“He said no,” I say, defending my dad. “Look . . .” I get tears in my eyes. “Why don’t you leave us alone? Haven’t we been through enough without you poking around?”
The detective nods solemnly. He says, “I’ll be brief.”
We don’t answer him. We stay in the living room while he searches. A half hour later, the detective comes back carrying all of Mom’s pills in a plastic bag. He says, “Mind if I take these with me?”
Paul says go ahead. As soon as he leaves, I notice Paul is white. I take his hand and ask him what’s wrong. He whispers, “Your fingerprints were on the bottle.”
I smile and shake my head no. “I wiped everything clean.”
Paul smiles and calls me beautiful. God, no one has ever called me beautiful. Want to know something weird? Paul’s a much better lover than he is a father. We make it right there on the couch, knowing it’s a stupid and dangerous thing to do, but we don’t care. An hour later we go to bed.
The fucking asshole pig comes back a week later with all his piglets. Paul is enraged, but the pig has all the papers in order—the search warrant, the this, the that.
Paul asks, “What is going on?”
“Complete investigation, Mr. James.”
“Of what!”
“I don’t believe your wife’s death was an accidental overdose.”
“Why not?” I ask.
Paul glares at me. The detective ignores me, and I don’t repeat the question.
“What do you think it is?” Paul asks.
“Intentional overdose.”
“Suicide?” Paul says. “No note was found.”
“There isn’t always a note,” the detective responds. “Besides, I didn’t mean suicide, I meant homicide.”
My body goes cold when he says the word. The pig asks us if we mind being printed or giving them samples of our hair. Paul nudges me in the ribs and answers, “Of course not,” for the both of us.
Then he adds, “We have nothing to hide.”
Now I’m thinking that was a real dumb thing to say.
They start to dust the Chippendale, spreading black powder over the fabric. Paul goes loony and screams how expensive the chair is. No one pays attention to him.
He stalks off to his bedroom. I follow.
“What are we gonna do?” I whisper.
“You wiped away all the prints?” he whispers back.
I nod.
“They’ve got nothing on us, babe.” He inhales deeply. “We’ll just have to wait it out. Now, get out of here before someone suspects something.”
I obey.
All the pigs leave about four hours later. They’ve turned our home into a sty.
Paul is becoming a real problem. He’s losing it, and that’s bad news for me. When I confront him with what a shit he’s being, he starts acting like a parent. Can you believe that? He fucks me—his daughter—then, when he’s losing it, he starts acting like a parent.
Yesterday he didn’t come home at night. That really pissed me off. I reminded him that we were in it together. That pissed him off, and he claimed the entire thing was my idea and that I was a witch and a whore. Man, what a battle we had. We’re all made up now, but let me tell you something, we watch each other carefully.
Real carefully.
They arrested me this morning for the murder of my mother. They leave Paul alone for now. Apparently, whatever they have is just on me and not him.
To tell you the truth, I’m kind of relieved.
I’m left waiting in this interview room for about an hour. Just me and the detective. Finally, I say what I know I shouldn’t say.
I say, “How’d you find out?”
“Find out what?” the detective answers.
“About my mom being murdered and all.”
His eyebrows raise a tad.
“You mean, how’d I find out you murdered your mom?”
I know it’s a trick, but what the fuck. I don’t care anymore. I nod.
“Did you kill your mom, Kristine?”
He asks the question, like, real cool, but I can see the sweat under his armpits.
“Yeah,” I admit. “I offed her.”
“How?” he asks.
“I laced her coffee with her own Seconal,” I say. “When that didn’t do the trick, I injected her with more. That finished her off.”
“Where’d you inject her?” he asks.
“Under her tongue.”
He nods. “Smart thinking,” he says. “No marks.” Then he pauses and adds, “So you’re a hype, huh?”
I shake my head. “Recreational,” I say.
“Ah.”
“So how’d you find out?” I ask again.
“Two other things set an alarm off in me,” the detective says. “The autopsy report showed bruises on the inside of your mom’s right wrist. Like someone squeezed her.”
“Maybe someone did,” I say.
The detective says, “Yeah, like someone was feeling for a pulse. Yet your dad denied touching her.”
I say, “Maybe she was playing a little game with one of her lovers.”
“I thought of that,” the detective says. “She went to a pretty wild party. But then the bruises would have been on both of her wrists.”
I don’t say anything right away. Then I say, “You said two things. What was the second?”
“Your mom had loads of Seconal in her body, along with booze and coke. She also had just a trace amount of heroin. Too little, if she actually shot up a wad.”
“My needle,” I say. “I forgot to clean it.”
“It’s hard to remember everything, Kristie,” the detective says. “I found it when I searched the house the first time, but I couldn’t take it with me for physical evidence because I didn’t have the proper papers. I waited a week until I had the search warrant in hand, then took it. We analyzed it, found traces of Seconal and heroin. People don’t normally shoot Seconal. You should have dumped all your evidence.”
“I never was too good at throwing things away. Mom used to yell at me for that. Called me a bag lady, always keeping everything.”
I sigh.
The detective says, “Also, we powdered your mom’s meds and found they had been wiped free of prints. If your mom had committed suicide, her prints would have been on the bottle.”
“I should have thought about that,” I admit.
“Well, you did okay for your first time out,” the detective says. “The marks on the wrist were a giveaway. Started me thinking in the right direction. You—or your dad—shouldn’t have squeezed her so hard. And you should have used a fresh needle. And gloves instead of wiping away the prints.”
He leans in so we’re almost nose-to-nose.
“Close but no cigar. You’re in hot shit, babe. Want to tell me about it?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why’d you do it, for starters?” he asks.
“ ’Cause I hated my mom.”
“And why did your dad help you?”
“What makes you think my dad helped me?”
“The bruises on your mother’s wrist were made by fingers bigger than yours, Kristie. It was your father who felt for the pulse, even though he emphatically denied touching her.”
“You can’t prove who made those bruises,” I say.
The detective doesn’t say anything. Then he sticks his hands in his pockets and says, “It’s your neck. You could probably save it by turning state’s evidence against your dad.”
I don’t say anything.
“Look,” he says. “I understand why you offed your mom. She treated you like shit. And your dad offed her so he could marry his girlfriend—”
“What girlfriend?” I say, almost jumping out of my seat.
“The cute little blond chickie that was on his arm last night.”
“You’re lying,” I say.
He looks genuinely puzzled. He says, “No, I’m not. What is it? Don’t you get along with her?”
I feel tears in my eyes. I stammer out, “I . . . I don’t even know her.”
“Don’t cotton to the idea of your dad making it with a young chick?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
“Why’s that?”
I blurt out, “Because I’m his girlfriend. We’re lovers.”
I hear the detective cough. I see him cover his mouth. Then he says, “You want to talk about what happens when you turn state’s evidence?”
I shrug, but even as I try to be real cool, the tears come down my cheeks. I say, “Sure, why not?”
Old Paul is on death row, convicted of murder along with rape and sodomy of a minor.
Me? I’m in juvie hall, and it ain’t any picnic. The food is lousy. I’m with a couple of bull dykes, and everybody steals. So I can’t make any headway in the money department. A couple of gals here say they were raped by their fathers, and they wanted to kill their mothers, too. They talk like we have a lot in common. I tell them to leave me alone. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But it’s cool. I’m beyond caring what the hell happens to me. Just so long as I don’t die from boredom.
All that attention. It was really exciting.
I’ve got to get out of here.
They assigned me a real sucker for a shrink. An older man about my dad’s age who gives me the eye.
I mean, he really gives me the eye.
The other day he told me he was going to recommend my release to the assessment board. He says I have excellent insight and a fine prognosis.
The other day he also asked me why I became a hooker.
I mean, what’s on his mind? I wonder.
Yeah, I have insight.
And I know what’s on his mind. And I’ll do what I have to in order to get out of here.
I need freedom.
At least juvie hall was a new experience for a while.
Just like killing my mom and fucking Paul.
I hate to be bored.
DISCARDS
“Discards” is one of my more complex
short stories and features my very first
private detective, Andrea Darling, a
young woman of whom I’m quite fond.
Los Angeles is blessed with mild
weather, a calm blue ocean, and
breathtaking natural terrain. But what
happens to the unfortunates who live
in the shadow of the “beautiful
people”? The Bible emphasizes that a
society is judged by how it treats its
widows and orphans. What does that
say about a town whose existence is
fueled by narcissism and celluloid
illusion?
BECAUSE HE’D HUNG AROUND LONG ENOUGH, Malibu Mike wasn’t considered a bum but a fixture. All of us locals had known him, had accustomed ourselves to his stale smell, his impromptu orations and wild hand gesticulations. Malibu preaching from his spot—a bus bench next to a garbage bin, perfect for foraging. With a man that weather-beaten, it had been hard to assign him an age, but the police had estimated he’d been between seventy and ninety when he died—a decent stay on the planet.
Originally, they’d thought Malibu had died from exposure. The winter has been a chilly one, a new Arctic front eating through the god-awful myth that Southern California is bathed in continual sunshine. Winds churned the tides gray-green, charcoal clouds blanketed the shoreline. The night before last had been cruel. But Malibu had been protected under layers and layers of clothing—a barrier that kept his body insulated from the low of forty degrees.
Malibu had always dressed in layers even when the mercury grazed the hundred-degree mark. That fact was driven home when the obituary in the Malibu Crier announced his weight as 126. I’d always thought of him as chunky, but now I realized it had been the clothes.
I put down the newspaper and turned up the knob on my kerosene heater. Rubbing my hands together, I looked out the window of my trailer. Although it was gray, rain wasn’t part of the forecast, and that was good. My roof was still pocked with leaks that I was planning to fix today. But then the phone rang. I didn’t recognize the woman’s voice on the other end, but she must have heard about me from someone I knew a long time ago. She asked for Detective Darling.
“Former detective,” I corrected her. “This is Andrea Darling. Who am I talking to?”
A throat cleared. She sounded in the range of middle-aged to elderly. “Well, you don’t know me personally. I am a friend of Greta Berstat.”
A pause allowing me to acknowledge recognition. She was going to wait a long time.
“Greta Berstat,” she repeated. “You were the detective on her burglary? You found the men who had taken her sterling flatware and the candlesticks and the tea set?”
The bell went off, and I remembered Greta Berstat. When I’d been with LAPD, my primary detail was grand theft auto. Greta’s case had come my way during a brief rotation through burglary.
“Greta gave you my phone number?” I inquired.
“Not exactly,” the woman explained. “You see, I’m a local resident, and I found your name in the Malibu Directory—the one put out by the Chamber of Commerce? You were listed under Investigation, right between Interior Design and Jewelers.”
I laughed to myself. “What can I do for you, Ms. . . .”
“Mrs. Pollack,” the woman answered. “Deirde Pollack. Greta was over at my house when I was looking through the phone book. When she saw your name, her eyes grew wide, and my oh my, did she sing your praises, Detective Darling.”
I didn’t correct her this time. “Glad to have made a fan. How can I help you, Mrs. Pollack?”
“Deirdre, please.”
“Deirdre it is. What’s up?”
Deirdre hemmed and hawed. Finally, she said, “Well, I have a little bit of a problem.”
I said, “Does this problem have a story behind it?”
“I’m afraid it does.”
“Perhaps it would be best if we met in person?”
“Yes, perhaps it would be best.”
“Give me your address,” I said. “If you’re local, I can probably make it down within the hour.”
“An hour?” Deirdre said. “Well, that would be simply lovely!”
From Deirdre’s living room, I had a one-eighty-degree view of the coastline. The tides ripped relentlessly away at the rocks ninety feet below. You could hear the surf even this far up, the steady whoosh of water advancing and retreating. Deirdre’s estate took up three landscaped acres, but the house, instead of being centered on the property, was perched on the edge of the bluff. She’d furnished the place warmly—plants and overstuffed chairs and lots of maritime knickknacks.
I settled into a chintz wing chair; Deirdre was positioned opposite me on a love seat. She insisted on making me a cup of coffee, and while she did, I took a moment to observe her.
She must have been in her late seventies, her face scored with hundreds of wrinkles. She was short, with a loose turkey wattle under her chin; her cheeks were heavily rouged, her thin lips painted bright red. She had flaming red hair and false eyelashes that hooded blue eyes turned milky from cataracts. She had a tentative manner, yet her voice was firm and pleasant. Her smile seemed genuine even if her teeth weren’t. She wore a pink suit, a white blouse, and orthopedic shoes.
“You’re a lot younger than I expected,” Deirdre said, handing me a china cup.
I smiled and sipped. I’m thirty-eight and have been told I look a lot younger. But to a woman Deirdre’s age, thirty-eight still could be younger than expected.
“Are you married, Detective?” Deirdre asked.
“Not at the moment.” I smiled.
“I was married for forty-seven years.” Deirdre sighed. “Mr. Pollack passed away six years ago. I miss him.”
“I’m sure you do.” I put my cup down. “Children?”
“Two. A boy and a girl. Both are doing well. They visit quite often.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “So . . . you live by yourself.”
“Well, yes and no,” she answered. “I sleep alone, but I have daily help. One woman for weekdays, another for weekends.”
I looked around the house. We seemed to be alone, and it was ten o’clock Tuesday morning. “Your helper didn’t show up today?”
“That’s the little problem I wanted to tell you about.”
I took out my notebook and pen. “We can start now, if you’re ready.”
“Well, the story involves my helper,” Deirdre said. “My housekeeper. Martina Cruz . . . that’s her name.”
I wrote down the name.
“Martina’s worked for me for twelve years,” Deirdre said. “I’ve become quite dependent on her. Not just to give me pills and clean up the house. But we’ve become good friends. Twelve years is a long time to work for someone.”
I agreed, thinking: Twelve years was a long time to do anything.
Deirdre went on. “Martina lives far away from Malibu, far away from me. But she has never missed a day in all those years without calling me first. Martina is very responsible. I respect her and trust her. That’s why I’m puzzled, even though Greta thinks I’m being naive. Maybe I am being naive, but I’d rather think better of people than to be so cynical.”
“Do you think something happened to her?” I said.
“I’m not sure.” Deirdre bit her lip. “I’ll relate the story, and maybe you can offer a suggestion.”
I told her to take her time.
Deirdre said, “Well, like many old women, I’ve acquired things over the years. I tell my children to take whatever they want, but there always seem to be leftover items. Discards. Old flowerpots, used cookware, out-of-date clothing and shoes and hats. My children don’t want those kinds of things. So if I find something I no longer need, I usually give it to Martina.
“Last week I was cleaning out my closets. Martina was helping me.” She sighed. “I gave her a pile of old clothes to take home. I remember it well because I asked her how in the world she’d be able to carry all those items on the bus. She just laughed. And oh, how she thanked me. Such a sweet girl . . . twelve years she’s worked for me.”
I nodded, pen poised over my pad.
The Garden of Eden and Other Criminal Delights Page 14