“DECAPITATION!” I shouted, and watched in alarm as Terry’s face practically turned purple. “Why didn’t you say anything about this when you called?”
“Well, you never know who could be listening in on a phone call, do you? I thought it more prudent to discuss it in person.”
“All right, please continue,” I said. “So the head was forcibly separated from the body?”
“Well, that’s a reasonable assumption, isn’t it? There aren’t too many people walking around headless, that I know of.”
“So what you actually found was the head,” Terry said.
“No.”
“I thought you said she was a bottle blond.”
Reba pursed her lips in distaste. “Yes, but I wasn’t referring to her head hair.”
Dear God in heaven. Why did we ever come home?
How did the dead girl get there, who could she possibly be, had there been any strange persons lurking about the house . . . ? Reba had no answers, no ideas.
“And how long have the rugs been here?” Terry asked.
“Oh, a couple of weeks,” Reba said.
“And you just now noticed this ‘lump’?”
“It wasn’t there before, I assure you.”
“No, it wouldn’t have been,” I said. “The body can’t have been delivered in a rug two weeks ago. You’d have noticed the smell, no way around that.” I finally thought to ask her, “You have called the police, haven’t you?”
Reba leaned in and whispered, “I thought it best to keep this en famille for the moment.”
“But . . . when did you find it?” Terry asked, her mouth agape.
“This morning.”
Terry slapped her forehead. “You found the body this morning, and you waited for us to get back from Hawaii? Reba, do you know how this looks?”
“How?” she asked, her eyes big and innocent.
“Bad,” I said.
“Well, I don’t see why the big rush. She’s not going anywhere . . . anyway, it was closer to noon, now that I think about it.”
Something was very wrong here. And I wasn’t thinking only of the brutally murdered woman. It was Reba’s reaction to it that was bothering me. Even for someone with her boundless capacity for denial, this was much too casual a response to such an outrageous occurrence.
Then it hit me. She’d been afraid to call the police. But why? Did she think someone in the household had had something to do with the heinous deed?
No. The idea was ridiculous.
We convinced Reba that the police had to be called. And even though the last time I’d seen him, I hadn’t been too friendly to Detective John Boatwright of the Beverly Hills PD homicide division, I decided to call him on the grounds that it would be best to report this to someone who knew us.
Okay, maybe “not too friendly” isn’t the right way to describe what happened. He’d come over to take me out on a date, and there’d been a little case of mistaken identity, wherein he stuck his tongue down Terry’s throat. I called him a bastard, and Terry bashed him over the head with the flowers he’d brought for me.
So what first date is perfect?
Still, I was pretty sure he’d give us the benefit of the doubt when it came to a dead body in our aunt’s house. Whatever the idiosyncrasies of our family, I didn’t think he’d suspect us all of some big plot to murder an anonymous blond. Or whatever color her hair was.
I called Boatwright’s office and he wasn’t there, so I tried his cell phone. He seemed genuinely happy to hear from me—he probably thought I was calling to apologize for the kiss snafu—but I got down to the new business right away.
“I was hoping you could help us with something,” I ventured.
“I can’t fix traffic tickets.”
“Ha. I wish it was that simple.”
“Okay, what is it?”
“Well, my aunt Reba left Beverly Hills and moved out to Malibu. She, uh, bought a house on the beach, and she’s found . . . well, she’s found a corpse in it.”
There was a long silence on the line. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Um, no.”
“By corpse, do you mean a human body? I mean, we’re not talking about a dead seagull or something like that.”
“No, it’s a human body. One that, unfortunately, is missing its head. So I guess it’s more of a torso, strictly speaking.”
“Arms and legs intact?”
“I’m assuming. I didn’t look. Didn’t want to mix my DNA up with the scene, you know what I mean?”
“Then we’ll call it a body for now. Male or female?”
“Female, twenties.”
“And where did your aunt find this body?”
In her spare bedroom. One of her spare bedrooms, I should say.”
He cleared his throat. “Where was it exactly?”
“Well, she’d had a bunch of Oriental rugs shipped to her by a Beverly Hills law firm—you remember that business with Lenore Richling?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Anyway, the rugs had been housed in a storage facility, then shipped to Reba after the will was probated. And she started to roll them out to, you know, see if any of them were suited to her new beach lifestyle, because they might be too heirloom—”
“Too formal,” Reba corrected me in the background. “Silver can be heirloom, not rugs.”
“Sorry, uh, too formal for the beach. So she rolled out a Turkish dinner rug, and what do you know? Out tumbled a headless body!”
He sighed like Sisyphus, looking up a big friggin’ hill. “Look. If you’re in Malibu, you need the sheriff’s department. But if you want, I can make the call for you.”
Uh-oh. The word sheriff conjured up someone with a pair of six-shooters and a ten-gallon Stetson who referred to women as “little lady.” I wouldn’t mind too much, but if someone called Terry “little lady,” she’d probably end up back in the slammer for assaulting an officer.
“Can’t you come, too?” I asked a little more timorously than I’d planned. “I mean, I know it’s not your beat, but—”
“I wish I could,” Boatwright said, “but I’m tied up at a triple homicide.”
“Well, okay. If you think that’s more important . . .” I heard another sigh, so I went into placating mode: “But it does make me feel better to know you’re going to speak to them on our behalf. You’ll tell them we’re not murderers, right?”
“I’ll vouch for you not being a murderer, but I don’t know about your sister. Listen, I don’t have to tell you not to touch anything, do I?”
“No, uh-uh,” I said. Dead-torso touching was not high on my list of fun activities. I gave him Reba’s new address.
“Okay, ’bye,” he said, like we’d just had a normal conversation, then hung up.
I let out my breath. “He’s calling the sheriff for us,” I announced to Reba and Terry.
“Well, I feel better already,” Reba said. “That’s a tremendous weight off my shoulders.” Then she clapped a hand to her mouth again. “Oh my, that was insensitive, wasn’t it?”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE BUTCHER OF BEVERLY HILLS. Copyright © 2005 by Tessera Productions, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book The Mangler of Malibu Canyon by Jennifer Colt. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
Excerpt from The Mangler of Malibu Canyon by Jennifer Colt copyright © 2006 by T
essera Productions, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Colt, Jennifer.
The butcher of Beverly Hills : a novel / Jennifer Colt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN 0-7679-2152-6
1. Women private investigators—California—Beverly Hills—Fiction. 2. Beverly Hills (Calif.)—Fiction. 3. Sisters—Fiction. 4. Twins—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.O467B88 2005
813'.6—dc22
2005042191
v1.0
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 32