bill and a disclaimer.
Gentex specialized in the analysis of DNA. Lenore had given them a biological sample, asking them to isolate any human DNA it contained for genotype testing. They were unable to find any human DNA, they said, and were returning the residual testing matter under separate cover.
On the report attached to the letter and invoice there was a section labeled “Source Material.” And in the little square underneath it someone had inked in a cramped scientist’s hand: Feces, canine.
I guess Lenore had learned all about bluffing in her years of canasta playing, but she’d bluffed her last with Sergei Pavlov. She didn’t even have his flesh at the time she tried to blackmail him. She’d obtained it from Janice at Hattrick’s office and secreted it in the Judith Leiber bag, intending to hold it at her house until Sergei came through with the money. But Paquito had apparently smelled the fresh meat and chewed through the leather purse to get at it, gobbling it all up.
Lenore had preserved Paquito’s poop and had sent it to Gentex for analysis in the hopes that Sergei’s DNA would show up in his stool. How she thought she’d get away with giving Sergei the dog doo in exchange for the big bucks she was hoping to nail him for, we’ll never know.
She can’t tell us. She’s gone forever.
Just days after finally discovering the purpose behind that mysterious Tupperware in Lenore’s fridge, her ashes were scattered to the wind from the rooftop parking lot of Neiman Marcus, by her dear friend Reba Price-Slatherton.
You’re probably expecting to hear about my follow-up date with Detective Boatwright. I can’t tell you about it because it didn’t happen.
Oh he called, all right. And came over to the house with a nice bouquet of flowers and another bottle of red wine.
When the door was opened, he yelled, “You don’t know how worried I was about you! You almost got yourself killed!” Then he grabbed me in his arms and planted a big wet kiss on my mouth, which lasted just about forever.
Could you tell us about the kiss perhaps? Could ya rhapsodize about the warmth going through your body and the tingles running down your spine? Could we at least hear about his
manly smell again?
No, because I didn’t actually receive the kiss.
Terry did.
She claims she tried to tell him that she was the wrong sister, says she tried desperately to push him away, but he was too forceful and he simply overwhelmed her. It was only when he came up for air that she was able to tell him which twin she was.
He stared at her and said, “Oh really?”
Then he looked into the living room and saw me standing there with my black eyes and my swollen lip, feebly waving my plastered wrist.
“Oh hey,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
And I guess I kind of overreacted. I called him a bastard and then I stormed upstairs, slamming my closet door for effect because there’s no actual door to my loft.
Terry grabbed the flowers and hit Boatwright over the head with them, then she smashed the wine overhanded on the porch.
Boatwright left pretty soon after that.
Why punish him for an honest mistake, you ask?
Well, when I reflected on all the insanity that seemed to follow me around like, say, an evil doppelgänger, I figured I was actually doing Boatwright a favor. Going out with me would be pure misadventure. Plus, I didn’t think I’d ever get that image of him and Terry out of my mind. There were plenty of other fish in the sea who had not actually French kissed my sister.
Besides, I had someone else in mind to punish. Someone whose mistake was less than honest. Someone who knew damn well that Boatwright thought she was me, and went right ahead and let him kiss her.
And I figured, what the hell? I have the rest of my life to punish her.
THE END
Kerry is a paranoid nutball.
THE END
P.S. There is no Beverly. The city of Beverly Hills was developed by oilman Burton E. Green, who named it after Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Who knew?
JENNIFER COLT is a screenwriter in Santa Monica, California. She has written for Dimension Films and Playboy Enterprises and has worked in the nontheatrical division of MGM/United Artists in LA.
Read on for a sneak peek at
The Mangler of Malibu Canyon,
the next installment in the series featuring the McAfee twins, by Jennifer Colt, available from Broadway Books in January 2006.
Terry turned the motorcycle left onto the one-car-wide shoulder in front of Aunt Reba’s new redwood beach house, the one she bought to give herself a fresh start. Our aunt was a Beverly Hills grande dame, a well-preserved, self-obsessed seventy-year-old who had married and buried five husbands within four city blocks without ever changing her zip code (need I say—90210?). Each husband had died richer than the last, and as a result Reba had more money than God. More than the entire GNP of heaven, probably. She’d been a service industry unto herself, keeping an army of boutique owners, caterers, plastic surgeons, manicurists, and masseurs fat and happy. They’d shed bitter tears when she packed it in for the beach at Malibu. It was our first trip to the new house. We’d been too busy tying up loose ends before our Hawaii trip to pay a visit.
Part of the reason we’d been summoned was that Reba’s son, Cousin Robert, was missing in action. After his life-altering fall down the stairs, he’d decided to quit drinking for good and had enrolled in the rehab program at New Horizons. We would learn that he was there for three weeks before he disappeared from his spartan room with the grass mat, wooden cot, and cheesecake picture of His Holiness the Dalai Lama hanging over a scented candle.
Terry parked and we hiked up the sand-sprinkled wooden stairs and knocked on the front door. The second story of the house was here at street level, the first story built directly on the sand below. A third, smaller section angled off toward the ocean with a skylight on top.
“Nice digs,” Terry said.
“What’d you expect, a fixer-upper?”
Grizzie opened the door with a sour look on her florid face and a whisk broom in her hand. “Mind your feet,” she said by way of greeting. She thrust the broom at Terry, who looked at me, perplexed.
“Sand,” I said.
“Oh.” Terry lifted her boots and whisked the sand away from each sole before setting foot inside the door. Then she handed the broom to me, and I performed the same ritual.
“Blighted sand!” Grizzie said. “Trackin’ itself in here like we was bleedin’ cave dwellers. I tell ye, girls. I don’t know how much more o’ this I can take.”
Grizzie obviously preferred Beverly Hills, where there are no natural elements trailing into one’s domicile. Just nice manicured lawns and the occasional circular advertising the services of a local plastic surgeon littering the front walk. Obviously the sand was stuck in her craw as well as on the new floor.
“You’ll get used to it, Griz,” I assured her.
“Not likely! Then there’s the gull droppin’s, and the dampness, and bits of shell everywhere, and now a dead body, on top o’ everything!”
“Excuse me?” I said, blinking.
But Grizzie had already stomped off in the direction of the kitchen, muttering under her breath. Terry and I looked at each other, wondering if we’d heard her correctly.
“Darlings!”
Aunt Reba breezed in wearing her beach attire—an African-themed caftan in bold yellows and reds, with a thick elastic band holding back the hennaed hair from her high-boned, patrician face. Gloria Swanson does Nairobi. “I’m so glad you’re here! I’ve been at my wits’ end.”
“Hi Reba,” we said in tandem, receiving our air kisses. “What’s up?”
“Well, it’s been hell around here. Robert missing and Eli leaving me because he’s too bored at the beach and—”
“And a dead body somewhere?” I inquired, just to test my hearing.
She made a little moue of distaste. “Let’s have coffee first, before we jump right into the unpleasantness.”
Unpleasantness? Okay . . .
Terry looked at me goggle-eyed. I shrugged back at her, then followed Reba as she scuffed on her red leather slingbacks into the breakfast room, which was paneled with light wood and had a spectacular view of the ocean through a spotless plate-glass window. Grizzie plunked down a tray with ceramic cups, a milk jug, a thermos pitcher, and a bowl containing large brown lumps of natural sugar.
“Where’s the silver service?” I asked. Reba’d been using the same silver coffee service for as long as I could remember, buffed to a mirror sheen by Grizzie’s chapped, red hands. Its absence seemed somehow sinister.
“Hmmph!” Grizzie said, before stomping back into the kitchen to prepare the muffins and mangoes that always accompanied the coffee.
“It’s too ‘heirloom’ for the beach,” Reba said. “We’re much more relaxed out here.”
Terry kicked me under the table. “I know I’m relaxed, aren’t you?” she said.
I shrugged and waited impatiently for Reba to come to the point. We were used to her going miles around “unpleasant” issues, but if there was a dead body somewhere in the vicinity, I really wanted to know what the story was.
“As I was saying,” Reba started, pouring the coffee with upraised pinkies, “Eli got bored. I should have known that such a vital, virile man would have difficulty adjusting to a life of leisure. I just didn’t think about it. I was too blinded by love.”
Eli was smart and funny, a peerless criminal attorney who had taken up with Reba during our last case. He was also my former boss. He had a stogie surgically attached to his bottom lip, suits that were a testament to the indestructibility of polyester, since they dated from the mid-seventies, and he looked like a giant, pockmarked Teletubby, minus the head antennae. I loved Eli, too. But you’d almost have to be blind to be romantically attracted to him.
“Not enough challenge without his legal practice?” Terry asked.
“Precisely.”
“Well, perhaps if you told him you’d found a dead body . . .” I suggested.
“Well, that’s just the thing, dears,” Reba said, waving a diamond-encrusted hand in th
e air. “I drag him to the beach, he gives up his practice, then I present him with a missing son and a dead body in my rug? I don’t know how much strain a new relationship can be expected to endure—”
“WHAT BODY?” Terry yelled.
Reba’s jaw flapped open at this rudeness. “Well, I was getting to that, Missy, if you’ll just hold your horses.”
Terry fell forward, sinking her head in her hands. I leaned back in my chair and took a sip of coffee. We’d have to play it Reba’s way, however insane. She took a deep breath, smoothed out her caftan, and finally dove into the story with morbid zest.
“I went into the guest bedroom earlier, where I’d stored the rugs that Lenore left me in her will. . . .”
We nodded.
“I wanted to see if any of them were suited to the new house, and I thought perhaps you girls would like one for your little cabin. You know, to dress it up a bit—”
Terry waved impatiently. “Stick to the body. Where was it?”
“I was getting to that,” Reba huffed. “I noticed that one of the rugs—a Turkish dinner rug, actually—well, it was rather lumpy. So I took it by the corner and unrolled it and what do you know? Out she came!”
“She?” we asked. “A girl?”
“A young woman. Somewhere in her twenties, with blond hair, bleached to within an inch of its life.” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh dear, that was insensitive, wasn’t it?”
I rolled my eyes. “Reba, I don’t think this woman’s in a position to mind a catty remark. What else? Do you know what killed her?”
Reba frowned. “Well, how would I know that?”
“Was there any obvious cause of death, like a bullet hole, stab wounds . . . ?”
“Oh my, yes.”
“What was it?” Terry asked.
“Well, the decapitation, I should think.”
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