Death at a Fixer-Upper (21 page)

It's common knowledge that emotion depletes blood sugar. I cranked over the engine and drove to the big-chain grocery, where I purchased a party-sized bag of M&M's. Sam Turner, party of one.

A few minutes later I was home, mounting the stairs to our near-empty apartment. No Max or Bernie to keep me company. Not even Harrison Ford, since the VCR had been boxed up. Just a possible visit from a homicidal trucker for my evening's entertainment.

I set my bag on the table. The answering machine light was blinking, and I pressed the play button. The message was from the county Sheriff's Department informing me an officer had found my missing plate on the road and had turned it in to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Grovedale.

Yes!
I wanted that plate back. On the other hand, a trip to the DMV was about as appealing as a Pap smear. I weighed a quick trip to Grovedale against a visit from a faceless killer and shrugged. Too close to call.

But the day had been a long one. I decided I was in for the evening. Dinner, some mindless television, a little chocolate. Who needed Harrison Ford, or his real-life equivalent?

I stripped off my jeans and tossed them over a chair. Before I could pull on a pair of ratty sweatpants, there was a fumbling at the door, then the metallic click of a key in the lock. All of a sudden my landlord strolled into my apartment, followed by a young couple towing a three-year-old.

“This is the living room,” Bob said. “Great view from this window here.”

“Jesus Christ, I'm in my underwear,” I snapped. “What the hell!”

“Prospective tenants,” he said, a smile creasing his fat face. “Didn't you get my message?”

“I have to make doody,” the little boy whined.

“Can's down the hall on the left,” Bob said. The woman led him away.

I was incensed. “You can't do this.”

“Read your lease. Landlord has the right to access the property to show it to prospective tenants.”

“But not without some notice!” I'd grabbed my jeans and was frantically pulling them up.

“Your machine must be on the blink. Kitchen has a garbage disposal and dishwasher,” he told the applicant. “This here's one of those new energy-efficient refrigerators.”

“It's not,” I said, buttoning my pants. “And the disposal's never worked.”

He took the guy's arm and led him down the hall. “Don't pay her no mind. Let me show you the master closet. You could move your fuckin' mother-in-law in there, it's so spacious.”

I thought about snatching up a skillet and bringing it down with considerable force on Bob's greasy head. Instead, I grabbed my bag and headed down the stairs, hoping an eight-mile drive would give me some time to cool off—and wouldn't net me another citation for my missing plate.

It was a quarter past four when I pulled up to the DMV. It was a long, single-story building with all the curb appeal of a maximum-security prison, built of concrete blocks and painted an indeterminate brown. The lot was full, and I circled it twice until a spot opened up. To park on the street in this neighborhood was simply asking for a trip to Salvatore's Used Tires and Wheels for a set of new rims.

Double swinging doors of smoked glass deposited me in a narrow lobby crowded with a tightly packed line of people, most of them clutching paperwork of some sort. Their object was a desk marked
R
ECEPTION,
where a woman in tortoiseshell glasses fingered their papers with maddening slowness before directing them to other destinations. Seated a few feet to her left was a second woman. There was no one in her line, so I hustled forward.

“Good afternoon,” I said. “I got a message from the—”

“Do you have an appointment?” she said.

“What? Oh. No, but I—”

She held up her hand and pointed silently to a placard on her desk that read,
A
PPOINTMENTS
O
NLY
.

“I just have to pick something up. I'll be quick.”

She simply looked at me.

“Can I make an appointment, then? For right now?”

“You have to call the eight-hundred number.” She dabbed at her nose with a tissue, then blew a couple of dainty blasts, keeping her eyes on me in case I became violent.

I turned away and took a position at the back of the pack. Three people had joined the line while I was at the counter, placing me out the double doors and into the parking lot. I breathed in deeply, trying to release some of the tension collecting between my shoulder blades, and considered doing a little tapping. I couldn't look any stranger than some of the folks in front of me.

Twenty minutes later, I'd reached the window. I gave the woman at the desk a bright smile, and she gazed back at me stolidly.

“I lost my license plate, and I believe it's here,” I said. “Could you possibly check?”

She tore a slip of paper off a dispenser and handed it to me. “Window G.”

“What?”

“When your number's called, report to window G.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but the fellow behind me was already edging forward, his breath hot on the back of my neck. I sighed and moved off, wishing I'd brought a book to read. Instead, I grabbed a brochure from a nearby rack to provide a little mental stimulation.

There was only one seat available near window G, a tight fit between a woman holding a solemn-eyed infant in a terrycloth sailor suit and an elderly man who appeared to be napping. I settled my ass in the rigid molded plastic chair and checked the monitor, which informed me that customer D3 was now being served. I looked at the crumpled slip of paper in my hand: G8. I had a lifetime of waiting in front of me.

I glanced at the pamphlet I'd scored, which was all about licensing trucks in California. A photo of a shiny red truck with “Santori's Plumbing and Heating” emblazoned across the door was on the cover. It reminded me of something, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I turned to page one and learned that the state of California considered almost all pickups to be commercial vehicles, which meant, of course, higher licensing fees. Was that fascinating or what? With a yawn, I leaned into the hard seatback.

The baby on my left squirmed and grunted. Uh-oh. A moment later, the air was redolent with the perfume of post-digestion strained peas. His mother rolled her eyes.

“Third BM today,” she told me. “Takes after his old man.” She rose, tucking the baby expertly into her hip, and shuffled off toward the restroom.

I closed my eyes, concentrating on clearing my head and envisioning myself in a peaceful place. Instead, a parade of faces danced across my mental landscape. Max, the soft rounded lines of his childhood smoothed away by new planes of maturity. Becky, her smile as garish as a neon sign. Merrit, her toffee-colored eyes unreadable as she confessed to killing a man. Then Bernie. I felt a tendril of warmth as I traced the contours of his face in my mind. Maybe, if I hadn't been so damn prickly, there might still be a chance.

Bernie's face was supplanted by Wayne's, his eyes the brilliant blue of a summer sky, his mouth weak and irresolute. I tried to hate him and failed. Now that he was back in our lives, after a fashion, I was having trouble clinging to the illusion that my life would have been better with him in it. Wayne wasn't the stuff of which enduring couplehood was made. I'd raised Max alone, a hardscrabble existence at times, but filled with moments of pure sweetness. And I hadn't had to answer to anyone. Maybe my life had gone according to plan after all.

There was another face I tried to bring into focus, but it remained a formless blur. Someone had entered our stairwell in the small hours of the morning. Unfamiliar shoes had mounted the stairs; a strange hand had rested on the banister. I pictured the dark form hunched over the wheel of the silver truck. My gut told me they were one and the same.

I gave up on inner peace and focused on more pressing issues. What had I learned so far? It didn't feel like much. Two of my clients were dead. Two other people had died under mysterious circumstances. I needed to know why.

I brought out the bag of M&M's and opened it, tunneling through the candies until I'd collected all the brown ones. Somehow they always tasted more chocolaty to me than the other colors. Popping a few in my mouth, I thought back to Bernie's interview with Mrs. Morehouse. There, at least, was a logical starting point. A dark-haired woman had delivered the fatal gift basket to Richard Ravello. That narrowed the field of suspects down to a handful. And the one who stood out was Loretta. She fit Mrs. Morehouse's description perfectly. And she had an excellent motive. While none of the “gang” seemed overburdened with brains, surely they could do the simple math that showed a pie divided by three was a lot less pie than when it was divided by one.

Wayne had warned me not to underestimate Loretta. And it would be satisfying to pin the crimes on her, no question about that. She was a grifter, a mercenary, a woman who laid claim to a husband I didn't even want…but, illogically, I blamed her for it. Ugh. I finished the brown M&M's and started on the green. Emotions were stupid things.

An ugly thought skittered through my mind. I was taking a lot of what Wayne said at face value. Suppose he and Loretta were in collusion. By his own admission, he'd been here in Arlinda, on the spot, not all that long after Vito Price vanished. Wayne, instead of fleeing from Loretta, might have been fleeing
with
her. I didn't want to believe it. But that didn't change the facts. He'd rescued me from the truck driver, true enough. But who was to say that whole nocturnal adventure hadn't been carefully orchestrated? Afterward, I'd been more inclined to trust Wayne. Maybe that was the desired effect.

I started on the orange M&M's. One slipped from my fingers and fell into my bag. Digging around to retrieve it, I spotted a square of white cardstock and pulled it out. It was the business card I'd picked up from the farmers' market. Underneath the Arlinda Botanical Society logo in its ornate cursive letters were the words “Lynn Klinghoffer-Hart, Board Chairman.”

My heart gave a sudden leap. It couldn't be coincidence. The woman I'd spoken to about tomatoes and garden pests could easily have been Louis Klinghoffer's daughter or daughter-in-law, or, more likely, his granddaughter. It wasn't a common name. I dredged up an image of her from my memory banks. Mid-thirties, fresh good looks, with a thick mane of dark hair.

I shifted in my chair. Edsel Harrington had confided to his attorney that he planned to marry his caregiver and change his will. Before either of those things could happen, he had died. Not in his bed, if I believed Merrit's bizarre story. I couldn't see a reason for her to lie about it. The society—headed by Lynn Klinghoffer-Hart—would have been denied the legacy around which they'd built their long-term plans. And the probate attorney was perfectly positioned to leak that information.

I dug around in the M&M's and collected all the yellow ones. Up to that point, everything hung together beautifully; then the whole edifice came crashing down. Sure, she fit the description, but why would Klinghoffer-Hart kill off potential buyers? From a real estate prospective, competing offers were the stuff of dreams for sellers. Frantic to outbid one another, rabid investors might be driven by their competitive juices to pay far more than a property was worth.

I popped a yellow M&M into my mouth, thinking hard. Until now, I hadn't stopped to wonder about the third buyer, Lois Hartshorne's client. It seemed far-fetched to think a party might take extreme measures to eliminate the competition, but real estate was a cutthroat business.

The elderly man in the chair next to me snorted and woke up, thrashing about in his seat and catching me in the ribs with a bony elbow.

“I beg your pardon, miss,” he said, looking about the office with a puzzled air. Then his brow cleared. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a worn leather wallet secured to his trousers by a short length of chain. From the wallet he extracted a ticket and examined it, first from a distance of about six inches in front of his face, then gradually moving it farther out. Finally he handed it to me. “If you would be so kind.”

“It says, ‘F3.' ”

“Ah! Thank you.” He tucked the ticket back into the wallet and put it away. From his breast pocket he brought out a pair of black plastic spectacles. The lenses were as thick as the glass that enclosed the shark tank at the San Francisco Aquarium. He put the glasses on his nose and stared up at the monitor. His lips moved.

“Hang it all, I've slept through my appointment,” he said in disgust.

“They've only got up to F1,” I told him.

“Really?” He turned to look at me and I jumped back, so huge were his eyes through the thick lenses. “Well. That's lucky. I appreciate your help. What are you here for, miss? New tags? Update your driver's license photo?”

“Lost my plate. How about you?”

“Eye test. A nuisance. I've had twenty-twenty vision since boyhood.”

I offered up the bag of M&M's.

“No, thank you,” he said. “I don't smoke.”

He lapsed into silence, and I closed my eyes again. Where had I left off? The third buyer. “A woman who truly loves flowers,” Lynn Klinghoffer-Hart had said. In a little acrobatic flip of memory, I was back in Lois's office, thumbing through her private papers. I had the contract in my hands, but I'd been focused on the bottom half of the page, where the financing details were laid out. Lois was coming, her heels clip-clopping on the concrete. My eyes had traveled up to the first couple of lines and—dammit, why did they make the print so small? There was a name there. And…did it start with an “E”? I was almost certain it did. But that was as far as my visual memory would take me. I cursed my limited recall. Maybe there was a course I could take to improve it.

“Final call.
G8.
”