How odd. Alice couldn’t keep her eyes off Edna Jeffers. Joe always said that criminals talked too much. What had Jeffers done? Didn’t she realize that Officer Reynolds might think her guilty? And she talked as if testing what premise might appeal to her audience. As if truth could be found in a fast moving river of words if she kept dipping her hand in it.
Abruptly Reynolds said, “How’d you know Tauscher was killed by a pigsticker?”
She cocked her head. “Didn’t you tell me?”
“Only the police and the medical examiner knew that. And the killer.”
She frowned. “Gordy found the body. He must have told me.”
Reynolds studied the housekeeper. “We found the bowie knife underneath the body. After we moved it. Mr. Laughlin wasn’t there then.”
She sighed sorrowfully. “Like I said, Gordy killed him. And he told me.”
Laughlin leaned on the couch behind Alice. Glancing up at the handyman, she felt concerned. He’d gone so pale, she thought he’d keel over.
“I didn’t kill him,” he said hoarsely.
“It’s a terrible thing what liquor’s done to him,” Jeffers said to Joe. “Fellow can’t remember much of anything anymore.”
Laughlin’s knuckles whitened on the back of the couch. “I’d remember killing someone. I had no call to kill those men.”
To her horror, Alice spoke. “But Miss Jeffers did.”
She clapped her hand over her mouth, but it was too late.
Reynolds scowled, but Joe ducked his head to hide his smile.
For the first time, Edna Jeffers looked at Alice. “What reason did I have to kill them?” Suddenly she didn’t seem angry or complaining. She sounded only curious.
Alice looked for direction from Joe and then from Reynolds. Both remained silent. She swallowed.
“You said it. The men had all the power. They used you disgracefully. They demanded your body, your money, and your time. Killing them was your only means of escape.”
“That don’t sound like me,” Edna Jeffers said. “I just felt like killing them.”
Epilogue
Later Joe told her that Edna Jeffers confessed not because they’d trapped her but because she wanted credit for the killings. Alice thought about what he said when she saw Jeffers’ picture in the paper the next day. Her large hands were cuffed, but her chin jutted forward triumphantly.
She set the paper aside. “Was she mad?” she asked Reynolds.
They sat alone in the Harbor Inn’s breakfast room. He’d dropped off a check for Joe, and stayed to eat.
He spread butter over his toast. “Not crazy enough to prevent them from executing her. But something was definitely twisted inside her.”
“Do you think she got a taste of killing with Evans, and it became easier with the other two?”
“It’s possible she got her first taste of murder a long time ago.” He tapped a folder on the table. “This came over the wire last night. Seems a stream of folk went missing around our Miss Jeffers.”
Alice’s eyes widened. “Missing?”
He nodded. “I asked an old friend of mine out Tucson way to look at the family she stayed with there. Turned out that they had a son, slow in his head, who liked collecting arrowheads in the desert. One day he didn’t come home. His folks thought he got turned around. Detective talked to the family and looked a little closer at the house. Seemed they were doing some plastering in the back porch about the same time the son went missing. They found his bones embedded in the wall.”
Alice shuddered and thought about the prehistoric whale bones in Signal Hill with the human skull grinning at her from its belly. Since Joe wasn’t there, she could risk saying it. “I thought the Admiral had something to do with the murders. There’s something not right about him.”
The policeman played with his coffee cup. “The Admiral saw plenty of bad in the war. His craziness comes from making something different of himself. He protects his troops with an empire. The war didn’t end for him, but now his people are safer.”
He stared sightlessly out the window. “Gordon Laughlin dove into a bottle after the war. Lots of ‘em don’t come out.”
Rubbing the rim of her teacup, she said softly, “Joe was in the war too.”
“Yeah,” he said.
When she looked at Reynolds, he smiled sadly. “And where is Finnegan now?”
She shook her head. She hadn’t seen him since he’d dropped her off at the inn and continued somewhere else in the taxicab. His note this morning said he was with Pierce and Laughlin. Which didn’t make sense now that they’d closed the case.
“I don’t know where he is either,” Reynolds said. “But I can tell you one thing. Every time he comes to California, I know he takes Pierce to where the San Gabriel river empties into the ocean near here. And they walk along its banks all the way to the mountains. About 35 miles from end-to-end.”
She stared at him. “Why would they do that? Pierce doesn’t even like Joe.”
His shoulders lifted and dropped. “Never met the Admiral. Only seen Pierce when I watch for Finn in the foothills. I know Joe Finnegan better than most men, but he’s said only one thing about the war to me. That he and his buddies buried the bones of a fellow soldier in a hill somewhere.”
Alice remembered the bones of Jonah Luciano in Signal Hill. She nodded carefully. If Joe wanted Reynolds to know where, he would have told him. Not her place to do so.
“I was too old to serve in the Great War, but I understand something about killing in the line of duty,” he said. “The demons can eat at you till you turn into a Gordon Laughlin. You drink till you black out. Or you walk thirty five miles till you’re too tired to think.”
He raised his coffee cup. “Might take off early to do some fishing today. In the San Gabriel foothills.”
Alice studied Reynolds while he finished his toast. For all the ways he vexed her, she also knew something they shared. Neither of them had been to war and they would never fully understand what had happened to those who had. But they did what they could. The policeman took Joe fishing in Chicago and gave him cases in California. And he waited for his war weary friend in the foothills.
And she? She was Joe Finnegan’s secretary. No demon stood a chance with her.
Sinking Ships
The First Novella in the Abishag Mystery Series
An Excerpt from Sinking Ships
Until I agreed to marry an 83-year-old brain-dead man, I’d never been on the second floor of the Abishag agency.
“You can change your mind, you know.”
Parked in front of the Westwood office building on a quiet, palm-lined street off Wilshire, I stared at the second floor overlooking the courtyard. Uncomfortable in my contract-signing clothes and hearing Jen’s words, I squirmed. Before she spoke, I’d only been thinking about not moving into Thomas’s Palos Verdes Peninsula home till tomorrow night and felt glad of the reprieve. I thought she at least would be on my side.
I inhaled the scent of sage from the courtyard and warm leather seats in her Audi convertible. “I can’t back out now. I signed a contract.”
“That one doesn’t count.” She sighed and rifled through my purse. Digging past the final notice telephone bill, she extracted a hair pick. “Let’s fix your hair.”
I plucked off the scarf and dropped it onto the dashboard, its silken folds shimmering. It also belonged to Jen.
“I get a finder’s fee when you marry the old geezer.” She fussed with my bangs. “I should be telling you that one day this could be all yours.” She waved my hair pick in a wide sweep across the windshield.
I blinked. “You’re giving me your car?”
“What? No.” She laughed. “Took me four Abishag husbands to get the car. Not to mention the loft in Malibu and college fees paid through grad school. I’m not giving that up—even for my best friend.”
Best friend? Jen had been my dorm-mate first quarter of our freshman year, but we rarely saw each other after she
took her first husband and I moved into a West LA rental with seven other students. I never thought of us being close and definitely not best friends.
She responded to my surprised look with a wry one. “Only friend, I should say. Since I turned Abishag, I’ve lost all my old ones and can’t make any new. And don’t get me started on dating between husbands. The good ones won’t date me, and I won’t date the scum that will.”
I’d waked with a frisson of nerves, thinking that by day’s end everything would be different. Jen’s words made my stomach churn. Marrying Thomas would solve my money problems, but I hadn’t heard that it could ruin my dating life.
Not that I had one.
Weeks earlier, I’d called Jen because I’d run out of options. I couldn’t keep a job, was a month behind with my share of the rent, and unless I took out another student loan, I’d no way of paying school fees this Fall. She’d done everything she could to discourage me from applying to the agency, but after doing her own assessment of my finances, she reluctantly coached me through the interviews, recommended me to the director, and helped me study for the licensing exams.
I tried to puzzle through her logic. “What does being an Abishag have to do with friendship?”
Her eyes suddenly welled with tears. Feeling the discomfort of something entirely different, the awkwardness of dealing with crying, I fumbled for the door handle. Jen stayed me with a perfectly manicured hand. “Les, I can count on you being rational. So what if being an Abishag wife is kind of sordid? That doesn’t make me bad friend material, right?”
I chewed my lip. “Who says being an Abishag is sordid? For all the stupid reasons people get married, seems like caring for the dying is the kindest.”
Laughing, she blew her nose and some of the butterflies abated seeing her return to her usual cynical pragmatism. “Yes, Leslie Greene, you are delightfully rational, with a perfectly daft view of relationships. It’s like you were made to be an Abishag wife. I bet you’ve already memorized the 89 rules.”
Ignoring the comment about memorizing the 89 rules (which I had), I managed a wobbly grin. “A perfect Abishag as long as I keep my mouth shut?”
Laughing again, she returned the hair pick to my purse. “Always a good policy with the tact-challenged. Rule 48.”
I tried to pick up my purse, but her hand rested on it, her gaze fixed again on the second floor of the Abishag agency. “The rich are guilted into contracting an Abishag wife, you know. Can’t have their loved ones passing into the Great Unknown without the ultimate companion, all the peace of mind you can buy in one short, blonde package…”
“Hey, I’m not…”
She stared at the bougainvillea winding around the building’s windows, not hearing me. “Really, in the end, it’s not the geezers or the families or even the Abishag wives who profit. It’s the lawyers.”
Of course they did. We lived in a capitalist society—thank God, as my political father would say. If there were no rich, there would be nothing like Abishag wives—and no way for me to return to the university in the fall.
I knew Jen worried about me being happy, so I didn’t talk about economics. When she coached me, she went on forever about how an Abishag wife was not part of the family, to remember that I would only be a hospice worker with a title, and when I didn’t know what to say, say nothing.
But I’d met Thomas’s daughter so I could assure her, “The family will be wonderful, Thomas will pass surrounded by love, and the summer will be over before I know it.”
“Spare me your fairy tales,” Jen said, but she released my purse, started the car and said as she often did, “If Cinderella were an Abishag, she’d get the glass slipper but no prince. Remember, Les, you’re being paid to attend the dying. You’re not being adopted into his family.”
I got out of the car in a twirl of Jen’s second signing ceremony dress, also a loaner. I read the worry in her grip on the steering wheel, and suddenly I felt calm. “It’s okay, Jen. Portuguese Cove’s a nice place, and the doctors say Thomas won’t last more than a month. Me being there means he won’t die alone, and I can go to school in the fall. It’s win-win.”
She nodded although her anxious smile slipped. “Call me, okay?”
I shut the door firmly. “Dinner when it’s over. My treat.”
I heard the purr of the retreating Audi as I crossed the brick-lined sidewalk to the agency’s red door.
The Westwood Abishag agency filled two floors in a Spanish hacienda-style building. The front half of the ground floor faced the courtyard and was used exclusively for the family of its elderly, comatose clients. Facing the alley, the back half was for interviewing Abishag candidates.
California boasted fourteen Abishag agencies, but the Westwood office had the state’s third largest clientele and drew wife candidates largely from UCLA, USC and six other public and private universities between Bakersfield and the Mexican border. On the second floor, the Westwood legal offices created the contracts (and provided the occasional litigation and even rarer criminal case support) 24/7. As it supported satellite agencies in Palm Springs and La Jolla, the Westwood office had more lawyers than any other Abishag agency in the United States.
Moments after I entered the front door, an assistant whisked me upstairs to a conference room overlooking the courtyard. Florence Harcourt had told us candidates the room was used in all the signing ceremonies.
Except for a bowl of white chrysanthemums on the conference table, it looked ordinary. A notary sat near the door, opening and shutting her inkpad in a bored manner, while Florence Harcourt’s assistant circled, whispering into her headset. I stood near the window, trying not to wrinkle Jen’s dress, trying not to sweat, wishing I could take off the pink sweater loaned to hide the mustard stained sleeve, wishing my new, strappy, white sandals didn’t pinch my toes.
“It should be just another few minutes, Leslie.” Florence Harcourt’s assistant squinted, re-pinning a white rose corsage to the pink sweater. It was the fourth time she’d tried to straighten it, and I almost bit through my lip trying not to tell her that she should have used two pins to stabilize it.
Jen told me to say as little as possible to the client’s family—actually to interact verbally as little as possible with anyone connected to the Abishag agency—so I gritted my teeth.
“Miss Crowder is running late because of traffic on the 405,” the assistant told me. “She’s keeping Mrs. Harcourt apprised of her ETA.”
Although my housemates were virulent in their opinions about Abishags, I thought I’d make a good one. Before I’d been fired from hospital volunteer work for mouthing off to a patient’s family, I liked working with the patients, especially the comatose ones. They never complained about anything I said.
A few minutes later, Florence Harcourt breezed in with a harried-looking Tina Crowder and a senior lawyer carrying a thick stack of papers, contracts I assumed. When we met a week earlier, Tina had made me nervous. She was older than my parents, large boned, with short black hair. She cried every time she talked about her father.
When I visited Thomas in his home the week before I agreed to be his Abishag wife, Tina had told me that she thought me “cute.”
Florence Harcourt had explained that overly protective daughters usually wanted short, waif-like candidates for their fathers, and that would work in my favor. Short, yes, a feathery blond with enormous kewpie-doll eyes, but I never had thought of myself “waif-like.” Still, I had chosen Thomas because he didn’t frighten me as some of the other brain-dead clients had, so I was glad when Tina hired me.
Tina dropped her Fossil purse on the table with a thud and sat. The lawyer slid a tall stack of pages toward her as the assistant set a glass of water near her.
Tina shot me a perfunctory smile.
Suddenly nervous, thinking I should speak, but remembering Jen’s strictures about staying silent, I bit my lip again.
“Did you have any questions?” the lawyer asked Tina.
Tina sh
ook her head. “My dad’s lawyer reviewed the advance, and he’s fine with it.”
My contract with the agency was only a page long, a standard employer/employee agreement. The Abishag contract didn’t have to be drawn up each time she took a husband, so I was there to sign only one piece of paper.
My sandals still pinching, I shifted slightly. Florence Harcourt frowned, and I froze. What had I done wrong?
“It’s a wonderful thing you’re doing for your father, Miss Crowder,” she said warmly. “A sweet and loving way to say good-bye.”
Really? Signing a contract is sweet and loving? But Jen had reminded me that Abishag wives fade into the background. Rule 43. I practiced fading.
The room went silent, and I realized everyone was staring at me. The lawyer exhaled impatiently. “I’m sorry…” I stuttered.
Tina patted the chair next to her. “It’s time to sign the marriage certificate, Leslie.” Her eyes welling with tears, she fumbled in her purse. “I’ve signed for Dad.”
I eased into the chair next to her, uncomfortable with her quiet sniffing. Florence Harcourt squeezed Tina’s shoulder gently.
Hand quivering, I signed the certificate just above her signature—Tina Crowder for Thomas Crowder.
She stood, wiping her eyes, gathering her purse while I remained seated.
I consider myself a Romantic Rationalist, believer of fairy tales but not in happy endings, dreaming of a soul mate but knowing nothing lasts.
Even so, I couldn’t stop staring at my husband’s name.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My heartfelt gratitude to:
My Beta Readers: Kris Klopfenstein and Rebecca Lang
The Admiral of Signal Hill Page 6