Dreams of the Dead

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  The Tahoe Keys, a beachfront development on Tahoe’s shores that had been built in the early 1960s, held standard suburban houses with docks on small, man-made keys that fed into the lake. Euphegenia Delmonica, Cyndi Backus’s best friend, did not live directly on the lake. She lived on the cheaper side, across the street, a few steps away from the water.

  Euphegenia did not open the door after the first ring. Nina could see herself being examined in the sidelight next to the front door. Finally, the door opened, slowly and suspiciously.

  Nina introduced herself. Tall as a showgirl and as pretty, with a perfect nose, a nice rack, and a pink cashmere sweater over gray wool pants, Euphegenia wanted to look at Nina’s ID. Finally, she nodded at Nina and let her inside.

  Right inside the doorway, without fanfare, Nina found herself dumped into a teal and purple living room.

  “Take a seat,” Euphegenia said, and brought Nina a drink.

  Nina accepted the glass, sitting on a chair with arms barely wider than her hips. “You’re—”

  “Feel free to call me Genie.”

  “Right,” Nina said, relieved. “Mind if I ask why you didn’t want to see the man who is investigating Cyndi’s death for the family? Mr. van Wagoner?”

  “I used to like men. Not so much anymore. I look for a day when we can collect babies from sperm banks and dispense with the man thing. Leave them the hell out of the picture. Okay, granted, bed’s good, but then you’ve got—what?—a child to raise on your own for eighteen, maybe thirty years, and you’re stuck to a jerk for life who comes and goes full of demands, giving you not a damn thing.”

  Nina heard a world full of pain behind the words. She wondered if Genie had a baby to take care of alone, but she heard nothing except a distant radio playing. Well, it was not her business to know who or what had hurt Genie so much. She thought of her life raising Bob, mostly alone, and remembered that Kurt was leaving. Partly to give herself a little time, she took the iPad from her bag and quickly reviewed the crime and the few details she knew for sure connected Genie with Cyndi. “I’m here to find out more about your friend Cyndi Backus.”

  “A man killed my best friend. I hope he dies and roasts in hell for eternity. If you need to know my kindest thoughts on the matter.” Her green eyes sparked.

  Okay, generally speaking, the murderer, in Nina’s limited experience, would not think and certainly wouldn’t blurt out such a thing. Nina took a breath and a moment to take in her surroundings.

  The home appeared to have been remodeled sometime in the eighties. Beams on the ceiling, once brown, had been repainted beige. A glimpse of the kitchen from the living room revealed not contemporary granite but sparkling, aging Formica on the counter-tops with an electric-coil stovetop. Fragile-appearing, tall, angular windows in the living room showed no sign of replacement by more modern double panes. On the plus side, a view out those large windows revealed a partial view of the lake as blue as her brother Matt’s eyes.

  “Tell me how you knew Cyndi.”

  “How? How about how long? I knew her since we were fourteen. We met in our English class when we were in eighth grade with Mrs. Rappaport. Cyndi transferred up here from Inglewood, showed up two weeks into the first semester wearing a skirt so short it pretty much exposed her butt, along with thigh-high leather boots.”

  “I take it that’s not the way most of your class dressed.”

  “Oh, hell, no. But I had never met a girl like her, so sure of herself. So sure of her sexuality. She was a revelation to me. Most of the kids shunned her, but I made friends with her right away. Her mother liked me, probably because I revered Cyndi and she saw that.”

  “Did she have other friends?”

  “We had a couple but we were both just off-key enough to be tighter. You know how that is?”

  Nina nodded, trying to think. Eighth grade was probably one of the nightmare years for her. Her mother in trouble. Matt in trouble. Her in trouble. Friends? She didn’t recall any friends.

  Genie went on, “Cyn used to stockpile teen magazines under her bed. We painted her room baby blue. We cried about every single cute boy we ever knew. We stalked a couple of guys, if you call it stalking, hanging around where they hung around.” Genie’s head bowed, and the tears dribbled down onto her gray wool pants.

  Nina thought she had a clue. “Your parents didn’t like her?”

  “They didn’t understand her. You know, she had a different attitude. She liked sex.”

  “Did you have a relationship?”

  “You mean sexual?” Genie laughed. “She liked men. She might have liked women later on, too. Certainly, that’s not something she would have told her husband. I can’t say I approved of her secrets and lies, but I never judged her. I’m sorry my parents didn’t see that, that she was so good at heart. They were so narrow-minded.”

  “Did her open mind about sex stop you from being her friend?”

  She shook her head. “Even after she dropped out of high school and started stripping. Loads of supposed friends judged her for that, but she was so pretty and never saw anything wrong in it. And guess what? A bunch of people I know did much worse and felt much guiltier than she did and never made a dime. By the way, up here? You make much better money stripping than you make doing child care, which is about all that’s available to a normal, smart woman.”

  Nina decided not to plumb those depths and said, “Her death hurt a lot of people.”

  After a few minutes of sniffling, swelling, and a downturned mouth, Genie recovered herself. “Her poor kids. She had such a huge heart. She fell in love easily. Anyone really nice to her, she trusted.”

  Nina pounced. “Genie, please. Tell me who she was with when she died.”

  Genie left the room. Nina twiddled her thumbs, wondering if that meant she should leave. She waited instead. Not long after, Genie returned, holding an armful of picture albums. “I plan to transfer these to digital format eventually,” she said apologetically, plopping them in front of Nina onto a table.

  They spent the next half hour flipping through prints of Cyndi and Genie together and with friends. When they were younger, they had both worn much more makeup. As the years went on, they grew more beautiful. Aside from the photos of them in malls, hang ing around in living rooms, playing on the lake, they were pictured paired with half a dozen young men apiece, mooning, kissing, hugging in badly shot flashes.

  “Any of these guys recent?” Nina asked, hitting the final page of the fifth album.

  Genie sighed. “The last one? There’s no photo. We used to talk about her ups and downs with this one on the phone, but Cyndi never sent a picture. When I asked her why, she said her latest was a privacy freak.”

  Interesting wording. Not her latest man. “What else did she tell you?”

  Genie sipped her flat Coke. “Tall, I remember her saying. Somebody she needed to keep secret. A scar on the belly, she said. Not a tattoo, some kind of injury.”

  “What else?”

  Genie put her glass down on the table and burped quietly, politely. “Nothing, really. I miss her. I wake up in the morning and there’s a moment when I don’t remember she’s gone. Then when I do, I crash. I don’t think I’ll ever recover from this. I can’t believe people have relationships for thirty years, and then somebody dies, and they walk around and accept that loss. How do they do that? I can’t stand that she’s gone. How could someone take her away so casually from the people who love her? We talked for hours every day. She told me everything and I told her everything. God damn it.”

  Nina set her empty glass down and patted Genie on the arm, feeling like a puny substitute for a friend. She murmured things, sincere things that sounded phony.

  After a while, she got up to leave, disappointed at not knowing more.

  Genie, tearstained but somewhat recovered, walked her to the door. “You know that story in the papers?”

  “What story?”

  “The one about the guy at the ski resort.”


  Nina pulled the jacket on and started to button it. “Are you talking about Jim Strong?”

  “Yes! That was his name. Cyndi said she knew something about him. He disappeared, and she knew why.”

  Nina allowed herself a moment to feel startled, then thrilled. Paul had been right! The cases were connected. “What did Cyndi know?”

  “She never got the chance to tell me more.”

  “Maybe that’s why she was killed.”

  “I knew you might say that. I knew it. There’s a lot of money involved. The family wants to sell the resort.”

  “It’s a lot of money, yes,” Nina said. “Genie, have you been questioned by the police?”

  “I’m due there tomorrow.”

  “Go now.”

  “What? Why?”

  “This guy might get some idea that you know about the tie-up between the sale of a big business here in town and a double murder. You might not be safe right now. And afterward, after you talk to the police, I think you should take some time off. Visit distant relatives.”

  “You think I need to get out of town?” Genie tipped her head. “For real?”

  “Yes.”

  Genie pulled on her sweater. “This is harsh. You’re saying there’s something wrong with the resort sale. You’re saying she told me stuff I shouldn’t know.”

  “The sooner you tell the police everything, the safer you’ll be. The information will be on file and doesn’t—”

  “Die with me?” Genie stood up. “Okay. I’m gonna err on the side of staying alive. My best friend’s dead. Let me get my purse.” She followed Nina back to the police station. Nina left her in the experienced care of Sergeant Cheney.

  Driving back to the office, Nina thought, was it Gene Malavoy? Ronnie Bee? Johnny Castro? Stamp, even? All of these possibilities defied rationality. Could any one of these men have slit one woman’s throat and smothered another one? What would it take? What could motivate such desperate violence?

  Think it through. Examine the result, not the confusion of the acts. What resulted from the murders was that the sale of Paradise Resort would probably go through.

  And then there was the escrow account.

  She and Paul needed to get closer to the escrow officer. Follow the money, she thought, changing her mind and making a neat right turn toward home, wending past the green lawns and elaborate baby gardens with their fragile shoots yearning toward summer. Paul loved tracking money, and that’s what they needed to do.

  She pulled into the driveway on Kulow, turned off the car, and sat looking into the golden windows of her house, watching for signs of Bob or Hitchcock.

  She heard barking. She was home. She’d have a quiet lunch, then make a lot of phone calls.

  CHAPTER 28

  Tuesday arrived.

  Philip was due home from the hospital today. His home would be put on the market and he would have to move, perhaps out of the state, as part of the settlements. Nina hoped he would have enough time to recuperate before that happened.

  If all went well, the purchase-money wire would be received on Wednesday and Lynda could gain access to the funds in the main sales account to pay creditors.

  Also, $2.5 million, the net after debts, was being wired the next day, separately, with Tahoe Sierra Title as trustee for a new escrow and trust account.

  Nina drove to Tahoe Sierra Title Company in a peculiar frame of mind. Too much was happening. She couldn’t catch hold of it; all she could do was surf along the ups and downs. Successful surfing involved staying in front of the wave, and she intended to follow her instincts and do the same with this case.

  On the Highway, sharing space with the biggest bank in town, the Tahoe Sierra Title building sat behind a large parking lot. She parked and got out of her RAV, wrapping her jacket around her in the wind that blew off the lake a few hundred feet away.

  Inside, Nelson Hendricks came out of his office to greet her, or shambled might be a better word. Maybe fifty, African-American, in good shape, lined and thin-lipped, he was formal and serious as he escorted her back to his office.

  The loveless place had eye-crossing horizontal blinds lowered halfway behind him as he sat down. The requisite family photo showed him with a wife and a cat, and three young girls, who Nina recalled were now adults.

  Nina remembered what Philip Strong had told her, that Hendricks’s wife had multiple sclerosis. The photo didn’t show her ill. She was an attractive Asian woman in her forties. Hendricks looked proud to be by her side.

  Hendricks’s hands shook slightly. Some people are nervous, some drink, and some slug down coffee. She didn’t know the source of his shakiness, but then again, she didn’t know him.

  “I have everything ready for you to sign,” he said. “Worked all weekend. The foreign connection and the court matter have made things somewhat complex. Here we go.” He laid the court order authorizing the escrow, various stipulations Nina and Mike Stamp had made, and title-company papers for the accounts in front of her. Nina went to work reading and signing. The papers made Hendricks the officer in charge of the escrow account, subject to further court order.

  The whole affair feels like a funeral, she thought, signing her name for the fifth time. “Has the wire transfer been finalized yet?” she asked.

  “The money’s wired but the bank won’t post the transfer until tomorrow.”

  “What’s the interest rate on the trust account?”

  He looked at the papers. “Small. Sad.”

  Close to zero, Nina noted. The minuscule amounts would be rolled back into the account. Nina regarded Hendricks thoughtfully.

  He felt her gaze and moved uneasily in his chair. “Is something wrong?”

  “I think something is. What about you? Do you think something’s wrong?”

  “Well, yeah. A lot’s wrong.” He ran a hand over his scalp. “My wife—she fell down the stairs at our condo last night and she may have a concussion.”

  “I’m so sorry. That’s wrong for both of you. She probably depends on you very much.”

  “As soon as we finish here, I go home. I’ll take care of her like I always do.”

  “Philip Strong mentioned that your wife has MS. Was her fall related to that?”

  “Everything relates to that.”

  “My mother had several chronic illnesses,” Nina said, surprising herself.

  “MS?”

  “A group of conditions, really. All bad.”

  “How old was she when she realized—” He asked her a number of questions about her mother, which Nina tried to answer as honestly as she felt she could without tearing up.

  “I find it hard to accept that my wife is going through such terrible changes. We looked forward to retirement. We made so many plans.”

  “Philip Strong said she was diagnosed very recently. It’s a shock at first. Later, you’ll figure out what the two of you can or can’t do. It becomes part of life, and you make accommodations.”

  “A shock that shakes up a lifetime of dreaming. The shock that changes everything. Philip shouldn’t have told you.”

  “I saw you were upset at court that day. He only offered an explanation.”

  “He shouldn’t have! Besides, it’s nothing to be ashamed of! It’s a matter of privacy!”

  “Tell him to keep it private in the future, then. Philip also mentioned that you know his investigator. How long have you known Eric?”

  “Brinkman? Not long.”

  “I’ve been wondering who recommended Sierra Title to handle the escrow.”

  Hendricks took a drink of water and mumbled something. He appeared hugely stressed, and it might well all be connected to his wife, but Nina felt a duty to press him now, find out if he was part of the skein that had to be unraveled before she and Philip could move on with their own lives.

  “We’ve done business here in South Lake Tahoe for two decades. Michael Stamp’s firm has used us for years. They mentioned us. And Eric mentioned us to Phil Strong also. I already knew
Phil, of course. We’re old-timers, used to play golf together years ago. I’m happy to say that Sierra Title has a good reputation and we handle escrows for many large business transactions in town.”

  “Did you ask Eric to recommend you to Mr. Strong?”

  Hendricks pushed his chair away. “How’s that your business? What’s going on here? I thought you came here to get the paperwork signed. Now you have this accusatory tone, as if I’ve done something wrong.”

  “How badly did you want this deal, Mr. Hendricks?”

  His nose seemed to be running now. He ran a handkerchief along it. “What are you suggesting? In twenty years, I have never been accused of a crime. Our firm has an impeccable reputation. Yet, you come in here, suspicious with no reason at all. I mean, who are you, anyway? Another little lady lawyer scraping out a meager existence up here, defending drug dealers, petty thieves, and wife beaters. I confess, I’m totally at a loss as to how to deal with you.”

  “Don’t deal with me. Just tell the truth. You know more than you want to say about all this.”

  “Perhaps you’re overinvested emotionally in this case. I know about your relationship with the Strongs and about your husband, and actually I have been a bit worried about your ability to withstand the stress. I’ve done nothing improper. I’ve done nothing I’m ashamed of. You’re out of line, coming in here with catty insinuations based on nothing.”

  She recognized the strategy: attack, never defend. Her father, Harlan, always recommended that course. She leaned forward and said slowly and deliberately, “Something is very wrong with this deal, Mr. Hendricks, and I would think you’d be alarmed.”

  “Oh, I’m alarmed, but not about the deal. I’m alarmed about you.” He stood up and opened the door, saying nothing, with the expression of one much put-upon. His hand went into his pants pocket, then came out as he adjusted his pose. She didn’t shake it.