Kiss of the Bees w-2

by J. A. Jance

  “She’s still alive then?” Monty asked.

  “Not now. She died within weeks of the time I saw her. It’s a good thing I went to see her when I did. Other than talking to Andrew Carlisle himself, my interview with Myrna Louise was one of the most important ones I did for the book. I was nervous about seeing her after what I’d done to her son—leaving him blind and crippled. I had no idea how she’d respond to me. Just because a court had ruled I had acted in self-defense didn’t mean that would carry any weight with the man’s mother.”

  “Didn’t you say in the book someplace that he tried to kill her once?”

  Diana nodded. “He did, but she got away. What I found strange was that she didn’t seem to hold it against him. She told me that there wasn’t any point in carrying grudges and that he was her only reason for still hanging on. She said that if she was gone, he wouldn’t have anyone at all.”

  “So when you went to interview her, how did it go?” Monty Lazarus asked.

  “It was fine,” Diana said. “Myrna Louise Carlisle Spaulding Rivers couldn’t have been more gracious.”

  The first time Diana had met Myrna Louise, it was mid-morning in the somewhat grubby lunchroom of the Vista Retirement Center in Chandler, Arizona. Andrew Carlisle’s mother, with a walker strategically stationed nearby, was seated on a stained bench shoved carelessly up to a chipped table in the far corner of the room. She looked up at her visitor from a game of solitaire played with a deck of sticky, dog-eared cards.

  “You must be Diana Walker,” Myrna Louise said as Diana walked up to the table. “I’ve seen your picture before. On your books.”

  “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” Diana said.

  Myrna Louise smiled. “I didn’t have much choice, now, did I? I’m not going anyplace soon. I figured I could just as well.”

  Her hair, an improbable color of red, was thin and wispy. Her face may have been made up with a once-practiced hand, but now there were a few slips. A dribble of mascara darkened one cheek, and some of the too-red lipstick had smeared and edged its way up and down into the wrinkled creases above and below her lips. The teeth were false and clicked ominously when she spoke, as though threatening to pop out at any moment.

  “Anyway,” she added, “I wanted to meet you. I wanted to apologize.”

  “Apologize? For what?”

  “For my son, of course. For Andrew. He was a good boy when he was little. Good and so cute, too. I used to have the curls from his first haircut, but I finally threw them away when I moved here. Carlton made me get rid of them.”

  “Carlton?”

  “Carlton Rivers, my late husband. My latest late husband. Anyway, when I told him about what Andrew had done—or rather, what he had tried to do—he said I should just forget about him. He said I should forget I’d ever even had a son. He said I should leave him in prison and let him rot. Andrew tried to kill me, you see. The same day he tried to kill you, as a matter of fact. I got away, though. When he got out of the car at that storage place, I just drove myself away. You should have seen his face. He couldn’t believe it—that I was driving. I almost couldn’t believe it myself. I’d never done it before—driven a car, that is. Not before or since.”

  Diana took a deep breath. “You’re not responsible for your son’s actions, Mrs. Rivers. There’s no need for you to apologize to me.”

  “A reverend comes by and conducts church services here every Sunday,” Myrna Louise continued as though she hadn’t heard Diana’s response. “I tried to talk to him about Andrew once or twice after I found out about the AIDS business. I suppose you know about that?”

  Diana nodded.

  “I asked him if he thought that was God’s way of punishing Andrew. You know, an eye-for-an-eye sort of thing. Just like he lost his eyesight over what he did to you.”

  “God didn’t throw the bacon grease,” Diana said. “I did.”

  “But God’s responsible for the result, isn’t he?” Myrna Louise insisted. “If God had wanted it to work that way, he could have just burned him, but he wouldn’t have been blind. Don’t you see?”

  “Not exactly,” Diana said.

  “Well, anyway, now I hear you’re writing a book about him.”

  “Yes, although it’s not just about him. It’s about all the people whose lives he touched. Whose lives he changed.”

  “Or ended,” Myrna Louise added sadly. “It serves him right that he doesn’t get to write his own book. He asked you to do that, to write it?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s hard for me to believe, but I don’t suppose anything about Andrew should surprise me anymore. I would think he would have wanted to write it himself, even if he couldn’t get it published. He’s still angry with me about the manuscript, you know.”

  “What manuscript?”

  “Of his book. The book he wrote when he was in prison the first time.”

  “And what happened to it?” Diana asked.

  “I burned it,” Myrna Louise said thoughtfully. “One page at a time.”

  “There aren’t any copies left?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “And what did your son call this book?”

  Myrna Louise shook her head. “I don’t remember the name of it now. After all these years, I guess I’ve managed to forget what it was exactly, although I remember the title had something to do with Indians. I didn’t read the whole thing, just parts of it. It was awful. I couldn’t believe anyone could write such terrible stuff. The things his main character did to other characters were just awful. It made me feel filthy just having in my hands. But of course, I know now that he must not have made some of that up.”

  “What do you mean, he didn’t make it up?” Diana asked.

  “That he had actually done some of those things himself. And that there were others.”

  “Other what?” Diana asked.

  “Other victims,” Myrna Louise answered. “Ones the police knew nothing about.”

  For several moments after that, Diana didn’t trust herself to speak. She was thinking about the ashes of the cassette tape she had swept out of the fireplace and thrown into the garbage can before Brandon and the kids came home from Payson. If there were other victims, did that also mean there were other tapes?

  “You told me a little while ago that he tried to kill you the same day he attacked me.”

  “He didn’t exactly try,” Myrna Louise corrected. “He was going to. He planned to, but I drove away before he had a chance.”

  “Did he have a tape recorder or tapes with him that day?”

  Myrna Louise pursed her lips. “It’s really hard for me to talk about this,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “About the tape recorder.”

  Diana felt a chill run up and down her spine. “So there was a tape recorder?”

  “Yes,” Myrna Louise answered. “Yes, there was.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “That’s the part I don’t want to talk about. When the detectives found it under the car seat in Jake’s Valiant—my second husband’s Valiant—I told them it was mine and they let me keep it. If you write into your book that it was really Andrew’s, I might still get in trouble over it. For concealing evidence.”

  “What did you do with the tape recorder, Mrs. Rivers?” Diana asked. “It could be very important.”

  “I pawned it,” Myrna Louise answered. “Andrew asked me about it later, about what had happened to it. I told him the detectives took it. So, please, it’s better if you don’t say anything about it at all. It could raise all kinds of ruckus.”

  “When you took the recorder, were there any tapes with it?”

  “Only some blanks. A whole package of blanks.”

  “But none that had been used?”

  For a long time after that, Myrna Louise Rivers didn’t answer. She had gathered up the deck of cards from the table and sat there absently shuffling them. Finally she reached for her walker and stood up.


  “Excuse me, Mrs. Rivers,” Diana said. “I haven’t had a chance to ask you . . .”

  “We have to go back to my room now,” Myrna Louise said. “They’ll be setting up for lunch in a few minutes anyhow, so we’ll need to be out of the way. But I want to give you something.”

  Vista Retirement Center was laid out in a quadrangle. The front wing of the building was the common area with the dining hall, a recreation area, library, and lobby. One of the side wings was the convalescent wing. The two other wings were devoted to patients who were still well enough to come and go on their own. The wings were connected by shaded breezeways, but in the 110-degree heat, the shade didn’t make that much difference.

  By the time they reached Myrna Louise’s room in the far back wing, Diana was worried the woman was going to faint with exertion. She sank down on the side of the bed, breathing hard.

  “I’m not much good in all this heat,” she gasped at last when she could speak. “Sit down. Let me catch my breath.”

  A wall-unit air conditioner grumbled under the screened window, but the air flow didn’t make a dent in the hot dusty air of that small, spartan room. In addition to a bed, the room contained a single easy chair, a dresser with a small television set on it, and a kitchen table with two chairs. A door led to a tiny bathroom. The place was grim enough that it reminded Diana more of a monk’s cell or prison accommodations than it did a retirement home. Diana sank into the chair and waited until a winded Myrna Louise Rivers was finally able to speak.

  “There are some shoe boxes on the top shelf of the closet,” the woman managed at last. “If you wouldn’t mind bringing me the bottom one, I’d appreciate it.”

  Diana did as she was told. In the closet she found three shoe boxes stacked one on top of the other. From the weight of the first two, it seemed likely that they contained shoes. The third one seemed to hold something as well, but it felt far too light to be a pair of shoes. When Diana shook the box slightly, it gave a muffled rattle, as though whatever was inside had been packed in tissue paper.

  Taking the box over to the bed, she handed it to Myrna Louise. The woman’s gnarled, liver-spotted hand shook as she reached out to take it. “That’s the one,” she said.

  Holding it on her lap for a few moments, she gazed off into space as though her thoughts were far away from this grim place where she was living out her final years. She sat with one hand resting on the lid as if she were unwilling to open it.

  “I send him candy, you know,” she murmured thoughtfully. “Every year on his birthday, I see to it that he has a box of chocolates from me. I know he gets them although he never sends thank-you notes. Andrew never was big on thank-you notes, you see. The problem is, it’s hard for me to connect the person I’m sending the candy to—the person who is my son—to this.”

  She gave the shoe box a desultory pat. “It doesn’t seem possible that the little boy I used to make birthday cakes for is the same person. Does that make sense?”

  Diana nodded and said nothing.

  “He came back home the day before all that happened,” Myrna Louise continued thoughtfully. “He had been gone overnight in Jake’s car. I didn’t ask him where he had been—I never asked him that, because he would have told me it was none of my business. But when he came home, he was wearing this.”

  Carefully she removed the lid. Inside the shoe box Diana saw a splash of vivid-pink material. Slowly Myrna Louise lifted the fabric from the box and unrolled it, revealing a bright pink silk pantsuit. Something hard and small was at the very center of the roll of material—something Myrna Louise deftly covered with one hand before Diana could glimpse what it was.

  “That’s a woman’s pantsuit, isn’t it?” Diana asked. “Why was your son wearing that?”

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” Myrna Louise said, passing the top to Diana so she, too, could finger the delicate material.

  “And expensive,” Diana added. “But you still haven’t told me why was he wearing it.”

  “At the time he said it was like kids playing dress-up, but I realized later that it was a disguise he wore when he left that hotel in Tucson after he killed that man, that guy who worked in the movies.”

  Johnny Rivkin’s name leaped to the forefront out of the long-buried past. He had been the second victim in Andrew Carlisle’s three-day reign of terror after he was released from prison in June of 1975. Rivkin, a noted Hollywood costume designer, had met Andrew Carlisle at a well-known gay watering hole, a pickup joint, in downtown Tucson. After meeting in the bar at the Reardon Hotel, Rivkin had invited Carlisle to join him for a drink in his hotel suite at the Santa Rita a few blocks away. That casual invitation had ended several hours later with Johnny Rivkin’s throat slit.

  “When Andrew brought this into my house,” Myrna Louise was saying, “I was upset. I hated seeing him dress like that because he wasn’t queer—at least I didn’t used to think so. But it was made of real silk. I had real silk myself once, back when I was married to Howie—Andrew’s father. But not since. And I guess I must have been a little envious, too. So when that police officer came to see me that night in Tempe . . .”

  “Detective Farrell?” Diana asked, remembering G. T. “Geet” Farrell, the Pinal County detective who had joined forces with Brandon Walker and Fat Crack in trying to track down Gina Antone’s newly released killer.

  Myrna nodded. “That’s right. That’s the one. When he came by asking me questions, I knew they were going to take Andrew away and lock him up again. So when I went down the hall to use the bathroom, I took this out of Andrew’s closet and put it in mine. I didn’t think he’d mind.

  “Everything happened that night. For months afterward, I just left it there in my closet without daring to touch it. Then one day I was invited to go to a senior singles dance and I decided to try it on. I thought if I had the sleeves and pants shortened, maybe it would fit. That’s when I found this,” she said. “It was there in one of the jacket pockets the whole time.”

  Myrna Louise moved her hand. There, in her lap, lay a single cassette tape.

  Without having to listen to it or even touch it, Diana Ladd Walker knew exactly what it was. In that moment, though, she found herself able to be grateful for one small blessing. In 1968, when Gina died, and again in 1975, VCRs and video cameras had been invented, but they weren’t available to everyone.

  And most especially Diana was grateful that they weren’t available to Andrew Philip Carlisle.

  Mitch Johnson tried to listen carefully while Diana told him about the interview with Myrna Louise. What interested him most of all was what she left out. Again, there was no mention of Andy’s tape. So he had been right about that. She had kept that part of their exchange a secret—not only in writing the book but probably also in what she told those closest to her. That was all right, she wouldn’t be able to keep that secret forever. Not after tonight.

  The other item of interest was what she said about Myrna Louise’s death. She had said a stroke. When word of Myrna Louise’s death had come to the prison, Andy had laughed at the incompetent ninnies who ruled it as death by natural causes.

  “Why is that so funny?” Mitch had asked.

  “Because they’re wrong. Because I made arrangements to have someone slip her a little something.”

  As well as Mitch knew Andy by then, the whole idea was a little startling. “Your own mother?” Mitch asked.

  “Why not?” Andy returned. “Once she handed Diana’s little care package over to my hired-hand delivery boy, there was no sense in her hanging around. After all, that damned rest home was costing a fortune. And don’t pretend to be so shocked, Mitch. After all, it’s in your own best interests.”

  “Mine!”

  “You bet. Myrna Louise’s rent at that retirement home was coming directly out of my pocket—and yours, too.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Mitch had said. “But you arranged the whole thing from here?”

  “Sure,” Andy said. “I
f you’ve got enough money, hiring decent help is no problem.”

  Mitch continued going through the motions of seeming to listen intently and of taking notes, but he was losing interest. There comes a time in every bullfight when it’s time to end the capework and uncover the sword. His purpose was to leave Diana Ladd Walker with something to think about later on. Something that would, in the aftermath of what was about to happen between Lani and Quentin, leave her questioning all her smug assumptions about the kind of person she was and how she had raised her children.

  He waited until she paused. “Listening to you now and remembering the way you describe Andrew Carlisle’s mother in the book, you make her sound perfectly ordinary.”

  “She was perfectly ordinary,” Diana said. “That’s what I wanted to show about her. Myrna Louise Rivers was far less educated than her son and hadn’t had the benefit of all the advantages that accrued to him from his father’s side of the family. People like to believe that monsters beget monsters, but she wasn’t a monster, not by any means. I think it’s far too easy for society to believe that killers inherit their evil tendencies from their parents and then pass them along to their own children. As I said in the book, I don’t believe that’s true.”

  “Is that the case in your own situation as well?”

  Diana frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “In the case of your stepson, Quentin. You don’t feel that his upbringing had anything to do with what happened to him or to the other son, the one who ran away?”

  Mitch was delighted to see the angry flush that flooded Diana Walker’s face. “No,” she said firmly. “Quentin Walker and Tommy Walker were both responsible for their own actions.”

  “But isn’t it possible that your relationship with their father closed those two boys out somehow and that’s why they ended up going so haywire?”

  Gleefully, Mitch saw the muscles on Diana’s jawline contract. “No,” she said. “I don’t think that at all. By the time I met them, both those boys were headed in the wrong direction. There was nothing their father and I could do to change that course.”