Poppy Harmon Investigates

by Lee Hollis

  Never once did they inquire about their dates or their interests or any stories they might want to share.

  It was as if Poppy and Iris weren’t even there.

  These two drinking buddies were too busy enjoying each other’s company to be bothered with paying any attention to their dates for the evening.

  Which was fine by Poppy, because when she did interject something or ask a question, suddenly Buddy would focus on her and try to play footsie with her under the table. It was far preferable that he just forgot she was even present at the table.

  After polishing off a bottle of pinot noir before their appetizers, Hawaiian ahi tacos and pan-seared jumbo scallops, Farley and Buddy quickly moved on to hard liquor, downing one scotch on the rocks after the other, their voices getting louder with each war story about bedding—or trying to—one Hollywood starlet after another.

  Iris didn’t even try to suppress a yawn.

  But neither man noticed.

  After the shockingly tall waiter arrived with their entrées, Poppy simply focused on her roasted Scottish salmon and garlic shrimp. Normally, she would avoid garlic while on a date, but tonight she had requested extra garlic, hoping it might be an impediment to any of Buddy’s awkward advances post-meal. She was certain Iris could take care of herself, easily discouraging any unwanted moves from Farley with a devastating taunt or, if need be, her hammy German fists.

  Poppy knew they were here on a mission, and with time elapsing, she racked her brain to try to come up with a smooth, subtle way to steer the conversation toward the recent spate of break-ins at the Palm Leaf Retirement Village.

  In the end, she needn’t have worried.

  Iris took the reins with a far more direct approach.

  “Hey, Farley, did you break into your ex-wife’s house and steal her jewelry?”

  Farley instantly stopped talking about the time he flew to Hawaii to appear in The Jim Nabors Polynesian Extravaganza and nearly picked up Pat Benatar at the bar in the Hilton Hawaiian Village, and shifted in his seat toward Iris. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me. Where were you on the seventeenth of last month?”

  There was an awkward silence.

  Poppy stabbed at her last garlic shrimp with her fork and popped it in her mouth.

  “I don’t know.... I don’t keep a diary . . . ,” Farley said, suddenly flustered. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because as a temporary resident of the Palm Leaf, I don’t want some burglar plundering my valuables, so if it’s you, I want to know now.”

  “Why on earth would you think I’m some kind of thief?”

  “Because you keep answering my questions by asking questions and not giving any answers, and quite frankly, I find that highly suspicious,” Iris said, her eyes boring into him.

  “And I thought Poppy was the detective,” Buddy cracked.

  “What?” Farley sputtered.

  Poppy sighed.

  She was hoping Buddy had forgotten about that little tidbit when they met at Shirley Fox’s cabaret act.

  Her cover was now blown, and Farley appeared ready to bolt.

  Iris quickly grabbed his hand and raised it to her face. “Yes, she may be, but I’m the one who wants to know. Can you blame a girl for wanting to know if I’m dating a criminal?”

  Farley raised an eyebrow.

  Dating?

  He was suddenly intrigued.

  But he was also a bit more than a little tipsy at this point and had no idea how to respond. He sat at the table like a little boy who’d been scolded by his teacher for acting out in class. “I want to reassure you, Iris, but honestly, I don’t know where I was last night, let alone last month.... But I can promise you I was nowhere near—”

  “I’d just feel more comfortable knowing it’s not you,” Iris said, suddenly a seductive tone in her voice. “That way, after dinner, I won’t have any inhibitions when we get back to your place.”

  Poppy nearly choked on her garlic shrimp.

  “Yes, ma’am, and I want to put your mind at ease . . . but honestly, I don’t recall.... When was it?”

  “The seventeenth,” Iris said.

  “The seventeenth,” he repeated. “That was what day . . . ?”

  Iris checked the calendar on her phone. “It was a Saturday—”

  “Farley, you were with me!” Buddy interrupted. “That was the weekend we hung out at the Spa Resort Casino and played the slots with those two divorcées from Toledo!”

  “That’s right!” Farley said, slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Now I remember!”

  “How late were you there?”

  “All night . . . well, until about three in the morning, when we got separated from the girls . . .”

  Ditched was probably a more accurate description.

  “Then we both took an Uber home.”

  The burglary was discovered long before 3:00 a.m.

  “Do you have witnesses?” Iris asked.

  “Well, you can call the Toledo broads, but the number they gave me didn’t work when I tried to call them the next day to invite them to lunch.”

  Big surprise.

  “We will check the casino’s security camera footage,” Iris promised.

  “Fine. Go ahead,” Farley said, shrugging. “In the meantime, you’re just going to have to trust me.”

  He reached over and tried grabbing Iris’s hand one more time.

  And once again she slapped it away.

  Hard.

  But he was too drunk to feel the pain.

  So Farley’s alibi was airtight.

  Or at least Poppy expected it to be.

  They didn’t seem at all worried that the Spa Resort Casino’s security cameras would tell a different story.

  Now the challenge was, how could they ditch these two drooling, obnoxious lotharios, like those tourists from Toledo obviously did?

  Poppy was impressed to discover that Iris had that detail already covered.

  Suddenly, Violet appeared at the table, her face flushed with anger. “Farley, how could you?”

  “I’m sorry. . . . Who are you . . . ?” Farley asked.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised you don’t remember. You were as drunk as a skunk the other night, when you told me that you loved me!” Violet wailed.

  “I . . . what?”

  Iris played along. “You told this woman you loved her? And all along I thought you and I shared something special.”

  “We do . . . ,” Farley said, fumbling for what was left of his drink.

  “We met at the Spa Resort Casino last week, and he said he had never met a woman like me! He told me he wanted to marry me,” Violet sobbed.

  “What? Farley, how could you?” Iris wailed. “All these stories about all the women you’ve dallied with over the years. I thought what you were really trying to tell me was that they meant nothing to you, that they were just a bit of fun until you met that special one! How could you be so cruel? You made me believe I was her, the one you had long been waiting for, ever since our eyes first met in Germany, and now we were finally reunited after all these years apart!”

  “I’ve never seen this woman before in my life . . . ,” Farley bellowed, pointing at Violet, utterly confused. “I swear!”

  “So I meant nothing to you!” Violet screamed, loud enough to turn heads at the surrounding tables. “I should have known better than to get involved with someone in show business!” Violet marched over to him and slapped him hard across the face with the back of her hand.

  This time, Poppy guessed, he felt it.

  He rubbed the red welt on his left cheek with his fingers.

  Violet stormed off.

  Iris stood up. “I had such high hopes for tonight. And once again, you’ve left me heartbroken, Farley.”

  She followed Violet out.

  “What just happened?” Farley asked, truly perplexed.

  Poppy pushed back her chair and grabbed her purse.

&nbs
p; “Wait . . . Where are you going?” Buddy asked.

  “Home.”

  “But I didn’t do anything.”

  “No, but I can’t say I’m impressed with the company you keep. Good night, Buddy.”

  Poppy raced to catch up with Iris and Violet.

  The host with the face full of nips and tucks intercepted her. “No dessert?”

  “Not tonight,” Poppy said before turning and pointing to Farley and Buddy, who sat dumbfounded at the table, wondering how their romantic evening had suddenly gone so violently off the rails. “They’re ready for the check.”

  She ran out to Violet’s car, which was where Iris and Violet were waiting for her.

  And for the first time, Poppy felt like her trio of mature lady detectives was working together as a very effective team.

  Maybe there was hope for the Desert Flowers Detective Agency.

  Chapter 29

  The iconic Plaza Theatre in downtown Palm Springs was once host to the world-famous Fabulous Palm Springs Follies show, a Broadway-caliber production celebrating the music, films, and television programs of the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, with a cast old enough to have lived through every period to which they paid tribute. The seasoned performers included dancers from The Carol Burnett Show; retired showgirls from the Vegas Strip’s early days, still doing high kicks well into their seventies; and old-timer comedians whose last TV appearances were on classic seventies game shows like Match Game and Hollywood Squares. The Follies was reliably hosted by popular performers from yesteryear, like Maureen McGovern, who would perform her crowd-pleasing pop hits, such as “Can You Read My Mind?” from Superman: The Movie and “The Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure. The theater, a historic landmark, closed in 2014 and now was rented only sporadically for special events, such as today’s tribute to the career of Shirley Fox for her friends and fans.

  Shirley had at first resisted such a tribute because, after all, she wasn’t dead yet, but a small but rabidly loyal Shirley Fox fan club, still going strong after all these years, had insisted and had raised the money to pay for renting the theater, so she had finally succumbed to their relentless begging.

  In the lobby, attendees lined up at the cash bar, while inside the theater, on the large screen, a compilation of clips from all of Shirley’s classic films unspooled to raucous laughter and enthusiastic applause from the barely half-full theater. Following many of her best scenes from her short but impressive list of musical films, the tribute reel highlighted her work on her popular TV series from the 1970s and displayed a few scenery-chewing scenes from a handful of issue-oriented TV movies.

  Immediately following the screening, an endless parade of Shirley’s former costars, writers, and directors were introduced to tell their own personal anecdotes about Shirley. It was a who’s who of the Hollywood directory from forty years ago, at least those still healthy and spry enough to make it to the theater. One by one they filed up on the stage and stood in front of a podium and microphone. Poppy was interested in hearing from the first three, but then, as they kept coming for what seemed like an eternity, the stories began blending together, and she could tell the audience was getting bored and restless.

  The evening hit a low note when one crazy-eyed, heavily made-up actress with a giant pink bow in her hair, who was well known for her dumb blond roles, bounced up on the stage. She had costarred with Shirley in one of her more modest hits, Senator Hot Pants, in which Shirley played a ditzy beautician who on a whim runs for senator and actually wins and then storms Washington with her wild ideas to make America Beautiful Again and winds up marrying the president. Not a classic on par with All the President’s Men, but it did garner Shirley a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical. The speaker onstage at the Plaza Theatre played Shirley’s teenage apprentice at the beauty shop and disappeared from the movie after the first ten minutes. Still, she had a lot of stories to tell, and all of them were about herself. She had been talking now for twenty-two minutes, and she still hadn’t mentioned Shirley.

  As the over-the-hill starlet droned on and on, Poppy prayed the power would go out in the old dusty theater and they would have to wrap up the tribute early, any excuse to stop listening to this self-involved crackpot, who at the moment was detailing how her twelve-step program saved her life. Luckily, Violet was the one who answered Poppy’s prayers as she scurried down the aisle, excusing herself as she stepped past the audience members filling the row, until she reached Poppy and plopped down next to her.

  Violet leaned into Poppy and whispered in her ear. “I just came from the management office that handles the Palm Leaf.”

  “Were they willing to talk to you?”

  “Yes. I told them I was an insurance investigator working with several home owners who have policies with my company.”

  Poppy stared at Violet, dumbfounded. “When did you become such a good liar?”

  Violet chose to ignore her. “The management company always does extensive background checks on all their employees, their maintenance crew, pool cleaners, the waitstaff and bar staff at the clubhouse, and none showed any signs of criminal activity. Most of them have been working there for years.”

  “What about the visitors’ log?”

  “The company insists they have very tight security at the complex, and they make copies of the driver’s licenses of all visitors entering the property, to keep track of who comes and goes. They’ve run through all of those and didn’t come up with any red flags. The woman I spoke to firmly believes that the thief is someone who has regular access through one of the residents.”

  “But if it’s the daughter or son or grandson or third cousin of one of the permanent residents, that still wouldn’t explain how he or she got inside all those houses with no sign of forced entry.”

  “I mentioned that to her, and she’s as baffled as we are,” Violet said.

  They suddenly heard a throat clearing from up on the stage and slowly turned to see the bouncy blonde with the caked makeup and pink bow in her hair glaring at them. She could obviously hear them whispering and was not amused that she did not have everyone’s full attention.

  Poppy and Violet, who were huddled together, both pulled away from each other and snapped back in their seats, pretending to be riveted on the blonde’s sleep-inducing anecdotes.

  After a brief pause to make sure everyone in the audience was focused on her, pink-bow blonde continued with her story. Now she was in Nepal, in search of the Dalai Lama.

  Out of the side of her mouth, Violet said in a hushed tone, “If the management company and the staff are in the clear, then someone who lives at the Palm Leaf or is there every day must have found a way to bypass all the alarm codes and has somehow gotten copies of everyone’s house keys!”

  “How is that possible?” Poppy muttered under her breath.

  Violet shrugged.

  After telling one last excruciating tale of a fateful encounter with Warren Beatty and how he encouraged her to go back to acting—and now she was looking for an agent to jump-start her career and would be in the lobby after the tribute to talk to any producers or agents who might be interested—pink-bow blonde finally wrapped it up.

  She looked visibly disappointed by the mere smattering of applause for her speech, although Poppy clapped her hands as hard as she could, because she was so grateful that the woman was finally exiting the stage. The host, an affable middle-aged man with bushy brown hair, which, Poppy suspected, was a toupee, and who was one of Shirley’s biggest fans, bounded over to the podium. After talking about the biography he was working on with Shirley’s blessing, he finally got to the business of introducing the guest of honor.

  “Shirley has touched so many lives during her long and celebrated career, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface today when it comes to detailing her plethora of accomplishments as an actress, a singer, a dancer, and a humanitarian. But it’s finally time to hear from the living legend hersel
f, so without further ado . . .”

  Before Shirley had a chance to stand up and make her way to the stage, Olivia Hammersmith blew past her, glass of champagne in hand, and stumbled up on the stage. She nearly pushed the host out of the way as she took her place behind the podium and in front of the microphone, a tote bag slung over her shoulder.

  She took a generous swig of champagne.

  Definitely not her first glass.

  “I suppose you all know me . . . ,” Olivia slurred, obviously blotto.

  Polite applause from the nervous audience members, who were on the edge of their seats, waiting for what was about to happen.

  “I’m Olivia Hammersmith.”

  A few people clapped again, in case she hadn’t heard them the first time.

  “I missed a lot of the speeches because I was out in the lobby, enjoying my bubbly, but I could never forgive myself if I missed out on the opportunity to say a few words about my dear friend Shirley.”

  Poppy’s eyes fell on Shirley, who was seated several rows down toward the front, and she could see her visibly tense up.

  First Buddy at the Purple Room and now Olivia at the playhouse.

  Shirley had been plagued by hecklers lately.

  The host stood skittishly a few feet from Olivia, eyeing her with growing concern, desperately trying to figure out a way to give the old bag the hook without looking like a bully.

  “You know, Shirley, standing up here, in front of these bright lights, suddenly I’m drawing a blank. I’m at a loss for words,” Olivia said.

  An audible sigh of relief from the audience.

  Olivia reached into her tote bag and pulled out a thick manuscript with an elastic band wrapped around the middle. “Luckily, I have this to jog my memory.”

  The welcoming sense of relief was quickly replaced by a palpable tension.

  Everyone suddenly expected the worst.

  And Olivia Hammersmith did not disappoint.

  She dropped the manuscript on the podium with a thud and plucked her reading glasses from the pocket in her skirt and then gave the audience a big smile before she began reading.