Die in Plain Sight

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Niall grunted. “Lovely.”

  “Wait until you see them. Anyway, we were exhibiting one of them tonight, a blonde being drowned in a spa, when Bliss Forrest told Lacey that the woman in the painting was wearing the same bracelet that belonged to her mother, who died in her spa.”

  “Murder?” Niall asked sharply.

  “Not according to the public knowledge.”

  “So you’re taking a vacation to investigate a murder that didn’t happen?”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Ian said.

  “Bloody hell.” Then he sighed. “Go on, boyo. I’m sitting down.”

  “Even though it’s not a Rarities problem, I’d like permission to access your computers. I could get the same information out of the county library archives, but it would—”

  “Take three times as long,” Niall interrupted impatiently. “You have clearance for the computers. Go in through the address I’ll leave in your e-mail. Do you have the skill or do you need Research?”

  “I hope not. I can’t afford your rates.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Just thanks.”

  “No worries. Susa thinks the sun shines out your arse, which makes us look like geniuses with the Donovan.”

  The cell phone went dead with Niall’s usual lack of ceremony. Ian hesitated, then called his great-uncle in Bakersfield. After a lifetime in law enforcement, Carl Lapstrake’s hours were unpredictable. Tonight he must have been up late watching TV, because he answered on the first ring.

  “Well, which one of my ten thousand relatives is it this time?” asked a raspy voice.

  “Great-nephew Ian. How’s it going, Gr’uncle?”

  “’Bout like always this time of year. Tule fog is hanging on. Must have had fifty wrecks on the highways this week.”

  “Ouch.” Driving code-three in the kind of fog that hid the front end of your own squad car was something no cop liked to do, but if you worked in California’s Great Central Valley, sooner or later you had to do just that. “Bet you’re glad you’re retired.”

  “Some days I like it better than others. What do you want?”

  Ian grinned to himself. So much for small talk. His grandfather’s brother was famous for being downright curt unless he was feeling talkative. He maintained he was much too old to waste time making nice.

  “I’ve got some questions about Moreno County,” Ian said. “Thought maybe you and cousin Chuck could help me out, since you both put in some time in uniform there.”

  “Long time ago. Hell, gotta be forty years now.”

  “At least. But you spent ten years down in Moreno County and Chuck spent, what, five?”

  “Twelve for me, six for my nephew. What do you need?”

  “Some background, mostly. If Moreno County is like the one I grew up in, the local deputies know who’s buying, who’s lying, who’s screwing somebody he shouldn’t, that sort of thing. The Moreno County sheriff, Rory Turner, is affable enough, but not real forthcoming, if you know what I mean.”

  “Rory, huh? Let me think.”

  While his great-uncle thought, Ian punched the built-in record button on his cell phone. If the old man got going, he was a regular talking encyclopedia.

  “Rory, Rory,” Carl muttered to himself. “Oh, yeah. Got it. Must be Morley Forrest’s son’s gofer.”

  Ian opened his mouth to ask for clarification, but Carl was still talking.

  “The Savoy family is always tight with whoever is the county sheriff. Hell, they elected ’em, and a lot of the other county and state officials in the bargain.”

  “Morley Forrest,” Ian said when Carl paused. “Is that Ward Forrest’s father?”

  “Yeah. Named after Davina’s father.”

  “Davina?”

  “Davina Berentson, Morley’s wife, a socialite type. Benford Savoy the Second was Morley’s real good friend, introduced him to the right people. Berentson was one of ’em. Morley Forrest wasn’t even a shirttail cousin to money, but he knew how to be useful. Savoy money got Morley elected sheriff and then DA and then state attorney general. Morley might have been born rough, but nobody ever said that boy was stupid. When he wasn’t sheriff, Ward was, and then whoever Ward’s handpicked man was. Rory Turner, that’s right.”

  Ian listened hard. If he interrupted to ask where Carl was going with all this, they’d never get there.

  “It was real useful to the family while I was there,” Carl summarized.

  “What was?”

  “Having Sheriff Morley Forrest in their pocket.”

  “Nothing new about wealth and ambitious politicians in bed together,” Ian said. “Common as house dust.”

  “Yeah, well, the Savoy family worked it like a cow at milking time. When Three—that’s the Savoy son—drove off a ranch cliff late one night, the coroner, who was also the sheriff, didn’t mention the fact that Three was higher than a kite when he died. ‘Mechanical failure’ was tagged as the cause of the accident.”

  “You’re saying there wasn’t much of an investigation.”

  “Much? Shit, boy, there wasn’t no investigation to speak of. Worst police work I ever saw. Same thing when some artist died a few days later on the ranch. The guy had a reputation as a drinker, a womanizer, and was one of Three’s pals.”

  “Artist? He died on the ranch?”

  “Yeah. He had a shack or a studio there.”

  “Would the artist’s name be Lewis Marten?” Ian asked.

  “Sounds about right. I can check.”

  “Don’t bother. What happened with the artist?”

  “According to the investigation, he was drinking and painting and smoking. Passed out and the place burned to ash, along with himself. Nobody claimed what was left, so the Savoy widow stepped up and did the decent thing and buried the remains.”

  “This was, what, a couple days after Three died?” Ian asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Must have been pretty hard on the widow, two deaths in such a short time.”

  “If gossip is true, it was damned hard on her. Not losing her husband particularly—hell, they never got along worth spit—but losing the artist. Rumor had it that he was her lover before she married. Some people say he was her lover after, too.”

  Ian’s eyebrows lifted. Nothing like a little adultery to piss a man off enough to think about violence. “How did Three feel about that?”

  “Didn’t much care. He was one of them men who only liked professional gals.”

  “Hookers?”

  “As ever was,” Carl said, chuckling hoarsely. “’Course, the amount he drank, it probably took a pro to get him up to the mark. That man was a nonstop party. Spent money hand over fist on his hangers-on.”

  “But Three didn’t mind if his wife got some sex on the side?”

  “Nope. The gossips were real disappointed there.”

  “So there wouldn’t have been any reason to dump good old Three over a cliff to make way for another husband?”

  “Widow never remarried,” Carl said.

  “Well, there goes that theory. How about lovers?”

  “None that lasted. Widow Savoy was real close to Morley Forrest, though. Made him her adviser. Some folks talked, but some folks have nothing to do except work their tongues.”

  “You don’t think she was Morley’s lover?” Ian asked.

  “Hell, nobody loved that son of a bitch. I think she was almost scared of him. He’d say ‘Jump,’ and she jumped. So did a lot of people. Morley was the kind of man even the devil would tiptoe around. Righteous, churchgoing, harder than Lucifer, and twice as ambitious. Even when Three was alive, Morley pretty much ran the county and the Savoy family money.”

  “Other than two badly investigated society accidents, anything else wrong with the local deputies back then?”

  “Three.”

  “Three Savoy?”

  “Three accidents. A few days before Gem Savoy announced her engagement to Ward Forrest, the old matriarch—the
wife of the first Benford Savoy—got in a snit and raced off on her favorite hunter like she was sixteen instead of seventy-six. Took one jump too many and broke her skinny neck.”

  “Who was she arguing with?”

  “Her daughter-in-law, who was pushing for Gem Savoy—that would be Three’s daughter—to marry Ward Forrest, Morley’s son. The old lady felt the Forrests were beneath the Savoys, even though she’d depended on Morley since her own husband had died in a hunting accident.”

  Ian frowned. “A hunting accident?”

  “It was before my time. Bunch of drunks shooting pheasant. Benford the Second tripped and blew his fool head off. Stupid to mix booze and shotguns, but fools do it every year and some of ’em get hurt.”

  “Seems like the Savoys have had a lot of bad luck with booze.”

  “The newspapers and gossips call it the Savoy Curse. I call it stupidity. Any cop can tell you that booze or drugs cause damn near a hundred percent of the ‘bad luck’ cops get paid to clean up after.”

  Ian didn’t disagree. It was one of the reasons he no longer worked for city, county, state, or federal police. He’d been real tired of cleaning up after stupid drunks who weren’t a hell of a lot smarter when they woke up sober in a cell where the cement floor was covered with puke on good nights and shit on the rest of them.

  “Any other dirt on the Moreno County cops?” Ian asked.

  “Oh, the usual. A handful of local police taking protection money, winking at gambling and prostitution, after-hours drinking, that kind of thing.”

  “Sounds pretty normal. Not pretty, just normal. So why did you and Chuck quit the department within a few days of each other and move back to Bakersfield?”

  There was such a long pause that Ian thought he wasn’t going to get an answer to his question. In the background he could hear a commercial for denture cleaner on Carl’s TV. The old man was hard of hearing and wouldn’t admit it, so his TV was loud enough to scare sheep. Fortunately he lived out in the countryside with cattle, and they didn’t give a damn.

  “I was on duty when Three and the artist died,” Carl said finally. “I was new to the county and I’d been butting heads with one of the other deputies over the correct way to investigate an unattended death. Morley came in, booted me out, and got on with it. Same thing on the artist’s death. If it happened on Savoy Ranch, it was Morley’s. He did the investigation, wrote the reports, and if you didn’t like it you could find another job.”

  “Again, not pretty but normal,” Ian said. “Money buys a lot of special attention.”

  “Yeah, well, twelve years later I was on duty the afternoon the older Mrs. Savoy died. I was doing the routine death scene investigation and things weren’t adding up real well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was following the horse’s tracks. It spooked, went sideways about five feet, like something had jumped out from a bush, except that the ground was swept clean. There was some broken shrubbery farther on where the old woman landed, got to her hands and knees, stood, walked about ten feet, and then fell.”

  “Yet she died of a broken neck?” Ian asked.

  “That’s what the coroner’s report said.”

  “I can’t see her getting up and wandering around with a broken neck.”

  “Neither could I, and I said so,” Carl muttered. “Sheriff told me he’d seen stranger things fighting his way through the South Pacific during the war.”

  Ian chewed on that for a minute. Again, it wasn’t something he could argue with—during times of extreme adrenaline, people sometimes performed feats that could only be called miraculous.

  “What about other tracks?”

  “Everybody with feet tramped around the scene. Anyway, I didn’t find any human tracks besides hers. The ground was real clean.”

  “You think somebody tidied it up?”

  “Could be,” Carl said. “The sheriff wasn’t much impressed by the idea. It was windy, the ground was dry. Never prove it either way now.”

  “Who found her?”

  “Some ranch hand. Must’ve scared him to death. He went back to Mexico the next day.”

  “Did he talk with the sheriff first?” Ian asked.

  “That’s what the report says.”

  “What do you say?”

  Again there was a pause so long that Ian wondered if Carl was going to answer. This time the TV was selling adult diapers and Caribbean cruises. Ian wondered if his great-uncle was watching reruns of The Love Boat.

  “I didn’t want any part of it,” Carl said. “None of it. Not the investigation that was a joke, not the pampering of the Savoy family. I’d had a gut full of the whole damn shootin’ match.”

  “What about Gem Savoy Forrest’s death?” Ian asked.

  “I was long gone by then.”

  “No contacts in the sheriff’s department when it happened?”

  “What are you after?” Carl asked.

  “There’s a painting of a woman being murdered in a spa. The woman is a blonde. The bracelet she’s wearing resembles one that once belonged to Gem Savoy, who died about nine years ago in her spa.”

  “Shee-it. Where’d the painting come from?”

  “Legacy from a young woman’s grandfather.”

  “Any connection to the Savoys?” Carl asked.

  “No. Just a suggestion that whoever painted it could be the killer.”

  “Is the case still open?”

  “It was ruled as an accidental death—prescription drugs, alcohol, and too much hot water,” Ian said. “An accident. Happens all the time among the rich and bored.”

  “Yeah, it sure does. Where do you fit in?”

  “I’m…” Ian’s voice died. The personal part of it was most important but hardest to explain. “The young woman, the one who inherited the painting?”

  “Yeah?”

  “She wants to know how it came to be painted, and why.”

  “Boy, you know you’re one of my favorite relatives.”

  Ian waited. When his great-uncle started talking about family, it meant things were serious.

  “I’m going to tell you the same thing I told Chuck forty years ago. There’s something wrong in Moreno County. Too many deaths. Not enough police work. Ain’t nothing changed. Stay away from it, boy.”

  Ian thought about Lacey. “I can’t.”

  “Then clean your gun and watch your back.”

  John Wayne Airport

  Sunday morning

  49

  Struggling not to yawn after too many hours spent querying Rarities computer files and worrying about Carl’s warning, Ian was about cross-eyed. If he read one more breathless account of the Savoy Curse, he was going to puke. If there was any hint, any suspicion, any rumor of murder it hadn’t made print. Suicide, sure, it was between the lines in every story about Gem Savoy Forrest’s death.

  Murder?

  Never heard of it.

  So he’d taken it from another direction—finding out more about Lacey’s grandfather. Since he hadn’t been a powerful scion of a drunken family, chances were good that any dirt on him would have made it into public reports.

  Wrong again.

  Either the man was as clean as angel crap or he’d never been caught dirty by anyone who left a record.

  Which was another problem. Official records dealing with David No-Middle-Name Quinn didn’t appear until the guy had to be at least forty. Granted, the time before computers wasn’t as easy to access as after, but there still should have been something about David NMN Quinn.

  Burying another yawn, Ian waited while Susa and Lacey hugged with real warmth, obviously reluctant to say good-bye. He had a fistful of old-fashioned notes on a notepad in his denim jacket and a head full of possibilities that went nowhere.

  Like my investigation of David NMN Quinn. No matter how he tickled the data or the questions, everything leading back into the past ended up at a blank wall. Or maybe it’s just my mind that’s blank

  Ian shi
fted impatiently. He wasn’t a skilled computer researcher, but he should have been able to get routine things like date of birth, date of death, cause of death, driver’s license, tax records, and all the other numbers that made up a citizen’s life.

  I’ll try again tonight. The stuff’s there. I’m just thickheaded right now