The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

“Norah used to be my housemate. She went away for a while, she never said where. I felt that rejection. I felt it terribly. I think she went with a man. She had boyfriends heck to breakfast.”

  “But now she’s come back?”

  “Just for a little while. I said she could room with me for a little while. I got a smaller place. I said why don’t you get in touch with your sister, and she said no way. She made me promise not to tell anyone she’s here. She went out, but she’ll be back any—”

  “Where are you?” asked the young lawyer.

  “Look, just talk to her. But Mr. Kwan, be careful.” The caller gave a number. “That’s her cell phone. It’s the best way to—” Mark Sharma heard a click. “Hello?” he said. “Hello.” He replaced the receiver.

  Sweating, he began to calculate.

  The information he had just received was astonishing, case-cracking, career-making.

  If it was true.

  For he had learned from Gary to be skeptical about anonymous tips in cases like this. Most nuts with tips were merely nuts. But this nut, he sensed, was special. If he could run this one down himself and prove something, Gary would have no choice but to—

  He heard the ca-chick of the outer door. He thrust the note pad into his pocket, leaped away from Gary’s desk, and fell to his hands and knees. As Gary came in, Mark Sharma looked up and smiled, like a puppy caught chewing a slipper.

  “Just stretching my back,” he said. “How was the play?”

  “What’s wrong with the floor in your office?” Gary asked, throwing his keys on his desk.

  Sharma kept smiling. “The floor is harder in there.”

  Gary said, “Huh?”

  “How was the play?” Sharma asked again, getting to his feet.

  “Oh, she was great in it.” Gary pulled out his swivel chair. “She played a daffodil.”

  “She must have been very cute,” Sharma said enthusiastically. “The best daffodil!” He flipped back his hair with the fingers of one hand and subtly adjusted his crotch with the other.

  _____

  I’d put Petey to bed and was drinking a glass of wine and cracking a few almonds in the gear teeth of my Le Cork Weasel when Daniel dropped in. He stood in my doorway, his arms stretched wide around an outer-space frenzy of dahlias, their bright blossoms bobbing like planetoids around the happy sun of his face. “Another small token of my thanks.”

  “You’re insane,” I protested. He’d been showering me with gifts since that meatloaf dinner last week.

  He helped me arrange the flowers in my two biggest vases, chattering all the while about how totally wondrous Gary was. They’d met for coffee once since that night, and I gathered it had gone well.

  “I think you guys might have a future,” I commented.

  “Yeah, but ’midst the ointment of my happiness ’tis a fly,” Daniel said, pulling out a dry stem. He was taking a Shakespeare refresher at Karen Bell’s acting studio.

  “Oh, hell, their marriage has been dead for years.”

  “But the little girl. Jade.”

  I tried to take the positive. “Look, Daniel, for all you know Jacqueline’s a heroin addict and Gary will get custody and you’ll all live happily ever after. You love kids—you’ll love Jade. She’s like Gary with slightly less testosterone.”

  The phone rang and I let my machine get it. Jeff’s voice, honking and drunk, spewed into the digital recorder.

  “Hey, bitch, better line up your lawyer. And give your precious little boy a hug, because pretty soon—”

  Daniel covered the speaker with his hand. “That bastard. Not even worth listening to.”

  _____

  Gary glanced at the papers on his desk. “Where’s that DNA comparison of the sex offenders and the ball cap?”

  “I—it’s almost finished.” Sharma dropped his eyes.

  “Mark, what?” Gary stared, hands open. “It’s eight-thirty. What’ve you been doing? I’m tired. I want to go over that. We need it tomorrow.”

  Sharma turned. “I’ll finish it right now. I’m sorry. It won’t take long.”

  “Sorry? Sorry? In the middle of a trial like this?” Gary did not bother to hide his contempt. “Get out of here.”

  This was a shock. “But don’t you want me to—”

  “No. Just give me your notes and go home. Give me what you’ve done so far.”

  The junior lawyer stumbled from the office and returned with two pages of handwritten notes.

  “This is it?” Gary scanned the pages. “This is all you’ve got?” The ice in his voice changed to heat. “God damn it! I take one night off last week and two hours tonight to go to my daughter’s play, and you drop your whole fish box!” Something, perhaps, his father used to say. “Steve gave me his analysis on final strategy this morning! Lisa took care of the PowerPoint by six-thirty tonight! Why can’t you handle a simple fucking assignment? I have other things I need to do! I’m trying to figure out...my life.”

  “What?” said Sharma.

  “Never mind. You’ve blown it, Mark.”

  Sharma squeezed his eyes shut and wished to cover his ears. He ventured, “There was another anonymous call—”

  “Shut up! I thought you had balls. Go.”

  Sharma backed to the door. “See you...in the morning?” he nearly whimpered.

  “Yeah, one of us ought to get some sleep.” Gary turned away.

  _____

  Mark Sharma trudged down the corridor. He punched the elevator button. All he wanted was to get outside, to breathe the night city air. Anything to get away from the toxicity of Gary’s insults.

  Why are the elevators so damn slow in this building?

  He was angrier than he’d ever been, angrier even than when the president of his condominium association had accused him, in front of twenty-seven people at the annual meeting, of throwing garbage into the recycling bin.

  As the elevator doors opened, he saw himself in a mirrored panel: chubby cheeks, wiry black hair flopping into his eyes. What a ridiculous haircut! Only a fool would wear a haircut like that.

  He rode down to the lobby. The nights he’d sweated and worked over this trial! And here was one time—one time!—when he’d relaxed. He’d taken Gary’s esteem for granted. But there never had been any esteem, he saw now.

  What a fraud Gary had been, all along.

  _____

  Listening to Jeff’s muffled obscenities on my machine, I couldn’t help crying with frustration and anxiety. After a few long minutes of raving, he hung up. Daniel encircled me with his arm. I felt his strong muscles and smelled his warmth through his linen guayabera. Why must so many gay guys be so damn perfect?

  The phone rang again immediately, and we looked at it as if it were a snake. But when I heard Gary’s voice I picked up.

  “I hate to ask you this,” he said, “but is there any way you can come to the office and help me finish Mark’s work for him?” I could hear his fatigue.

  “Right now?”

  “I’ll give you the day off tomorrow. If I do it alone, it’ll be an all-nighter. I can’t reach Steve or Lisa.”

  “What happened to Mark?”

  “I fired him for the night.”

  I looked a question at Daniel. He nodded.

  Smiling, I said into the receiver, “Luckily for you, Daniel just stopped over with a third of a ton of flowers, and he says he can stay with Petey. So hey, I’m on my way.”

  “Rita...” Gary said, then paused. “Let me talk to Daniel for a second.”

  Daniel took the phone and listened.

  “I love you too,” said my friend gently, tears filling his eyes.

  Chapter 25 – Suite 7A

  As Mark Sharma approached the glass lobby doors a woman rushed up from the night outside. She wore sunglasses and a melon-green T-shirt. Her mouth was frantic, as if she were talking to herself.

  He pushed open the door.

  She almost collided with him, but he stood firm in the doorway, sizing up this little si
tuation.

  “Is this Gary Kwan’s office?” she said in a cold fast voice.

  This was not an occasion to be rushed through.

  Her tight shirt drew his eye to her breasts. He noticed drops of blood on the green fabric. The blood almost appeared to be a red decoration, a pattern. But it was a spatter of blood, yes, there at her breast line, and what’s more there was a smudge of blood on her bare arm. The woman carried a shoulder bag; one hand was hidden in it.

  “I have to see Mr. Kwan,” she said.

  Sharma looked into her eyes, but her sunglasses were in the way.

  As if she were joining him in an act of rare honesty, she removed the glasses.

  The moment was very brief.

  He saw fury and humiliation in her eyes, and he knew his own eyes showed the same. For one moment, with someone—a woman!—he felt perfect harmony.

  He knew exactly who she was and what she had come for.

  And it was as if lightning struck and split the core of him. He felt charged with destructive energy, and he was no longer the same old Mark Sharma. He was exceptionally alive. He stepped into the street and held the self-locking door open for her.

  “Suite 7A,” he said.

  _____

  Los Angeles is a funny place, I mused as I drove down Santa Monica, then veered right on Wilshire. From high in an airplane, the city is an untidy mottled blot spilling from the desert and the mountains all the way to the sea, indeed reaching out into the sea with fingers of piers, breakwalls, and, down at Long Beach, the monstrous wharves.

  Then, closer, say if you are looking down on the city from one of the stone parapets of the Getty, or from a deck in the Hollywood Hills, the whole thing appears much more orderly, like a circuit board. The buildings line up neatly by the block, their pediments toe the level concrete. You see the crisp squares of parking lots, the clean recognizable shapes of the downtown skyline and the arenas. Cars and trucks flow like electrons along the neural gridded pathways.

  But up close again, at street level yourself, how narrow and nasty the avenues feel when you are merely trying to maintain the speed limit. You see and smell the garbage cans, you hear the jarring sounds of millions of lives meshing, clashing—the chock-a-block storefronts—Chaldean cell phone shop by Haitian fruit market by Colombian taco stand.

  The crosstown boulevards make their motley journeys from the stink and grandeur of downtown through the cheap gauntlet of low-end Hollywood, then the out-of-body luxe of Beverly Hills, out through the quieter wealth of the farther west side, to Santa Monica’s theme-park shopping streets, then, well, there’s nothing more but the astonishing beach underlining the ocean with its painted ships and Hawaii just over there.

  I let myself into the building with the keycard Gary had given me. A few other tenants were up late; from outside I’d seen a spattering of lights around the different floors.

  When I walked into the outer office of Kwan & Associates I always felt so excellent: glad to be doing something important, glad to be needed. Plus being with Gary always settled my nerves.

  As I passed Lisa Feltenberger’s deserted desk, I smelled an odor I wasn’t expecting, thus I did not identify it consciously.

  But my subconscious knew what it was.

  Too, the place was silent, completely silent. Although the door to his office was standing open and his light was on, I heard no squeak from Gary’s chair as he habitually rolled it back and forth in a three-inch pattern on the rug. I heard no throat-clearing, no finger-drumming, no paper-rustling.

  I stood at the door for a moment, cherishing the world as it was. Then I walked in.

  _____

  Gary lay on his side halfway between his desk and the door. A huge ghastly smear of blood trailed from him to a place next to his desk.

  Blood pooled in the rug under and around him, a pool of it, it appeared to have depth, that was the most horrifying thing, the pool of blood was not a flat spill but a pool, and even though I knew he was dead, I went to him, fell to my knees, and turned his face up.

  My throat closed.

  He was not cold yet, but he was no longer warm either. His eyes were open and his expression was a mix of bafflement and regret, as if he had spent himself trying to remain alive, then had met death with some measure of acceptance.

  Somehow, a bluebottle fly had materialized—from thin air, it had to be, since I had never seen a bluebottle fly in that building, ever. It buzzed up from Gary’s nose when I turned his head.

  I remember the fly, but I don’t remember recoiling.

  The eternal message of the universe: this beautiful fit body was nothing but food for decay now. How quickly they work, the agents of rot, drawn by the rich powerful smell of blood. The smell filled the room, and I supposed more flies were on their way, hoping to lay eggs and have kids.

  Gary’s pale blue shirt was cruelly soaked with blood, dark red like a howl from hell, much of it having originated, it seemed, from his upper belly.

  A numbness I had never felt before came over me, my whole body from spine out to skin, and I rose and stepped to his desk. I read what he had written on his legal pad—a to-do list for the rest of his life:

  Tell Jacqueline—ask for understanding.

  Give her everything—start over if I have to.

  Be best dad to Jade.

  Show him I love him.

  Let the chips fall.

  Somehow my heart was able to ache within its ache. I considered taking the pad away with me or hiding it somewhere in another office, but I saw a dot of blood on it, and left it alone. The chips would fall.

  Poor Jacqueline, unless she did this. Poor little Jade. Poor Daniel.

  It didn’t enter my mind that the assailant or assailants might still be around. I felt totally, thoroughly, alone.

  I walked to the outer office not feeling my legs under me. Lisa Feltenberger’s desk. Her telephone. 911. “I need the police. A man is dead. I believe he’s been murdered,” I began, then followed the dispatcher’s prompts.

  “OK, stay where you are,” she said to conclude our conversation. “And don’t make any other calls on this phone.”

  I took out my cell phone and called Daniel.

  I told him.

  “No, Rita,” he said, his voice small and brittle.

  “It’s true. He’s lying in there bloody. Dead.”

  “For God’s sake, give him CPR! You don’t know he’s dead! Go do it!”

  “Daniel. Listen to me. Gary is dead. He is cold and dead and the flies are already coming.”

  I heard a groan of primal anguish, then another.

  Lisa Feltenberger’s desktop was very neat. Her pen mug said PARALEGALS DO IT WITH ALACRITY.

  “Daniel,” I said quietly, “I need you.”

  He managed to gather himself. “They’ll be there in a minute,” he said, his voice trembling. “What happened?”

  “Daniel, I don’t know!”

  “Who was there?”

  “Well, Mark Sharma, that other lawyer on the team. I guess they’d had an argument. But by the time Gary called me, Mark had gone home, I thought. It had to be someone with access to this building. The security guy locks the doors at six when he goes home. Or the person was already in the building.”

  “All right, don’t speculate to the police. You could be their first suspect, you know, since you discovered the—scene. Be careful what you say.”

  I looked down at my hands. I hadn’t gotten any blood on them. I looked at my knees, but I must have instinctively avoided plopping down in Gary’s pond of blood. I was clean, I thought. Clean. What does that word mean, anyway?

  Daniel’s voice now was expressionless from the shock, yet he had gone into some kind of hyperfunctioning mode, as somehow I had done. “Rita, listen. Don’t say too much.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I should go down and let them in.”

  “Wait. Can you check the phone log right now? You guys have phone log software, right?”

  “Yeah,
I think so. Why?”

  “He just called you. Your number will show up.”

  “What’s wrong with that? Even if I wanted to hide it, I don’t think I can erase numbers, so—”

  “I want to know if any other calls came in.”

  “Well—”

  “Just look. Can you look?”

  I went to the cubicle Gary had assigned me, where I’d spent hardly any time. I turned the PC on and clicked on the phone log icon. The day’s numbers popped up on a white-and-blue screen. Above my number, which Gary had called at 8:46 p.m., I saw Gary’s home number, then three other numbers I didn’t recognize. Mine had been the last one.

  “Read them to me,” said Daniel.

  I did.

  “But Daniel, why?”

  “I’m good friends with our technical consultant—former technical consultant—and—”

  “You mean from the show? Abilene Cop Shop?”

  “Maybe it sounds silly to you. But he’s a cop himself, and the stories he’s told me about how things can go wrong when the police get there and find it’s a VIP! They lose their minds. I want to protect you. He told me if anything heavy ever goes down to call him.”

  “Well, for God’s sake, don’t! I don’t want a—”

  “Rita, listen to me. Relax. Breathe. You’ve got to compartmentalize your emotions now. Put your shock in a box. Put your grief in a box. You’ll open them up when the time is right. There’s too much going on now. Too much danger. Hear me? Danger for you and for Petey. Your boy needs you, OK? I need you. Do you hear me? Whoever did this will not get away with it. I promise you. Now go down and meet the police. Do not call his wife. Do not talk to reporters. They’ll be there, you know, they have police scanners. Call me again as soon as you can.”

  Chapter 26 – The Show Must Go On

  I remember things in shards.

  The police asked me many questions, but not much about myself except what was on my driver’s license. I told them I was a paralegal, but that was the only lie I told that night.

  The place filled up with cop-vibes, all these cops with their gun belts and forearms and black tactical shoes.