The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Read online

  “Well, I am. Basically.”

  He looked at me.

  “I am,” I insisted. “I’m just doing little jobs here and there to help me get through law school.”

  He smiled. “Once an actress, always an actress.”

  I shrugged that off. “Are you doing just dogs on this one?” He handled rodents too.

  “Just dogs, yeah. But I’ve got a hundred mice ready to start shooting tomorrow on a made-for-TV on Louis Pasteur.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, I read he actually used dogs for his testing, but the producers think mice’ll be cuter.”

  “Plus imagine the spin-off possibilities.”

  Sylvan laughed.

  “Wanna do lunch?” I asked.

  “Nah, I’ve got to water and feed this guy and the other burly boys. Come on, King.”

  The Canary Syndrome was supposed to be a labor of love for everybody involved (French for low budget), but at least the extras, which I was one of, got scale, almost two hundred dollars a day.

  And as in all good low-budgets, they were making the few do for the many: there were only about forty protesters and fifteen cops, including Sylvan and the other two dog-handling officers. The cameraman had snaked through the scene with his handheld, guided by the belt by his assistant so it looked chaotic and tight-packed. The director shouted from above, one eye on the remote monitor that showed what the camera was seeing.

  When Sylvan had phoned to give me a heads-up about the extras call, I thought I’d have a better chance if I dressed as a protester, given that I’m blond, fairly small, and, well—that clatter you’re hearing is my false modesty falling to the ground—pretty. I thought I’d make an unconvincing cop, so I put on an angry-looking outfit of tight torn jeans and a hot pink top. But first thing I knew I was hired as Police Sergeant I / Nonarmored, I guess in the name of diversity.

  When I touched that police uniform, a special feeling came over me. A sense of potency filled my body, inch by inch, as I pulled up the pants and fastened them. They felt bulletproof. “Wool?” I asked the mohawked dresser in surprise. “Yeah,” she said, “it’s a great fabric, wool gabardine. The LAPD’s used it forever, that’s why they look so good. The shirts are tropical weight. Here.”

  I drew on the short-sleeved shirt, with its badge and insignia, and it felt great. I put on the black socks and duty shoes, buckled the leather gun belt around my waist with the dresser’s help, put on the hat, and looked in the mirror. There behind all that officialdom was little old Rita Farmer. But my expression was clear and authoritative, and I looked powerful and proud.

  I slipped my own small wallet into my back pocket, not quite trusting the security of the wardrobe room, a messy space rented in the same building providing the facade for the shoot.

  The belt was so heavy, what with all the stuff on it—handcuff case and so on—that I thought the gun was in the holster already. But no, I had to see the prop guy for my fake gun, which looked and felt totally real. It must have weighed two or three pounds. “Are you left-handed?”

  “No, right.”

  He made me take off my belt, and he found a right-handed holster to replace the left-handed one.

  “It doesn’t make any difference, you know,” I said. “I’m not even going to draw it, much less—”

  “It does matter,” he said. “You’ll look maybe two percent more natural, having the gun on your handed side. It’ll feel different to you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And from my perspective all those two percents add up.” He adjusted my cap with a quick tap, and I was done.

  Man, did I feel good. I tried to imagine what I’d do if I were a real cop in some tough situation. Probably crap my pants.

  Our tidbit of Eighth Street wasn’t far from Skid Row and downtown. A shipping office that had escaped blight was dressed as the headquarters of some evil multinational company, and this was the location of our protest scene.

  The food on a movie set is usually quite luxe, but they’d cut even that corner. The one measly lunch wagon was overwhelmed by the crowd, so the caterers resorted to throwing wrapped sandwiches and poly bags of vegetable sticks to the throng, refugee-style.

  I caught a sandwich, grabbed a Diet Pepsi from an ice bin, and sat down on a curb. The sandwich looked OK—ham and avocado ciabatta type thing—but as my mouth approached for bite one, a bug appeared between ham and bread. Hiya, bug. I watched its head emerge, feelers waving in the sunshine. It wriggled all the way out and began crawling along the ridgeline of a ham slice. I tried to convince myself it wasn’t a cockroach, merely some clean-living lettuce-dweller, because I was very hungry. But no, it was a roach, it was a roach—that disgusting oily brown carapace. As soon as I realized it I recoiled like a Winchester, the sandwich flying from my hand. “Oh, God!”

  I almost dry heaved, but got a grip and forced myself to pick up the sandwich. The roach fell to the ground and zipped to a wad of gum for cover.

  I’m not really afraid of bugs in general, although spiders aren’t my favorite. The best thing about my married years was that my husband, although an abusive drunk, would kill the spiders. Being divorced, upon finding a spider in the apartment I either had to slaughter it or adopt it as a pet. I’ve heard tell of people who scoop them up and take them outdoors, but that is so not me. When I had to, I’d kill them with one of my slippers, using my Gramma Gladys’s spider-killing chant: “Oh, little spider, got no mama, got no papa, wanna see God?” Smack! The key is not to hesitate. Do not hesitate.

  I would have stomped on the roach for vengeance since they’re not yet an endangered species, but it was gone. I threw the sandwich into a trash barrel and trotted down the sidewalk to find something decent to eat. As soon as I got away from the cables and lights and gawkers, the mean streets pressed in, bleak and broken. The very air vibrated with low serotonin. I saw ugly hostile tagging all over the place, as if even the skilled graf artists had moved on to Pasadena. I jogged and jogged, finally turning north on Mateo, at least a through street. Where the hell was a market, a party store, a goddamn vending machine? I cruised past steel gate after brick facade after dirty plywood, my heart lifting for one second at a gas station that turned out to serve only petroleum products, a garbage-strewn parking lot. A drop of perspiration rolled down the side of my face and evaporated in the dry street heat.

  It was nice to be putting so much mileage between me and the roach-wich, but the farther I went, the more anxious I got, what with having to be back for the next take. The blocks flew by and my sense of futility increased in direct proportion to my hunger.

  Maybe I should give up, I thought, but then my inner voice demanded, Are you a quitter, then?

  No, I answered. No quitter am I.

  I trotted on.

  Ah! An old enameled Orange Crush sign was almost covered over by a poster for some new brand of malt liquor, and the sign up top said GROCERIA.

  The Mexican shop was dim, the windows plastered over with vivid signs, PINTO 79C, CORONO 3.99, and so on. But the proprietor smiled and his fruit glowed in heaps like treasure. My mouth watered cautiously. A girl of about eleven stood gazing from the shop’s doorway into the white glare of the street. She wore a turquoise cotton dress with yellow rickrack around the hem. Her face was dreamy.

  A sign pointed to ready-made sandwiches in the cold case, but not wanting to tempt fate, I returned to the fruit and chose a nectarine and a banana, first examining them for bugs with careful paranoia. I saw a package of peanuts and picked up that too.

  I got out my wallet to pay, but the storekeeper pushed the food to me saying, “No, no, you take. You take it, OK?”

  “What?”

  Suddenly the young girl cried out at something in the street. She grabbed my arm, pulled me to the door, yammering and pointing in Spanish.

  On the opposite sidewalk a young black kid was trying to shield himself from blows coming from a couple of thugs, one fat-assed, the other lean, their faces shrouded deep u
nder sweatshirt hoods. The fat-ass swung a length of two-by-four like an axe, overhand, pounding the kid’s shoulders and then, as the kid curled himself into a ball on the sidewalk, his back and legs.

  You see this kind of thing all the time in movies and TV, the violent clichés we all have a beer by, go to bed by, entertain our children by. Just a few minutes ago I watched the picketers slamming their breakaway polyethylene signs on the cops’ helmets, and the cops unleash their spongy fake batons on their opponents. Everybody acted extremely fierce, with lots of grunting and wincing.

  But this—this. The purposeful silence of the attackers. The sound of the blows in the suddenly quiet street, the sound so small compared to the amplified thwack! of movie blows, but so much more chilling, so much less tolerable: bone and muscle yielding to kiln-dried lumber. My spine contracted at each sick thud.

  The other attacker was attempting to stomp the kid’s head. Someone’s son. A brown suitcase lay on its side next to him.

  I had a mental flash of my own son. His trusting little face—had I packed his favorite dinosaur, the orange one, in his daybag this morning?

  My blood pressure spiked and I found myself on the bright sidewalk. Found myself is exact: my legs took me there without any command from my brain. I heard more sickening blows and then the kid’s muffled pleas. The first attacker lifted the piece of timber again.

  “Stop it!” I barked.

  The pair looked over at me. I rushed into the street, dodged sideways for a car, and by the time I reached the curb, the attackers had dropped the two-by-four and taken off, fast. They separated, one darting down an alley, the other continuing up the street, then disappearing around a building.

  The boy rolled over on the sidewalk and sat up, blood pulsing from beneath a flap of scalp. He looked to be fifteen or sixteen years old. He struggled to get up. I said, “Wait, don’t, you’re hurt.” Blood coursed down the side of his face, slick and so red in the L.A. sunshine.

  He kept trying to stand. “Leave me alone,” he mumbled. He wore green camo pants and a white T-shirt, the shirt soaking up the blood like snow. Each of his breaths was torn with pain, but he spoke again. “They’ll be back.”

  I looked around for help. A few passersby had stopped to stare; others hurried by.

  The bleeding boy struggled, again, to stand. His eyes were confused. “Stay down!” I yelled in my mom voice. His skin was as smooth as boot leather and dark brown, his hair short-cropped.

  “Hey, leave him alone!” a stranger shouted.

  “Racist!” called another.

  “What?” I said.

  “No, she no touch him,” contradicted someone else.

  I comprehended none of this.

  Automatically, I reached for my cell phone, always clipped to my waist, and found the prop gun in my hand instead. Surprised, I stared at it, its lethal-looking barrel leveled at the hearts of the bystanders.

  The small crowd screamed and scattered.

  The boy cowered on the sidewalk. “Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot,” his voice a terrified rasp.

  As I stood in that street holding the gun, everything came clear at once. In the heat of the moment I’d forgotten I was dressed as a police sergeant. The storekeeper had tried to give this new cop free food, the little girl saw violence and drew the cop to it, this inner-city black teen surely would fear a cop—blond and pixie-faced though she might be—and the crowd saw a black kid bleeding with a white cop standing over him yelling. Yes, everything came clear. Perception is reality, just like they say in acting school.

  Where the hell’s my cell phone? Oh yes, in my little changing basket, back in wardrobe.

  The boy moaned. I knelt to him. “You’ll be OK, honey. Please,” I shouted, “someone call 911!”

  But the street was empty now. Did the people here know what was about to happen?

  “Hey, grocer!” I hollered.

  The boy lurched from my arms and scrambled to his feet.

  A dilapidated car pulled up to the curb.

  Crak! I saw a flash inside. Photography? Paintball? I stupidly wondered. Crak! and again crak-crak! the sounds quick and flat in the silent street.

  My young friend collapsed. The car sped away.

  I felt a hot sting on my upper arm and flinched away from it but it stayed with me and I saw torn skin and blood starting down from my LAPD uniform shirt.

  I knelt again to the boy. His eyelids fluttered. Blood seeped from a new wound in his side and poured, more ominously, from another in his neck. He tried to speak.

  Supporting his neck with one hand, I pressed my other hand firmly over the bullet hole. “Help!” I shrieked.

  Softly, the boy said, “I’m gonna die.”

  “No, honey, you are not gonna die. You hang on, you hear me?”

  “Officer.” He looked up at me, struggling to say something.

  I bent my ear to his lips.

  “Tell my grandmother I’m sorry.”

  His eyes closed.

  Chapter 2 – Old Dogs Bark for New Tricks

  George Rowe grasped the brass ring, lifted it, and let it fall solidly on the strike plate cast in the shape of a wolf’s head. The wolf’s mouth was closed.

  A sharply dressed old man answered the door. “Mr. Rowe, I presume? Come in.”

  Rowe walked into the stone foyer of a house in Hancock Park.

  Beginning in the 1920s, the old-money names of Los Angeles built mansions here of imported stone and fine brick, employing masons from Italy and Mexico to fit the basalt sills, build up the facings, and craft the chimneys.

  This house was solid and nice, smaller than most in the neighborhood but with more stone.

  “I’m Colonel Markovich.” The man’s face bore a wealth of small scars and spots of age. His eyebrows were like tiny white angel wings over his eyes, and the eyes were clear and blue. His bearing was straight. “I don’t have a butler,” he added.

  “Then I guess he didn’t do it,” said Rowe.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Rowe smiled. The old man made an I-get-it sound and smiled too.

  Since he had left his job as an insurance investigator and gone into private practice, George Rowe had had plenty of work, some of it challenging, like tracking down the origin of counterfeit securities on behalf of a corporation that didn’t want the word to get out, or finding a politician’s stolen laptop. For the past few months, though, most of it had been pretty pedestrian: missing persons who’d clumsily run away from some crappy deal or another. This appointment, today, had the aroma of something different.

  Markovich steered Rowe through an arch to a reception room, with leather furniture and books on the walls. Rowe stood waiting for what Markovich had to say.

  “Do you like dogs, Mr. Rowe?”

  “I like them all right.”

  “Drink?” Markovich indicated a sideboard with two crystal decanters and some glasses. “Whiskey, brandy?”

  It was one in the afternoon. “I guess whiskey,” said Rowe.

  “A whiskey man, then.” Markovich poured off about three fingers’ worth for each of them.

  A gently dangerous feeling hovered in the air; Rowe half expected a beautiful woman to stalk into the room smacking a riding crop against her palm.

  After handing him his glass, Markovich led him to a sunroom that overlooked a smooth lawn.

  “One thing, the grass is doing better now that Ernest is gone,” he said.

  “Who’s Ernest?”

  “That’s why you’re here. Have a seat.”

  There was an eagerness about Markovich, something more energetic than Rowe might have expected from a snowcapped fellow like this.

  “Ernest is my dog. To say that: Ernest is my dog, is to make a gross understatement. He is my dog, but he is much more to me than that. To call him a person would be a slur. I’ve known so many people with hideous souls, Mr. Rowe.”

  “Yes,” said Rowe.

  “Ernest certainly transcends the animal kingdom
, but his line is straight to enlightenment. Pure clear light, pure atomic essence.”

  This kind of talk made Rowe uncomfortable. He uncrossed his legs and made a move as if deciding whether to leave.

  “Please, Mr. Rowe, I’m not a kook. I may be an odd sort, I grant that. But if you bear with me, you’ll see how things are. I’m serious about hiring you.”

  Rowe sat back.

  “Ernest disappeared two days ago.” The Colonel sipped his whiskey. “Of course I notified the authorities. But you know how it is.”

  Rowe nodded.

  “I need someone to find Ernest. A man like you: a serious investigator who gets results. Someone who isn’t afraid to take bold action on behalf of a client. I read about the Tenaway case.”

  Rowe looked at him. “But my name barely made the—”

  “I can read between the lines, Mr. Rowe.”

  That felt good. “OK. Well, what happened to the dog? Did he run away?”

  Markovich laughed, a Sunday-matinee laugh, a you-are-quite-mistaken laugh. “Oh no, Mr. Rowe, Ernest did not run away.”

  “Have you checked the shelters?”

  “He is not in any shelter. Hellholes. He is not in any animal rescue situation, not Ernest. When you begin your inquiry you’ll soon see the shelters are not the place to look.”

  “Then—”

  “Ernest was taken, Mr. Rowe.” Blood rose up Markovich’s neck, then into his jaw. He stopped and snapped open a white linen handkerchief. He wiped his face. “This has been the most upsetting occurrence of my life.”

  “You were very fond of the dog.”

  “Please don’t use the past tense. Yes. I won’t be so trite as to say I love him. Let’s just say I hold him in the highest regard.”

  “So who did it? Any neighbors mad at you?”

  “Your naiveté is almost cute, Mr. Rowe. Before I go into detail, are you interested in taking the case?”

  “I’d like to learn a little more. Do you have, uh, a picture of Ernest?”

  Markovich’s eyes flicked to a painting that looked like an abstract bunch of blobs, but on closer look depicted a beagle emerging from a fog bank. Just the pattern of the coat and a pair of rich round eyes, set against a shimmering sea-coasty sort of background. “That is Ernest as seen through the eyes of a master.” He named a painter Rowe had never heard of, not that that was saying much.