“Jesus Christ, I’m in my underwear,” I snapped. “What the hell!”
“Prospective tenants,” he said, a smile creasing his fat face. “Didn’t you get my message?”
“I have to make doody,” the little boy whined.
“Can’s down the hall on the left,” Bob said. The woman led him away.
I was incensed. “You can’t do this.”
“Read your lease. Landlord has the right to access the property to show it to prospective tenants.”
“But not without some notice!” I’d grabbed my jeans and was frantically pulling them up.
“Your machine must be on the blink. Kitchen has a garbage disposal and dishwasher,” he told the applicant. “This here’s one of those new energy-efficient refrigerators.”
“It’s not,” I said, buttoning my pants. “And the disposal’s never worked.”
He took the guy’s arm and led him down the hall. “Don’t pay her no mind. Let me show you the master closet. You could move your fuckin’ mother-in-law in there, it’s so spacious.”
I thought about snatching up a skillet and bringing it down with considerable force on Bob’s greasy head. Instead, I grabbed my bag and headed down the stairs, hoping an eight-mile drive would give me some time to cool off—and wouldn’t net me another citation for my missing plate.
It was a quarter past four when I pulled up to the DMV. It was a long, single-story building with all the curb appeal of a maximum-security prison, built of concrete blocks and painted an indeterminate brown. The lot was full, and I circled it twice until a spot opened up. To park on the street in this neighborhood was simply asking for a trip to Salvatore’s Used Tires and Wheels for a set of new rims.
Double swinging doors of smoked glass deposited me in a narrow lobby crowded with a tightly packed line of people, most of them clutching paperwork of some sort. Their object was a desk marked RECEPTION, where a woman in tortoiseshell glasses fingered their papers with maddening slowness before directing them to other destinations. Seated a few feet to her left was a second woman. There was no one in her line, so I hustled forward.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “I got a message from the—”
“Do you have an appointment?” she said.
“What? Oh. No, but I—”
She held up her hand and pointed silently to a placard on her desk that read, APPOINTMENTS ONLY.
“I just have to pick something up. I’ll be quick.”
She simply looked at me.
“Can I make an appointment, then? For right now?”
“You have to call the eight-hundred number.” She dabbed at her nose with a tissue, then blew a couple of dainty blasts, keeping her eyes on me in case I became violent.
I turned away and took a position at the back of the pack. Three people had joined the line while I was at the counter, placing me out the double doors and into the parking lot. I breathed in deeply, trying to release some of the tension collecting between my shoulder blades, and considered doing a little tapping. I couldn’t look any stranger than some of the folks in front of me.
Twenty minutes later, I’d reached the window. I gave the woman at the desk a bright smile, and she gazed back at me stolidly.
“I lost my license plate, and I believe it’s here,” I said. “Could you possibly check?”
She tore a slip of paper off a dispenser and handed it to me. “Window G.”
“What?”
“When your number’s called, report to window G.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but the fellow behind me was already edging forward, his breath hot on the back of my neck. I sighed and moved off, wishing I’d brought a book to read. Instead, I grabbed a brochure from a nearby rack to provide a little mental stimulation.
There was only one seat available near window G, a tight fit between a woman holding a solemn-eyed infant in a terrycloth sailor suit and an elderly man who appeared to be napping. I settled my ass in the rigid molded plastic chair and checked the monitor, which informed me that customer D3 was now being served. I looked at the crumpled slip of paper in my hand: G8. I had a lifetime of waiting in front of me.
I glanced at the pamphlet I’d scored, which was all about licensing trucks in California. A photo of a shiny red truck with “Santori’s Plumbing and Heating” emblazoned across the door was on the cover. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I turned to page one and learned that the state of California considered almost all pickups to be commercial vehicles, which meant, of course, higher licensing fees. Was that fascinating or what? With a yawn, I leaned into the hard seatback.
The baby on my left squirmed and grunted. Uh-oh. A moment later, the air was redolent with the perfume of post-digestion strained peas. His mother rolled her eyes.
“Third BM today,” she told me. “Takes after his old man.” She rose, tucking the baby expertly into her hip, and shuffled off toward the restroom.
I closed my eyes, concentrating on clearing my head and envisioning myself in a peaceful place. Instead, a parade of faces danced across my mental landscape. Max, the soft rounded lines of his childhood smoothed away by new planes of maturity. Becky, her smile as garish as a neon sign. Merrit, her toffee-colored eyes unreadable as she confessed to killing a man. Then Bernie. I felt a tendril of warmth as I traced the contours of his face in my mind. Maybe, if I hadn’t been so damn prickly, there might still be a chance.
Bernie’s face was supplanted by Wayne’s, his eyes the brilliant blue of a summer sky, his mouth weak and irresolute. I tried to hate him and failed. Now that he was back in our lives, after a fashion, I was having trouble clinging to the illusion that my life would have been better with him in it. Wayne wasn’t the stuff of which enduring couplehood was made. I’d raised Max alone, a hardscrabble existence at times, but filled with moments of pure sweetness. And I hadn’t had to answer to anyone. Maybe my life had gone according to plan after all.
There was another face I tried to bring into focus, but it remained a formless blur. Someone had entered our stairwell in the small hours of the morning. Unfamiliar shoes had mounted the stairs; a strange hand had rested on the banister. I pictured the dark form hunched over the wheel of the silver truck. My gut told me they were one and the same.
I gave up on inner peace and focused on more pressing issues. What had I learned so far? It didn’t feel like much. Two of my clients were dead. Two other people had died under mysterious circumstances. I needed to know why.
I brought out the bag of M&M’s and opened it, tunneling through the candies until I’d collected all the brown ones. Somehow they always tasted more chocolaty to me than the other colors. Popping a few in my mouth, I thought back to Bernie’s interview with Mrs. Morehouse. There, at least, was a logical starting point. A dark-haired woman had delivered the fatal gift basket to Richard Ravello. That narrowed the field of suspects down to a handful. And the one who stood out was Loretta. She fit Mrs. Morehouse’s description perfectly. And she had an excellent motive. While none of the “gang” seemed overburdened with brains, surely they could do the simple math that showed a pie divided by three was a lot less pie than when it was divided by one.
Wayne had warned me not to underestimate Loretta. And it would be satisfying to pin the crimes on her, no question about that. She was a grifter, a mercenary, a woman who laid claim to a husband I didn’t even want…but, illogically, I blamed her for it. Ugh. I finished the brown M&M’s and started on the green. Emotions were stupid things.
An ugly thought skittered through my mind. I was taking a lot of what Wayne said at face value. Suppose he and Loretta were in collusion. By his own admission, he’d been here in Arlinda, on the spot, not all that long after Vito Price vanished. Wayne, instead of fleeing from Loretta, might have been fleeing with her. I didn’t want to believe it. But that didn’t change the facts. He’d rescued me from the truck driver, true enough. But who was to say that whole nocturnal adventure hadn’t been carefully orchestra
ted? Afterward, I’d been more inclined to trust Wayne. Maybe that was the desired effect.
I started on the orange M&M’s. One slipped from my fingers and fell into my bag. Digging around to retrieve it, I spotted a square of white cardstock and pulled it out. It was the business card I’d picked up from the farmers’ market. Underneath the Arlinda Botanical Society logo in its ornate cursive letters were the words “Lynn Klinghoffer-Hart, Board Chairman.”
My heart gave a sudden leap. It couldn’t be coincidence. The woman I’d spoken to about tomatoes and garden pests could easily have been Louis Klinghoffer’s daughter or daughter-in-law, or, more likely, his granddaughter. It wasn’t a common name. I dredged up an image of her from my memory banks. Mid-thirties, fresh good looks, with a thick mane of dark hair.
I shifted in my chair. Edsel Harrington had confided to his attorney that he planned to marry his caregiver and change his will. Before either of those things could happen, he had died. Not in his bed, if I believed Merrit’s bizarre story. I couldn’t see a reason for her to lie about it. The society—headed by Lynn Klinghoffer-Hart—would have been denied the legacy around which they’d built their long-term plans. And the probate attorney was perfectly positioned to leak that information.
I dug around in the M&M’s and collected all the yellow ones. Up to that point, everything hung together beautifully; then the whole edifice came crashing down. Sure, she fit the description, but why would Klinghoffer-Hart kill off potential buyers? From a real estate prospective, competing offers were the stuff of dreams for sellers. Frantic to outbid one another, rabid investors might be driven by their competitive juices to pay far more than a property was worth.
I popped a yellow M&M into my mouth, thinking hard. Until now, I hadn’t stopped to wonder about the third buyer, Lois Hartshorne’s client. It seemed far-fetched to think a party might take extreme measures to eliminate the competition, but real estate was a cutthroat business.
The elderly man in the chair next to me snorted and woke up, thrashing about in his seat and catching me in the ribs with a bony elbow.
“I beg your pardon, miss,” he said, looking about the office with a puzzled air. Then his brow cleared. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a worn leather wallet secured to his trousers by a short length of chain. From the wallet he extracted a ticket and examined it, first from a distance of about six inches in front of his face, then gradually moving it farther out. Finally he handed it to me. “If you would be so kind.”
“It says, ‘F3.’ ”
“Ah! Thank you.” He tucked the ticket back into the wallet and put it away. From his breast pocket he brought out a pair of black plastic spectacles. The lenses were as thick as the glass that enclosed the shark tank at the San Francisco Aquarium. He put the glasses on his nose and stared up at the monitor. His lips moved.
“Hang it all, I’ve slept through my appointment,” he said in disgust.
“They’ve only got up to F1,” I told him.
“Really?” He turned to look at me and I jumped back, so huge were his eyes through the thick lenses. “Well. That’s lucky. I appreciate your help. What are you here for, miss? New tags? Update your driver’s license photo?”
“Lost my plate. How about you?”
“Eye test. A nuisance. I’ve had twenty-twenty vision since boyhood.”
I offered up the bag of M&M’s.
“No, thank you,” he said. “I don’t smoke.”
He lapsed into silence, and I closed my eyes again. Where had I left off? The third buyer. “A woman who truly loves flowers,” Lynn Klinghoffer-Hart had said. In a little acrobatic flip of memory, I was back in Lois’s office, thumbing through her private papers. I had the contract in my hands, but I’d been focused on the bottom half of the page, where the financing details were laid out. Lois was coming, her heels clip-clopping on the concrete. My eyes had traveled up to the first couple of lines and—dammit, why did they make the print so small? There was a name there. And…did it start with an “E”? I was almost certain it did. But that was as far as my visual memory would take me. I cursed my limited recall. Maybe there was a course I could take to improve it.
“Final call. G8.”
Shit! I bounded out of my chair with a start and hustled over to the window. The woman behind the counter was on the phone. She held up one finger, bidding me wait. She giggled into the receiver, turning her back to me slightly to share something intimate and breathy. She touched her cheek and then her hair, winding a lock of frizzy dark curls around her fingers coquettishly. Her shoulders were rounded by clerical stooping and set atop a thick waist. She shot a look at me and edged away to create the illusion of privacy, displaying generous hips barely contained by leopard-patterned Spandex stretched to the brink of extinction. I sent a little finger wave her way.
“Just a moment.” She went through a series of good-byes, each one more sexually charged than the last, then set the receiver down and looked over my left shoulder. “What can I do for you?”
For the third time, I explained my dilemma. Before I’d finished, she was thrusting a sheaf of paperwork in my direction.
“Fill out Section 2, lines D through L,” she said. “Then come back up to the window.” She started to turn away.
“Wait. Why all the paperwork? Can’t you just grab my plate?”
“No, ma’am. The paperwork’s for your new plates. Fifty-five dollars.”
“I don’t need new plates. I just want my old one back.”
She was shaking her head no. “Ma’am, our policy is to issue replacement plates in the event the originals are lost or stolen. Fill out the form and come back up to the window when you’re done.”
“Just a sec,” I said, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. “My old plate was, well, special. One of the blue ones with yellow lettering. A classic. I’d really prefer to have it back. Can’t you just check to see if it’s lying around somewhere?”
A gleam of pure enjoyment came into her eyes. She leaned forward slightly, her lips parted. “Ma’am, anytime a plate is delivered to our offices our policy is to immediately crush it and recycle it. We don’t run a lost-and-found here. This is the DMV.”
“You crush them?”
“We have a machine made for us special. You feed a plate in, and it comes out the size of a sugar cube. That’s our policy. Anybody could say they’ve lost a plate and pick up one they’re not entitled to. Sometimes they go on to use it for illicit purposes.” She gave me a look that suggested I fit that profile to a tee.
I gritted my teeth. “But it was just turned in this morning. Can’t you check and see if it’s sitting in a box somewhere?”
Her eyes strayed to a spot near her left buttock, then swung back sharply to me. “It’s been crushed,” she snapped. “Fill out lines D through L and come back to the window.” She turned her backside on me. Her hips were like feedbags overfilled to bursting with oats.
I pinned my arms by my sides in case they made wildly obscene gestures of their own volition and walked stiffly to my seat. It was still warm. I sat down and began to work my way through the form.
By the time I got through line L, I felt a tad calmer. I tucked the pen into the clipboard and rose to my feet. She must have been biding her time, because just as I reached the window she whipped out a WINDOW CLOSED sign and plunked it on the counter.
“We’re closing,” she said. “Come back first thing tomorrow.” She turned off the video monitor and made her way toward the back, picking a judicious route between cubicles so the voluptuous sway of her ass in its tight stretch fabric didn’t upset anyone’s potted plants.
My vision dimmed to a dark tunnel. I yanked the form off the clip and stuffed it in my bag, then slammed the clipboard on the counter so hard the pen skittered across the Formica and dropped out of sight.
Suddenly there was a commotion across the room. A man with a shaved head as glossy as a billiard ball leaned against the counter over at window C, waving h
is tattooed arms. Furious words filled the building.
“I been waiting an hour and forty-five goddamn minutes!” he yelled. “I’m not leaving here without my fucking registration!”
The receptionist by the door swiveled around to stare, then reached under the counter and pressed a button. All eyes were across the room. In a flash, I hiked my body up and over the high counter so that I was dangling from my waist. There was an industrial-grade desk below me covered in food wrappers, the crust of what looked like a ham sandwich, and a framed photograph of the big-bottomed clerk with her arms around a guy I thought I recognized from America’s Most Wanted. To my right was a metal shelf. A brown cardboard box was tucked into the middle level. Stretching as far as I could without tumbling over the counter, I managed to hook it with a fingertip and pull it toward me. It was full of dented plates. Something blue and yellow caught my eye and I snatched it up, then wriggled my way back to the floor, slipping my prize under my jacket. I braced for shouts of outrage, but nobody so much as glanced my way as they took in the spectacle at window C. Speed-stepping past the front desk, I burst through the double doors to the relative safety of the parking area, expecting the heavy hand of authority to come down on my shoulder at any moment. It never did.
When I got to the VW, I unlocked it and slid into the driver’s seat. Only then did I dare look at the plate. It was mine. I gave a whoop of relief, then drove a block and a half and pulled over to the curb, where I secured the plate to my bumper. In the context of all that had happened over the last few days, this was a modest victory, but I savored it nonetheless. It was sweet—very, very sweet.
Chapter 32
I drove home on the 101, checking my rearview mirror occasionally for truck headlights. Dusk had dragged away the last of the light from the west, and the bus couldn’t generate enough heat to drive away the chill that had settled into my bones. I took the Arlinda exit and headed east toward Arlinda Corners, skirting the roundabout and bouncing over a couple of speed humps designed to slow down traffic by wrecking your shock absorbers.
Death at a Fixer-Upper Page 22