No Place Like Home - A Camilla Randall Mystery (The Camilla Randall Mysteries) (30 page)

"You and Dorothy have some kind of…relationship, I take it?"

Marvin let out a tragic sigh. "I thought we did. But she disappeared. Everything's gone totally surreal since I got home yesterday and found her gone. Seriously, I was terrified she might have been taken…by Harry's people." He scanned the room. "How about the purse? There should be a neat little Chanel-style bag—quilted, with a gold chain strap…"

Now I was starting to get annoyed. "So are you really worried about Dorothy, or is this simply about getting your Manners Doctor outfit back? I take it Dorothy stole it?"

Marvin put the folded dress and wig together into a neat parcel and gave me a huffy smile.

"She must have found my Mistress Nightshade wardrobe and decided to wear this one, since the boxy jacket would cover up the fact it didn't fit. Clever girl. I couldn't figure out what she could be wearing, since I'd sent her dreadful cheap knock-off suit to the dry cleaner to get the blood out."

Blood. It sounded as if he'd said, "blood." Maybe I needed more coffee.

Or maybe I should call the police.

"Dorothy's suit had blood on it?"

He whirled around, looking me in the eye as if I'd done something terribly wrong. "Did Ronzo bring her to you? Has he been conning me? Maybe he sent me to San Simeon so he could snoop around my house."

This was going too far. I used my coolest voice.

"As far as I know, Dorothy has never met Ronzo. She showed up at the store yesterday with two other women in Manners Doctor outfits and offered her services. She's excellent with a cash register. And very cool under pressure."

Marvin gave me a look of arch skepticism. "I can't imagine how she got there. She was still too weak to wander. Her tummy tuck was a mess and still needed time to heal. Seriously. When I found her, she looked as bad as some of our wounded guys in Iraq. Besides, I thought she was enjoying the hospitality. I still have three packages of Jell-O cups." He opened the drapes and surveyed the room in the brightening morning light. "And now she's flown the coop again, it seems."

Marvin was even more annoying in daylight. I asked my question again.

"You said Dorothy's suit had blood on it. Whose?"

"Oh, hers." Marvin gave a half-smile. "Don't worry. No foul play. It was from the tummy tuck. She hadn't emptied the drains. They fill up with blood and you have to empty them regularly. But it's okay now. She's healing nicely. I took out her stitches yesterday. I was a paramedic in the Army you know."

I didn't. But then, I didn't know much about the bizarreness that was Marvin Skinner.

"Let's go back to the kitchen," I said. "Bring your outfit and anything else you think is yours. I'm going to pour us some more coffee and you are going to explain to me what the hell is going on."

"Language, Doctor Manners," Marvin said.

I wanted to hit him.

Back in the kitchen, I topped up his coffee and wondered again if I should be calling the police.

First I asked him the obvious questions—

"Who is Dorothy, how do you know her, and where on earth do you think she's gone?"

Marvin sipped his coffee and waved his hand as if my questions were too inconsequential to be answered. "It's a long story. What's more important, are you sure she put Ronzo's notebook in that Chanel purse? Because if Doria's gone, it's gone, and we have no hope of finding Ronzo."

I heard stirrings in the hallway as Marvin spoke.

The kitchen door opened and Plant walked in, obviously as much in need of caffeine as I had been.

"What do you mean, 'Doria's gone'. Are you talking about Doria Windsor? Because apparently she isn't. She may not even be dead. They found no trace of her in that Mercedes. They've hauled it out of the water and there's no sign of her. And the CHP officer says he never saw Doria in the car. The man they found is the driver he saw. So the dead man is probably the person who stole the car from Betsy Baylor. Nothing to do with Doria, who could be anywhere. I just heard it on the radio."

I shook my head. Everybody seemed to have lost their minds this morning.

"No. We're talking about Dorothy Castelo. Our Dorothy. She's not in her bed."

"Dorothy Castelo is Doria Windsor's real name." Marvin spoke in a flat voice as if he were relating a factoid at a cocktail party. "Castelo is Portuguese for Castle. So she picked "Windsor" because of Windsor Castle. I read it in a profile of her in Vogue."

My brain did somersaults. I did not want to be hearing this. Not any of it. Doria Windsor was a dead celebrity. Not the nice older woman who rescued me yesterday.

Plant looked as bewildered as I felt.

"Marvin," he said. "Are you saying that Doria Windsor is not only alive, but she slept in our house last night?"

Marvin shook his head and gave an annoying smirk.

"Apparently not. At least the bed is quite untouched. She seems to have evaporated sometime in the night. Our list of missing persons is growing at a rather alarming rate, isn't it?"

I guzzled coffee. It didn't help.

Doria took another sip of the milky coffee and blurted out the thought that wouldn't leave her head.

"You would have killed Tom to keep him from telling Ronzo your real identity?"

Joey gave Doria an intense, dark look, as if he were trying to access her brain with some kind of ESP. Then he let out a big laugh.

"Did I kill Tom? Is that what you're asking? No way. I'm not saying I wouldn't have if had to. I didn't like the guy. He was a bully—and a mean drunk—but not worth killing."

This didn't do much to soothe Doria's fears.

"So how do you know Tom didn't give Ronzo your story? How do you know you're not about to be exposed in that blog?"

"I don't think he believed I'm J.J. Besides, who cares what's on a stupid blog? Nobody reads those things. Ronzo's been demoted. He's never in the real Rolling Stone magazine anymore. Cause nobody believes his crap about J. J. Tower."

"Sorry to be the one to break it to you, Joey, but everybody reads blogs these days," Doria said. "That's why Home magazine is hemorrhaging money and Tina Brown edits the Daily Beast."

Joey laughed again, but he wasn't smiling.

Doria couldn't tell if he was covering up his crime with fake cluelessness or if he genuinely didn't comprehend the impact Ronzo could have on his life.

"Hundreds of people in this town alone read this man's blog. That's why everybody was mobbing the bookstore yesterday. And poor Camilla didn't have a clue what he was doing until the mob showed up."

"That's not going to happen to me." Joey said. "You want some more coffee?"

Doria accepted the refill, although she felt altogether too jumpy already. She could be alone in the woods with a killer.

"How do you know that? How do you know Ronzo didn't pay Tom a chunk of change and Tom's not sitting on a beach in Baja right now?"

Joey snorted and gave her a pat on the head. "Doria, calm down. I'm not worried. Even if Tommy knew who I was, he wouldn't have had the smarts to do that. Tommy was not a big-picture kind of guy. He'd rather have twenty bucks today than the promise of a hundred bucks tomorrow. He thought he was playing Bonzo like a Stratocaster. "

"Do you mean he was simply feeding the man lies?" Doria thought this Ronzo person sounded more like an idiot by the minute.

"Yup. Tommy bragged about it all over camp. He'd sell Bonzo a different bunch of lies every day for like, twenty dollars a pop. He'd throw in enough truth to keep him coming back, like telling him I played guitar and where I usually go to busk for donations. He'd always give a place where I'd been the day before. He knows my routine. He wasn't dumb enough to send Bonzo down to Lucky and Bucky's camp. You don't crap where you sleep—not within fifty paces anyhow." He grinned and looked over at his toilet-paper- adorned shovel. "Speaking of which, it's about that time."

Doria flashed on the image of Joey carrying a shovel the night before and tried to remember if it had toilet paper on it. She was pretty sure she'd have noticed. So he'd been using a different shovel to bury that raccoon.

"Do you think Tom is dead?" She blurted it out before she realized this probably wasn't the moment to ask.

"Dunno." Joey leaned on the shovel. "Twenty dollars' worth of Old Crow tends to make a man like that develop a case of drunk and disorderly real quick. So the cops might have taken him in. Or somebody could have killed him. Hell. Booze makes him so mean anybody might have killed him. There sure have been times when I've been tempted."

Doria tried to smile. She looked around her. She could see the path back to the main part of the camp, and heard the children's voices. It wasn't far if she had to make a run for it.

Joey kept on. "Of course, if I was going to kill anybody it would be that Bonzo. Every time I get settled someplace nice, he comes along to mess it up. If somebody popped him, my life would be a whole lot easier. "

Doria's stomach tightened. Ronzo was missing. Just like Tom. That's what Marvin said last night.

She kept seeing the image of Joey coming out of the willows with his shovel.

What if that hadn't been a raccoon he was burying?

She didn't know this man Hobo Joe. She knew Joey Torres, an idealistic kid who hadn't existed for forty years.

She might very well have spent last night in the arms of a murderer.

Plant looked as if he might explode. Or maybe hit Marvin with his coffee mug.

"Camilla, are you and Marvin saying that Dorothy—the woman who helped Silas cook that lamb last night with Doria Windsor's recipe—that was the real Doria Windsor? Are you sure?"

"I'm not—exactly." I hardly knew what to say. "I mean, I guess Marvin knows if it's his dress or not."

Marvin showed Plant the Manners Doctor dress Dorothy had been wearing.

"And you think Doria Windsor took this dress?" Plant's voice still held a lot of skepticism.

Marvin sighed. "I know she was in my house recovering from a tummy tuck and her own suit was at the dry cleaner, so yes, I think it's pretty likely. I might have done the same thing. She obviously had tired of my hospitality. I must admit to being a terrible cook. And I did feed her a lot of Jell-O. But I thought she liked the Jell-O. She said she did."

"Why was she at your house?" I finally managed to ask the obvious question. "Are you a friend of hers?"

Marvin shook his head sadly.

"Well, I thought we were friends, but who knows what goes on in her airy little head. I rescued her. She was sleeping in the garage of the burnt-down house. Totally down and out. On Oxycontin and who knows what else. She told me somebody had stolen her car and I took her at her word. I've always adored her. A total fan. Have you seen my house? It's all Doria's designs."

Fandom could easily go over the line into creepiness. Maybe that's why Doria left.

"Why didn't you tell the authorities she was still alive?" Plant said. "They've spent millions trying to get her body out of the ocean."

Marvin sighed. "You know how I feel about 'the authorities', Plantagenet. Besides, Doria wanted to wait until she was in good health to announce her 'resurrection' as she put it. She was planning to talk to lawyers and that sort of thing. She had money somewhere. Jewelry she was going to sell. She wanted to look her best before she appeared in the media. I'm sure you understand the dangers of not being prepared for that, Camilla."

I gave him a stony look. The pictures of me on Ronzo's blog had not been flattering.

Plant gave a huffy snort. "Marvin, do you have any idea how many laws you've broken? We probably all have. She's a known fugitive."

"Not known to us," I said. I didn't want Plant to start throwing blame around. "She told us her name was Dorothy Castelo. She was totally disguised. Anyway, how can a dead person be a known fugitive?"

Plant dithered. "I don't know if we should go looking for her or call the police. Do you suppose she might be wandering around, having a morning constitutional or whatever?"

Marvin jumped up. "Don't call the police, for God's sake. What would you say? 'Oh, officer, a dead woman came to our house last night and cooked lamb, and didn't stay for breakfast.' You're the one who would get arrested."

Plant leaned against the granite counter, glaring over his coffee cup. "What do you suggest we do, then, Marvin?"

"I suggest we try to find Ronzo, who may very well be in the clutches of Doria's husband, who I am convinced is not dead. In fact, he may have snatched Doria from this very house. He probably knows the layout, if he ever visited here."

"Harry here? No he never visited our house." Plant looked a bit disgusted at the suggestion. "He had no interest in our property, which relieved Silas…well, except the motel near Ragged Point. He kept hammering Silas to sell him those grungy old cabins. Silas wouldn't sell for sentimental reasons, even though I kept telling him he should. Harry was offering way over market value. But I suppose he would have paid in phony securities. So it's probably good Silas won that fight…"