Not A Girl Detective (12 page)

I probably needed a new cell phone anyway.

We had, of course, forgotten to bring out towels.

Dripping wet, I traipsed across the velvety green grass to where I’d left my Diet Coke, took a swig, then

walked through the sliding glass doors into the living room. The air conditioner was blasting. Shivering, I

turned it off and tiptoed through the breezeway toward the bedrooms. The linen closet was located just opposite the room I’d been using.

“Love is in the air,” I hummed to myself, da-da-da-

da-da-da-da-da. Halfway through the next chorus,

something caught my eye.

The door to the master bedroom was ajar.

Strange. I’d walked through the master bedroom ear-

lier this morning, when I’d come in after getting soaked by the sprinklers. I distinctly remembered closing the door behind me before I walked across the hall to my

room. Why would Lael or Bridget have opened it in the interim? They wouldn’t have. Maybe Edgar had finally

arrived.

“Hello!” I called out, suddenly conscious of the fact that I was for all intents and purposes naked as a jay-bird. “Who’s in there?” There was no response. I

walked slowly toward the door. “Who’s in there?” I

asked more insistently. “Edgar, is that you?” I won-

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tapped gently. No one answered. I pressed my ear to the door and thought I could hear soft music playing.

I stepped back for a moment, then knocked harder.

The door swung open and banged against the wall. The

noise startled me. Not to mention the unmade bed.

There were sheets and blankets everywhere. A pair of

faded blue jeans was lying in front of the fireplace.

Jake.

But where was he? And where was Edgar? They’d

obviously been here. And now they were gone.

I backed away from the room and headed to the

kitchen. I remembered seeing a typed list posted by the phone with emergency contact information. This didn’t seem like an emergency, not exactly, but something

wasn’t right. I wanted to talk to Edgar. The first number on the list was the Carroll Avenue house. I dialed and waited. The machine picked up. I hung up, frustrated.

The next number was Mitchell Honey’s cell phone. It

rang and rang. No answer. I started pacing back and

forth.

“Ow!” Jesus H. Christ. Perfect. I’d stepped on some

broken glass. Bridget had dropped something in here

yesterday. Of course, it was too much to ask that she clean up her messes properly. I bent down and rubbed

my hand across the bottom of my foot. Damn it. This

was a monster piece. How could she have missed it?

And now I’d cut my hand, too, and there was blood all over the place.

I grabbed some paper towels and started blotting up

the drops of blood, then wrapped the last few sheets on the roll around my hand and foot. I peeled the list off the wall and studied it. Jake’s cell phone was next. I 100

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limped across the living room, trying not to stain the beautiful wood floors, and back out to the pool.

“Did you talk to him?” asked Lael. “What happened

to you?”

“I never realized you were so accident-prone,” said

Bridget.

“I cut myself,” I said, glaring at Bridget, “that’s what happened to me. And something strange is going on.

Someone’s been in there. Edgar’s bedroom is a mess.”

“How can that be?” asked Lael.

My hands were trembling as I dialed Jake’s cell. “I’m sorry, you have reached a number that is no longer in service.”

Of course, he didn’t pay his bills. The next number

was Edgar’s cell. Time to get to the bottom of this.

It rang several times.

“What’s that?” asked Bridget.

“What’s what?” I asked, thoroughly confused. I

hung up. Who else could I call? Edgar’s was the last

number on the list.

“That noise I just heard.”

I hadn’t heard a thing.

“It was probably nothing.” Or it was them. Some-

where out here.

“Edgar? Jake? Are you in the backyard?” I cried.

“Please come out.” I stepped around an enormous palm

tree embedded in some cement, and toward a sea of

boulders leading to the mountains beyond.

“Where are you going, Cece? You don’t have any

shoes on,” Lael said.

“Only bloody paper towels,” added Bridget. “And

they’re going to get bloodier if you keep heading out there.”

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“I’m coming to help you. C’mon, Bridget.”

They got out of the pool and huddled next to me.

“I’m going to try Edgar’s cell again. I didn’t let it ring long enough.”

“There’s that noise again,” said Bridget.

This time I heard it, too. Coming from beyond the

boulders.

I hung up. The noise stopped. I dialed Edgar’s num-

ber again. The noise started again.

It sounded like a phone ringing.

Like when you’re home, but you don’t want to get the

phone, and you’re waiting for the answering machine to pick up, to release you from some obligation you don’t want. But the ringing goes on and on, insistent, like a reproach.

I headed toward the edge of the property, my heart in my mouth. I went past the boulders, through the cactus, and deep into the brush. And that was where I found

him, Edgar Edwards, with a small hole in the middle of his forehead.

His cell phone was lying next to him, still ringing,

still insisting.

11

The Eames chairs in Edgar’s living room were unre-

lenting. I guess that was the theme of the day.

“Let’s go over it just one more time.” Detective

Mindy Lasarow tucked a strand of prematurely gray

hair behind one ear and smiled grimly at me.

“No problem,” I said.

“Why are you ladies here, in this house?” She looked

at me as if she were hoping for a different answer, if only to relieve the monotony.

“We were invited here,” I recited. It was the fourth, maybe the fifth, time I’d explained it.

“By whom?”

“Edgar Edwards.”

Her partner, Detective Dunphy, scribbled madly, as

if this were brand-new information.

I turned to Detective Dunphy. Cindy. She didn’t

look like a Cindy. Cindys have dimples. This one had

a single furrowed brow. “I’m talking about the dead

man.”

“Uh-huh.”

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She wasn’t exactly the conversationalist Detective

Lasarow was.

“Okay. The dead man invited you here, to stay at his

house.”

“Right.”

“And your friends, too.”

“We have every right to be here,” exclaimed Lael.

“We were planning to leave a carrot cake.”

Detective Dunphy spoke up. “If you just answer the

questions, ma’am, we’ll all get out of here sooner.”

“Don’t you ma’am me.” Lael outraged was a thing to

behold, but now was probably not the time.

“Should we be contacting our lawyers?” asked Brid-

get, who was sweating profusely, as if she were already locked up in a Third World prison. “Don’t we get a

phone call?”

“Don’t be silly, Bridget,” I said. “We aren’t suspects.

Right, Detective Lasarow?”

She glanced at her partner.

“Not yet, Ms. Caruso.”

They were so cool, these two. But Edgar was dead,

and they were wasting precious time. Surely we didn’t look like the type of lowlifes they usually dealt with.

My bikini was by Dolce and Gabbana.

“Okay. You were invited here by Mr. Edwards. But

he wasn’t planning to be in town.”

“That’s right.”

“But he showed up unexpectedly.”

“According to Clarissa Olsen, yes.”

“Spell it.”

Come on. “O-L-S-E-N.”

“And she said what?”

“She told me Edgar was here, in Palm Springs. He

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was planning to give a talk at her conference at the hotel. But I never saw him. He canceled his talk. Or she axed him, I don’t know.” Bad choice of words. But she was pretty riled up about something.

“So back when he didn’t think he was coming he

gave you a key.”

“Yes.”

“You and your girlfriends were supposed to let your-

selves in.”

“Correct.”

“And you did. Last night.”

“Correct.”

“And where is that key?”

Here was the sticky part. “I lost it.”

Detective Lasarow sent a meaningful glance to De-

tective Dunphy, who promptly started a new page in her notepad.

“I think the key fell out of her purse at the Wynd-

ham,” volunteered Lael. “We had it this morning when

we left. I remember seeing Cece lock up. But we didn’t have it when we came back this afternoon. We had to go around the back. The gate was open.”

“Did you leave the gate open when you left?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t even think it locks.”

“Why are you all cut up, Ms. Caruso?”

I looked down guiltily at my hand. She didn’t know

about the foot, of course. “I told you. Bridget broke a glass yesterday in the kitchen.”

“By accident,” Bridget insisted.

“Of course it was by accident,” I said. “Anyway, I

went inside to make some calls after noticing the bedroom door open, and I cut myself.”

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“Must’ve been a pretty big piece of glass.”

“I can’t sweep to save my life,” said Bridget.

“Actually, you did a great job. The crime scene guys

didn’t find so much as a splinter.”

Bridget looked pleased until she realized what Detec-

tive Lasarow was implying. I was fed up. We hadn’t

done anything and these glorified meter maids had nothing—not a shred of evidence—to suggest otherwise.

“Just stop this,” I said, my voice trembling. “Forget about us and find Edgar’s boyfriend, for god’s sake!

What are his jeans doing in the bedroom without him in them?”

Everyone turned to look at me.

“How do you know whose jeans those are in the

bedroom?”

How embarrassing. “He was wearing them when we

met, on Wednesday, I guess it was.”

Detective Dunphy could barely contain her excite-

ment. With some color in her cheeks, she looked more

like a Cindy. Her partner took over with the pen and pad.

“And you recognized them, glancing through a half-

open door, crumpled in a heap on the floor?”

“Cece is very good with clothes,” said Bridget.

“That means a lot, coming from you,” I said.

“Okay, okay,” said Detective Dunphy. “You girls can

save that stuff for the Wyndham.”

“Excuse me?” Lael said. “Excuse me? Did you say

what I think you did? That’s sexual harassment. We

could report you for that.”

“Sorry. I just assumed.”

“That was totally inappropriate,” Lael said. She loved this sort of thing. A righteous cause. “How dare you?”

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Mindy Lasarow took back the reins. Cindy Dunphy

looked chagrined. “So, was Wednesday the day you

were given the key?”

“Yes. Look, just call the boyfriend, curator, what-

ever. His name is Mitchell Honey. He was there that

day. He’ll vouch for me.”

“The boyfriend whose pants you saw? How can I call

him? You said he’s missing.”

“Those are Jake’s pants. I’m talking about the other

boyfriend. Mitchell Honey would never fit into those

pants.”

And Mitchell Honey would never vouch for me. He

hated me, plus he hadn’t actually been there when

Edgar had pressed the key into my hands. He probably

knew nothing about it. I thought back to my conversa-

tion with him on the phone Thursday morning. He’d

been really concerned about Edgar giving me some-

thing. Maybe he
had
known about the key. Why would he care? For that matter, why had Edgar given it to me if he was planning to use the house himself? I guessed I’d never know. One thing was for sure. Mitchell was

going to believe the absolute worst of me. That I’d broken into the house with my desperado girlfriends. That I’d shot Edgar. That I’d done something equally horrific to Jake, but only after stealing his pants. I hoped Jake was all right. Where could he be? Maybe back in L.A., with Mitchell. The two of them would really be stuck

with each other now.

The detectives consulted their notepads one last

time, then stood up. They were finished with us. We

shook hands without meaning it. They gave us permis-

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guage possible, to stay in touch. To be available for further questioning. And not to be foolish. A serious crime had been committed, and we were to conduct ourselves

accordingly. I found that last part a bit obscure. I wondered if they were trying to tell us that we were no

longer suspects. Or maybe it was routine procedure for homicide detectives to remind people to watch their

backs.

Two uniformed cops took over from there. They

helped us pack up our things, fished my apparently wa-terproof cell phone out of the bottom of the pool with a net they’d found in the storage shed (three messages

from Gambino), then escorted us out to Maynard’s car.

What a road trip this had turned out to be. Lael

switched on the radio so we didn’t have to talk to one another, which would’ve been a good idea except that I was distracted by the sudden blast of rockabilly and ran over the yellow crime scene tape on the way down the