The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  “You’re Eileen’s little sister,” I said. “You’re Norah.”

  She kept looking at the dent.

  “And this is your car, isn’t it?”

  Instantly I saw it all, the mannerisms—the lost-girl aura of her—the arched brows, the tilt of the head, the curve of the lips—she did resemble Eileen. Not to mention the jewelry. Which was badda-bing authentic, not costume. I remembered the moment weeks ago—years ago?—when I’d asked Eileen about her sister. I remembered what she’d said: One time I helped her out of a very bad situation...I put myself in jeopardy to do it...I wish to God I’d turned my back instead.

  This Jaguar, I realized, had been involved in a hit-and-run, some time ago.

  “Did you know this car was here?” I asked.

  “Shit.” Her voice sounded as if steam were escaping her throat with every word. “I thought he’d gotten rid of it. I fucking can’t believe it.”

  “Who? Richard?”

  A tight smile spread over her face and she nodded. “I guess he wasn’t looking out for me like he said.”

  Deep down in my chest, I exulted. I was getting closer to figuring it out—the connections, the grudges, the petty shit between people that grows into holocaust.

  I opened the rear door, leaned in, and retrieved the key just as Eileen had instructed. The air in the car smelled of leather and stale panic.

  “Where to next?” I said.

  We turned to leave. Norah, stewing over the car, was slow to get going, and I glanced around the garage again, noticing for the first time something looming overhead: a speedboat, perhaps twenty feet long, its wooden hull shining sleekly brown, like the belly of an animal just out of the water. Thick canvas loops from a hoist suspended it conveniently above the garage floor. Curlicue script on the stern said Little Gem.

  “Is this their yacht?” I asked as Norah finally turned from the Jaguar. She had decided to cover it up again.

  “Oh, no!” I think she would have found that question funny under other circumstances. “They had a real one down in Marina del Rey. Eileen sold that. This was just a little toy.”

  The beautiful vessel gleamed there in the darkness.

  We left the property.

  “Oh, wait,” I said as we neared the street. “I left the pry bar. Fingerprints. You go on, I’ll just run back real quick.”

  A few cars passed as I walked, but I looked as if I belonged in the neighborhood, no problem.

  In fact, I had replaced the pry bar in my tote bag. I stole up to the house’s dark front door and slipped a small envelope through the mail slot. I had printed RICHARD on it, and inside, on a piece of notepaper, I’d written the address of the Topanga Canyon house I’d rented for Eileen.

  George Rowe had speculated that Tenaway would return to Los Angeles after the trial, but I felt him coming closer now.

  Chapter 33 – Rita and Rowe Pick Up the Pace

  The storage locker was in Florence, off Central somewhere—I was starting to glaze over. En route, Norah’s and my conversation flagged. I ached for Petey. Was he asleep? Warm enough? Terrified? Had he drawn back the shower curtain?

  I couldn’t believe I was trying to comfort myself by thinking, Well, at least a dead body can’t really hurt Petey. At least he’s not being babysat by a pit bull or something.

  Norah fished a box of Jujubes from her purse and offered me some.

  “Uh, no, thanks,” I said. A cigarette was one thing, but taking candy from a stranger?

  “I love these,” said Norah, sucking.

  Florence, one of South Central’s border towns, is never included in any maps to movie stars’ homes or anything like that.

  Around midnight, street activity increases. Tonight the avenues buzzed with cruising crap cars like my Honda, plus the awesome metal-flake custom cars that crack built. It began to drizzle.

  Norah turned off Central and followed an alley to a blind pig of a storage facility: rusted fence, new razor wire on top, some guy’s name on the sign. In one place the razor wire sagged, sprung as if someone had actually tried to storm it with brute force. There was no tidy guy in a clip-on tie checking IDs. Norah drove straight up to a junk-strewn yard where three old black guys were feeding wood from broken pallets into a fire in an oil drum. They squinted into Norah’s headlights unwelcomingly. Gravel crunched under the tires.

  “Cut your lights,” I suggested.

  She did so. She got out. I rolled down my window and watched from the darkness of the car. The leaping orange flames hypnotized us both for a second. They looked so evolutionary and beautiful in the misty night. How long ago had I last seen an open fire?

  I heard her say, “I have a key for eleven.”

  One of the guys, looking away from us, said, “Go ahead.”

  She got back in and said, “I tried to bribe that guy twice. Bastard pretends not to remember me. Well, that’s good. I think Richard made a very, very special deal with him.” She eased the car around to the rear of a long cinder-block shed. “The trunk in this thing’s pretty big,” she said. “I can practically back in. To, you know, load up.”

  I allowed myself a taste of hopeful relief. The show was almost over. In the time it would take to drive to wherever he was, Petey would be back in my arms. His dimpled smile, his fair-skies blue eyes.

  The building had evidently served as a kind of preschool for vandals. Every surface was covered with the jumbled scrawls of taggers; there were no interesting drawings or scripts like you see in more prominent ghetto areas. Further, it appeared someone had tried to bash in the door to every one of these five or six lockers at one time or other; in the dim light I saw nickel-sized angry pits in the metal doors.

  “Doesn’t seem like a terribly secure place,” I remarked.

  “Look closer,” grunted Norah, throwing the car into park.

  She was right. Whoever had built that shed had built a bunker. Even the roof was concrete. Maybe a stick of dynamite would’ve busted into it. Maybe.

  “Oh, boy,” murmured Norah, actually licking her chops.

  She held out her hand for the key, but I retained possession. As I stepped around her and fitted it into the lock, her breathing quickened; I practically felt it on my neck. I glanced at her. Her upper lip quivered, and sweat glistened on her scalp beneath the nesting material of her hair. Her lids were low, and she wet her lips over and over, like a woman about to have an orgasm.

  I paused, the key still in the lock. “So this was the depot for the cash and gemstones Richard stole from Gemini, right?” I said.

  “Right,” she panted.

  “How did you know about it?”

  “I helped him.” She clutched my arm in a talonlike grip. “Open the door!”

  I waited.

  She said, “I caught him at it—I opened a carton by mistake. He was about to bring it over here. So he cut me in on it if I kept my mouth shut. I did. But then it went to hell. Took a while, though.”

  Someone had pasted stickers for two goth-type bands on the door at eye level. In jagged black typefaces, one said BRASS POPOVERS. The other said RELAPSE.

  The concrete room was bare except for a lightbulb overhead and a steel chest against the back wall. The chest was the kind they store lifejackets in on ferryboats, or stretchers and avalanche supplies at mountain camps. A large welded hasp hung without a padlock.

  “What’s that smell?” I said.

  “Help me, this lid’s heavy.”

  I found a fingerhold and together we heaved it open.

  And I learned that the odor I’d detected a second ago had been but a molecule or two’s worth that had escaped the chest.

  Norah recoiled as the harsh light fell on what was inside. The body was tall, troublesomely so; someone had had to bend him at the knees to fit. His face was a mottled poufy mess, like a melting ice-cream cake.

  But his wardrobe was impeccable as always, fine wool suit, silk tie—and the neat barbering of his thick red head of hair suggested the fastidiousness tha
t wealth so often encourages.

  Even as his flesh decomposed, Padraig McGower’s presence was commanding.

  Where were the flies? As soon as I thought that, one zoomed past my nose.

  And McGower’s odor was beyond commanding.

  Could Pine-Sol have helped?

  I staggered backward out of the concrete cell, vomiting before I knew I was going to. As it came up, I managed to bend over so it hit the ground instead of my shoes.

  Norah wasn’t as fast getting out. Conveniently, she upchucked right on top of McGower. Which would be an improvement, because now I knew that the smell of vomit, compared with that of a rotting human corpse, is perfume.

  She let the door slam shut behind her.

  We stood in the drizzle gasping. Neither of us screamed. I’m sure neither of us could have gotten enough wind.

  “So that’s his message,” Norah said with hot bitterness, her body rigid with fury. “Quite a fuck you, don’t you agree?”

  “Quite one.”

  “Well.” She cleaned her teeth with her tongue and spat in the dirt. “You’ve got a job now, don’t you?”

  “I guess I do,” I said, trying to ignore the stake of anguish that was piercing my heart. I would not see Petey tonight.

  We got in the car. She adjusted her seat belt. “I’ll call you now and then for the next twenty-four hours. By then I’m gonna be sick of that kid. Find the loot.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t care. Do I look like I care?”

  _____

  George Rowe had left a message on my machine, giving a landline number to call him back. Standing in the kitchen I punched it in immediately.

  “Rita!”

  His baritone voice steadied me. I pictured his crew-cut self on the other end, sturdy and earnest and competent.

  I plunged right in. “Petey’s been kidnapped by Janet who is Norah Mintz, Eileen’s sister and Richard’s former mistress, as I think you suspected already, and I got the key to the storage place and we went there but the only thing in it was Padraig McGower who’s been dead since at least Monday which was the first day he didn’t show up in court, and now I have to find the treasure for her or she’ll kill Petey because she’s been trying to get her hands on that loot for the better part of a year.”

  I paused for breath, gazing out the kitchen window. The lightwell caught stray rays from the streetlights; they bounced around silvery in the narrow space.

  After a moment, he said, “And it looks like Richard just beat her to it.”

  I said, “No, I’m not sure he did.”

  “You haven’t called the police?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Rita. Your child—”

  “No, George.”

  “Well then—”

  “Richard’s here in L.A., all right. I thought he’d get moving before the trial was over.”

  Rowe said, “I’ve been back and forth to Brazil from Tijuana.”

  “Are you in Tijuana now?”

  “Yes, but I’m going to drive back to L.A. as soon as we’re finished talking. There’s no question he was embezzling from Gemini. The company never did reach actual solvency, in spite of all the showing off. Obviously McGower found out at some point, then he got involved in covering it up. They owe money to a couple of government guys in a town called Ouro Prêto, and to another mining commissioner in São Paulo.”

  The gears of my mind meshed and clanked. “How did Tenaway’s scam work, George?”

  He blew a sound of amazement into the phone. “I can’t believe you even want to know. I can’t believe you’re not talking to the police right now.”

  “There are as many ways of being an angry mama bear as there are women in this world.”

  He was silent, but I thought I could hear him smile. “You’ve changed, haven’t you?”

  I said nothing.

  “Strong experiences can do that,” he said.

  It was my turn to smile. Coldly.

  He said, “Richard Tenaway bought gems from local miners in Brazil and Venezuela with funds from Gemini. Most of them got shipped to Los Angeles and elsewhere, like they were supposed to. But over time, in small batches, he diverted gems and reals—Gemini’s cash—mostly from Ouro Prêto, to another import company here in Tijuana. He had a deal with them where they bought from him but turned around and couriered the stuff to him personally in Los Angeles. Essentially, the gems were laundered, and the cash disappeared as if it were their cut. But the bulk of the reals got converted to dollars and went to Tenaway somehow.”

  “How did you—”

  “I impersonated a German gem buyer and was able to set up almost an exact duplicate of the system. I’d visited this guy in Berlin and copped a few of his cards. Then I came to Tijuana and presented myself as him and flashed a wad of cash in this company’s boss’s face. And I was able to, uh, review some of their records after-hours.” He sounded pleased with himself. He added, “The Mexican police and customs have their hands full with more dangerous problems.”

  “What about American customs?”

  “Tenaway tried to appear as open as possible about what he did. He went down and paid off the couriers with checks from his own company. That’s how McGower found out about it. But then I wonder about the cash. Either it was well hidden in the packages, or it didn’t go in the same packages. Or there was no cash. One of my sources here insists Tenaway must have put the money offshore. If he did that, he drew it out in the U.S. and stashed it in this locker you’re talking about. In fact, I think that’s the likeliest scenario.”

  “But why would he—”

  “Only if he’d been planning to fake his death for a while. If you’re dead you can’t get your money, even if your bank is somebody’s desk drawer in the Cayman Islands.”

  “Oh.”

  “The other Gemini managers were starting to catch on, and that’s why Tenaway decided to get out of town last year.”

  “In a hurry,” I added.

  “They always do. They always think they’ll get away with it for just a little longer. But it looks like they had a nosy Joe in accounting who got suspicious. I saw some letters. Since it hasn’t blown open, I guess McGower must’ve bought him off.”

  “The iceberg emerges,” I murmured.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. So since he left without the treasure, he must have cleaned out whatever money he and Eileen had together. Now I get it. That’s what must have led to the faked death—he knew Eileen and Gabriella needed money. Even as he was sleeping with the sister in some rented villa in Rio.”

  “Right,” said George Rowe.

  I felt a stab of hunger and reached for an orange; I’d barely eaten anything since finding Petey’s bed empty. But I saw a chain of three tiny ants on it, so I rolled it on the counter to crush them.

  Then I saw other ants around the fruit bowl. I set the orange aside and began smushing ants with my index finger. Little bastards: Argentine ants, the bane of California pantries.

  I said, “Norah was the loose cannon in the picture, right?”

  “So stupid and typical. He falls in love with her, leaves the wife behind, then all it takes is one dumb argument—about the money, probably—and he dumps her. Woman scorned. Only now he’s got two women scorned.”

  “He thought he could handle it. Still thinks he can.”

  Rowe went on, “McGower probably tried to take care of Eileen, but he’s been busy trying to keep the embezzlement a secret all these months. It was a fair amount of money—between twenty and thirty million dollars, all told. McGower did a sword dance through the audit the other company officers instigated.”

  “Is that why he was hanging around the trial?” I crushed the crisp ants.

  “I think he thought he might learn something.”

  “George, I don’t think Tenaway has the loot.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I think Eileen’s got it. Somewhere. If Norah and Padraig knew Richard was stea
ling from the company, Eileen did too. Had to have. Maybe she even disposed of it already.”

  “No, I think it’d make more sense for her to sit on it than try to liquidate it.”

  “You think? How come?”

  “For somebody like her to sell off large batches of uncut gems? The execution would be difficult, not to mention the attention she’d risk attracting. At least for a while. Likelier she’d use the stash as a bargaining chip with Richard or McGower. Or both.”

  “Yeah,” I said, remembering the day my bad credit shut me

  out of buying groceries. I thought about Adil’s Pawn America and Gramma Gladys’s diamond brooch. Ant carcasses littered the countertop. “She’s hiding something until the trial’s over. When I talked to her this morning about the storage locker, she hinted that there’s some kind of cartel controlling things. She said she wants to stop them before they hurt anybody else.”

  “Look, Rita, if you’d just get the police involved—”

  “If I got the police involved they would eventually locate Petey’s body. George, I’m going to talk to Eileen in the morning. I can stall Norah if I have to, but I’ve got a strong feeling it won’t be necessary. The jury’s going to take the case today. And I think by this afternoon—I think—I hope—we’ll know a lot.”

  “I’d have bet Tenaway would have stayed out of the country until the trial was over.”

  “McGower tried to fake him out. Told him he’d help him if Richard would come and open that locker. They all needed—wanted—that treasure. Richard wouldn’t have left the only key with Eileen. He’d have kept one.”

  Chapter 34 – Nobody Has It All

  A few sleepless hours later, I showered and dressed in my taupe suit with the maroon flecks, which worked with my coloring. I remembered thinking that when I bought it: This works well with my coloring! Now I was living in a different world.

  The rain had stopped overnight, and the morning broke out in eighteen-carat sunshine. The Los Angeles I looked on as I drove to the lockup was different still than any I’d seen before. A city where, beneath Miramax and Sony and gas prices and guys trimming dead fronds off palm trees with knives on sticks, lives were bargained for and appointments with death were kept. My life. My appointments.