He Done Her Wrong: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Eight) (Toby Peters Mysteries) (8 page)

The land went flat about two minutes past Dot’s Dixie Gas Station, just inside Antelope Valley, where I had stopped to fill the tank and buy a candy bar.

Antelope Valley was named for the herds that roamed there a few hundred years earlier at the edge of the Mojave. Low hills, the Lovejoy Buttes, separate the valley from the desert. The twenty-five-hundred-square-mile valley is supplied with water from a giant natural reservoir underground and runoff from the mountains.

In April and May tourists from town come out to see the desert flowers, particularly the California poppies that sometimes stretch like a red blanket for twenty miles. I had gone slowly behind tourists for much of the way.

Dot was a skinny guy with a bad leg and no interest in conversation. A mongrel dog, which was stuffed, dead, or in deep meditation, lay next to the pump where Dot filled me up after looking at the dent in my roof and the rear window.

The flat land turned to desert brush and stretched on dry and far past Palmdale. I was somewhere near Plaza Del Lago or what once had been Plaza Del Lago, but it wasn’t there. Then the narrow road took a sudden dip, and I saw the town sitting in a basin. It was bigger than I expected and sprawled out. A narrow part of town lay in front of me on both sides of the two-lane highway with wooden storefronts and old houses. Beyond the street on both sides stood larger, more substantial houses with grounds and an occasional pool. Face-to-face off the highway, about a block in to the left, were two big sprawling buildings both with large pools.

Five minutes later I was on Plaza Del Lago’s main street and pulling into a parking space in front of Cal’s General Store and Gifts. I went in, plunked down a quarter and got a box of Wheaties and a quart of milk and two cents in change from a woman I supposed was Mrs. Cal, a thin-haired knot of a woman dressed in overalls. I’d worry about a bowl and spoon later.

“Could you tell me where the Grayson place is?” I said, hoisting my bag of groceries.

“Could,” said Mrs. Cal and turned back to stacking Gold Dust Cleanser.

“Will you?” I went on.

She looked at me in a way that would have put Arnie’s sigh to shame.

“You got business?” she said. Her voice had a desert dry rattle, resulting I imagined from eating nothing but crackers from the cracker barrel and conserving her voice for the opera.

“I got business,” I said, getting into the swing of things.

“They’re new, practically everyone is here,” she said, looking at me in a way that made it clear that I would not be a welcome addition to Plaza Del Lago.

“Why’d they all come?”

“The springs,” she said, pointing at a display across the aisle behind me. The store wasn’t big, and the two aisles were narrow and filled from floor to ceiling. The display she pointed to was bottles of something called Poodle Springs water. The labels were yellow with a white cartoon poodle on them, standing on its hind legs, with its tongue out. The water inside the bottle was a little murky.

“Spring under the town,” Mrs. Cal explained, growing talkative. “Been there since God created it.”

“That a fact?” I encouraged.

“Stuff tastes like turkey piss,” she said, shaking her head.

Never having tasted turkey piss I said, “No kidding.”

“I don’t kid,” she said, leaning on the counter.

“How’d it all start?”

“Fella named Grayson, the one you’re looking for, come down here maybe ten years back, bought up most of the land. People were happy to sell it to him. Thought he was a idiot.”

“He wasn’t?” I asked.

“Look around if you got eyes,” she said, turning her head in every direction. All I could see was piles of groceries, but I assumed she meant the buildings beyond. “He got all kinds of fools from places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Reno to put up money and build houses and those two hotels. Sunk money into ads in the papers. Told people this turkey piss could cure anything. Pretty soon old people were down here buying, swimming in the stuff, drinking it. Some people will buy a goat’s ass and stick it on their head if a smart talker gets his jaw going at them.”

“Some people,” I agreed.

“We make out all right with it,” she added. “I ain’t complaining.”

Since it had sounded to me like complaining, I considered debating the point with her, but remembered my job.

“Grayson’s?”

“Keep going two roads east, turn left and drive till you can’t drive no more. Big ’dobe house with an old mission bell on top and a Joshua tree in the yard.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking my package and turning.

Mrs. Cal went back to her stacking and piling without another word.

The directions were fine. Plaza Del Lago wasn’t that big. I passed the two face-to-face hotels with porches covered with old people wearing floppy hats and drinking murky turkey piss. None of them had a goat’s ass on their head, unless it was under the floppy hats.

The fronts of the houses further down were landscaped with sand, rocks, and cactus. Poles with telephone and electric lines hovered over the houses and connected them down the road.

At the end of the road touching the desert was a yellow adobe house with a mission bell on the roof and a Joshua in the yard. I parked at the rough wooden gate and went up the sandy path. The Joshua was in bloom.

The Joshua isn’t a real tree, just a California imitation, a kind of yucca, named by early Mormon settlers, who remembered the book of Joshua: “Thou shalt follow the way pointing for thee by the tree.”

The Joshua starts out life branchless, standing like a pole on the desert, then starts putting out clumsy limbs pointing out and up with green bristles on the end like bayonets. The leaves die, turn gray-brown and lie back along the branches giving the plant a weird shaggy outline. Blossoms appear on the end of each branch from March to June, clusters of waxy cream white flowers. They smell like mushrooms.

My old man, when he had a spare afternoon, used to like to drive out and look at the Joshua trees. He remembered the time the London
Daily Telegraph
had sent out crews of Chinese to cut down trees to make paper pulp. But, he said, God had intervened, spoiled the first shipment back to England, and a terrible rainstorm had routed the Chinese cutting crew.

I moved on to the front door shaded by a small porch. On either side of the door were wooden lounge chairs so that Grayson could sit in the evening and watch his town go to sleep.

I knocked and knocked again—nothing but a faint sound inside the house that might have been someone moving around or could have been the normal aches and groans of a late afternoon. I walked around to the side of the house, loosening my jacket, and popped the button that had been threatening to depart for a month. I knelt to retrieve it among the stones and sand and felt a shadow over me.

“What are you doing?”

The voice was a woman’s. The age was unclear. I squinted up into the sun and saw her outline. She seemed to be naked.

“I lost my button,” I said, spotting it and stuffing it into my pocket. I got up and could see that she wasn’t naked but wearing a white bathing suit.

“I meant, what are you doing here, sneaking around our house?”

“Mrs. Grayson?” I said, stepping to the side to get a look at her.

“Miss Ressner,” she said. “Delores Ressner. What are you doing here?”

She was tall, maybe even taller than I, with a good, trim figure, short brown hair, and blue eyes. She seemed to be about thirty.

“I want to talk to your mother,” I said, trying not to finger the threads on my jacket, which had just given up their responsibility for holding that button. I was sweating and uncomfortable. She was tall and demanding.

“What about?” she said without moving.

“Your father.”

“Harold Grayson isn’t my father,” she said flatly.

“I know. It’s Jeffrey Ressner I want to talk about.”

Something fell in her face and facade. A shudder or shiver ran through her tan body. She turned and walked slowly to the back of the house. I followed her. The swimming pool there was small and filled with blue water, not the product from the local spring.

Delores Ressner picked up a towel from a lounge chair near the pool and began to dry herself, giving her time to think, which was all right with me. I had no place to go, and I didn’t mind looking at her. When she was through toweling, she slipped into a blue robe. Finished, she turned toward me, folded her arms, and asked: “What do you want to know about my father?”

“I want to know where he is.”

“Who are you?” Her eyes had narrowed, and she shook her hair to rid it of a few remaining drops of water or to let it hang loose. It was a nice gesture.

“I’m a private detective. Name’s Toby Peters. I’ve been hired by Dr. Winning of the Winning Institute to find your father. He broke out of the institute four days ago.”

“And Dr. Winning thinks he might come here?” Her hands tightened and turned white as they clutched her arms. I couldn’t tell if there was an undercurrent of fear or disbelief in her voice.

“No,” I said, looking at the house for signs of life before turning back to her. “It’s a place to start. Dr. Winning doesn’t want him hurt and doesn’t want him to hurt anybody.”

“My father never hurt anybody,” she fired back.

“Maybe,” I said. “I think we met the other night, and he expressed something more than verbal hostility.”

“I never wanted him in that place,” she said. “That was my mother and her husband’s idea.”

“Maybe I could talk to your mother and …” I said, taking a step toward the house.

She unfolded her hands and stepped in front of me.

“My mother isn’t here. She went to San Diego to visit her sister. My stepfather is in the house sleeping. He hasn’t been feeling well and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

We stared at each for two or three minutes, waiting for a break. She didn’t give me one, so I tried, “I’ve got a warm carton of milk and some Wheaties in my car. Maybe we can share a bowl and watch the sun go down while we wait for stepdaddy to wake up.”

She couldn’t stop the corners of her mouth from curling up from her full lips in a near smile, so I went on.

“I could sew on my button while we laugh at my clothes and you show me the family album. I’d like to see a picture of your father.”

She thawed a little and let her palms up.

“There are no decent photographs of my father. There used to be when he was acting, but when he grew … when he began to have problems, he tore them all up and refused to have another one taken. We’ve got one of him dressed as King Lear, but you can’t really recognize him in it.”

“He played Lear?” I said, taking another step toward the house.

“No.” Her head bent and shook sadly. “He dressed as Lear but never played him. Knew the part. I remember when I was a little girl he did scenes for me in our kitchen back in Ventura. He was really good.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “Can I put my milk in your refrigerator?”

Her head came up cocked to one side quizzically.

“O.K., but let’s keep it quiet. Harold can be a bit difficult, especially when he’s disturbed during his nap or when my father’s name comes up.”

She led the way in through the back door. The kitchen was large, pine, and modern with shining steel and a double sink. The refrigerator in the corner made self-satisfied gurgling sounds, and we sat at a kitchen table made of redwood. My milk could wait. I’d drink it on the way back to L.A. Through the side window on the opposite side of the house I could see a big blue car, probably a Packard.

Delores Ressner was tight and edgy as she turned the coffeepot on and sat. She scratched at a bothersome cuticle and bit her lower lip before looking up at me.

“What do you do?” I said. “Besides swimming.”

She shrugged. “Some acting. Nothing much. A few small parts at Twentieth Century-Fox. I was in
Blood and Sand
. One of the ladies-in-waiting. Things like that. A little modeling, mostly for mail-order catalogs. Now”—she looked out the window—“Now I’m resting before I go back into the jungle.”

“Have you heard from your father in the last four days?”

She looked down at a knot in the wooden table. Behind us the coffeepot bubbled.

Somewhere deeper in the house the floor creaked. It wasn’t the creak of weather and sundown, but the creak of a human moving.

“He needs help,” she said. “Not the kind of help Dr. Winning gives, imprisoning him. My stepfather, if you want the simple truth, pays to keep my father locked up and out of the way. My mother goes along with it because she can’t bear the idea of facing my father again. It wasn’t easy for her.”

“Or you either,” I said.

Her eyes were a little moist.

“I think I hear Grayson getting up,” I said.

She touched her cheek nervously and stood.

“Let’s have coffee. He can find us here.”

“Your father,” I repeated, turning toward her. “You’ve heard from him. I don’t want to hurt him. I just want to keep him from hurting you and your mother, other people, maybe even himself.”