The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Read online

  “I’m up for it,” I decided, “but there’s just one thing. There’s this director named Serge Oatberger.” I told Gary how the auditions for the new film were coming up, and how my agent Marly thought I’d be perfect for the second lead, or even the lead. “If I got either part,” I explained enthusiastically, “it’d be my dream come true. So if I can just be available for auditions when they’re called, and then of course if I actually—”

  “No.”

  The tone of that one no gave me a glimpse of the inner Gary Kwan: the icy desire that made him such a good courtroom performer, capable of cheap manipulative sentimentality, cold disgust, and everything in between.

  Firmly, he said, “This cannot be a side job for you, Rita. Either you commit fully to this project, or forget it. I can’t guarantee you’ll be free when that audition comes up.”

  I stared into space.

  I thought about my career.

  Gary waited.

  I thought some more and drank my water.

  He waited some more, patiently, watchfully.

  After a minute he added gently, “You’ll get a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus if she’s acquitted.”

  “Oh, God.” The sun moved in the sky a little bit, pushing a patch of shade over my fingers on the table.

  Finally I said, “All right.”

  “Yes!” In a burst of energy, Gary pumped my hand, clapped me on the shoulder, and strode to the window, as if for a breath of fresh air, though of course the window was fixed in place and the air in the office was perfectly nice and cool. “Good, good, good! This is an excellent day, Rita. Trust me. Oh, this is going to be an adventure. A first.”

  The light from the window shone dazzlingly on Gary’s face and charming haircut—short over the ears, thick on top—as he gazed down at the street. I’d wanted to tousle that hair since the library.

  He turned and beckoned to me. “Look what’s going on down there.”

  I joined him at the window. Seven stories below, a man in blue jeans lay on the sidewalk, writhing in pain. Dark blood was seeping through his shirt. He appeared to be screaming or moaning, though we couldn’t hear it. A bystander had stopped and was crouching next to him, talking on a cell phone.

  Gary murmured, “He tripped on that bump in the sidewalk, fell, and now his arm’s broken. See how he’s holding it? An open fracture, with that blood. Ten years ago I’d be running down there to sign him up as a client. Sue the city.”

  The man’s suffering made me feel sick. “We should do something.”

  “If he were unconscious I’d go down and see if he needed CPR. But he’s breathing and rolling around, so he’ll be OK. And look, there’s an EMT truck coming up from Beverly Glen already. They’ll take care of him.” He watched me watching the man on the pavement. “You need a strong stomach in this world, Rita.”

  “I have it for some things.”

  “Yes?”

  “Such as I’m not afraid of poop and vomit.”

  “How about blood?”

  “I’m a woman, I know all about blood.”

  “Touché.”

  Chapter 6 – The Glamour of Surveillance

  Beyond the office buildings on Wilshire Boulevard the city seethed and rumbled. It was getting warmer as the day wore on, the temperature edging up to seventy-seven degrees, seventy-eight. A taxi backed over an unopened bottle of Mountain Dew: poph! A biplane slalomed overhead, preparing for an air show at Venice Beach. People watered their lawns and thought about cooking out later.

  George Rowe, a crew-cut guy who used to wrestle convicts for a living, parked his yellow VW Beetle in front of a house in Rancho Park and got out.

  When Volkswagen introduced the cuter Beetle, so many people in Los Angeles bought it that it quickly became an innocuous car, the kind of car people stopped noticing, or if they did notice they thought, Oh, cute banal car, I suppose a cute banal person is driving it.

  Along with the crew cut, Rowe wore short-sleeved shirts with ties and leather shoes and he didn’t care that women thought he was a nerd king because that was just like the car. People flicked their eyes on you and then past, and one second later would not be able to tell anybody what color your hair was if their life depended on it. He was neither tall nor short. He took some pride in having a sturdy build but made sure his shirts didn’t show it off too much.

  George Rowe walked up to the house and let himself in with the key the owner had lent him.

  He was thinking how money is a magic charm. It makes people tell you things. It makes them let you do things to them. It makes people think they’re much smarter than they are. Can you buy intelligence with cash? In a way, you can.

  The house was empty of people. He went to the laundry room and reached up for the handle to the attic steps. He climbed the steps, hearing the metallic tinks of the springs settling under his weight, then scooted over to a miniature video camera he had installed there two days ago. It was very hot in the attic and he felt the slickness of sudden sweat on his face and under his arms. Holding a flashlight in his teeth, he pulled out the camera, looked at it, fiddled with the coat-hanger-wire mount he had made for it, and repositioned it. The lens pointed down through the attic floor. It had worked fine, the camera, but he had not aimed it properly at first, and it had to be just so.

  He climbed down and, glancing into the kitchen, noticed a sinkful of breakfast dishes. He washed a glass with a sponge and a squirt of detergent, rinsed it, and took a drink of cold water from the tap. He went ahead and washed the rest of the dishes, setting them to dry on the drainboard.

  He left the house, stopped at a grocery store near his apartment in Culver City, and went home and put away the food he’d bought. He changed into a pair of cutoffs and a T-shirt his boss had brought him from Nantucket. He washed a carrot, cut off the top, and stood chewing it, thinking.

  George Rowe’s apartment was his nest and workplace. He kept it tidy because he’d discovered that if you’re a slob you can never find anything, and then you waste time. His double bed, with its blue-piped coverlet, occupied one corner of the bedroom. Another corner housed his surveillance electronics and his PC. A bank of six file cabinets lined one wall of the living room, and two whiteboards on easels stood in front of them. The boards were covered with Rowe’s forward-leaning handwriting in black marker: names, dates, arrows, little sketches, and way too many question marks.

  He munched the carrot and looked at one of the boards for a long time. He rubbed out something with the corner of a dry eraser and wrote in something new. Whatever it was didn’t please him, because he stood looking at it unhappily, hands on hips, his knotty toes gripping the decks of his house shoes, a pair of cherry rubber flip-flops.

  He was working a lot these days. He didn’t like downtime and he didn’t have a lawn to water.

  He looked at his watch. The phone rang.

  “We didn’t do it last night,” a female voice said.

  “That’s OK,” said Rowe. “I had to fix the camera anyway. Try again tonight.”

  The other voice paused. “Did you do the dishes when you were here?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come?”

  Hearing the puzzled smile in her voice gave him a good feeling. People don’t expect you to do something nice just for the hell of it.

  “I just felt like it. You seem pretty busy.”

  “Well—thank you!”

  He hung up and called the cell number of a urologist who answered while pulling his car into a gas station in Pasadena.

  “Doc, we appreciate everything you’ve done for us. But are you absolutely sure you couldn’t testify?”

  “Oh, I can testify,” said the tennis-tanned doctor, popping his filler door and two-fingering his wallet out of his back pocket, “but it won’t be what you want.”

  “You really can’t say if his penis functions sexually or not? I mean, you gave him a complete examination, didn’t you?”

  “Yes! He was more than willing to urinate f
or me, but—”

  “That was never the issue.”

  “I know! What did you want me to do, get down on my knees and—”

  “OK.”

  “He said he couldn’t give a semen sample, all right? There’s no way to actually tell if—oh, he’s got some interesting scars on the thing. A ferret attack, for God’s sake. I think the bastard probably does have sexual function, because I could find nothing organic. But as you know, the sex act—”

  “OK, OK.”

  “—involves more than just—”

  “OK. Thank you.”

  Next Rowe called his boss at home. The boss, a supervisor in the claims department at Fenco, the insurance giant, was used to hearing from him anytime, any day of the week.

  “I think,” Rowe reported, “I’m about to get the video we want in the Crunch & Munch case.”

  “Yeah? Good.”

  “You know I hate these porn jobs.”

  “Yeah, but you do ’em so well.”

  A few months ago, a bartender from Santa Monica was having sex with another man’s wife at her home in Malibu. The woman kept several ferrets as pets, and while the two humans were noodling around in bed after a session of intercourse, one of the ferrets had decided to join them under the covers. The bartender’s penis had in some way upset the ferret, which sank its small, needlelike teeth into it and hung on, only to let go and regrip several times. Finally the bartender managed to part the ferret’s jaws. He stanched the blood with a towel and sought medical treatment.

  Soon afterward, the woman and her husband received word that the bartender had filed a lawsuit against them for permanent loss of sexual function, for fifty million dollars. The husband was not pleased.

  He had, a decade earlier, purchased an umbrella liability policy with Fenco for a maximum of two million dollars. Fenco had begun negotiations with the bartender’s lawyer, who insisted that his client would settle for no less than ten million, or go to trial and win Fenco’s two million plus everything else the couple owned.

  The claims bosses at Fenco decided that the bartender’s claim, supported only by an affidavit from an unaccredited cancer specialist in Tijuana, was suspicious. Thus it was that George Rowe got assigned to find out whether the bartender’s wounds had robbed him of sexual function or what.

  He followed the man, figured out he already had a new girlfriend (a single woman, with no pets, this time), and approached her. After winning her trust with a hundred-dollar bill, he learned the bartender could indeed achieve erection, penetration, and ejaculation. The girlfriend and Rowe decided that in exchange for five thousand dollars now and another five thousand later, she would allow him to install a digital video camera above her bed and leave it in place for one month. He would probably get what he wanted within a few days. All he needed was explicit proof. The girlfriend’s testimony could be valuable, should the case get all the way to court, but pictures were always best. Too, pictures were cheaper than lawyers.

  The girlfriend wanted to leave Los Angeles anyway, and so she aimed to move up to Portland after receiving the second half of her money. The bartender wouldn’t bother her; Rowe knew from experience he wouldn’t do anything but drop his lawsuit and hide under a rock for a while, just as soon as his lawyer had a chance to view Rowe’s video.

  In olden days—that is, five years ago when Rowe left his job as a corrections officer at Folsom State Prison and went to work as an investigator for Fenco—cases like this excited him. Busting scammers was fun, and uncovering evidence that a suspicious individual really was honest was unexpectedly satisfying. He would have gotten a real boot out of the Crunch & Munch bartender, would have laughed about it and captured the video with relish. He would’ve almost wet his pants showing it to the bartender’s attorney.

  He had solved all sorts of cases for Fenco. There was the infrared-aerial work he’d done to show that a pea grower could not have lost a crop to drought because he had not planted one in the first place; there was the disabled-vet disguise he’d donned to find out that a man who claimed to be paralyzed indeed was, he just had a crappy doctor; there was the plain old waiting-in-the-dark-on-a-hunch work he’d done to bust up a jet fuel swindle at a private airstrip at Lake Tahoe.

  Yes, he would’ve been challenged and gratified by this stupid bartender’s opportunism. And that was the thing about fraud: so often somebody without the brains to cook up a well-organized scam will be tempted by happenstance to defraud an insurance company. Such people were usually easy to catch, with tricks and bribes.

  But now such stuff was hollow. Too easy. Stakes not high enough. George Rowe had become addicted to the chase. He needed a greater challenge, or his work was going to stop being fun.

  He said to his boss, “Yeah, Avery, but an orangutang could do what I do. You know the case I want to go back to.” He gazed at his whiteboards.

  “Yeah,” said Avery, who knew Rowe was the best investigator he’d ever worked with. “The Jeweler in the Jungle. Well, let’s talk about it after you wrap this one up.”

  Chapter 7 – Where Gramma Gladys Dwells

  I pulled into the parking lot on the west side of Rodeo Drive at Santa Monica and backed into a space.

  I was not here to shop.

  At Ann Taylor in the Beverly Center I’d just bought, with some of the money Gary had handed me that morning, two neutral skirted outfits like you see on lawyers on Trial TV, plus a decent pair of slingbacks at Banana Republic. I had a slightly-beat-up-but-dignified Coach purse at home that would work, but I didn’t know if I needed a briefcase. I let that go for now. The new stuff was in the cargo hold of my Honda.

  I shut off the engine and rolled down my window. The ambience of Santa Monica Boulevard instantly filled the car: four flowing lanes of traffic plus left turn, the sound like metallic surf, accented by the chug of an unmuffled tailpipe, the hasty skid of tires. The light turns red and the traffic-surf ebbs, the waiting cars sigh anxiously, then the cross-current of cars on Rodeo begins, a much smaller stream, their engines and tires almost individually distinct. Then the green light comes for Santa Monica and the relieved surge begins and builds to that metallic surf again. I closed my eyes and listened and breathed.

  The air quality here was what you’d expect in the heart of Beverly Hills, which is, if not the heart of Los Angeles, then one of the major organs, L.A. itself being the heart of American car culture, with California being the conflicted nerve center of American popular culture. In short, the air here was lousy.

  And yet the air here was rarefied and desirable. Anyone can come and breathe it for free, of course. But few belong to the shopping class of this part of Rodeo Drive, where a sweater might cost you six hundred dollars—or even six thousand—and a luncheon plate fifty. Not everybody can afford to pay money just to park a car, especially when you can park for free in front of the houses on Rodeo Drive on the other side of Santa Monica.

  One day, shortly after Petey was born and I was still going fulltime to UCLA for my theater degree, I realized I had to get out of my marriage. When you get hit in the eye, the shiner takes about thirty-six hours to look its worst, whether you’ve applied ice or not. I’d gone to class with a thirty-six-hour-old black eye, and although I’d gained enough makeup skills to reduce its obviousness, people could tell. My partner in improvisation that day, a gentle stud named Daniel Clements, bought me a coffee after class and said only, “That wedding ring is costing you a lot to keep, isn’t it?”

  It was like being hit in the other eye, only a good hit. I had to think, and after I left campus I drove aimlessly for a couple of hours, not caring that Jeff, who was in Torrance feeding Petey from the bottle of pumped milk I’d left in the fridge, would be furious that I hadn’t come straight home. Let him fume, I thought for the first time. Do you believe it? For the first time. I was driving along in a state of deep confusion when I found myself turning into this parking lot at Rodeo and Santa Monica. All I wanted was to take my foot off the gas for a while. I call it
a lot, but it’s actually a two-level structure, with the first level underground and the top one raised just slightly above street grade. It gives you a little bit of a view, a little bit of elevation. Which is nice, for a parking lot.

  As soon as I’d turned off the engine, a feeling came over me, a mystical type of feeling. The feeling felt like Gramma Gladys. I had the strong sense she was there with me, right in that parking lot.

  I even said, cautiously, “Gramma?”

  The feeling stayed.

  I began to talk to her, pouring out my troubles. I cried about Jeff’s drinking and horrible temper, the affair I suspected he’d been having with some bimbo at work. I told her how scared I was to be a mother, how I should have known better than to get pregnant, how stupid my dream of becoming an actress must be.

  In spite of—or perhaps because of—having been dead a decade, Gramma Gladys was able to help me. She listened. I felt her say, in her all-exclamation-points-all-the-time voice, Of course you have to leave him! Next time he’ll put you in the hospital! Time after that he’ll kill you! He’ll kill the boy!

  You’re too smart for this!

  Gramma Gladys, my mother’s mother, dug a life out of the apathetic soil of a Wisconsin alfalfa farm and the family of uncommunicative weirdos she came from. After giving birth to four kids in six years, she talked my grandfather into buying her an adding machine and a typewriter, with which she started a business doing bookkeeping for neighboring farmers and the storekeepers in town. The town’s name is Durability, chosen by early homesteaders who didn’t want to tempt fate by calling their town anything remotely cheerful or grand. Even today doggedness is a valuable trait in those parts. Gramma branched into tax preparation, then began giving business advice for money, and in this way eventually pulled the family into the middle class.