“She’ll be fine but it’ll be a long recovery. Why, what, you seem so much better than her?”
He smiled sheepishly.
“We met at a car show, she was a model. I was swept away for an instant and when I woke up, she was living with me and demanding all sorts of things. I just wanted peace, so when a friend told me about a way to use cars to make some quick money on the side, I took it. I know I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t just throw her out on the street. I hoped that after a bit she would just tire of me and move on.”
“I take it she didn’t.”
“Worse, she had snooped enough to know I was into something illegal and she held that over my head. Cost me everything I had.”
“So her visa expiring was a gift from the heavens?”
“I had to tell her that I’d go with her, we’d take a long vacation and then decide where to live. Even though I knew that this was my one and only chance to escape her. I will never forget Rosa, and I will never forgive Tala if she killed her. But at least I can turn myself in, set the record straight about everything and go from there.”
I nodded. He suddenly looked like a scared little boy sitting cross-legged on the rug.
“I am so sorry that you have had to keep proving your innocence to the cops about the murder. I can’t tell you how often I wanted to tell you the truth, but Tala had me on a very short leash.”
I wondered if the time I caught him spying on me at my office window was one of those occasions.
“Let me call Augie and have him meet you, he’ll be the most understanding. And if you can testify to Rosa’s murderer and who actually shot Sally, that should go a long way to getting some leniency.”
“Grazie,” he said, placing his hands together in prayer.
Is this really over? Can I breathe again?
Chapter 33
It was Burger & Chimay night at the Carbon Beach Club, the delectable terrace restaurant that hangs over the sand of the Malibu Beach Inn. The heat lamps and the mild temperature made it a perfect spot to watch the December sunset.
Both of us were sad that we weren’t going home for Christmas, but it just wasn’t in the cards this year. Jack and I agreed that we would celebrate the holidays by kicking back and treating ourselves to some really nice meals. This was the first one.
Served on a wooden plank, my mouthwatering gourmet burger was held together by an impressive steak knife speared through the middle. I’d lost about nine pounds from the ordeal of the past few weeks, so I happily ordered mine with bleu cheese, bacon, and extra avocado. I’m not a big beer drinker, but Chimay is an authentic Trappist dark ale brewed by monks who have renounced all the pleasures of normal life to stay in an abbey and live off the land. Slowly poured into an icy stemmed snifter, this copper-colored elixir with a creamy head and fruity apricot aroma had me at “bonjour.”
“So—”
“Don’t talk, just eat.”
My eyes were closed so that I could properly absorb the heavenly combination of fat, starch, red meat, alcohol, and salt air. And I certainly didn’t want the soothing sound of breaking waves muffled by idle chitchat. I could sense that Jack was watching me but I didn’t give him the benefit of a look. After about five minutes, I opened my eyes and the table for discussion.
“You know you were humming while you were chewing, right?”
“I was not!”
“You certainly were,” Jack said, laughing. “And that shiner becomes you, by the way.”
“I’m not admitting to anything but this really is perfect, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I wasn’t sure for a while that we would ever have this.”
“Jack, you know that I come off as an easygoing person, but when I get pushed too far look out.”
“I do now.”
Jack’s cell phone went off.
“Excuse me a minute,” he said after seeing who the caller was. He walked down the short flight of stairs to the beach.
“Oh crap,” I whispered to myself, thinking it was probably the ex-girlfriend again. I wasn’t worried about the possibility of them getting back together, our relationship was past that. But Jack has a big problem saying “no,” and she could be calling to have him come by and hang a picture on the wall for all I knew. He returned rather quickly, so maybe he’d gotten better at “no.”
“I don’t like that look on your face,” I said, seeing his hard expression.
“That was CARA. I’m so sorry but I’ve got to go,” he said, handing me a bunch of cash. “I need to take the truck, I’ve got Clarence in the back. Can you have them call you a cab to take you home?”
“Sure, what’s happened?”
“They’re putting the sting together at the Marina, the DEA needs everyone there now for a briefing. We’ll use dogs to track and trap the dealers.”
He was already heading out when he turned back.
“Listen,” he said, kissing me. “Why don’t you go and stay with one of the girls until I can get back? Even going to Marisol’s would be safer than being home alone, just until we are sure that this has all blown over.”
“I’ll be fine,” I protested. “Tala, who we now know is the murderer, has left the country and you’ll be running down Ray and his people.”
“Okay. Also, I spoke to Ali and he agreed to talk to the DEA and make a deal to turn evidence. That should give us a time and a place so we can tie everything up.”
“Love you,” I said but he was already out of earshot.
* * *
I’d never actually been inside Marisol’s house; my experience was limited to what I could see from her doorstep and the time she quickly ushered Sally and me through to the backyard. Something just didn’t sit right with me when I got home, so I’d figured Marisol’s wacky mind would be a welcome distraction.
Bardot sure knew her way around the house. She was more than comfortable hopping up on Marisol’s king-size bed.
“Bardot, get down,” I shouted.
“It’s okay.”
“No it’s not. Bardot, you are a guest in this house, where are your manners?”
I suspect that she understood everything we said, which is why she remained standing on the bed with a big smile and lots of tail wags. She loved that Marisol was giving her a free pass.
“Jack called me a few minutes before I came over, he said he’s going to be awhile. We’ll just stay for a bit and then we’ll go home. Bardot and I will be fine.”
“You don’t look 100 percent sure; if it would make you feel better, you can sleep in one of the girls’ old rooms.”
I’d met a couple of her daughters when they visited for Thanksgiving; they were sweet and fully aware that their mom is a professional snoop.
“If she’s bothering you just let me know. I’ll tell Ms. Nosy Pants to back off. But just remember, she’s got your back, girl,” the oldest daughter Martha had told me.
Boy did I know that now. Marisol had gone from being a thorn in my side to a jewel in my crown. We walked down a hallway lined with photos to the kitchen. I couldn’t help but stop to take in a wedding photo. Every bride should be beautiful on her wedding day and Marisol was no exception. And her groom looked handsome and proud, almost regal. We’d never talked about him, so I pulled myself away and followed her into the other room.
“I’m making tea,” she said as I sat at the family kitchen table.
Bardot leapt up onto a barstool at the counter. I swear she had springs for legs.
“My family came to America in 1940. I was ten,” Marisol began.
“You don’t have to—”
“Javier’s family, same thing,” she continued, ignoring me. “We’d grown up on the same street in Mexico.”
The characteristic twinkle had gone out of her eyes.
“We did two big things when we turned eighteen. We became American citizens and we got married.”
“I love the wedding photo, such a beautiful couple.”
“In 1951 Javier was sent to Kor
ea. He was so proud to be fighting for America, he wore that damn uniform even before he needed to.”
“Had you started a family by then?”
“We had a one-year-old and twin baby girls.”
We moved to the living room to drink our tea. The TV, which was constantly on, had the sound muted.
“He got shot one week before he was coming home.”
I gasped.
“He had a bullet in his spine and them doctors said it was too dangerous to operate. He came home in a goddamn wheelchair.”
“Marisol, I’m so sorry.”
“They said he was an American hero, but that didn’t buy us shit once he was discharged.”
“Didn’t the service pay a pension or something?”
“Barely,” she said with a dry laugh. “But he couldn’t work, he couldn’t play with his girls, we couldn’t—”
She was tearing up and I thought I was going to lose it.
“One day he said he was going to lunch with a friend who came by and picked him up. Another guy back from Korea. I’d never seen him or heard about him before. When they drove off, I had one of them bad feelings.”
On the television was some kind of game show. Two people in arm and kneepads were fighting each other atop a slippery platform with giant Q-Tips. I tried my best to block that out.
“He never came back.”
She finally took a sip of her tea, relieved to have told me her story. She really did think of me as another daughter.
I moved onto the sofa and held her in my arms. Even Bardot recognized the sadness of the situation and gently licked her hand. My attention was drawn to the TV as a box with a black-and-white picture appeared in the top right corner of the screen.
“Ah-ha!” she said, jumping up and scaring me.
“What?”
“Shhh, somebody’s at Musso’s house.”
I looked at the screen and sure enough we were watching someone enter the house.
“Why you little sneaker!”
“I didn’t do this, my godson did. He just wants me to be safe. Now, where’s that damn remote?”
“You know how to work all this stuff?” She seemed to be more of an abacus and cave drawing gal.
“I’m still learning. Alex, that’s my godson, is teaching me. Don’t tell Augie, I have a feeling we shouldn’t have been in Musso’s house putting up cameras.”
Ya think?
She located a small device and pointed and clicked it at the television. The whole picture changed to the interior of the house.
“You’ve had the whole house wired?”
I made a mental note to check my house inside and out for cameras.
“Just recently. We thought that the house was empty, this was just in case someone came back.” She was grinning. It was hysterical to see this little old lady in a housedress running such an intricate espionage mission.
I looked closely at the screen. A light was turned on in the living room.
“That’s Musso,” I said.
“Someone else is coming through the door!” I swear that was a squeal.
My stomach sank and I felt my heart go into overdrive. Please let it not be Tala.
“That’s Augie, I wonder what he’s doing in there?” Marisol asked.
I let out a deep breath and sat her down to explain. When I’d finished it was Marisol’s turn to tell me her thoughts. She admitted to hating Tala with a passion, she’d be happy if she stayed gone or was hauled off to prison somewhere.
“But? I sense a ‘but.’ ”
“But I don’t think that she could have killed Rosa,” Marisol said sheepishly, looking down at her shoes.
“Why, what makes you so sure?”
“Well, you know how I like to keep any eye out, just in case anything happens on Rose Avenue?”
“I know that you have eyes like a hawk, both in front and in back of your head which you use to spy on us. I’m pretty sure that you have the whole street bugged for sound and visuals. And I suspect that somewhere under your house there is a safe room filled with computers operated by the women of the Bletchley Circle.”
She looked at me smug and slightly confused.
“Well?” I asked, getting frustrated.
“Well, that day I saw Tala quietly shut the front door to her house and walk up and wait in front of your house. Then a car pulled up and she got in. There was a guy driving.”
“So? She could still have come back and killed Rosa, and maybe this guy helped her. Maybe he was her new mark in case Musso didn’t work out?”
“Not possible because I followed them in my car. They drove up to the Palisades to a house. When they got out they were all kissing and flirting on their way inside. Made me sick. They played ‘hide the salami’ for almost two hours.”
Now I felt sick on so many levels.
“Crap,” I said after I’d sufficiently recovered. “Well, we know it wasn’t Musso, so I guess that Rosa’s brother Ray must have done it. So sad.”
We both knew that we were close to solving this, and that hopefully Jack and the DEA are right now catching the killer. We agreed to call Augie together in the morning.
* * *
This day had been exhausting and I couldn’t wait to crawl into bed, curl up with a dog, and slip into blissful slumber land. When we got inside, I didn’t even bother to turn on the light.
Bardot was uncharacteristically silent, sniffing softly into the air and creeping low along the floor. When she got to the hallway, I could just make out that she turned left into the den rather than right toward my room.
I heard a growl and then the loud, reverberating bang of a door slamming. Bardot then growled and barked like a rabid bear and I figured that she was behind the door in the den.
What or who had slammed the door?
“This is the last time that you mess with my business, New York. You should never have come here.”
I saw a woman’s hand in my face, and more importantly, a knife at my throat.
“You are going to be my insurance ticket out of here, missy. You owe me for ruining my nice little business, I can’t go anywhere without the cops on my heels.”
A second hand came around and placed a cloth over my nose. As I breathed in I felt my knees give way. Just before I landed I saw her familiar red shoes.
Chapter 34
I felt a chill and then a piercing headache. It was pitch black and my arms ached from being pressed under my body. I tried to sit up and hit my head on something above me. It was enough to make me black out for another minute or two. When I woke, I had that horrible numbing feeling from lack of circulation and tried arching my back and flexing my hands to get the blood flowing. That was when I realized that my hands were tied. All this started to knock something loose in my woozy mind, but I couldn’t quite get there.
I could hear talking, although it was faint. I tried to call for help and discovered that my mouth was taped. I quickly stopped as it dawned on me that the voices I heard might be coming from the people that put me in this condition.
“We’re on our way, baby,” I heard a male voice say.
“More than you know, honey,” a woman answered.
“Woohooooo!”
That didn’t sound good. I rolled over on one shoulder to give my back a break and tried to think back to the last thing I could remember. I was drawing a total blank. Instead, I decided to try and figure out where I was and how I could get out of this tight, dark space.
The good news was that my head was starting to clear. The bad news was that this meant that I was far more aware of what a lousy situation I was in.
I was still very disoriented, but I got the sense that this thing I was in was outside. I was pretty sure that I heard raindrops pinging off metal. Since I couldn’t use my hands to explore my space, I kicked off my shoes and figured I’d try the My Left Foot approach.
The floor and top were soft, like they were carpeted. On one side I felt something uneven with holes in
it. I was able to grab a piece with my toe and pull. It had some give and stretching ability. I knew this was a clue, but I couldn’t sit up or move enough to try and get a look at it. Instead, I closed my eyes and tried to picture what I was feeling. Just then I felt a jerk from below that bounced me off the bottom and back down.
I’m in something that is moving. That thing on the side was an expandable pocket to store things. I was riding in the trunk of a car!
But whose? And where was I going?
I tried to reposition my body to get more comfortable and felt something fall out of my pocket. Thankfully my hands were tied in front, so if I squirmed and crunched just right, I should be able to reach it.
Success! I was wearing sweats that had deep floppy pockets and whoever grabbed me must have missed my cell phone in one of them. I raised it up to my face and noticed that my earbuds were still attached to it. I struggled to put on the headphones and was about to dial 9-1-1 when it occurred to me that I don’t know where I am or whom I’m with.
And then I had an idea. In the middle of all the police investigations into my comings and goings, I had figured that I’d try and stay a step ahead, so I downloaded a fully robust police and other law enforcement scanner app. It was so fine-tuned that I was able to zero in on a specific area and choose which service I wanted to monitor. I chose the Beach Police and Marina del Rey, hoping to hear about Jack and his crew. I listened noiselessly through the earbuds.
I waited through reports of the smell of gas leaking at the Marina boat filling station and a possible stolen beach cruiser that the cops were pursuing.
Seaplane N9063M approaching south jetty 100 meters from breakwater, this is pilot Jack Thornton. ETA 2002.
Bingo! Hearing his voice made me feel much safer in spite of my current predicament.
Roger N9063M, are you carrying any passengers ?
Unfortunately more than I’d planned, three adult females and a canine that I am working with in search and rescue. Issue a BOLO for a fourth female arriving by car, will be asking about a possible kidnap victim named Halsey.
Full Bodied Murder Page 19