Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (67 page)

She wasted no time calling the number Detective Bower had given her. He came on the line immediately. She told him about the pepper spray and how the male caregiver looked like someone who’d taken a direct hit.

“You never mentioned anything about pepper spray,” the detective said.

“Well, it didn’t seem important until I saw the guy next door wheezing and all teary-eyed and I remembered the pepper spray canister Vera showed me, which later was missing from her purse. It…well…all came together then.”

“How do you know the spray was missing from her purse?’

“I looked. In her purse…in the car yesterday. When she was at my house, she showed me a house key and the pepper spray. The key was going to get her inside, and maybe it did. The pepper spray was going to protect her. Well, obviously it didn’t.”

“This man who you think just committed homicide, who took a shot of mace in the eyes, strolls out to pick up the mail?”

Moto holding the pink wad crossed mind. “Wait—” she said to Bower. She took a moment to assimilate Moto’s actions. He was not collecting the mail. He was picking something up off the street. What looked like a wad of gum. Only it wasn’t gum. It was a hearing aid.
Vera’s hearing aid
.

“Did anyone find Mrs. Wade’s hearing aid?” she blurted out.

“What?”

“She wore a hearing aid. I think that’s what the Asian man was picking up when I came up on him. That’s where her car was parked. Was a hearing aid with her personal effects at the morgue or the house?”

“I don’t know anything about a hearing aid.”

“Ask. Will you please ask?”

“Okay, I’ll check into it,” the detective said. “Anything else?”

“No. Not that I can think of.”

“Good—oh, and Mrs. Lundberg?”

“Yes?”

“Let me remind you that by digging around where you shouldn’t be digging around, you could be tampering with vital evidence, making it of no use to us. If there is a crime, your meddling could set the guilty party free on something as simple as a technicality. You wouldn’t want to do that, now would you?”

“Well…no.”

“Leave it to us. I promise you there will be a full investigation.”

She wanted to believe him, but somehow she wasn’t convinced. Gordon would’ve insisted she back off. Nana would’ve encouraged her to follow her gut. “Have they done the autopsy?”

“I doubt it. They’re pretty backlogged at county.”

“Ask them to look for pepper spray on her hands.”

“Goodbye, Mrs. Lundberg.”

#

The days passed with nothing further from Detective Bower about Vera’s death. Four-twenty a.m. and unable to sleep, Piper rose out of bed and went to the window. Gazing at the house next door had became a habit, as automatic as brushing her teeth or making the bed, though she didn’t expect to see anything, not tonight, not so soon after Vera’s death. So when she caught sight of someone below, it snapped her awake. A flashlight beam crawled over and under the bushes next door. The half moon in the cloudless sky illuminated the area enough for her to see that the bearer of the flashlight looked to be male. Mr. Moto? What was he looking for at four in the morning?

The light continued to play over the shrubs near the rear door. What was he looking for? The pepper spray canister? The umbrella?

She grabbed the camcorder and began filming. Without night vision apparatus, the chances of catching anything more than the beam of light was remote, but it was all she had. The man bent and retrieved something. He held it under the flashlight beam. Whatever it was, it fit between his thumb and forefinger. Small, the size of Vera’s canister. Headlights approaching the intersection at the corner washed over the house, illuminating the man briefly. The light held long enough for her to make out the back of a bandana-wrapped head. She gasped.
How many people were involved
? The car headlights passed, the flashlight beam went out, and the man was gone. She knew for certain, along with him, a piece of vital evidence would also disappear.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Sybil Squire Husband Dead:
The manner of producer Paul Winger’s death was grisly, serving only to fuel the rumors. Why did Winger kill himself? Who was the mystery woman at the couple’s Pacific Palisades home that evening? What did Sybil Squire’s ten-year-old daughter witness that fateful night?…
“Everyone wants to make something sensational out of this tragedy,” said Transworld Artists studio executive Edward Hill to reporters at a news conference. “This is real life, folks, not a horror show.”

—Los Angeles Times

The callousness displayed by the media regarding the tragic death of her second husband only proved that the public did not accept that Sybil had a real life.

—Excerpt from the biography of
Sybil Squire: The Platinum Widow
by Russell Cassevantes

On the third floor of the glass and steel building of the Parker Center in downtown Los Angeles, in the Robbery-Homicide Division squad room, a female patrol officer directed Piper to the desk of Detective second-grade Jason Bower. The squad room, with its old wooden filing cabinets, outdated venetian blinds, and bright overhead fluorescent tube lights, gave Piper the feeling she was on a 50s film noir movie set. The men in the room were all dressed conservatively in dark suits and white shirts. Detective Bower, leaning against his desk with a phone to his ear, wore a deep blue suit and matching tie. He looked over at Piper, a surprised look on his face. He pulled a metal chair around and indicated for her to take a seat. He finished his conversation, hung up the landline, and turned to her.

“Mrs. Lundberg?”

“Detective Bower, I was wondering if you’d heard anything from the coroner. It’s been over a week.”

“Coroner?”

“The Vera Wade case.”

“I know what case you’re referring to.” He shuffled through some papers and files in an ‘in’ box and those on the desktop. “No. I haven’t gotten the coroner’s report yet.”

“Did you mention in your report to the coroner to look for pepper spray on her hands?”

“You could’ve phoned, Mrs. Lundberg, you didn’t have to come all this way to ask me what I’m doing on the case.”

“I thought I did. My call didn’t seem to be very effective.”

“Any new problems over there? Anything suspicious?”

“Yes.” She crossed her arms and told him about the bandana-headed man with the flashlight at the Squire house in the wee hours of the morning.

“Oh?”

“I videotaped it, but it was dark.” Piper brightened. “Maybe you have equipment that can enhance the footage. I can email you a copy of the video.”

“Why don’t you do that?” He glanced at his watch, checked his cell phone, and clipped it to his belt. “Mrs. Lundberg, I have to be somewhere now.”

Fine
. He didn’t know how persistent she could be.

She made her way through the squad room to the elevator. A moment later Detective Bower joined her. The elevator came and they rode down to the ground floor in silence. When they exited the building, Piper stopped on the steps and asked, “Have you spoken with Mrs. Squire yet?”

He shook his head. “I’m in homicide, Mrs. Lundberg. There’s nothing I can do until the death is declared a homicide. If the coroner hasn’t completed the autopsy, I’ll push him to move it up. That’s the best I can do for now.”

Piper suddenly became lightheaded. The ground beneath her feet rolled and shifted. Fifty yards away on the sidewalk, a flower vendor’s cart shook, one-by-one the potted plants and cellophane wrapped bouquets tumbled to the concrete. Cars in the parking lot moved independently, as if on a suspension bridge, swaying from side to side. Piper’s vertigo increased, making her sick to her stomach.

“Quake,” Detective Bower said under his breath.

She looked up in terror at the towering glass building. The sunlight shimmered on the moving panes. Piper froze. All that glass. All that steel. If it collapsed … Her heart pounded beneath her ribcage. She bit down on her lip as wild thoughts raced through her mind. She fell against the detective. Her knees buckled and she felt herself going down. A moment later, she was lifted by strong arms and propelled down the steps, away from the building and toward the open spaces of the parking lot. The ground calmed, but the shriek of car alarms, honking horns, and screams of frightened people waged on around her, sounding like a city under siege. Detective Bower held onto her. She smelled his aftershave and shampoo, and felt his warm breath on the side of her neck.

“Are you alright?” the detective asked, still holding tight to her.

Piper looked down at his arms, secure around her.

He dropped his arms and stepped back as if realizing the moment had passed and it had now entered into a different moment.

She nodded and leaned against a car. “I’m fine.”

He touched the corner of her mouth. “You’re bleeding.”

Piper touched the inside of her lower lip. Blood covered her fingertips. “Bit it.”

She reached into her purse for a tissue. “I have to get home. The bird will be going nuts.”

“There’s bound to be aftershocks. You should wait before going out on the freeway.”

With trembling hands, she dabbed at the blood on her lip. The ground jerked under her feet. She grabbed the detective’s arm.

“Aftershock. I’ll wait here with you for a while.”

She offered him a weak smile. “I’ll take the side streets. I really have to get home.”

He walked her to her car. From behind the wheel, she watched him walk away. He turned once to look back at her. She quickly started the engine and drove out of the lot, in the opposite direction.

#

The drive was slow. Uniformed police directed traffic at intersections where lights were malfunctioning or out completely. Utility trucks were everywhere. Helicopters patrolled overhead.

On a street corner, Piper passed a broken fire hydrant spurting water into the air while a group of kids ran through it. The children seemed unfazed by the earthquake, laughing and playing. Piper loved to watch kids play. Gordon would have complained about these kids in the street. He always had some observation about misbehaving children.

Gordon had wasted five of her prime years. She thought back to their honeymoon, at a restaurant in Costa Rica when a couple with their kids entered the dining room, the kids ranging in age from toddler to teen. Gordon stiffened and frowned, obviously upset by their presence. Piper should’ve realized then that he wasn’t into kids or anything family oriented. The first friends of hers to be dropped from their social circle were the ones with kids. Then eventually he found fault with all her friends. It shouldn’t have taken her so long to catch on. Looking back on it now, Piper was glad that he’d deceived her. For the past two years, while questioning the validity of their marriage and her love for him, she realized she did not want Gordon to be the father of her children.

Nearing home, the radio reported on the quake. Centered in a remote part of the valley, it was 5.8 on the Richter-scale. A dozen injuries, but no deaths. She wondered what she’d find at the Vogt’s house. She did a mental inventory of the two residences. The editing systems alone were fragile and expensive. There were paintings, glassware and china, the usual. The high-strung cockatoo would be completely traumatized by an earthquake. Scared of his own shadow, he freaked out if someone so much as entered the room unexpectedly.

The neighborhood was quiet compared to the racket of car alarms that had immediately followed the quake in downtown Los Angeles. She passed the Squire house and wondered how Sybil had coped during the quake. Wondered how solid the mansion was and if there had been damage to the pricey collection of figurines. The figurines, she learned from a news source on the internet, had not been her collection after all, but that of her second husband, Alec McDaniel. Alec had been one of the leading stage actors of his time. While filming in New York for
Transworld Artists
, Sybil had gone to see him in the Broadway play,
Donnybrook Fair
. At the backstage party, it was love at first sight for the dramatic thespian, thirty years her senior. He proposed before the evening was over. Struggling to raise a one-year-old daughter, with creditors badgering her day and night, Sybil told a friend she could learn to love the rotund Irishman with the sad hound dog eyes. She never got the chance. He died on their wedding night.

The drapes were open in the front of the mansion, yet she saw no movement. She hadn’t seen any movement inside since the night Vera had gone there. The place had been closed up tight, the canaries unnaturally silent.

She pulled into the Vogt’s driveway, shut off the engine and stepped out of the car near the glass-paned doors. One of the double doors stood open a crack. If the alarm had gone off, it was silent now. It was possible the quake had shifted the foundation slightly and popped the lock. Just in case, she palmed her cell phone before pushing open the door and stepping inside. She listened for any sounds of an intruder. Stepping quietly, she made her way through the house. Debris covered the floor.