“His class ring,” I repeated.
Joan shut her mouth so firmly that her lips went white and disappeared. She fished around up her sleeve for the hanky again.
“You dropped it,” said Kathi pointing at the floor, where the crumpled square of lace and cotton was sitting. Of course Kathi had noticed the handkerchief pulsing with fictitious stomach germs sitting there. “You should use Kleenex,” she added. Of course she did. It was her biggest bugbear at the Skweeky Kleen—people who sent balled up cotton hankies full of snot for her to wash.
“Kleenex?” said Joan. “I got this set of handkerchiefs for my trousseau and forty-nine years later it’s still as beautiful as the day I chose it in Gilliam’s Department Store. I miss the days when you could order a set of beautiful handkerchiefs in a downtown department store and have them monogrammed, don’t you?” She held it up for us to admire: a square of lawn so fine you could see the light through it, with lace in one corner and an elaborate JFL monogram intertwined with ribbons and roses.
“Me?” said Kathi. “Not really, to be honest. But I agree about supporting local businesses. I’m with you there. I’d hate to see Cuento lose its independent stores and turn into Any Town, USA.”
Joan was nodding along, soothed by this anodyne chat. I ruined it.
“Did the Ortizes have a problem with you girls as well as with Thomas?” I said. “Did they want Patti to spend time with other Latinos instead of with you lot?”
It wasn’t just Joan who froze this time. All three of them got a glassy look. Because that’s not how you talk about it. I’d learned that pretty quickly. I should have said with her family or even with people her parents knew. Her community at a stretch. We were all supposed to be pretending we didn’t know why Mr. Ortiz was angry.
“Not at all,” said Joan. “Mr. and Mrs. Ortiz wanted the best for Patti.” She was ruffled for sure.
“Until they killed her,” I said.
Joan flushed again. “That was crime of passion, I’m sure. A moment of madness. The Ortizes didn’t try to isolate Patti. They wanted her to get on the world and make friends who could help her do that. They were very happy to have Patti be our friend.”
“To help her ‘get on the world’?” I said.
“Yes,” said Joan. “We all came from very respectable families. The Tafoyas owned a—The Heedles family had bought a—I mean, the Worths lived in that—The L— … ” Realising, I reckoned, that nothing she could say in defence of the cool kids on the student council would sound like anything except monstrous snobbery, she stopped talking.
“What about the Shatners?” I said.
“The Shatners weren’t part of Cuento society,” Joan said, unironically as far as I could tell. “It was just Thomas and his mother and they lived at a motel on the far south edge of the town.”
“Oh no,” said Kathi quietly. “How shabby of them.”
“And Thomas didn’t have much leisure time,” said Joan. “He had a job after school and on the weekends. He worked with Joe Ortiz. So when Mr. and Mrs. Ortiz said they didn’t want Patti spending time with Tam Shatner, they knew what they were talking about. They—or he anyway—knew the boy. I can only assume they had his number.”
“It would certainly be kind of hypocritical of Mr. Ortiz to nix him because of his job if he worked in the same place,” I said. “Where was that, by the way?”
“Poor Patti,” said Joan. “She loved her father but she couldn’t be proud of him. He worked in the sanitation department. And so did Thomas Shatner. Every day after school and Saturdays.”
“Poor kid,” said Todd. “I had some crummy jobs, but I never literally swept the streets.”
“Neither did Tam,” Joan told us. “He worked at the roadkill disposal site. Sweeping the streets would have been a picnic compared with shovelling flattened raccoons into a lye pit.”
There was a long silence after that. It was so long that the “Great Dane” must have thought we’d left. We all heard “it” shifting from foot to foot, out of sight in the bedroom corridor.
“I didn’t know that’s how roadkill was dealt with,” said Todd at last. “Lye?”
“It’s not a very savory topic for chit-chat,” said Joan.
It was such an unsavoury topic that it had done for Kathi. She stood, thanked Ms. Lampeter for her time, and headed towards the front door, with Todd and me not far behind.
Twenty-Four
That wasn’t a dog,” said Todd. We were at one of the many frozen yoghurt shops of Cuento, the clean one that Kathi doesn’t mind frequenting. And it was a good choice: the pastel colours of the walls, the shining surfaces of floor and table-top, the bright stink of sherbet and sugar over a base of pure Clorox—it all served as an antidote to the scenes we were imagining.
Kathi gave Todd a grateful look for easing into it with the dog talk. “No,” she said. “There was no dog in that house. I can always spot at least a few hairs.”
“And plus there was no pet door,” Todd added. “She said it had gone out the pet door, but I had a clear sightline when I went over to the bookcase—and didn’t that freak her! Pet door, there was none.”
“What about the utility room?” I said. I was proud that I’d stopped calling it a scullery and that my friends would no longer break into fake Shakespearean English and call me a wench to take the mickey.
“The laundry room?” said Todd. So close, I thought. “It would open into the garage in that house. Kinda gross for letting a dog out to hm-hm.”
“How about the yearbook?” I said. “When you went over to the bookcase.”
“Oh sure, it was there. It was even wrapped in cellophane to keep it nice, like it was a treasured possession. No way she forgot she had it. She just didn’t want us flicking through it and busting her.”
“So who was it?” Kathi said. She had a taster pot of sprinkles and was dipping the back of her spoon into it before each mouthful; this because Todd couldn’t deal with sprinkles. They looked too much like fleas.
“It was Mrs. Ortiz,” I said.
“What?” said Kathi.
“Well,” I began, “if Mike and the rest of the cops think Tam killed Patti Ortiz, that explains why they’re shutting down the investigation of who killed Tam, doesn’t it?”
“Protecting Mrs. Ortiz for avenging her daughter?” said Todd. “That’s pretty maverick. For Mike. And do you really think that woman is capable of murder?”
“I meant who was in the house if it wasn’t a dog,” said Kathi. “But I suppose we’ve got to talk about it sometime.”
“And if they’re right,” I said, “and little old Mrs. Ortiz did kill Tam for that reason, then that’s kind of okay,” I said. “But if they’re wrong—if Joan is right—and Tam did nothing except be a bit of an old goat for the girlies and displease a heavy-handed father … and if that heavy-handed father killed his daughter and his wife kept it secret for fifty years and then killed Tam before he could bust her … then we can’t just leave this. Can we?”
“But none of that’s true!” said Kathi. “Joan just made it up. She killed Tam. She must have. She lied about the yearbook and she lied about the dog. So she probably lied about Joe Ortiz too. And she definitely lied about Tam’s sexuality, like everyone is. I don’t get that.”
“What’s her motive?” I said.
“Revenge,” said Kathi. “Justice for Patti.”
“It’s a lot to do for a friend, fifty years later,” Todd said.
Kathi rubbed her nose. “Maybe it’s just that I didn’t like her. Such a snob with her ‘good families’ and stupid monogrammed hankies.”
“She lied about the hankies,” I said. “Which is beyond pathetic. She said that rag was in her trousseau but it had her maiden name initials on it. Oh wait—unless her married name had the same initials. Do we know her married name? Yeah, scratch that. Talk about give a
dog a bad name and hang him.”
“Then cut him down and dispose of him in a tub of lye,” said Todd. “No, we can’t just leave it. If Joe Ortiz killed his daughter—even in a rage, even accidentally—but covered it up and blamed it on Thomas? And then when Tam finally comes back, his widow kills him to keep the story going? That’s evil. And even if none of it’s true and Tam did kill Patti and then years later Joan killed Tam, we still can’t leave it. Where’s it going to end? If John Worth dies up there in that hospital, that’s three. If Joan turns on whoever was doing the Great Dane impersonation, that’s four.”
“What if John Worth did the killing?” I said. “He’s hiding something. And he admitted to running Tam out of the reunion.”
“And he’s single,” said Todd. “Joan just said she was with someone single, didn’t she?” He thought for a moment. “But why did Mo Heedles’s stomach turn over?”
“And why did Mo Tafoya pretend to list the old Armour place?” Kathi said. “Assuming Mike’s right and it’s not really for sale.”
“And,” I said, “what happened to Patti?”
“She’s dead,” said Todd.
There was a short silence then as we all took it in and accepted it.
“And we’re all thinking the same thing about where her body ended up, aren’t we?” I said, at last. Which is how I found out that we weren’t. Both of them looked at me as if I’d bitten the head off a baby rabbit. “Sorry,” I said. “It was the first thing that occurred to me. If Patti died, whether it was her father or her boyfriend who killed her, each of them had a great way to dispose of the body.”
Kathi pushed her frozen yoghurt away from her. Todd took one last guilty spoonful and then, in solidarity, did the same. I was good because nothing in this world will ever persuade me to eat frozen yoghurt and I’d finished my bottle of water.
“What now?” Kathi said.
“I want to find out if John Worth’s home from the hospital,” I said after thinking for a minute. “Because if not, and if he’s still feeling ill and vulnerable, he might talk to us.”
“Good point,” said Todd. “But I wish we’d stuck around at Joan Lampeter’s house. To see if anyone snuck out. Find out who dove for cover when they heard your voice, Lexy.”
“Is that what that was?” I said. “I’m getting pretty sick of that, to be frank.”
“Why, has it happened before?” Todd said.
It had. I was almost sure it had, but I couldn’t bring the incident to mind and the more I thought about it, the further away the little wisp of a memory seemed to drift. I let it go, thinking it was probably unconnected to all of this anyway.
Idiot.
We thought we’d try John Worth’s house first. If he was home, we could talk to him and if he wasn’t, we could skedaddle right on up to the hospital and try to get past the nurses. Todd could do it, I was sure. Kathi, in her Skweeky Kleen uniform looked like some kind of maintenance person who might have legitimate business in a hospital. I’d just hope for luck. I looked down at myself and wondered if I should go down the scrubs route too. Then we had arrived at the gingerbread Victorian and were parking.
“Welp, he hasn’t gone back to L.A. anyway,” I said, pointing at the sacred El Camino still parked on Becky Worth’s drive. “And behold the decal complete with phone number. Apologies accepted.”
“Lexy, why have you got such a bug up your—Sorry, Todd—bee in your—Jesus! Sorry, Todd—hard-on for this crazy notion?” Kathi said. “That is a memorial to Coco. Not an ad. That is the date Coco died. Not a phone number.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Well if it’s not a phone number how come you can phone it?” I was dialling already and put it on speaker phone to regale them.
“Welcome to Verizon Wireless,” a voice said. “Your call cannot be completed. Please check the number and dial again.”
“Hmph,” I said. “The lines must be busy.”
Todd hit speed dial four and my phone started playing “Jolene.” I answered it.
“The lines are fine, Lexy, you lunatic,” he said. “That is not a phone number.”
I hung up. “Let’s see if John Worth’s home.”
As we trooped up the steps, a neighbour came out on her porch and hailed us.
“Yoo-hoo!” she said. “There’s no one ho-ome!”
God, this country! Why couldn’t they plant some hedges? If my neighbours yoo-hooed visitors and told them there was nobody in, I’d be ready to brain them. California’s such a huge place; I would never understand why they were all so crammed into it.
“Calm down,” Todd said, reading my mind. “This could be useful.” He raised his voice. “Is Johnny still in the hospital?” he said. “We hoped they’d let him out today.”
The neighbour woman was peering at us, hanging right over her own porch rail, and she’d moved her glasses down her nose to get us into sharp focus. “I can take in your casserole or what have you,” she said. “Keep it in my refrigerator until Becky gets home from work. Of course, you’ll have to tell me your names, so I can label it.”
“We left it in the back of the car in a cooler,” Kathi said. “Till we made sure if anyone was home.”
I was glad they were here. They knew the rules. Pizza for moving house, flowers for a baby, casseroles for serious illness and death. I knew the rules too but the knowledge wasn’t cemented in deep enough for me to lie smoothly.
“At least your momma raised you right,” she said. “You’re here at a civil hour and not just dumping gifts down on the porch any old how. So nasty! And some people don’t bother at all anymore. They send Starbucks gift cards online. Can you believe it? Becky told me. There’s her poor brother lying there full of tubes and she’s getting text messages about credit on her Starbucks card!”
I thought that was a great idea. There was a Starbucks right beside the hospital—well, of course there was; it’s in the zoning laws that there must be—and saving Becky from the hospital coffee was the work of a true friend. Sentencing Becky to eat what passes for a casserole every night until her brother recovered was a rotten trick. And if he died, it would only get worse: casseroles all the way down, madam. I had tried them before I knew better and had learned a valuable lesson. Mushroom soup is a menu item, not an ingredient. Ditto tomato.
“Have you seen him?” Todd said once he’d finished clucking about the Starbucks card. “Or is he still in the ICU? We haven’t been up there since Saturday.”
It could have gone either way. She might have taken the hump at us for knowing more than her. But we got lucky. I recognised the leap in her eye for what it was. If we knew John Worth was in intensive care, that leap said, then she had to show us she knew something too. Anything. Her entire body of knowledge on the Worth family was now at our disposal.
“Still no visitors except family,” she said. “Are you … cousins?”
“I’m Reba’s boy,” said Todd. “And this is my partner, Kendra, and my sister-in-law. You remember Bradley? He used to come and stay in the summer. His wife. The children stayed at home with their dad. Keep your mouth shut, Lexy,” he added sotto voce, being no admirer of my American accent.
The neighbour was blinking at the avalanche of names and relationships.
“I decided not to bring the children,” Todd said, hitching his bum up onto the porch rail and giving Mrs. Neighbour a brilliant smile. “We didn’t know what was going on here. Becky made it sound like some kind of orgy. On Saturday night? At the reunion? And we weren’t sure if ‘heart attack’ was maybe a euphemism for, you know.”
“No,” said the neighbour, but her tone said she was dying to.
“Well, he works down in L.A., doesn’t he?” said Kathi. “So we wondered if that was maybe a polite way of saying … ”
“Drugs?” said the neighbour. “I don’t think so. It was a week later he collapsed and it was the middl
e of the day. But you’re right to say it was quite a night, the reunion night. I woke up I don’t know how many times, headlights and doors slamming.”
“Fighting in the street at their age!” said Kathi. “You’d think they’d know better.”
“Their age!” the neighbour was scoffing. “They’re young enough to be my children. But there was no fighting. Just the cars. Which was bad enough. At my age, a good night’s sleep is like a good morning’s bowel movement. I hate to have potential interfered with for no reason.”
“Did you take plates?” Todd said. “You can complain, you know.”
“Oh my old eyes aren’t good enough to be taking down license plates in the middle of the night,” she said. “And they were doing a good deed.”
“Who was?” said Kathi. Saying nothing was killing me.
“Whoever it was. They might have watched him get passing-out drunk, but they didn’t leave him to wake up on a bench frozen to the marrow. They brought him home. It took four of them to carry him, but they brought him home.”
“So you’re saying four people brought John Worth here, passed out drunk, after the reunion?” said Todd.
“Four,” she said, nodding. “Brought him home in the small hours, carried him up the path, and left him on the porch.”
“He slept on the porch?”
“What are porches for,” she said, “if not to sleep off a party and not stink up the house with your breath or make messes on the rug?”
“It was a cold night for sleeping on porches, wasn’t it?” Todd said.
“Well, he woke up nice and early anyways. By the time I was done in the bathroom and downstairs for my coffee, Becky had her porch decorated for Halloween.”
“Well, I must say I am shocked,” Todd said. “Johnny stopped drinking years ago, or so he said. I don’t think I’ll tell my momma what brought on this heart attack we’ve all been so worried over. Drinking himself unconscious again? Shocking!”
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