by Dianne Emley
She looked at Nan, who hadn’t budged, and asked with annoyance, “Could you get the broom and dustpan for me, please?”
Stifling a sigh, Vining got up and went into the kitchen.
When she returned, her mother was taking canned goods flecked with red goop from the bag.
Vining helped clean up the mess and put away the groceries.
After they were finished, Patsy announced, “I’m having a glass of wine. Don’t worry, Detective. It’s after six o’clock in the evening. I assume you won’t have any.”
“No, thank you.” Vining took the same chair at the dinette table.
“I have Coke and orange juice. You want anything?”
“Nope.”
In the galley kitchen, Vining heard the clinking of glass and the pop of a cork being pulled from a bottle.
“Nan, is this about your grandmother? I’m sorry, but I can’t live in that house with her.”
“It’s not about Granny, although we’re going to have to have a family meeting about that soon.”
Patsy carried a brimming glass of white wine to the table and sat. She took a healthy sip and asked, without looking at her daughter, “So what’s this about?”
Vining answered without hesitation, having planned what she was going to say. “Your house was bugged, Mom, and so was Tink’s.”
Patsy puckered her lips.
“Mom, look at me. Please.”
She reluctantly met her daughter’s eyes.
“Did Vince Madrigal pay you to get access to Tink’s house?”
Patsy’s eyes reddened. She brought the wineglass to her lips, slowly sipped, and just as slowly set it down. “Nan, I spent hours talking to Jim about this right in your police station.”
“I know you did. Jim and I both think that you weren’t being honest. Please tell me what happened.”
Patsy frowned and then sighed. “Okay, Nan. I’ll tell you. But it wasn’t that cut-and-dried. You make it sound like I sold my friend out for money. It didn’t happen that way. It’s more complicated.”
“More complicated how?”
“It just is.”
Vining sucked in air through her teeth. “How did it happen? How did he approach you?”
“Like I said.” Patsy’s voice turned small. “He came to the Estée Lauder counter and told me he wanted to buy perfume for his mother. Then he asked me out to dinner.”
“How long before he revealed his true motives?”
She lazily raised a shoulder. “A couple of nights later, I met him for dinner at a restaurant near here. We were chatting and having drinks. We ordered dinner and then he started with this strange conversation. He told me he knew I was in trouble with my credit cards. I asked him how he knew and he said he had friends who knew things. He said he could help me out.”
Vining grimaced. Madrigal had used his dirty law-enforcement connections to illegally access Patsy’s financial records. “What did he want you to do?”
“Spy on Tink. He said it like it was no big deal. Get her to talk about her life, her regrets, any secrets she might have. Just normal girl talk. See if I could get inside her house and take any diaries she might keep. And he said, ‘By the way, if you can get to know Cheyenne better, that would be valuable.’ He was especially interested in things that were going on at Berryhill. He made out like he was trying to help Tink. Thinking about it now, it was all a bunch of double-talk that didn’t make sense.”
“Did he want you to get him inside Tink’s house?”
“Not specifically. He said that was taken care of.”
“How did he plant the bugs?”
“I’d found out later that he’d already put them in place. He’d messed up the external wires to Tink’s cable TV. Tink told me she’d had problems with her cable. Guys in a van had showed up to fix problems they’d detected with her service and they were in the house. I asked Vince if they worked for him.”
“How much did he pay you?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“You took five grand from a dirty P.I. to give him access to one of your best and oldest friends? Five grand for information that probably got her murdered. Did he want information about Georgia’s Girls?”
“No, no.” Patsy covered her face with her hands. “It wasn’t like that, Nan.”
“So tell me what it was like.”
“Nan, I loved Tink like a sister. I helped her survive the worst time of her life. I was there for her every day. I would never hurt her.”
“Then why did you?”
Patsy turned her head, moving her hands to cover her mouth, as if restraining the words inside. Her eyes were red, but she wasn’t crying.
“Why’d you do it, Mom?”
Patsy shook her head, her hands still over her mouth. She peeled away a couple of fingers and raised them, still shaking her head, as if struggling with an internal debate. “It’s all over. They’re all in jail. I don’t see the point in having to keep this a secret.”
“Keep what a secret?”
“I didn’t do it!” Patsy shouted, letting her fists fall to the table with a bang. She fiercely stared at her daughter. “I told Vince Madrigal to go to hell. That I wouldn’t betray my friend like that.”
Vining raised her hands, not knowing what to think. “If you told him no, then why did you continue seeing him? Why is your place bugged? Why did you take his money?” She shot her hand toward her mother like a dagger. “You have extra money, Mom. Everybody’s noticed the way you’ve been throwing cash around.”
“The FBI approached me and asked me if I would play along with Vince. They offered to pay me and said I could keep Vince’s money too.”
Vining’s mind was spinning. “FBI…You mean the man who was posing as Kingsley Getty?”
Patsy sipped wine and nodded with the same casualness as if she’d just told her daughter that she’d decided to dye her hair a different color.
Vining rose from the chair in slow motion and took a few steps in the small living room. “You’re telling me that you were a double agent for the FBI?”
“I guess you could call it that.”
Vining had to laugh, slapping her thigh and holding her ribs.
Patsy was offended. “Is it so surprising that your mother can be a hero too, Nan? You think you’re the only one in this family who’s capable of doing big things?”
Her comment took Vining aback. Was her mother that competitive with her? Vining realized that it had been insensitive for her to laugh. She calmed down. “The real name of the FBI special agent who was posing as Kingsley Getty is David Scarbray.”
Patsy’s gaze darkened. “I know that, Nan.” She held the edge of the table with both hands, as if steeling herself. “That night, right after I got home from having dinner with Vince, I heard a knock at my door. It was David Scarbray. He told me the FBI knew that Vince had approached me and asked what we’d talked about. I told him everything. I didn’t care about Vince. I would have already told Tink what Vince had wanted me to do, only it was too late to phone her. David told me that Tink might be in danger.”
Vining fumed. The night of the bust at the Berryhill compound, Scarbray had insisted that Tink hadn’t been in danger. So his relationship with Tink had been more than just a way to socialize with the Berryhills and Gig Towne. It suddenly came to her. Scarbray and Madrigal hadn’t been interested in Tink. It was Cheyenne who they wanted intelligence about. Cheyenne held the key to bringing down the Berryhill empire. Tink had been in danger by virtue of her growing closeness to Cheyenne.
Patsy drank wine. “David wouldn’t go into specifics but said I could help Tink by telling Vince that I’d changed my mind and that I would help him get access to Tink and spy on her.”
“Did the FBI match what Vince Madrigal was paying you?”
“Nan, I didn’t do it for the money, okay? Vince’s money was nice. Lord knows I needed it, but that’s not why I did it. I told David that I had half a mind to just tell Tink to cut off co
ntact with that Berryhill place. To tell her about Vince and the FBI and all of it. David pleaded with me not to. He said it was a way I could help take criminals off the streets.”
“Like I did.”
“Nan.” Her mother looked at her squarely. “I want you to know something. I am inspired by what you did to find the man who stabbed you and who killed those policewomen. The courage you showed. You did a wonderful thing, Nan. The families of those dead women finally know what happened to them.”
Vining thought she was truly seeing her mother for the first time. “I always thought you looked down on my work.”
“Oh, honey, I am so proud of you.” Patsy moved her chair beside her daughter’s and took her hands between both of hers. “Let me tell you something. I know I’ve messed up a lot in my life. I’ve made bad decisions.” She added with an eye roll, “A lot of them. But your old mother’s not as big a fool as you think she is. The money that Vince and the FBI paid me was helpful, but I did it because I wanted to do something good. I wanted you to be proud of me. Then Tink ends up murdered.”
Patsy yelped a sob and buried her face in her hands.
“You couldn’t have prevented that, Mom.” Vining pulled her mother against her and rubbed her back, feeling her bony shoulders against her chest. It always surprised her to realize how much bigger and more muscular she was than her petite mother. “Your intentions were good. Sometimes even the smartest and best-trained law-enforcement professionals can’t stop bad things from happening.”
“I keep thinking of Tink. I was the last one who talked to her.”
“I know, Mom. I know.” She gave her another hug.
“And she left me her jewelry. I’d always admired it and told her so. I never expected…”
“Tink loved you a lot, Mom.”
“There’s a bracelet that would look good on you.”
“Mom, save your money, please.”
Patsy nodded. “I will. I promise. This whole thing has changed the way I see everything.”
Vining was thinking that she’d believe that when she saw it when Patsy confirmed her suspicions.
“Although I could use a new car.”
Vining let it go. “So, Mom, what did David Scarbray say that nudged you over the edge and convinced you to become an FBI informant?”
Patsy sat back in the chair and grabbed her wineglass by the stem. She breathed heavily, as if struggling with how to frame her words. She was holding the wineglass stem so tightly, Vining thought it might snap. “Because I was in love with him.”
“You fell in love with him?”
“No, I knew him from before.” Patsy again grabbed Vining’s hand and squeezed it. “Nan…David Scarbray…”
There was a look in her mother’s eyes that gave Vining pause.
Patsy tried again. “Nan, David Scarbray is your father. I gave him those clippings about you. I wanted him to know that his daughter was a hero.”
FIFTY-ONE
Standing at her bathroom mirror, Vining searched through her hair with her index fingers. Spotting another gray hair, she tried to separate it from the dark strands. It slipped from her grasp. She ferreted it out again, wrapped it around her finger, and yanked. She drew her fingers along it, feeling its coarse texture, before dropping it into the trash.
She’d always wondered about her preponderance of gray hair at age thirty-five when her mother didn’t have any at fifty-four. She now knew why after David Scarbray had answered that personal question, one of many she’d asked when they’d met over coffee earlier that day. Scarbray said he’d turned completely gray by the time he was forty.
She finished blow-drying her freshly washed hair. She ran her fingers through it, brought a thick lock to her nose, and inhaled the scent from the new herbal-and-citrus shampoo that she’d tried for the first time. In the drugstore, she’d chosen one of the more expensive brands on the top shelf instead of automatically reaching for the cheap brand on the bottom shelf that she’d been buying for as long as she’d been doing her own shopping. Somehow her shampoo decision mimicked how she was feeling about her life: turned upside down.
She picked up and read the instructions on the box of hair color rinse she’d also bought. It was designed to cover gray.
Twenty-four hours had passed since Vining and her mother had talked late into the night about love lost and found, paths not taken, and regrets and happiness.
A few hours ago, she’d returned from meeting her father at a Starbucks, where they’d discussed deep personal sagas while seated at a corner table among students with laptops and soccer moms gossiping after spinning class.
Between her mother’s and father’s separate recounting of times, events, and emotions, Vining had come to some conclusions about where the truth lay. After Patsy had graduated from high school, she took classes at Pasadena City College and had a part-time job as a waitress at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor in Rosemead. Her high school friends, Tink, Maria Alicia, and Vicki, were all away at big colleges. Patsy was growing distant from her old friends, and felt her life drifting.
One day, three young marines came into Farrell’s. They were stationed at Camp Pendleton but one of them was from the San Gabriel Valley and had brought his two friends to stay with his parents for a few days. David Scarbray was one of the friends.
“It was love at first sight,” Patsy had told Vining during their talk around the dining room table.
“She was pretty and a lot of fun. Always laughing,” Scarbray had said at their corner table in Starbucks.
“I was living with my mom and dad in Alhambra and he came to visit me there. Sometimes I drove to see him at Camp Pendleton.”
“After a few months, I left for Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. I was the third generation of Scarbray marines. It was sad to leave, but…”
“It broke my heart to say good-bye.” The memory still made Patsy cry. “I dreamed that he’d propose before he left. I was just a girl, full of romantic ideas.”
“I promised to write, but I was never much for writing letters.”
“Granny warned me not to get too involved with him. I don’t regret it. I’ve never forgotten a minute of it. Later, I found out I was pregnant. You can imagine how my mom and dad took that news. Attitudes about that were different then, especially in my parents’ house. They talked late into the night, discussing everything from abortion to sending me away to have the baby in secret and then giving it up for adoption to making David marry me. They wanted me to tell David but I refused. I’d come to accept that I was just another girl in a port for him. If I’d told him and he’d rejected me, I wouldn’t have been able to bear it. I was determined to keep my baby. At least I had something of him. Something of my one true love.” Patsy grabbed Nan’s hands. “You were truly my love child.”
Nan had wept.
“I bought a plain gold wedding band. I told my friends that his name was David Smith and that he was one of the last marines in Vietnam. He’d been shot down and was Missing in Action. I didn’t see my friends that much then, but when I did, I never brought photos. I said it was too painful. That was the truth. I had a few photos, but I couldn’t look at them. My parents went along with the story as a way to save face. After a while, we all sort of believed the lie.”
Patsy had then dug out the photos to show her daughter.
Vining’s father had told her how he’d left the Marines after attaining the rank of captain and had joined the FBI. He’d married a young woman from Baltimore and they’d had three children: a girl who was now thirty, another girl who was twenty-seven, and a boy who was twenty-four and a marine first lieutenant. Scarbray had four grandchildren—five, counting Emily, who was the oldest.
Over his second cappuccino, Scarbray told Vining, “When I thought of my Camp Pendleton days, I’d think of Patsy, the lively, pretty girl I’d dated, and I’d wonder what happened to her.”
He became part of the FBI and L.A. Sheriff’s Department task force investigat
ing the Berryhills for transporting Fallon Price and other young women across state lines for sex, the suspected murder of Fallon, and other crimes. They’d had Vince Madrigal under surveillance since they’d learned that he was the go-to guy for dirt on the Berryhills and their clients. When the surveillance team identified Madrigal’s dinner companion as Patsy Brightly, Scarbray did a background check, uncovered her maiden name, and determined that she was the same Patsy Brown he’d romanced years before.
Tink Engleford emerged as a way for the task force to get deep inside the Berryhill organization and close to Cheyenne Leon, potentially a key witness to the dirty goings-on involving Georgia’s Girls.
“Did you lie to my mother to get her to cooperate with you?” Vining asked Scarbray.
He responded without hesitation. “I told her the truth. That I’d often thought of her and fondly recalled our times together. I said I was happy to reconnect with her.”
“You didn’t tell her that you’re married.”
“It didn’t come up.”
Vining couldn’t blame him for leading on someone useful to an investigation to get that person to cooperate. She would have done the same.
The previous night, at the conclusion of Patsy’s tearful story, during which Vining had accepted a glass of her mother’s chardonnay, she’d hugged her mother and said, “I’m not mad, Mom.”
Now, in the cool light of day, Vining thought the whole drama was so Patsy. Vining would have handled it differently, but she had always strived to live her life differently from her mother’s. Vining was not much for carrying grudges or harboring thoughts of vengeance. She’d discovered her baser impulses after she’d tracked down the creep who’d stabbed her and left her for dead. She’d released her anger about him and many things, finding that it was lighter to live that way.
After Vining and her father had talked—not taking hours, as their law-enforcement background had trained them to get to the facts with brevity—she’d made a call to Kissick. He’d been wandering Old Pasadena with Emily. They came to the Starbucks, and Emily met her grandfather for the first time.
Before they parted, Scarbray heaped praise on Vining’s skills as a cop. “You’ve got great instincts, Nan. If you’re interested in coming over to the FBI, a larger organization with a bigger budget and more opportunity, I could get you in.”