The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 30

  “Yeah.”

  “Now sit on the umbrella. Put your whole weight on it.”

  “OK. I’m—”

  And with the most satisfying demolition noise, the air conditioner tore loose. It teetered a moment, plummeted silently, then crashed into the paved drainage zone thirty feet below. It sounded like the engines exploding on the Titanic.

  Petey’s head popped out and looked around.

  “Wow!”

  _____

  “Help!” screamed Eileen, as the banging continued at the front door. “Help!” She struggled and squirmed, neck muscles popping. The banging ceased and footsteps spattered toward us, and Norah swept into the kitchen.

  “What the hell? What are you doing here?” said Norah to her sister. She turned to me. “I thought—”

  “What’s she doing here?” cried Eileen. “Oh, God! Norah, she’s trying to kill me. Help me!”

  “You’re wrong,” I contradicted. “If that was the case I’d have finished stomping down your grave out there already.”

  I left Eileen to hyperventilate on the floor and stepped around the cook-top island to Norah, who looked stunned. Still clutching Le Cork Weasel, I told her, “I’m doing the best I can to find out where she stashed the gems and money. I’d sooner kill you both, frankly, but if I do that I won’t know where to find Petey.” Norah looked at me as if I were insane. Which was odd since she was the insane one: a person who kidnapped and terrorized to get money, and perhaps for spite. All I was doing, by contrast, was torturing and terrorizing to preserve the life of my child.

  My one comforting thought was this: If Petey’s alive now, he’ll likely stay that way as long as Norah remains here.

  “Well, you’re not gonna kill anybody,” Norah told me. “If anything, I myself—”

  “Help me!” Eileen grunted and struggled on the floor in her puddle of urine.

  Norah said, “Where’s Richard?”

  “Richard!” exclaimed Eileen. “No!”

  “Well, he’s not here yet,” I confessed. “See, I thought—”

  Eileen said, “You told both of them where to find me?”

  “I had no choice. Shut up. Is my boy all right?”

  “Yeah, for fifteen million bucks he’s fine, believe me. That kid sure can eat a lot of M&Ms.”

  Ridiculously, compulsively, I broke in, “They’re his favorite, next to pizza and McDonald’s.”

  “...out of house and home,” Norah was saying. “Yeah, we had some of that stuff too. You know, I sort of like the little bastard.”

  “Please just tell me where he is.”

  Norah said, “He’s so cute. You know what he said? He puts his hands on his hips and he says, ‘We don’t hurt.’ Very stern. Like he’s telling me his rule. What a little man.”

  I closed my eyes. Keep it together, hold on.

  “All I want is to get my property and get out of town.” Norah reached into her Barbie-pink handbag.

  “Your property?” yelled Eileen.

  “I can hear you, I’m right here,” said Norah. “You don’t have to holler.” She perched herself on the other barstool, extracted a Benson & Hedges from her purse, and lit it like Bette Davis, streaming the smoke sideways. “Well, sister of mine, we have all day to talk about this.”

  She flicked her ashes directly on the floor. Now that’s a sociopath for you.

  But before Norah had a chance to take a second drag on her cigarette, Eileen erupted from the floor, trailing duct tape like a George Romero zombie. She’d worked herself almost free, and she headed for the French doors to the garden, dragging the barstool by one foot.

  She made it barely to the patio—Norah and I overtook her easily, but she, with the strength of desperation, managed to bash Norah in the mouth with her elbow, then turned, picked up the barstool, and rammed me in the chest with it.

  I think she must have knocked me out for a moment, because when I got to my feet Eileen was free and the sisters were fighting like a couple of iguanas. Norah’s purse was tossing on its shoulder strap and she seemed to be struggling to grab something from it, while slapping Eileen’s face and neck with the other hand.

  Eileen shouted, “You stay away from my money!”

  “Oh, no, honey, you owe it to me!”

  “You killed my baby! You go to hell!”

  “I did not!”

  Struggling there on the patio beneath the shadow of the high dive, they had forgotten me. I shook my head trying to clear it, fearing I’d faint, taking deep breaths, not knowing which sister to root for. Together like that, they showed those sisterly similarities you don’t always notice when they’re apart. For instance, Norah led with her left and so did Eileen. Each fortified her blows quite athletically, with power from the knees. They bared their teeth with the same hateful grimace. Very twinlike.

  When I’d dropped down the rabbit hole after discovering Petey missing, I wondered what would be at the bottom.

  This was it.

  The sisters spewed recriminations as they fought. Norah shouted, “I sacrificed everything for Richard. He promised me that money.”

  “No, honey, he promised it to me!”

  “You never wanted me to have anything nice!”

  “All you ever wanted was exactly what I had!”

  I saw something move, out of the corner of my eye. It was a shadow in the pool’s shimmering water. A human shadow, the shadow of a man.

  Chapter 39 – Waiting for the Puppetmaster

  Seeing Petey’s bowl of brown hair on his reedy little neck made Daniel so happy he couldn’t find his voice for a second. He cleared his throat and told him, “Don’t lean any farther out.”

  “Come get me,” said Petey, reaching up one arm. He was still in his pajamas with duckies on them.

  “Well, pal, see, I can’t get any farther down than this.”

  The boy looked up to his friend’s dangling figure and the square of blue sky beyond.

  “I’ll jump onto your legs and you pull us up, OK?” suggested Petey.

  “No, Pete, that’s not safe. I won’t be able to control both you and the rope, see? Here’s what we’ll do. You’re gonna be Spider-Man. For real this time. I’ll show you what to do.”

  “For real?”

  “Real as can be. You wait there.”

  With difficulty—his long legs in the cramped space worked against him, besides gravity—Daniel half hauled, half walked himself to the top. During this, he heard windows popping open and curious voices drawn by the smash of Sally Jacubiak’s air conditioner.

  He flung himself onto the roof, then scrambled to check his anchor, the iron pipe. It was fine.

  He wished he’d taught Petey to make a bowline, that all-purpose, lifesaving knot of cliff and sea. He could not risk trying to talk him through tying one around himself now, sight unseen, because one mistake, an under instead of an over, would cause the knot to slip apart the instant it took any weight.

  Instead, he tied a figure-eight knot to make a stationary loop just big enough, he judged, for Petey to slip himself into.

  “OK, Spider-Man,” he said cheerfully, “here comes the rope. Pull your head in.”

  The rope dangled in front of the hole and Petey’s hand grabbed it.

  “Now, Spidey, listen. Take that loop and step into it. Bring it up so it goes around your chest muscles.”

  “I’m doing it!” called Petey excitedly. “I got my sneakers on!”

  “Ready?” Daniel wrapped his end behind and around himself in classic belay position.

  “Ready!”

  “Grab the rope with both hands. Not the loop, the rope above it.”

  “Like a loop?” Petey was suddenly baffled, his spatial circuits overloaded.

  Daniel groaned softly. “OK, OK, just grab the rope and ease yourself out of the hole. I’ve got you.” Oh please oh please oh please.

  The boy clambered from the hole and swung into space, his little hands clutching the rope too high. Daniel’s loop slithered
off the boy’s slender body and dangled below.

  _____

  I looked up to the high dive and realized that the man had been hiding by lying flat on the platform, way above the blue dappled pool.

  Amazing. I’d searched that whole damned house and garden and missed him.

  “Stop!” he called, almost lazily.

  Eileen and Norah froze in mid-eye-scratch. The three of us stood on the pebbled walk and shaded our eyes as the man looked down on us, spraddle-legged, hands outstretched like a pharaoh or Elvis, the sun flaring behind him. The pistol in his hand caught the late light like a molten chunk.

  He laughed to see our faces squinting up at him.

  “You bitches,” he said, “would kill each other for a dead cat.”

  Handsomer, squarer-cut, and trimmer-hipped than even his pictures showed, Richard Tenaway stood above this clutch of agitated women in contemptuous amusement and evidently complete relaxation. He was wearing only a white T-shirt and a pair of slim black pants, as if he’d thrown off a coat and tie a minute ago.

  He said, “I’m going to straighten you out. Everybody’s going to get what they want.”

  Under her breath, Eileen said, “The hell you will.” But she wanted to believe in him, it was there in her face, the longing to have some goddamn thing turn out solid today. He didn’t catch what she said. Norah looked at him fearfully. The breeze wafted the smell of pool chlorine.

  He stood, crotch forward, and I saw that his crotch was absolutely central to him. In this moment, watching the man who had held such sway over so many lives, I understood everything.

  For him to have sneaked onto the property—as I’d engineered and expected—and then waited, waited, listening as Eileen and I circled the gardens and pool—he didn’t even really know who I was—how insidious and cool. Then hearing, as he must have, Eileen’s screams from the kitchen—to have waited still, waited, to have known exactly what was going on—to know that if I murdered Eileen it would be for the money, then he would only have me to deal with.

  And now to rise up above us as if he had created it all, like a grandiose puppeteer—he was pleased with himself and I could tell he’d been born pleased with himself, some men are. Women doing a fight dance below his feet! All we lacked were wet T-shirts and a mud pit.

  There was, however, the question of his stash. The question of his murder of Padraig McGower. The question of his avoiding capture.

  “So, you beat the rap,” he said to Eileen.

  His widow, bedraggled, urine-stained, sore-fingered, and furious, said, “You know what happened that night better than I do.”

  “No,” he responded, “I don’t.” Now he held his gun pointing up, like a SWAT guy at ease. “Who would I have heard it from?”

  “Richard, come down here so we can talk,” said Eileen flatly.

  He ignored that. “Norah, did you poison Gabby to hurt me? Were you trying to kill them both that night? Or Eileen, were you just taking the easy way out?”

  What do you care? I wondered.

  As if he’d heard my thought, he said, “I loved my little girl. I doted on her.”

  “That’s what you used to call me,” said Norah wistfully. Eileen threw a hip forward. “Doted on her? Gabriella was just another piece of property to you, that’s all.”

  He appeared to consider that. The sun slipped lower, behind his legs now. “Well, all I have to say is, no one fucks with my property. Least of all you two.” He lowered his gun barrel so it pointed first at Norah, then Eileen. “I won’t hesitate to shoot both of you. What happened that night? Tell the judge.”

  I couldn’t believe it. He wanted to run his own little trial here. And the women obliged him, looking up at him, fearing him, fearing his gun, wanting him, wanting his gun. I watched, mesmerized.

  Eileen said, “She came to the house, two months after you supposedly died. Fenco had just paid me my money. I was cordial enough, under the circumstances. I gave her a glass of wine. She told me what you’d tried to do to her, in order to get me on her side, I suppose, and—”

  “What did I try to do to her?” Richard looked blank.

  “The assassination attempt.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, don’t pretend, dear,” said Norah nervously.

  _____

  The only things securing the boy to the rope were his own two hands.

  Aghast, Daniel called, “Hold tight to the rope every second!” He forced a confident smile through his inner panic. “Use your leg muscles to walk up this wall, Spidey! Hold tight and just walk up, I’m taking in your slack.”

  Grinning, the boy obeyed. “Look at me!” he shouted. Then he decided to hand-over-hand it, like he’d seen movie heroes of all stripes do.

  “No,” said Daniel extremely calmly, “just hold tight with both hands and keep walking.”

  A shadow of strain crossed Petey’s face. He faltered, his sneakers slipping on the wall’s stucco facing, which was just as lousy here as on the outside. The boy gasped and looked down, one foot dangling.

  Daniel deepened his voice to make himself sound calmer yet. “Don’t look down, Spidey. Look at me.”

  Petey looked up desperately.

  Daniel smiled. If he tried to haul him up, the boy might lose his grip entirely. “Spidey, you’ve got the muscles for this job. You’re almost here. You can do it.”

  _____

  “It was you that tried to have me killed,” Richard said to Norah. “That moron you hired, what a joke, as if I’d—”

  “Oh, I see,” I said. The words just popped out.

  Richard turned to me.

  “Who are you? The one in the trial? That left me the note?”

  “I’m a mercenary for Fenco,” I said.

  “What?” said Eileen.

  “Then I owe you one,” said Richard. “But I’m afraid right now—”

  Eileen broke in, “Norah came to try to get the stuff you embezzled. You were smart not to have given her access to it, even though you were screwing her brains out every time my back was turned.”

  Richard made no reaction to that.

  “She asked my forgiveness for having stolen you from me. She came crawling. I forgave her, all right. I did! But when I wouldn’t agree to turn on you, she dropped something in my wine to put me to sleep. She knew there was a locker somewhere, and she thought she could find the key. She ransacked the house.”

  “No!” cried Norah, hands splayed anxiously.

  “Shut up!” snarled Richard.

  Caution to the winds, Norah wailed, “Richard, you never appreciated my mind! I tried to help you! I gave you lots of ideas!”

  “Shut up!”

  After a moment of silence, Eileen continued, “Gabriella must have woken up, and that’s when she gave her the Valium in some ice cream.”

  “Auntie Norah,” said Richard.

  “I didn’t do it! I didn’t!”

  “You were there.” Eileen crossed her arms. “Who the hell else could have done it?”

  Norah paused as if listening to something in the distant trees.

  “Quit stalling,” said Richard.

  She looked up at him, and flung it in his face. “Padraig was there, and he did it.”

  Richard glared at her skeptically, but I thought, Now I get it. At last I really get it.

  “Once I’d gotten Eileen to sleep,” she said, “I started looking for the damn key. I couldn’t find it. I looked everywhere. Padraig was waiting. Finally I called him.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Richard, a terrible expression creeping across his face. “Back up. What was going on between you and him?”

  “I can’t believe it,” whispered Eileen.

  “I can.” Addressing Norah, I said, “You seduced Padraig as soon as you came back from South America, right?”

  Norah stood there trying to hold to some shred of honor. Hesitantly, she said, “How would you know that?”

  “I put myself in your place. What would a screwed-up br
oad with good tits and no prospects naturally do? You’d whored yourself to Richard, then when that didn’t work out you whored yourself to his best friend. You came back to the States and decided you loved him.”

  Everybody listened. “You told Padraig about Richard’s stealing,” I continued, “then the two of you joined forces.”

  With a grotesque primness, Norah said, “He was very interested in what I had to say.”

  “Fuck,” spat Richard.

  Norah peered up at him. “We decided the right thing to do would be to recover all that stolen property.”

  “How principled of you,” commented Eileen.

  The afternoon sun shone in everyone’s hair, incongruent with the tenseness of their postures—Richard, thighs forward, Eileen with clenched arms—blood dripping from one fist—Norah in a half crouch, clutching her stupid purse like an Uzi.

  “He must have been waiting for you that night, right?” I said. “The plan was for you to go over there, because you’d have a better chance with Eileen alone. Then when you couldn’t find the key, you called him and he came over.”

  “So that’s how that highboy got turned over,” said Eileen. “That thing weighed a ton.”

  “Yeah,” said Norah, “I thought I was being thorough, but I discovered I didn’t know the first thing about ransacking a house.”

  “Good God,” I said.

  “There’s almost a science to it. Gabriella woke up at that point. I couldn’t calm her down.” Norah’s eyes drifted into the distance as she remembered the scene. I pictured it: the semidark bedroom, Gabriella in her big-butt overnight diaper standing up in her crib crying, clutching the top rail and shaking it with the full force of her little body, increasingly panicked the longer Mommy did not come. “The screaming was getting on Padraig’s nerves. He came in and said, ‘Let me try.’ I suggested he look for some cough syrup, then I went downstairs.” She threw up her hands. “Why didn’t you have any cough syrup? That always works with kids.”

  Eileen had gone into some kind of fugue state. She stared at her sister.

  Norah went on, “Well, like I say, I was in the kitchen opening all the canisters when Padraig came in looking for ice cream. He goes, ‘This is for the baby,’ and I thought how nice, he’s going to give her a treat—why didn’t I myself think of that? He didn’t say anything about Valium at that point.” Her voice dropped. “It was only later.”