A Dead Sister (Jessica Huntington Desert Cities Mystery) (8 page)

“You’re not the only one in shock about how soon they’ll be teenagers. When I tell one of them to do this or stop doing that, I catch myself expecting to see this accommodating six-year-old say, ‘Okay Daddy’. Instead, I get resistance, sometimes even belligerent questions asking me why! Half the time, I’m too tired to offer any reasonable explanation. For God’s sake, it just seems so obvious why you should put your dirty clothes in the hamper and your dirty dishes in the dishwasher. Or why you should get off the phone at ten when you have to be up at six for school the next day. I hear myself saying, ‘because I said so, that’s why!’ You can imagine how effective that is.” He shook his head as he dug into the chocolate cake on his plate.

“That sounds grueling,” Jessica offered, as she took a bite of her own plate of cake and ice cream. As expected, the cake was ambrosial! The rush of chocolate and sugar, with a hint of spice, sent a surge to Jessica’s pleasure cente
rs, still on high alert from that close encounter with Cousin Frank.

She stole a glance at him as he pondered the cake he was about to eat. He looked a lot like Uncle Don. Well, a lot like Uncle Don had when he was closer in age to Frank. His was a pleasant face, not exactly handsome in the conventional sense, but attractive. Maybe a little like Andy Garcia or John Cusack. “Good cop faces,” Jessica had often thought about Uncle Don and Cousin Frank. Honest, dependable and direct, always able to look you in the eye.

Uncle Don and Aunt Evelyn’s house had a whole wall covered with family photos. It was filled end-to-end with pictures from three or four generations of Fontana family members. There were baby photos, school pictures and graduations. A picture of Uncle Don snapped when he first put on the uniform was positioned near a similar one of Frank taken decades later. Wedding photos and pictures from their honeymoons were there, too. One portrayed Uncle Don and Aunt Evelyn at the Grand Canyon, the photo faded with age. Cousin Frank and Mary posed in another, a blissful young couple somewhere in Hawai’i.

Jessica was always a tad envious of that wall with all those family memories on display. Her mother and the design divas she worked with over the years would have been appalled. Although Jessica rather liked it, her impulse to order things would have forced her to arrange the photos in a more systematic way.

“Yeah, kids are tough. Even the good ones can push you to your limits. And then there are the ones who lose their way.” He put the cake he had been moving around on his plate into his mouth. You could tell the alarms were going off in his brain, chasing away some of the melancholy that had closed in around him.

“Wow! This is even more fantastic than I remembered.” With that, he attacked the rest of the cake with gusto. Watching him eat, Jessica abandoned any attempt to be demure, and devoured her cake too. “That cake is amazing. Would it kill us to eat a second piece?”

“Let’s find out,” Jessica suggested, cutting more cake and scooping out the rest of the pint container of French vanilla ice cream. Spurred on by sugar and chocolate, they chattered away. He asked her for details about the events that had led up to the discovery of Roger’s killer. Uncle Don had given him the run-down, but he wanted to hear the whole story. Her account of how she had eluded assailants with the use of her iPhone and Jimmy Choos, and what a headache she had become for Detective Hernandez, had him in stitches. Frank said that, according to Uncle Don, she was still a topic of discussion among police officers in the Coachella Valley. As the story passed from person to person, the number of bad guys the “classy lady lawyer from Mission Hills” vanquished had grown to more than half a dozen. They had added to her ad hoc arsenal too, including stories about whacking bad guys with designer handbags and champagne bottles.

“The legend continues,” Jessica said wryly. “I hope they let it go soon, although I do like the ‘classy’ part.”

“Well, they have
that
part right. You are a class act, Jessica Huntington-Harper.” Frank raised his glass of lemonade in a toast.

“Let’s make that to Jessica Huntington-no-hyphen. How about to divorced women and men everywhere, struggling to do the classy thing?”

“Here, here,” Frank said, as they clinked glasses. “So, I take it, then, that it’s official. You and Jim are through?”

“Yeah, we’re through. As soon as the State of California says so, that is, by Labor Day, for sure.”

“Mom mentioned you were back in the desert without Jim. Are you here for good or do you plan to take off and start over somewhere new?”

“I’m just sort of drifting, taking things one day at a time. I don’t trust myself to make good, long-term decisions right now. There are still times when I think it might be worth it to let some nice police officer like you arrest me for the pleasure of wringing Jim’s neck with one of his two hundred dollar silk bespoke ties.” Frank let out a whistle. Had she gone too far by revealing such a graphic fantasy of revenge?

“A two hundred dollar tie, are you kidding me? What a waste of money to strangle him with that, Jessica.” Jessica laughed, then, bounded out of her chair.

“I don’t normally do this, but how about another act of indulgence? Want to chance a pot of coffee this late in the day, or will the caffeine keep you awake?”

“Are you kidding? I live on caffeine, round the clock sometimes. It never keeps me from sleeping any time I get a chance. Coffee sounds wonderful.” Jessica picked up their dirty plates and hauled them to the kitchen.

“Jessica, another thing,” Frank said.

Jessica looked up from where she was filling the burr grinder with black oily coffee beans.

“Yes?” she asked.

“I’m sorry, Jessica, about the divorce. Divorce
is
a hard thing to do with class or grace. Mary and I have been divorced for three years now, and I am mostly civil when we have to deal with each other for the sake of the kids. That first year was the worst. You have to go through a whole year remembering all the things you did together and figure out how to do them by yourself, you know? I had the kids to take care of, but I was still a single guy instead of a married guy, and that just felt wrong.”

“But it does get better, right?” Jessica asked, hoping the answer would be yes.

“Yes. Yes it does.”

Jessica used the sound of the grinder to give her time to think. She trusted he was being honest with her, but she hadn’t told him the whole story. Maybe at some point, she’d tell him about Jim and the strumpet and the baby on the way, but not today. Dumping the ground coffee into the coffee press, Jessica poured water over it and set the timer on the stove for 10 minutes.

“How do you like your coffee Frank?” she asked. She wanted to add, “And what went wrong with
your
marriage?” but didn’t.

“Milk would be great.”

Jessica went to the fridge and found a small carton of half-and-half. Jessica didn’t quite understand why Bernadette preferred half-and-half in her morning coffee but 2% milk in her beloved lattes.

“How about half-and-half, is that okay?”

“That sounds great.”

Jessica loaded a tray with the French press full of steeping coffe
e, two mugs, and a small pot of half-and-half. She carried it all to the table where Frank was sitting. They had a few more minutes before the coffee had steeped long enough to pour it. Jessica decided it was time to hear what Frank had come to talk about.

“So, Frank, what did you want to tell me about Kelly?”

“Well, Jessica, this is sort of a strange situation. Did you know we have a Cold Case team at the County Sherriff’s department?”

“No, I didn’t know that. I’ve heard that there’s new interest in cold cases because of better DNA testing and better databases that track DNA profiles from convicted offenders like they track fingerprints. Of course, there’s been some controversy among lawyers about their use like what constitutes probable cause, reasonable search, when using computers to match evidence to stored profiles. But I don’t know much more than that.”

“A lot of jurisdictions have added units like ours, if there are enough resources in the department to run a team. Our team works cases for the whole county. And it’s not just DNA evidence and information from databases that can reactivate a cold case. Sometimes it’s good old fashioned police work that gets a case going again like when a cop takes a new look at the case and gets a new angle. Or sometimes someone in the community comes forward and decides to confess or turns in an old friend for a past crime because they’ve had a row. Maybe a guy dumps his girlfriend and she gets even by calling the cops and telling them where the money or the drugs or the body is stashed. You know?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it.” Jessica thought about Margarit Tilik and what she had been willing to do to her boyfriends and anyone else who got caught in her tangled web, for that matter.
Poor Roger Stone.

“A couple days ago, I’m having a beer after work. I’m sitting with Art Greenwald, one of the guys in the Cold Case unit. He’s going on about the kind of thing they have to sort out when they’re reviewing a cold case. Like some lowlife who gets nabbed by the cops, caught red-handed doing something he shouldn’t d
o. What does he want to do? Play ‘let’s make a deal’ by claiming he’s got information about an old crime. They never know what to make of it. Does he have something legit, or is he just bullshitting or maybe recycling old news about a case?”

“Okay,” Jessica said. “I’m following you. What has this got to do with Kelly?”

“Well, Art goes on and on about the latest bozo sitting in jail who claims he knows something about a girl who was murdered. The guy’s a third striker. You know a guy who’s going away for a long time unless he can make that deal? They caught him with a bunch of drugs and drug paraphernalia, and the clincher, a gun. It wasn’t loaded, but it adds to the trouble he’s already in.” Jessica nodded, encouraging him to get on with the story.

“So, the public defender assigned to the case goes to the county prosecutor’s office
about his client’s claims. The prosecutor asks Art to check it out. He pays the guy a visit but doesn’t get very far because the old ‘tweaker’ is being cagey. Art figures he’s pushing fifty, maybe. It’s pretty rare for a serious meth addict to live as long as he has. It’s no wonder he doesn’t want to spend what little life he has left locked up. Art is sort of mimicking the guy who says something about: ‘It weren’t no accident. It was on purpose.’ I’m only half listening to all this until Art says something about this all happening so long ago near the casino in Palm Springs. Now he’s got my attention. I ask him to repeat what he just said. The girl he witnessed being murdered was run down in a hotel parking lot at the casino in downtown Palm Springs.”

A jolt
of recognition hit. “When?”

“I’m not even sure, Jessica. Art says he was about ready to let it go, but he can look into it a little more if I want him to. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. This guy’s claiming she was murdered, Jessica.
If it was Kelly, does it make any difference how she died? It won’t bring her back if they reopen the investigation. It
will
reopen old wounds. And there’s no guarantee that this half-wasted human being can give the police enough information to find her killer. Or that they can make charges stick, even if they dig up a suspect. Uncle Sammy and Aunt Monica have been through so much, I don’t know what to do. Did it make a difference to Laura that you found out who killed Roger?”

Jessica’s mind was in a whirl hearing the questions he asked and distress in Frank’s voice. The alarm for the coffee went off. They both jumped! Frank must have been concentrating as hard as she was, or his nerves were as shot as hers. They looked at each other and burst out laughing, releasing the tension that gripped them both.

“You think we need caffeine? Maybe I should be pouring a couple scotches!”

“If I didn’t have to go home and face Mom, I’d ask you to add a little something to the coffee. She won’t like it if I have a drink and then drive home, and if I stick around long enough to let the buzz wear off, I’ll be late for dinner. So, there you go!” Jessica was back at the table after running to turn off the alarm. Frank had already pressed the coffee and was pouring it into mugs.

“Boy! Does that smell wonderful! The stuff I have to drink a lot of the time is strong enough to strip paint, and the taste is hard to take. There is a Starbucks nearby, so if I have time, I’ll make a coffee run to get a decent cup. I have to watch it, though, or I can go through a lot of money in a month on coffee. I just found out Evie is going to need braces.” He took a sip of coffee after stirring in some half-and-half.

“Ah! Fantastic! Maybe I should get into the habit of making a pot at home and taking it with me.”

“This is Peet’s. It’s not cheap, but you would save money if you fixed it yourself, and brought it with you. Another thing for you to do with all that spare time you have on your hands.”

Jessica sipped her own coffee, savoring the dark roasted Sumatran beans, flown in monthly. There weren’t any Peet’s stores in the Coachella Valley. In a pinch, she could buy a bag at one of the local grocery stores, but the selection wasn’t always great. Sometimes all they carried was ground coffee, a taboo for her inner coffee snob. Soothed by the warmth of the delectable brew, Jessica ventured back to the topic of what to do about Kelly.