The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Read online

  When I splurged these days, I tended to spend on my son. It was good for my budget that at least his Spider-Man sheets had a decent amount of life left in them. Or so I thought until that moment, when Petey rolled over and his blanket fell away. Suddenly he looked like a little homeless man wrapped in a shredded rag, which I realized was his Spider-Man top sheet. That sheet had been fine yesterday, when I’d stripped his bed and tossed the linens in the hamper. Now it looked as if—well, as if a T. rex had flossed with it.

  Silently, I crept closer and inspected the shredded percale, with its pattern of webs and heroism. It was a shade bluer than the bottom sheet—hmm. The raw cotton edges of the tatters were tinged with indigo.

  I walked out to the living room where my older sister, Gina, slept.

  Holding my temper before drinking even a single cup of coffee is not an easy thing for me to do.

  Gina, three years my senior, lay like a mermaid in the sheets, her glossy brown hair arrayed as if by strong eddies, her body curved, feet together, beneath the flowing folds of the bedding. She’d come in quite late last night.

  Back last spring, no sooner had I gotten a bigger place—an upgrade from Petey’s and my cramped studio-plus to a real two-bedroom in the same building—than Gina phoned to say she was coming out for a visit.

  “Wonderful!” I enthused, immediately on guard. “How long will we have you?”

  She was vague on that. “I’ve just got to get out of Wisconsin! I just want to see you, it’s been forever!” She was working as a secretary to some grain-elevator executive and told me this was vacation.

  “Oh, for a week or two, then?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  When she got here I put her on the fold-out after only briefly considering giving her my room. I knew her too well.

  I showed her around L.A. on my time off from school and studying, and she helped with Petey. Within days, she’d begun to pick up certain California attitudes, like a strong sanctimoniousness against people whom she saw as behaving in an un-ecological manner.

  “Look at the smoke belching out of that SUV. Call themselves patriotic. See that bumper sticker?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “But it’s the people who drive electric cars who’re truly patriotic, because they save energy. The solar people.”

  As the two-week mark approached, I asked Gina about her homebound flight. We were grocery shopping while Petey was doing a hike somewhere with Daniel.

  “Well…” she began, smiling brightly with pent-up optimism. “Well…”

  “I knew it! I knew it!” I flung the radishes into the cart.

  “I love it here!”

  “What happened to your job?”

  “I quit!” She tossed her bangs.

  “You did not!”

  “OK, so what, I was fired!”

  “What for?” I pulled the cart over to a quiet spot in Fruit. “My boss didn’t understand that I need a grace period.”

  I sighed. “You mean you kept showing up late for work.”

  She sniffed a plum. “Plus he was a troll. Plus he caught me playing poker online.”

  “Once?”

  Small voice. “No.”

  “Oh, Gina.”

  Her eyes got sly. “Well, he’s crying the blues now, I assure you.”

  “What did you do.”

  “I slipped a motel key into his suit pocket and I think his wife found it.”

  “Good God!”

  Her master plan finally came out: she wanted to stay with me just for a few weeks, in order to launch a career in Los Angeles as a torch singer. She’d start out singing in small clubs, and soon she’d be able to afford her own place, then after that it’d be onward and upward. Recording contract. Hey, world tours.

  That was Gina. She was my sister. I loved her.

  And I have to admit I was secretly glad she came to L.A. to pursue a dream. Only, I wanted her to chase the damn thing, not lie around my apartment. When she found out George occasionally played drums in a jazz combo, she thought he’d be able to get her gigs, but his group didn’t want a singer, so all he could do was introduce her to a few other musicians and a club manager or two.

  The plain fact is, anybody who wants to make it in L.A. has got to find out a lot for themselves.

  The apartment was more tuneful with Gina around, I’ll say that. She had a distinctive voice. Tone-wise, it was slightly nasal, but clear and true, like a traditional country singer—think June Carter or even Lynn Anderson. Yet she liked to sing the sad jazz ballads, which seem written for a cigarette-and-whiskey voice, or at least a throaty one, like Billie or Judy. Gina’s voice singing those songs, bending around the blue notes, was arresting. Different.

  And now here she was, crooning Petey to sleep with “The Man That Got Away” and “Blues in the Night.” She’d haul the laundry down to the basement sobbing, “Love for Sale.”

  At my insistence—“Any job!”—she found a position in a record store, up on Sunset, only nine blocks from our apartment on Curson, so she earned a little money, putting in about fifty dollars a week to the household fund. Which just about covered the “organic” label on the groceries she bought.

  Thank God, though, she hadn’t given up chocolate, which we shared a passion for. We loved the gourmet stuff—the Godivas and the Peruginas and so on, and I grooved on the local Mrs. See’s—but mainly we were chocolate whores. Which was fortunate, due to our budget. Our roots were firmly anchored in Hershey bars and Three Musketeers.

  Gina adored California, how progressive it was. She loved the concept of recycling, except she avoided the rinsing and sorting and stacking and hauling, leaving those little chores to Petey and me.

  She loved the apartment. I’d furnished it from Ikea and junk shops with rugs to lie on while munching popcorn and listening to music, a couple of small bouncy sofas, plus some fun paintings Daniel had given me. He painted abstracts, which Petey kept trying to find order in. “See this part over here? I think it’s supposed to be the inside of a dinosaur’s stomach. In fact, I’m sure of it.” We got better daylight in this place too, thanks to a glass doorwall to a real patio, where I’d placed some herb pots for a bit of green.

  As I knew she would, Gina shunned the unsexy bus system and acquired a car as soon as possible. A full-sized Jeep. Red.

  “I need to get around, don’t I?” she protested, before I could even open my mouth. “I mean, this is L.A.! And it’s used! I only paid three Gs for it!” She was rapidly adopting the lingo.

  “What, did you get under payments?”

  “Yeah, they only wanted two hundred down.”

  “Not an electric car, huh?”

  “My God no, those things are expensive!”

  Confidence is great, and I was glad she had a pile of it, right next to her talent.

  But talent is plentiful and dirt cheap. It really is, especially here. Talented people roll into Los Angeles every hour of every day, you can see them flowing over the passes like hopeful lemmings. The real key to success, if you’ve got talent, is to combine it with relentless hard work.

  Now, as Gina slept, I continued to hold back the cresting flood of my temper. True, we’re only talking about one ruined sheet, but how the hell did she do it?

  I prepared a pot of coffee and mindlessly scanned the newspaper, when I was startled to see a picture of Amaryllis B. Cubitt and the headline DOT-COM PRINCE TO ENDOW ANGEL’S MISSION. Next to Amaryllis’s photo was a smiling shot of Khani Emberton, a former gangbanger made good—very good. He was going to give the ABC Mission five million dollars to start a real foundation, something that would generate income for the mission’s basic operating expenses, and more.

  The Times recapped the story all of us Angelenos knew by heart: Emberton was the scion of a third-generation African-American welfare family from South Central. His mother was a drug addict, the all-too-typical story. Even she didn’t know who his father was, let alone where.

  Khani had plunged into gang
life at the age of eight, following his brothers, all of whom were dead or in jail. After his umpteenth stint in juvenile hall, Amaryllis picked him up in one of her regular neighborhood stomp-arounds. “I could see the boy had sense, under all that do-rag and basketball pants,” she said in the paper.

  “She saved my life,” Khani Emberton said simply.

  She took him in and started walking him to school herself. She fed him good food, taught him the gospel, and encouraged him to work and put himself through junior college.

  He studied hard, and before he graduated he’d started a software company that enabled old computers to talk to new ones. There was enough worldwide demand for his products to make him almost a billionaire.

  And now he told the Times that he wanted to repay the woman who’d made it all possible, as he saw it.

  They were going to throw a big presentation ceremony three weeks from Sunday, after service, on the front steps of the mission. The Christian rapper Malcolm Cross was to perform, there’d be dancing and more music from the Hybrids, the famous band from Detroit. Plus plenty of food, of course.

  Emberton explained, “I’m not the only one who’s done well from humble beginnings. Being public about this endowment is my way of telling my successful brothers and sisters they should do the same. It’s too easy for us to forget our roots, when our roots seem so shabby to us.”

  The smell of the coffee finally penetrated Gina’s brain stem.

  “Hiya, hon!” she said cheerily, waking up quickly.

  “Good morning.”

  She scooted into the bathroom and by the time she came out I heard Petey stirring.

  Gina is the most cheerful morning person I’ve ever known. “Oh, coffee coffee coffee!” she said, smiling, reaching for my favorite mug, a thick yellow hand-thrown one I’d gotten at some craft fair. She liked it so much I’d ceded it to her, it was just easier. “How was your evening?”

  “Look,” I began—

  “Mine was fairly productive! Sasha and I went to—mmm. You realize this coffee’s better than from that old machine?”

  “Yeah, fortunate that you broke it. While we’re on the subject of—”

  “Sasha took me to an art party, and—”

  “They’re called openings.” Sasha was one of the handful of guys she’d met in jazz clubs and did stuff with.

  “Gina, what happened to Petey’s top sheet?”

  “Plenty of wine and stuff, and all free. They had these mini quesadillas?”

  “That’s amazing. Did you hear what I asked you? You did the laundry yesterday before you went out.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I wondered what you’d say about that. The thing is, I was economizing. That’s your favorite word, isn’t it—economize?”

  “God damn it.”

  “So, you know those old studded jeans of mine?”

  “Those jeans aren’t ‘old,’ you got them just last—”

  “They’re vintage.”

  “They’re not even made of fabric, they’re like chain mail or something. You threw those in the wash?”

  “I didn’t have a whole second load, so yeah, I put them in with that sheet. They didn’t come out too well either, if that makes you feel any better. I found the dry-clean-only tag in the bottom of the washer.”

  “Gina, that set of sheets had a future, you know?”

  Defensively, she said, “In case you didn’t notice, the pillowcase and bottom sheet are fine, they went in with the underwear.”

  “I can’t believe you actually made his bed that way.”

  Through this whole argument my sister kept doggedly drinking her coffee, getting that first dose down.

  “What’re you so upset about?” she demanded. “Just buy the kid new sheets. He doesn’t like those ones anyway. He wants dinosaur ones, like they have at—”

  “I’m not made of money!”

  “You’re starting to sound like Gramma Gladys.”

  “You’re driving me to it!”

  “You have plenty of money!”

  I fixed her with a cold eye. “What do you know about my savings?

  She gazed into her coffee mug, swirling the dregs. “Almost thirty grand.”

  “You looked at my money market statement!”

  “So what!”

  I paused and breathed, trying to calm myself. Gina was perfectly serene. “Yes,” I admitted quietly, “I have about thirty thousand dollars in that fund. But do you know how much UCLA costs? That’s not even enough for a year’s tuition. And I’m only working as an extra, plus with the temp service.”

  “But you’re getting financial aid.”

  “I have to pay most of it back! Hardly half of it is scholarship money. The rest is loans.”

  Gina considered that. “Where’d you get all that money, anyway?”

  “Some of it I saved up—I know that’s a foreign concept to you, so let me repeat the phrase: saved up. That’s where you put money aside, where you live on less than you take in. And I received a reward from that insurance company, after the Tenaway thing.”

  “How much?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “Forty-two thousand?!”

  “George and I helped them recover millions, at the risk of our own—”

  “OK, OK.”

  “I have to make that money last.”

  Petey ambled in, rubbing his belly. “You guys are loud.”

  I kissed him and fixed him a pre-breakfast slice of seven-grain bread and butter. He wolfed it, then went back into his room. We heard the boopitty-boop of his damn ScoreLad.

  Gina said, “I’m sorry about the sheet. Maybe I could—” she cleared her throat and forced herself— “buy a…new one for him.”

  “OK,” I agreed. “That would be really good, Gina.”

  Pleased to be finished with the quarrel, she poured herself more coffee, then together we folded her bedding and retracted the sofa. We made breakfast, fruit and eggs and more bread. She scrambled up the eggs beautifully, adding some parsley from the patio.

  As we worked, I mused about my love life. I’d barely dated anybody since starting law school and breaking off with George.

  “I’m thinking about sex a lot these days, you know?” I said. “I keep feeling guilty about George, and he’s quite good in bed, I must say, but—”

  “Let me reveal something to you, little sister.” She turned the eggs onto a platter. “Lots of guys are a good lay. At least at first. After five years, no guy is a good lay.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Just trust me, I’ve known enough guys at different stages.”

  “I think you’re just a nympho.”

  “So what if I am?” Gina placed the eggs on the table with a flourish.

  “Petey!” I called. Then, dropping my voice, “Being a nympho’s a liability in life, Gina. It is clearly not the road to—”

  “Oh, I think it comes in handy enough.”

  Chapter 7 – Canine Desire

  George Rowe stripped off a piece of duct tape, tore it into fourths, and slapped up a color photograph of Ernest the missing beagle on a pole at the corner of Rossmore and Fourth, LOST DOG. REWARD. Rowe knew that if he put up a number, say $1,000, he’d be deluged with calls from people who’d gone out and stolen a beagle. He had already posted similar notices on lost-dog Internet sites, and he had phoned the shelters and clinics.

  Methodically, sweating in the morning sun, he papered the intersections and supermarkets within a half mile of Markovich’s house in Hancock Park. The skin on his fingers got raw from ripping tape. Today being Friday, people ought to be able to see the notice all weekend.

  He wore his customary outfit of short-sleeved cotton shirt with a chest pocket (maroon plaid today), plain pants, and brown leather lace-ups. No tie today. With his crew cut, he looked forgettable, harmless.

  As he worked he occasionally talked to people about the dog. He stopped in for a chat with the greenskeeper at the nearby Wilshire Country Club, with its rolling
acreage and tempting rabbits.

  After he finished with the posters, he got in his car and returned to the area of the shooting incident involving Rita and the Cubitt boy.

  True, the police were investigating. But they had only so much time for things like this, even attempted murder, and much depended on how full their hands were.

  Rowe knew he was a good investigator. And he was determined that no more harm must come to Rita. He zeroed in on a bar he’d noticed on his first trip.

  The strange little den, half house, half industrial shed, had no sign; he’d simply noticed people going in and out, sometimes carrying a bottle in a bag. He went up the three concrete steps.

  Entering a place like this where you don’t belong, your impulse is to go slow. But you can’t creep in, never; you stride right into the darkness and establish yourself before anyone has a chance to react poorly.

  The bar was hardly larger than a home kitchen. Grime-streaked blankets covered the windows, but the front door was open to the street, letting in the white glare.

  He placed a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and said to the narrow-eyed black dude behind it, “Relax, I don’t even want a beer.” The man’s expression didn’t change, but neither did he reach beneath the bar for his baseball bat or whatever. The bar top was white laminate with gold starbursts, coated with gray stickum from spilled beverages and elbow dirt. No stools.

  Rowe said, “My name is George. If I were a plainclothes cop, I’d be wearing a jacket, right, with my gun under it?”

  The man nodded. He wore a shiny black shirt and had a bushy beard pulled tightly into his lips. He folded his arms.

  Rowe asked, “Did anybody talk about that drive-by last Monday to you? Or the beating of the kid before the shooting?”

  The man’s beard opened and he said slowly, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Two other men sat at the only table, back from the door. They had stopped talking when Rowe came in. The place smelled of rotten wine and tobacco spit.

  “Might as well share around,” said Rowe, stepping to the table and laying a twenty before each of the men. In some situations such a gesture would be an affront, but these men quickly slipped the money out of sight and looked hungrily at Rowe’s pants pockets.