The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

On Monday morning in the holding cell I said, “All right, Eileen, to hell with feelings. To hell with life story, to hell with emotional touchstones.” To hell with Method, I’d decided over the weekend, time now to devote ourselves to pure technique.

  “I agree heartily.” Fear had taken over her eyes.

  All along I’d thought everything would fall into place if only she could bring forth her deepest feelings. Huh. “Here’s what you do,” I said. “This is what’s going on in your brain. Forget the grief. You’d been thinking all this time that because you’re innocent, they can’t frame you for it. You’ve been complacent that Gary would get you off. But now, to your alarm, you see the prosecution just might win!”

  As I knew she would, Eileen agreed. “I’m frightened of exactly that.”

  We both glanced around the horrible little claustrophobic sun-deprived cell. The deputy’s face hung in the window like a dark moon.

  “All right,” I went on. “You must communicate that to the jury. I want you to change the way you sit. No longer just passive in your chair, like a good girl. I want you to move. Like this.” I brought my upper body forward, erect, and placed my relaxed hands on the table. “This is a good position to return to anytime you feel unsure what to do. Now watch.” I rocked back with a look of shocked amazement. “But not all the way back; I don’t want your shoulder blades to touch the chair ever again.”

  “I like that,” Eileen said. “Gives me something to focus on.”

  “OK. I want you to breathe audibly, sometimes, like people do when they’re upset. You’re feeling the walls of a trap closing in. It’s a trap!”

  “Yes!”

  “At times cup your chin in your hand, as if you’re trying to listen patiently and understand the prosecution’s case. Then, after Tracy Beck-Rubin thinks she’s made some triumphal point, you shake your head firmly. You look at Gary like, How can they get away with such a lie? OK?”

  She tried it, opening her eyes and mouth as wide as they could go.

  “Too much,” I said. “Too much head-waggle, too much eyes. You want to underplay it. Trust me, you’ll be more convincing. You’re holding back your story, see?”

  My student tried again, subduing her expression.

  “That’s better. Obviously you can’t say anything yet. You can’t interject a word out loud. But let’s talk vocal presence.”

  “Vocal presence?”

  “Yeah, I learned this stuff from Meryl Streep. We did a scene together in one of Eastwood’s films. It got totally cut from the final movie because of a prop failure. Anyway, here’s what you do. You clear your throat from time to time, like you desperately want to speak, but then you remember you’re not allowed to.”

  “Yeah! That’s good.” Eileen’s energy was rising moment by moment. She was getting it.

  “Try it now. That’s fine. Good. And gasp, for God’s sake. Take in your breath at some outrageous piece of testimony, like you’re about to say, Oh, my God! But you catch yourself just in time. You swallow. In discomfort. Keep your hands visible, you’re not hiding anything. Try gasping.”

  She gasped.

  I said, “Softly. Remember, you don’t need to be loud for the jury to hear you. You don’t want the judge to think you’re trying to call attention to yourself. This stuff is coming out in spite of yourself, right? Try it again.”

  She did, and came across perfectly. At last I’d hit on the right approach: not drag forth her emotions, but make her work to hold them back.

  I told her that doing some of these things might bring sadness up, and if it did, let it. The jury would expect her moods to be changeable, since she was under tremendous stress. “So if you quietly start to cry, that’s all right.”

  “I just can’t cry in front of—”

  “Try to suppress it, then, get what I’m saying? But that only makes it worse. If you let your mouth twist sideways, that’ll suggest pain, and show you’re trying to keep it under control.”

  “Yes.”

  “Try it. Good.” Eileen’s sideways mouth looked awesomely stricken.

  “Let this happen when Gabriella comes up, but not when they’re saying how evil you are, because crying might look guilty—or desperate—right then. You believe the jury won’t let you down. It’s all you can do to not let your emotions totally take over and destroy what sanity you’ve got left.”

  I paused to let all this sink in. Eileen looked at me gratefully. I watched her think.

  After a while she said, “God, I miss my baby.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.” We sat there missing Gabriella together.

  After another while she said, “Should I look at the jury? I’ve sort of been trying not to stare at them.”

  “Yes, go ahead and make eye contact now and then. As if you’re trying to see into their hearts. You’re not asking for anything. You’re not trying to appeal to them. You’re just wondering about every single one of them, Who are you? Do you have a just heart?”

  “My God, Rita, I can do this.”

  “Attagirl.”

  “It’s paradoxical, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  For the first time since I’d met her, she breathed freely, as if relieved of a burden. I lingered, basking in it.

  Eileen rather shocked me by saying, “Almost feels like after sex, doesn’t it?”

  “Um,” I said. “Did you and Richard have a good sex life?”

  “Yes, I’d say so. You know what we liked to do?” Seeing my face, she said, “No, I mean—I mean afterward. We’d talk.”

  “It’s nice when a man talks to you after sex,” I remarked.

  “Talking was a tonic for us. We’d lie there, propped on our elbows drinking old cognac, and we’d speculate on how often our friends did it!” Relish crept into her tone.

  I smiled.

  She went on, “We’d talk about who was having an affair, and why. Richard always defended the guys. I rooted for the women, of course.” She paused thoughtfully. “That made for some tension, but you know...”

  “Tension can be good for sex,” I said. “I’d think that in your set, the wives rarely leave the husbands because the money is too good.”

  “Boy, are you right.” Eileen leaned forward confidentially. “If the guy’s mentally cruel there’s always a ski instructor at Klosters or a masseur at Cabo, you know? Or even, hell, the nanny. Who’s uptight about things like that anymore?”

  “Comfort’s comfort,” I agreed.

  “Besides, if you let him have sexual adventures you can always use them for leverage later.”

  True.

  “We’d hash over stuff that happened to our friends, like she almost died from a tummy tuck, his kid got caught bribing a professor, their parents got conned out of a fortune by some stranger on the Internet.”

  “Schadenfreude can be fun,” I said.

  She knew the word. “We liked feeling happier than other people.”

  “Yes,” I said. Knowing others were full-on miserable made you happier still. We talked some more, and I learned that Richard had been an exciting mate: athletic and bold, tall, with heavily muscled legs and back from rowing crew at college. Any man who rows crew you can assume is a disciplined man, and I found that interesting.

  Eileen said, “You don’t get up at five a.m. every day of the week and row your guts out unless you have discipline, unless you can do delayed gratification. Richard rowed for the medals and, once he had them, the knowledge that other men knew it. Deep down, if only to themselves, they acknowledged his superiority. That was what he lived for. That and sex.”

  Eileen understood all this about Richard. Nevertheless, she mused as we sat in that godawful interview room as the morning pressed forward all around us, invisibly, something had changed in him. She realized that one day. Was he less attentive? Yes, that was part of it. He hadn’t given her a new piece of jewelry in six months. She tried not to let it bother her.

  Richard would never get old. He was a perpetual
boy, with a boy’s enthusiasms for novelty, and a boy’s talent for getting away with things, and for being forgiven things. No matter if his face showed a crease or two, his whole persona was naughty-boy ageless. She, of course, aged, and I understood how strongly she would have felt the dread all trophy wives eventually feel: the desperation borne of a nonrenewable resource that was starting to get tapped out—her own physical beauty.

  Then Richard left her, and then Richard was dead. I wanted to hear more, but it was time to go.

  Eileen, that day, came across differently in the courtroom. Not startlingly different, subtly so. She didn’t use all the tricks we’d practiced, just a couple, once in a while. I could see the change, and most of all I could feel it.

  So could the jury. She began to draw their attention. A few of them looked at her inquisitively, as if for the first time. Gary gave me a half-hug in the corridor.

  Chapter 16 – The Iceberg Reveals Itself

  I had a lot of balls in the air, and one I kept dropping was Petey. I was leaning pretty hard on Daniel and Yvonne, but even when I was there for Petey I wasn’t.

  At home all I wanted to do was study trials on the Internet, think about how I could learn the truth of Gabriella’s death, and fantasize ever more seriously on how I could begin a guilt-free affair with Gary. Some nights I’d open a bottle of Merlot with my Le Cork Weasel, the ingenious new corkscrew Daniel had given me. The thing was a real marvel of gears and levers and so on. I’d pour a glass, then use Le Cork Weasel to crack a few almonds in the shell left over from Christmas, because Petey had taken our real nutcracker to the park for some reason and lost it. The corkscrew worked great on the almonds, it was amazing. I’d munch the nuts, drink the wine, and brood.

  In a weird way, the ever-present photographs of Gabriella Tenaway had begun to work on me. I wondered what kind of kid she’d have been if she hadn’t died. I decided she would become the kind of extraordinary fourth-grader who would read about a terminally ill child in some distant place like Pennsylvania and galvanize all her classmates to raise money for a new iron lung and a birthday party for the kid. She’d be the kind of seventh-grader who makes the most points on the basketball team but sits down in the big game because the coach broke his promise to play all the kids on the team, thus forcing him to put in the weakest kid, who shoots the winning basket anyway. She’d be the kind of teenager who would stay out late, but then learn ancient lace-making skills and proceed to repair her grandma’s wedding gown so she could wear it someday. I wanted a girl. Well, maybe someday.

  As I say, even when I turned away from the Internet and played with Petey or read to him, he sensed my distance. And it pissed him off.

  “I won’t!” became his favorite sentence. Didn’t matter what, I could give him two or three choices—because as a contemporary parent I knew the power of choice-giving—and he’d reject them all.

  “I only eat chips!” he’d scream, dashing his chicken and lettuce to the floor. “I won’t go to school!” His will was strong.

  So was mine.

  When he began hitting—kids at school, and sometimes me—I’d quiet him down, explain, “We don’t hurt,” then tell him guilt-tripping stories about little animals who victimized other little animals until they themselves were victimized. Then they sorrowfully saw the light. He’d listen skeptically.

  I prevailed, but it wasn’t fun. I found it harder and harder to keep my temper. I was starting to have abandonment fantasies: just drop the little bastard off with some sincere shepherd and go. Of course, his bad behavior was all my fault: I was a lazy, weak mom. Which I felt like shit about, but then it was just one of the many things in my life I felt like shit about. There was my failed marriage, the wound of which I pressed on regularly. Analyzing my relationship with Petey, the word enabling came to mind.

  With Jeff, I’d certainly been an enabler, and in a really nasty way. Sometimes when his chips were down I’d pick a fight, knowing he’d probably go on a binge. Why did I do that? Maybe to feel superior to him. Maybe I was angry about his lack of respect for me. Over and over he told me I was too dumb to have a real career, that acting would probably be the only thing I could do. He thought actors were soulless pieces of meat. He tried to make this sound like witty teasing. These days I was temporarily making myself feel better about all this by fantasizing about Gary with my vibrator at night.

  I was enabling Petey too. Whenever I’d snap in anger, my guilt, like a bottle of toxic slime, would spill all over the place. He could perceive that, and it pleased him, for reasons he didn’t understand yet.

  I was starting to fuck the kid up.

  One evening after a particularly acrimonious struggle over television-watching which I’d won by seizing the remote control and taking it down to the car and locking it in the glove compartment, Petey washed up by himself and went to bed oddly docilely. I turned on the computer and settled down to read case files on Trial TV’s Web site. This was now Tuesday night in the Tenaway trial’s fourth week. After an hour I went into the bathroom to pee and lifted the lid to find that Petey had dropped all my cosmetics into the toilet.

  All.

  My.

  Cosmetics.

  Into.

  The.

  Toilet.

  To achieve this, he had climbed from the toilet seat to the toilet tank to the windowsill to the top shelf of the cupboard where I kept them, somehow transported them to the floor without much noise, then gone ahead and placed them in the toilet bowl. He had peed in the bowl either before or after adding my compacts of powder and eye shadow, bottles of foundation, under-eye whitener, my mascara, liner pencils, lip pencils and lipsticks, my tubes of blush, pots of gloss, vials of nail polish, my emery boards and nail files and clippers, my eye creams, my Visine, well, that was just to start.

  I went to his room.

  He was sleeping soundly, splayed on his Spider-Man sheets, his breathing even and deep, his small body as relaxed as if I’d given him a fatal dose of Valium. I stood there looking at him, breathing in his clean little smell—it would be merciful years before the rankness of puberty would set in—when the phone rang.

  I stood there another moment, feeling oddly detached from my temper, which was rampaging through my chest like a fire-spewing elephant. I could not allow myself to lose it. I closed my eyes, breathed out, then turned and closed the door.

  I answered the phone.

  A man with a deep voice introduced himself as George Rowe, representing the Fenco Insurance Company. He addressed me as Ms. Farmer, and told me he’d been following the Tenaway trial. “I’d like to talk to you,” he said.

  “Uh, I’m afraid I can’t,” I said. “How did you get my—”

  “I understand you’re not to talk about the case, ma’am,” said this George Rowe. Although his voice came from the baritone register, he didn’t swallow his words, he spoke cleanly. “But,” he went on, “I don’t want to discuss Eileen Tenaway’s situation.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I want to talk about her husband, Richard Tenaway.”

  “Oh?” A current of excitement zoomed into me, replacing the elephant rage.

  “Give me an opportunity to tell you what’s on my mind, then you can decide if you want to talk to me.”

  It dawned on me that this was the cute-ugly guy in the courtroom with the pocket notebook and crew cut. “Yes, but how,” I demanded, “did you get my number?” My home phone was unlisted.

  “I’m an investigator,” he said.

  My God, I thought. The iceberg.

  “Ms. Farmer, my business is helping people separate right from wrong. Sometimes it’s not so easy. Does that interest you?”

  “Yeah. Yes, it does.”

  “I thought it might.”

  “How come? Have you been scrutinizing me?”

  “Not in the way you think.”

  My pulse accelerated. “I cannot betray Gary Kwan.”

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  He g
ave me his boss’s phone number if I wanted to check him out.

  _____

  Two nights later we met at the Hot-n-Tot, a diner down the PCH in Lomita. I’d worried vigorously about the ethics of this, but my curiosity about this George Rowe—and the iceberg—just barely overrode the worrying. His boss had assured me George was doing legitimate work for the insurance company, but still I was nervous.

  I was charmed by George’s suggestion of the Hot-n-Tot. Retro in the real sense, it’d been established in the forties and had not changed since. I parked in back and looked around carefully, guiltily, clandestinely. A robin rustled under a bush and I about jumped out of my dress.

  The restaurant was plain and smelled good inside, and the waning light was L.A.-golden-gorgeous. Usually on days like this I felt a little depraved going indoors, but not in a nice bright diner like this.

  George Rowe had gotten there first and stood to greet me. I had the feeling he would have held my chair for me had we not been given a booth. I asked him to call me Rita.

  He ordered coffee and a grilled ham sandwich, and I decided on cinnamon toast. My mouth watered, not only for the toast, but at the prospect of learning more about the Tenaways. I smoothed my dress, a lemon-and-lime palm leaf print I’d scored at a thrift shop in North Hollywood. Perfect, I thought, for a mysterious meeting with a deep-voiced stranger at a retro diner in Southern California.

  “You may be wondering why I picked you out,” he began. “Why I’m trusting you with what I’m about to say.”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “In my business, hunches pay off.” He sighed as if he knew that sounded lame, though I found it thrilling. He added, “But you have to weigh the strength of the hunch against the possible payoff. I haven’t had a lot to go on. So here we are.”

  In straight, compact sentences, he told me that Richard Tenaway’s life had been insured under a dual policy by Fenco, which had been obliged to pay $10 million to Gemini Imports and another $10 million to his widow, Eileen.

  Fenco suspected a scam, but couldn’t prove it before they had to cough up the money. After all, the circumstances were suspicious. The guy had disappeared, Eileen’s sister Norah had disappeared, then the guy’s body gets found and twenty million bucks spill out of Fenco’s coffers.