She propelled herself onto her side, willing her right leg to flop over the left and her right arm to get her right hand somewhere near the top of the bag. The shafts stuck out like tree trunks, and she easily latched onto the neck of the driver. She yanked as hard as her atrophying muscles would allow in an attempt to pull the club out of the bag, but it hit the side of the car after only a few inches. There was no way to get any club out of the bag unless the trunk was open.
Andy let gravity pull her back onto her butt and closed her increasingly drowsy eyes. She forced them open. Concentrate, she told herself. Focus on the problem. Be creative. It’s the one thing you’re good at. Her mind was still all over the place and so was her mouth. She was saying everything she was thinking out loud, just as she had back in the kitchen. But Tilda wasn’t here, so what did it matter?
Think of it as a scene, you idiot. What do you do when you can’t get a scene to work? You come at it from the opposite direction. Okay, okay. If I can’t use a club that’s inside the bag, is there a club outside the bag?
Oh, my god, you’re a genius, she said. And do you know why? Because you took your 4-iron out when you bought the new rescue club. It’s behind the bag, you clever devil, and you’re going to use it to kill Tilda Trivette before she kills you.
Another push rotated her onto her side again, and another reach brought her leaden arm in contact with the object of her desire. Andy fished with outstretched fingers until she felt the grooves in the blade. She grabbed onto the shaft as tightly as she could, and this time when she yanked, she got exactly what she wanted. The force of the movement rolled her onto her back again so that she was laid out like a body in a casket, clutching a graphite posy.
The car was slowing now, moving away from Interstate 5 and winding toward the recreation area that surrounded Castaic Dam. It was impossible to know exactly where in the park Tilda was taking her because there were two different bodies of water, a lake and a lagoon. What Andy did know was that she would only have one opportunity to swing the club, and it would have to happen the minute Tilda opened the trunk. If she neglected to make good contact on the first try, everything was over. There’d be no time to take a mulligan.
The problem was clubhead speed. If she remained on her back, she would have to get her arms and the club over her head and then hope she would have enough of an arc to build momentum. On the other hand, if she rolled back onto her side so that her rear end faced Tilda when she opened the trunk, Andy could put her deadweight in motion, rotating her hips and shoulders and squaring the club face at impact. If she did it correctly, the club and target would meet with full force in exactly the correct place; it was what male golfers euphemistically called hitting the ‘sweet spot.’
At last the car stopped, and the engine went silent. In what now seemed like excruciatingly slow motion, Andy once again tried to roll onto her side. It took a few moments to discover she wasn’t actually going anywhere. She started to rock herself back and forth, moving as many muscles as were still taking direction from her addled brain. She heard herself grunting and winced in anticipation of Tilda popping the lid before she was in position. Time barreled on. She could hear movement outside. Muffled sounds. A car door shutting. At last Andy was at address, club pointed upward, a neutral interlocking grip, and torso wound like a spring. It was going to be a remarkably powerful swing, she told herself, except for the fact that, with her head facing backward, she wouldn’t actually be able to see her target. She heard a breathy, mechanical thump and felt the rush of cool air, as the trunk lid opened. Too late to change her stance now.
Giving it every ounce of venom she still commanded, Andy hurled her unwieldy body from one side to another and let the club snap in her hands like a wet towel. A deep, deafening wail cut through the morning stillness, as the 4-iron met flesh. Almost instantly, Andy’s eyes caught up with her accomplishment, as she watched a middle-aged man in a light brown suit reverberate from the blow, his head slicing slightly to the right, just before his entire body began falling backward toward the ground.
“Oh, my god!” she mumbled, wondering what the hell was going on. Completely drained of the necessary willpower to find out, she closed her eyes and gave in to unconsciousness.
Chapter 32
Right Thing for the Wrong Reason
There is no good antidote for an overdose of most barbiturates. You either end up dead or in a coma. If you’re lucky, you wake up from the coma sooner rather than later. Andy opened her eyes thirty-three hours later in a hospital room. A nurse was checking her vitals.
“There you are!” said the young woman. “How are you feeling?”
“My head hurts,” Andy mumbled.
“To be expected. In general, you’re in very good shape.”
“Where am I?”
“Henry Mayo Hospital. Do you know where that is?”
“McBean Parkway?”
The nurse nodded. Andy liked her smile. She would have liked anyone’s smile right now.
“I live just down the street,” Andy said.
“Well, you appear to be functioning on all cylinders. The doctor will be around this afternoon to check you out.”
“Oh.”
“Do you remember what happened?”
“No. Not really. What happened?”
“Don’t think I’m supposed to say.” Her kind grey eyes rolled toward the glass window between the room and the hallway. “You’ll have to talk to Officer Ortiz about that.”
The olive green and tan uniform of the man standing outside the door of the room was unmistakable. An LA County Sheriff’s Department deputy.
“Was I in a car accident?”
“I’m really not the right person to answer that,” said the nurse, apologetic but firm. “I need to let the doctor know you’re awake.” She turned to leave.
“Wait,” Andy pleaded. “Something happened. Right? It was Tilda. I remember her.”
Some kind of home invasion, she could remember that much. She recalled the image of Tilda standing in her bedroom door. “Did she get away?”
The nurse understood what a struggle it could be to piece together the events leading up to a coma. With some barbiturates, there were almost no memories to assemble. “Did who get away?” she asked, just to be polite.
“Tilda.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about anyone named Tilda.”
“But that’s an armed guard out there, right?” Andy asked. “The police are here to protect me, right?”
The woman in the blue scrubs looked uneasy. “I’m not sure.”
“What does that mean?”
“They don’t really tell us that much about these things.”
“What things?” Andy asked.
“Maybe you should ask your son, Ms. Bravos.”
“My son? Mitch has been here?”
“He left about an hour ago. I think he went to see a lawyer.”
Andy must have looked like a deer in headlights because the nurse rushed forward, as if Bambi’s mother was about to die on her shift.
“Ms. Bravos, please, don’t be upset.”
“Why won’t you tell me what’s happening?”
“I can’t. All I know is that you’re in police custody of some kind.”
“What kind?”
“I don’t know. Really. But whatever went on before they brought you in to the ER has your son very worried.”
The woman’s beside manner wasn’t doing anything to quell Andy’s mounting anxiety.
“Worried. About what?”
The nurse finally gave it up. “That you’re about to be arrested.”
“Arrested?” The word tasted acidic. Andy tried it again. “Arrested?” It didn’t taste any better or sound any less frightening. She eyed the policemen outside her door. His gun and girth made her tremble. She hated cops; she hated fat cops more.
The nurse started to back away. Andy grabbed her arm and held it hostage.
“Don’t leave me
.”
“I shouldn’t have said that. It was unprofessional.”
“What else do you know?”
“Nothing. Nothing, I swear.”
Andy looked from the nurse to the policemen and back again. “Am I hallucinating?”
“No, Ms. Bravos. You’re fully conscious, believe me.”
“Then why do the police want to arrest me?!”
The nurse was desperate to free her arm. She pulled one way, as Andy pulled the other. The tug of war was about to get nasty when a third arm entered the fray and put an end to it. “You’re about to be arrested because you beaned a federal agent, Andrea, and that’s very serious business.”
Andy looked up to see Lorna motioning the nurse toward freedom.
“I what?” Andy asked.
Lorna sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed. “You clubbed, and I use the word literally, a government employee with a piece of golf equipment.”
Andy was dumbfounded. “I did?”
“You did.”
“I don’t remember that.” Her brain was still shooting blanks. She strained to recall what happened. “And did I …” She was distracted by the sheriff’s deputy standing by the door. She reached out and drew Lorna close. “Did I kill him?” she whispered.
Lorna snorted. “You may be good, Andrea. But that good, you are not. He is alive and lucid and sporting a goose egg the size of—well, the size of a golf ball.”
Relieved and utterly derailed, Andy collapsed onto the pillow, trying to hold back the saltwater seeping out of her eyes. “I have no idea what happened. I just don’t get it.”
“Would you like a hug?”
“No. Keep your distance,” Andy sniffed. “Or my dam’s going to break.”
“All right. Should I help you try to clear things up?”
“Can you?”
“Most things, yes. What would you like to know?”
Andy tried to open her clogged sinus passage by inhaling. Lorna handed her a tissue. Blowing out worked significantly better. “Am I going to jail, Lorna?”
“No. Mitch just called to verify that. The lawyer says that no one has charged you with anything.”
“Yet, you mean?”
“Yet. To be fair, the agent was as unprepared to find you at Lake Castaic as you were to find him.”
“Lake Castaic? Why would I be at Lake Castaic?”
“Tilda drove you there. In the trunk of your Camry. Whatever she gave you to get you into the trunk also seems to have erased your memory of the events. We know it was a barbiturate, but we won’t know which one until your tox screen comes back. Do you remember being drugged?”
“No. But I vaguely remember waking up and hearing somebody in my house.”
“Tilda?”
“Or Tom Hanks. It’s kind of a jumble.”
“Hmm. And you don’t remember how you got in the trunk?”
“Oprah,” Andy said.
“What?”
“It had something to do with Oprah.” The tears started leaking through her composure again. “God, Lorna, this is all so frustrating. Why did she take me to Lake Castaic?”
“I think she was hoping for another accidental drowning.”
Even without any clear memories, the sequence of events began to make sense.
“She was going to kill me?”
“She was,” said Lorna. “Thank god the feds were following her.”
Suddenly, something very specific surfaced in Andy’s recollection. A detail in search of a context. “Tilda told me she was being followed! I remember that.”
“Did she know who it was?”
“No. No. She thought I knew. But I didn’t.” Andy couldn’t recall anything else about the conversation, but she was re-feeling the feelings; Tilda was angry, and she was terrified. “So Tilda really was being followed?”
“By U.S. Treasury agents.”
Andy’s one brief shining moment of understanding went completely dark. “Did you say Treasury agents?”
“I did.”
Tears of frustration let loose from the corners of her eyes. She couldn’t see beyond the puddles collecting around her cornea. “I don’t get it, Lorna,” she sobbed. “I feel so stupid.”
“But you weren’t stupid, Andy. You’re the one who said this whole thing was more complicated than the tax code. I should have listened to you.”
“To me?”
“Yes. We kept focusing on death, when we should have been focusing on taxes. That’s the way they finally got Al Capone. And that’s the way they finally got Tilda.”
“They got Tilda?” Andy asked, sitting up and wiping her face with the bed sheet. There seemed to no end to the number of things Andy couldn’t remember.
“Are you saying Tilda was arrested?”
“By the Internal Revenue Service. For tax evasion.”
Andy’s clueless stupor grew more clueless.
“For failing to report her ill-gotten gains. Can you believe it? We kept trying to prove murder, when all we had to do was prove she was a tax cheat.”
“A tax cheat,” Andy repeated, numbly. What was Lorna talking about? There was nothing Andy hated more than being in the middle of a situation she didn’t understand. It was why she avoided visiting countries where she didn’t speak the language and why she never got involved in discussions of the periodic table.
“Remember all that money Tilda accumulated from her string of husbands?” Lorna went on. “Well, she did the same thing with it that she did with them.”
Andy idled, waiting for her friend to help her get her mind back into gear. “Huh?”
“She moved it offshore, Andy. Hoping no one would notice what happened to it.”
Andy sighed, as she finally got a little mental traction. “Of course, she did.”
“Naturally, she never reported a penny of the earned income to the U.S. government, so that’s how they got her. Talk about feeling stupid. I’m a certified public accountant, and I never once thought about calling the IRS.”
“But how did they know Tilda was hiding that money?”
“Somebody besides us must have reported her,” said Lorna. “And it’s a damn good thing. Because if they hadn’t, you might not be here right now.”
Despite her drug-induced amnesia, Andy was beginning to understand how close she’d come to dying. “How did the agents know Tilda would be at the lake?”
“They followed her there. Then they watched her leave her car and take a cab back to Valencia. While she was gone, they got a warrant to search the car and found a plane ticket in the glove compartment. When she returned to the park in your Camry, they decided to arrest her before she fled LA.”
Tilda was getting on an airplane. Another coin dropped in Andy’s memory bank. She told me that, thought Andy, just before she put me in the trunk.
“Oh, my god, Lorna. I was in the trunk, and those agents had no idea.”
“Believe me, the poor schmuck who opened it up told me you came as a complete surprise.”
The man in the brown suit, Andy remembered. “I hit him with a 4-iron.”
“Is that what it was?”
“Oh my god,” Andy cringed and then said without thinking, “I always use way too much club.”
It came out sounding funny, but it wasn’t. None of this was funny. More importantly, as far as Andy could tell, these treasury agents all had missed the point. “You mean nobody knew about the murders when they arrested Tilda?” she asked.
“Not a clue. The IRS assumed Tilda’s husbands all died of natural causes.”
“They had no idea she was a black widow?”
“None. They thought she was avoiding her taxes. And thank god they did, or you’d be dead, and Tilda would be long gone.”
This wasn’t the first time government employees did the right thing for the wrong reasons, Andy noted. She blessed their myopic devotion to duty. “But you told them about her real crimes, right?”
“I told them.”
“And our evidence? Did somebody take our evidence?”
“The FBI can’t get enough of it,” said Lorna.
Although Andy had never been a big fan of the J. Edgar Hoover Boys Club, she had a strange sensation—the same feeling she fantasized having if, and when, she ever won an Oscar.
“The FBI! Really?”
“They want to know how we came up with the idea of using those passport stamps.”
Andy found herself smiling involuntarily, a smile big enough to fill the Kodak Theater.
Lorna laughed.
Having accepted the honor, Andy thought it would be a good idea to show some humility. “Well, let’s be honest,” she said. “That passport thing was all you, Lorna.”
“Oh, no. Now you’re suffering from selective memory,” Lorna chuckled. “Using the passport to track Tilda’s travels was actually Harley’s idea.”
Harley. Oh, yes, Harley. Andy had forgotten all about Harley. Where was Harley? An image of the keek-stane Tilda had left on her doorstep flashed into view. She suddenly remembered sending Harley off to Santa Monica for safekeeping.
“He’s still with Mitch, right?”
“Yes. In a manner of speaking. But don’t worry, he’s okay.”
“He’s not with Mitch?”
“Not exactly, Andy. He’s out of town.”
There was a faint stirring of familiar juices under the residual sedative in Andy’s system. “Out of town? Why?” The Academy Award-winning smile was gone now, replaced by an equal, but opposite, emotion.
Lorna could tell Andy was riding the roller coaster of drug withdrawal. She needed to keep things simple.
“For some—training.”
“This is Mitch’s doing, isn’t it?”
“No. No, Andy, it’s not,” said Lorna in her very controlled, very conciliatory account’s voice. “It was Melissa’s suggestion.”
“What kind of suggestion?”
“She sent him off to boot camp.”
“Boot camp?” What the hell else had been happening while she was under Tilda’s spell? “Are you telling me that Harley has joined the marines?!”
“It’s not the marines, Andy. She promised me it wasn’t the marines,” Lorna said.
Follow the Dotted Line Page 28