The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Read online

  “Well,” said Yvonne, her eyes gleaming above the magnifying lamp, “he might be a corpse now, I don’t know. But he wasn’t one when this photo was taken.”

  My pulse accelerated. “Why?”

  She tucked a flowing auburn tress behind her ear. “When a person dies, their muscle tone goes away and the skin shrinks a little bit, hence the sunken-eye effect. We’re seeing just the hint of beard stubble, but you’d expect pronounced stubble after death, at least before decomposition gets going. Once the maggots show up, all bets are off.”

  “Ew.”

  “Except here. See this?” She touched the tip of her pinkie fingernail to Richard Tenaway’s upper lip. “See a little longer stubble?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yet it’s not of a consistent length. But most of all look at this, see this sheen here, like a soft ridge just above his lip line?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s a similar patch on his forehead.” She looked at me. “Rita, his makeup is slipping.”

  “Well, so what?” I was thinking about the heat and humidity of Brazil. “It was really hot there,” I said.

  “Rita. What causes makeup to slip?”

  It hit me. “Perspiration.”

  Yvonne handed me the picture and let out one of her operatic laughs. “No matter how hot it gets, corpses don’t sweat.”

  Chapter 18 – Saturday Strategies

  “Daddy!” shouted Petey, accelerating fifteen feet across the living room, vaulting over our spanking Swedish sofa, to wrap himself around Jeff’s legs.

  It was nine-thirty Saturday morning, the beginning of Daddy weekend, and Jeff looked undrunk.

  “Hey, big guy,” he said in his fake hearty way that didn’t fool Petey. However, the boy had no choice but to be crazy about him, given how boys want their dads, and especially given the treats and toys he invariably got showered with on Daddy weekends.

  I looked at them. The contrast between the two couldn’t have been starker: the energetic boy, every cell in his body living in the present moment, and the listless man, half of him focused resentfully on the past, the other half peering fearfully into the future.

  Jeff’s upper lip tightened with contempt—his signature expression—as he glanced around the apartment. I was beginning to feel a shade more confident about being an independent human in this world, and he clearly sensed it and didn’t like it.

  “New furniture,” he said.

  “Yeah. IKEA.” Besides the sofa, I’d gotten a new coffee table and two lamps. It had been a pleasure to drag the old stuff to the curb, where it sat for less than an hour before a scavenger loaded it into his truck. The Swedishness of the IKEA items coordinated nicely with my geometric rug and Daniel’s paintings.

  Jeff said, “I thought the credit card companies had cut you off.”

  Petey said, “Let’s go!”

  “Actually,” I said calmly, “I paid cash for this stuff, and my credit card, singular, is paid off.”

  “Well, this place is still a dump.” Right in front of the boy. Well, I was used to it.

  In high school Jeff had been a baseball star and still looked it: solid body, broad nose, and wide-set blue eyes—he’d been handsome in a brawny way, competitive and brash. But something was different. What was it? His good edge had been rounded while his bad edge had gotten sharper. He wore the same weekend clothes every thirtyish straight guy in L.A. wears, untucked polo shirt with the name of some resort in the Grand Tetons embroidered on the left breast, cargo shorts, sneakers.

  I didn’t respond to his comment, only made sure Petey had his backpack and Spider-Man jacket before he raced down the hall to the elevator and Jeff’s waiting black Mustang.

  _____

  I drank another cup of coffee and ate some of the nutritious Swedish cereal I’d bought recently, I’m sure you can guess where. Every time you buy something from IKEA, you have this pleasant Swedish feeling for a couple of weeks.

  Last night, I called George Rowe as soon as I’d left Yvonne’s. He was delighted to hear what she’d said. He came right over to pick up the picture and told me he’d be in touch. Before he left, he pulled a tiny windup dinosaur from his pocket and gave it to my son. Petey had never seen such a toy. The dinosaur ground its head up and down with a beensy fierce sound and waddled in a circle. I asked George how he happened to have a tiny windup dinosaur in his pocket.

  “I knew you had a child, of course,” he told me. “But I always carry toys.” He looked shy and left.

  Petey played with it for fifteen minutes, then put it in his backpack, where he kept his current favorites.

  This Saturday morning, after seeing Petey safely off with Jeff, I went to meet with the defense team at Gary’s offices. Gary and Mark Sharma were planning the cross-examination of one of the prosecution’s expert witnesses, this one on toxicology. Mark was going to do the questioning. He said, in his liquid accent, “There’s no way she can be certain as to what was in the baby’s blood. I intend to be aggressive against her theories—all that drug half-life information, molecular bonding. I can confuse the jury by asking her about the percentage of Caucasians classified as poor metabolizers.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “What is your goal?” Gary asked, finger poised at his cheek.

  “My goal is to get her to admit the test results could be evidence of two other drugs, bromazepam or chlordiazepoxide. The jury won’t know what to think!” Mark drew in his cheeks to try to give the impression of dimples. Little chipmunk cheeks.

  He had, I noticed, gotten his hair cut like Gary’s—short on the sides, long and almost floppy on top, a boyish cut that made Gary look vigorous. But it only made Mark, with his chubby cheeks and poufy lips, look regressed. Also, he had bought loafers similar to the Allen-Edmonds pair Gary wore, only his weren’t quite right. They were made of some exotic pebbled leather like manta ray or something, which was supposed to make him look individualistic. He didn’t understand shoes.

  Poor Mark. He wanted so hard to be like Gary, to show he had balls, to succeed. It was so clearly written all over him—the way he looked at Gary with those spaniel eyes, the way he knocked his ass out trying to please him.

  He was so loyal and so clueless.

  Gary sat thinking.

  Almost without realizing it, I plunged in. “But Mark, that’s just the problem: confusing the jury. We don’t want to mix them up, we want them to know exactly what to think. They’re looking to us to simplify and tell them what to think.” I glanced at Gary, who had shifted his attention to me. “We should hit hard on the couple of shaky links in that chain of custody—the envelope seal, the fallibility of the lab—any lab—and that vial that got juggled around. And we should hit on the police not doing a toxicology on Eileen herself. If she seemed at all guilty, plus the fact that she told them she felt sick and sleepy when she got up, and they still didn’t do a tox on her? All due respect, Mark, but we should leave the woman’s theories alone. Drug dosage and toxicity—she’s spent her entire professional life studying and developing those data tables, and she’s going to be able to deflect our attacks fairly well. That just stands to reason. And the jury’s going to think, well, hell, she didn’t kill the kid, why are they giving her such a hard time? We’ll look desperate.”

  Gary cleared this throat.

  I finished, “But! If we focus on possible contamination or tampering, plus bad judgment by the police, that’s something everybody understands. Everybody knows a simple mistake can change the course of history. The Watergate burglars left a piece of tape on the lock.”

  Gary and Mark were looking at me with totally different expressions. Gary’s was a relaxed smile, while Mark had erased his self-satisfaction with that forced-blank expression people have when they’re trying to hide disgust or fear. Mark so, so wanted to be a team player, but this was the best he could do. I pitied him, he was so harmless and transparent.

  Gary said, “I’ll handle the toxicology cross, Mark.”
<
br />   I watched Mark exhale and look down at the tabletop, where he had untwisted a paper clip into a thin silver straight needlelike object. He rolled it on the table and looked up at me.

  _____

  When I opened the door for Petey that Sunday night, he was alone; I saw the elevator doors close in front of Jeff’s impassive face at the end of the hall.

  As I dumped Petey’s dirty clothes from his backpack I asked him if he’d had a good weekend.

  “Pretty good,” he said, busy searching in the front pocket of his backpack. “We went to a lady’s house. She has a pool and I went swimming with her dog.”

  “How nice.”

  “Her dog’s name is Dolphin.”

  “She named her dog Dolphin?”

  “They’re a lot funner than you.” He pulled out the windup dinosaur George had given him, looked at it for a moment, touched its head with his forefinger, then put it down and drew out his ScoreLad to play the new superhero game Jeff had given him. With a look of satisfaction, he turned it on.

  The device booped and whick-whicked.

  I said, “Honey, that’s not a nice thing to say. Wait a minute before you play with that. Did you stay overnight at the lady’s house?”

  He looked at me impatiently. “No, we came back to Daddy’s with pizza. I had two Cokes!”

  “My goodness, that’s a lot of Coke. But you’re a big boy. How did you sleep?”

  “I don’t know. I watched Police Academy. Daddy fell asleep on the floor.”

  “Oh? What did Daddy have to drink?”

  “Barley soda!”

  Barley soda. How creative.

  “Bottles and bottles of it! They were lying all over the place.” Petey settled down to play his game and I unloaded the dishwasher and wished Jeff had approached life differently. He’d snowed the judge at the divorce, going to a two-week rehab and swearing he was clean for good. So on that basis he got Petey on weekends.

  I thought about Jeff’s capacity for beer and tequila, and I thought about his zooming black Mustang, and I tried not to think about the L.A. freeways and slamming metal and screams and blood and a cop snapping a sheet over a small corpse on the pavement.

  _____

  Very early next morning, I drove to the parking lot at Santa Monica and Rodeo where Gramma Gladys’s spirit, or part of it, hung out.

  “Gramma?” I asked, getting out of the car so I could feel any possible vibes better.

  A man in a filthy rain jacket and bare feet wandered among the parked cars. I glanced around for one of Beverly Hills’ plentiful security guards or cops, but saw none. The man veered toward the exit to Rodeo Drive.

  After a minute a sparrow flew past my face, and I decided it was a sign Gramma Gladys was willing to listen, from deep within the spirit world.

  To be polite, I made small talk about my parents and aunts in Wisconsin, then gushed out my worries.

  “I’m doing the wrong thing in this weird job I took, I’m sure. What about the poor little dead girl at the center of it? But is she really at the center of it? All I want to do is make love to this guy, the main lawyer on the case. I told you about him. That’s all I want to do—drink sake and go to bed with him. But moreover, oh, Gramma, it’s so senseless. I’m in love with a married man, there’s nobody else on the horizon, nobody else I want in the world, and Jeff’s being a butthead. If anything happens to Petey, I’m going to have to kill Jeff and myself. Something bad’s coming, I just know it. And I’m scared. Oatberger will never call me. I should go back to Durability and get community playhouse roles in Blithe Spirit and Our Town. And I’m mad, mad at myself. I feel sorry for Jeff because he’s such a loser. Hah! A loser with a Mustang and a new girlfriend with a pool and a mermaid dog. I hate myself because I want to kick his ass, then wipe the blood off with a soft cloth. Maybe that makes me a loser too.”

  I stopped. The sounds of the cars flowing through the intersection swelled and crested and receded. I listened.

  I felt Gramma say, Just kick his ass and let him bleed! You gotta protect the boy.

  “I know. But what if Petey turns out to be a butthead too? Think of some woman down the line, some son or daughter—”

  Then you’ll have to kick his ass too. How do you think your uncle Tim got straight? Because he wanted to? Hell no! I kicked his ass until he got it right! The turd-butt!

  “You mean when he left Aunt Cecilia and the kids and went to Wyoming—”

  Who do you think hunted him down and brought him back?

  “Oh, my God.”

  I stopped at nothing!

  “But I don’t know exactly how to—”

  Suddenly the filthy man was right behind me. He smelled as if he’d just climbed out of a bathtub filled with sewage and muscatel.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but who are you talking to?”

  I felt Gramma Gladys waft away.

  “Myself,” I told him angrily, “and you’re interrupting.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said.

  “Ah, the hell with it.”

  “Spare change?” He held out his hand, fingers slightly spread, as if he didn’t expect any change to fall into it but might as well make the gesture.

  As I dug a five-dollar bill from my purse I asked, “How did you get this way?”

  He clenched the bill in his greasy sore-encrusted hand and answered, “What way?”

  Chapter 19 – Wars and Warnings

  The prosecution devoted that week, the trial’s fifth, to the level of diazepam in Gabriella’s body, as well as time-of-death estimates, the tedium of which I can’t begin to describe. We were now nearing the end of February, and who knew how long Tracy Beck-Rubin was going to draw it out? I was amazed the jurors stayed awake, but I realized that Tracy Beck-Rubin must have figured that if she put a lot of juicy stuff out there first—like Eileen’s supposedly scandalous lifestyle—they’d pay attention during the boring parts. However, when Gary got up to do the crosses, he was brilliant, impressing even the judge, who kept swatting down Beck-Rubin’s objections.

  Maybe Eileen really didn’t kill her own daughter. Whether she did or didn’t, there was something big in it for her if she kept her mouth shut. Did she know Richard had staged his death—did she help?—or was she handed, when she arrived in Ouro Prêto, the fake dead-Richard picture, a phony death certificate, and a closed casket she sent to the incinerator without opening? I wondered what George Rowe was up to.

  Jeff came for Petey Saturday morning, and this time I could tell he’d been drinking from the look in his eyes (slight glaze plus avoidance of looking directly at me), plus I smelled gasoline on him. His same old stupid trick: he’d gas up the car and spill some on himself to mask booze or, when we were married, to cover up the bimbo at work’s perfume.

  I was furious. I accused him, he denied it, I refused to let Petey go with him, and then a dreadful thing happened.

  He pushed past me, grabbed Petey around the waist, tucked him under his arm like a football, and stalked out.

  I followed, yelling, “You are not—not!—going to do this!”

  “Shut up!”

  Petey yelled, “Wow!”

  “Put him down, Jeff!”

  “He’s my son,” he snarled, flinging open the stairwell door.

  “Oh, yeah, what a loving father!” I shrieked.

  Petey, at first amused by the whole thing, started to cry. I heard him wailing down the stairwell. None of the neighbors were dumb enough to come out of their apartments.

  I was no match for Jeff in that state.

  What would Gramma Gladys do? She would leave off shrieking, for one thing.

  With a sudden calmness that amazed me, I returned to the apartment and called the police.

  To make a long day short, Jeff got busted for drunk driving, I picked up Petey at the police station, and Jeff, I knew, would declare war.

  _____

  Petey was not in bed that Tuesday night when I got home. He and Daniel were busy in the livin
g room, putting the finishing touches on a sort of Ewok village they’d built of furniture and beach towels. Daniel explained that it was Commander Butch Peterson’s temporary quarters during the neutron wars. Petey was holed up in the command center, between the sofa and an armchair. Commander Butch Peterson was the name Petey, when under stress, liked to use as an alias. It was late, almost eleven, and something was wrong.

  Daniel asked the commander to come out and meet with the emissary from the Teleflora System, but the chief wished the emissary to come to him. I looked at Daniel and received the cue to enter. The three of us huddled in the soft darkness, along with Benjamin Bunny, Petey’s bedtime companion.

  Daniel told me that when he picked up Petey after preschool, the police were there. Speaking quietly, he said, “The teachers took the class for an outing to the park, and one of the kids got grabbed by a stranger.”

  Petey said, “Ryan. Ryan. He’s my friend.”

  “Ryan got grabbed?” Ryan was the same age as Petey to the month. When they played together they looked like brothers: same brown bowl haircut, same skinny-boy build.

  “Yeah,” said Daniel. “But fortunately one of the teachers and a guy who saw what was happening came running over and stopped it. They had to physically rip the kid away from this woman. His arm got dislocated, but they said he’s going to be OK.”

  “Who was the woman?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Daniel. “It wasn’t his mom or anybody he knew. Supposedly she drove off in a blue sports car. I couldn’t find out anything more because the cops were talking to everybody. The teachers were calling all the parents, but it happened at the end of the day and I guess they hadn’t gotten to you yet. This little guy here’s fine.”

  Petey corrected, “Commander Peterson.”

  Daniel said, “I’m afraid Commander Peterson, although unhurt, got a little shook up by the incident.”

  Petey burst into tears and threw himself into my arms.