Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series) (14 page)

“I was in love with her,” he said. “I can’t believe she’s dead. I just can’t believe it.”

“I don’t understand.”

He sighed. “I don’t guess anyone will. I swear to God, Rebecca! I swear it.”

“Take it easy, Rick. I believe you. I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t be in love with her. She was obviously a very beautiful woman.”

And rich.

“She was, wasn’t she? But the age difference—people are sexist about that sort of thing. They just don’t want to accept it.”

“How old was she?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Middle fifties, I guess. I’m twenty-nine.”

“Well, she looked wonderful. Who was she?”

“Didn’t I say? Katy Montebello.”

“How do I know that name?”

He shrugged. “It’s big around here.”

“I remember now. Marty mentioned her. She was a patron of the aquarium.”

“That’s right. We call it ‘sponsor.’”

“So is that how you know her? From the aquarium?”

He nodded.

“Shall we sit on that bench and talk about it? You can tell me the whole story. Then we’ll call the police. Okay?”

“You sit. I’ll pace.” But he seemed relieved that I’d agreed to sit down—had made that much of a commitment to hearing him out. I sat on the white metal bench, more to give him a focus than anything else, and he stood over me, not really pacing much, but occasionally patting his pockets as I’d seen Julio do earlier that day. I could smell a faint odor of alcohol on him.

“You know, I’m a model-maker.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I do handyman stuff and carpentry and, oh, painting—stuff like that—to keep it together, know what I mean? I’m a sculptor, really. I’d like to devote full time to my art, but I have to make a living.” He smiled, sadly, I thought. “I have a little girl.”

“Amber.”

“Yeah. Amber’s mom left me because I could never get my money trip together, and now I have to scramble or I’d never get to see Amber at all—her mom would see to that. At least now I get her weekends and a few weeks in the summer—as long as I can provide a halfway decent place for her to live. So—we all got problems, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, along comes Katy and she sees my work—at the aquarium, I mean, I do a little carpentry there, too—and she wanted me to do some work on her guest house. She has a maid, see, and the maid had to live in the main house, and that cramped Katy’s style, so she had me do this work on the guest house—for the maid—and she asked me in to have coffee and drinks and—” he shrugged “—she liked me.” He sounded astonished.

“And you liked her?”

“Umm-HMMMM.” He swallowed. “Yeah, I liked her. I liked her a lot.”

“Were you dating?”

“No. No, I wouldn’t exactly call it that. But sometimes she’d call and ask me up to have a few drinks. After I finished the carpentry, I mean.”

“And when was that?”

“About three months ago.”

“And would you spend the night?”

“Yeah. I usually would. Or sometimes I wouldn’t. We’d drink and we’d have sex and then she’d have someplace else to go. Tonight she asked me to come up early, so maybe she was going out later. I don’t know. She said she wanted to talk about something.”

“Frankly, Ricky, it sounds as if she treated you like a servant.”

He stared at the ground.

“Why did you put up with it?”

“I liked her. I was in love with her.” He looked undecided, as if there was more but he didn’t want to get into it. I had a pretty good idea what it was.

“I’m sorry to ask this, but I’m your lawyer and I need to know what went on. So here’s my question: Was there compensation?”

He flushed rosy pink, a nice color to paint a boudoir. “She’d always say it was for Amber. So I couldn’t say no.”

“She gave you money?”

“Yes. Sometimes a fifty, sometimes more. Sometimes nothing.” He straightened up and looked me in the eye. “I didn’t do it for the money. I would have married her—” Sure. For the money.

“Other gifts?”

“One.” He sat on the grass, as if finally defeated. “She drank a lot. She’d get drunk pretty often and try to give me things. And then about a week ago—I don’t know, I think someone dumped her. Someone she cared about, I mean. She got really drunk and started telling me about all the guys she’s had—besides her ex-husband, I mean. Oh, man. She named movie stars, politicians, millionaires—practically every dude that ever played in the Crosby. Jeez, it was embarrassing. But, you know, she’s got this thing for the sea. We should walk to the other side of the house—” He stopped, remembering we weren’t there on a sight-seeing trip. “Anyway, this place isn’t built right on the ocean for nothing. That’s her first love. And she’s a big sponsor at the aquarium. She’s got a real thing for it, no kidding.”

I nodded.

“So after she dumped her husband—her first husband, I mean, before she married Francis Montebello—some dude came along and wanted to marry her, but he didn’t give her a diamond. Uh-uh. He gave her a half-pound pearl.”

My ears pricked up. “How big?”

“Real big. So big you couldn’t even make jewelry out of it. Anyway, she didn’t want to marry the dude, but he said keep the pearl anyway, no one else was good enough for it, or something like that, and so she did. It got kind of famous, at least locally, because she’d show it around and stuff. It’s called the Sheffield Pearl, for some reason.”

“I think Marty told me Katy Montebello was once named Katy Sheffield.”

“Anyway, she showed it to me one other night. She kept it in a little velvet bag locked in a wall safe. She made this ritual of getting it out and letting me see it and putting it on the glass table and looking at it and I don’t know what all—it lasted, seemed like hours.”

“She was pretty drunk, huh?”

“Drunk as fifty skunks. And morose. Crying. Awful. Anyway, she gave me the pearl.”

“She
gave
you the pearl?”

“‘For Amber.’ She said it meant nothing to her and she wanted someone who’d really appreciate it to have it. Well, listen. I was pretty drunk, too.”

“Something like that must be worth a lot.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I was going to find out.” He tugged at a tuft of grass, pulled up a handful, and pulled up another handful. “Oh, shit!”

I waited.

“I didn’t think I should keep it. Thought I’d talk about it with her when we were both sober—and I guess she had second thoughts, too, because that’s what she wanted to talk about tonight. That’s why she invited me here.” He flushed. “To tell you the truth, she left a pretty weird message on my machine. I don’t think she remembered giving it to me.”

“What did the message say?”

“She asked if I could come over and said the time I should come and all, and then there was this pause and her voice got kind of strange and embarrassed and she said, ‘I wonder if you have my pearl?’”

“Oh, Ricky!” It wasn’t very professional, but I couldn’t keep the dismay out of my voice.

He flushed again. This was a man who shouldn’t play poker. “Yeah. Looks bad, huh?”

I shrugged.

“It’s true, though. She gave it to me, Rebecca. Think I’d steal a thing like that?”

“Did you bring it?”

He shook his head.

“No? Listen, the message made it pretty obvious she wanted it back. Were you going to pretend she never gave it to you?”

“No!”

I waited, having no choice but to play dumb to protect the anonymity of my other client—the one whose sticky little fingers couldn’t be explained by M&Ms.

“I don’t have it,” he whispered.

“You don’t have it?”

“Amber took it. I think she lost it. She won’t say what happened to it.”

“You’re sure she took it? Does she say she did?”

“She denies it, the little witch.”

“Why don’t you believe her?”

“Where I put it, she had to have taken it. Nobody broke into the house. And anyway, it was like that story about the letter, the Poe story; nobody would have looked for it there. The perfect hiding place. But when I looked for it, it wasn’t there.”

“Tell me something. Were you still drunk when you hid it?” This was mean of me, but I couldn’t stand hearing Amber falsely accused.

“I’m telling you I know where I put it.”

“Okay. Tell me what happened when you got here.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know what I can add. She didn’t answer the door, I heard the dog, and I broke the window.”

“We’d better call the police.”

But I was suddenly hit with a very unlawyerly urge—a need almost. A criminal impulse welling up from the subconscious. Well, not criminal exactly, just unprofessional. A little illegal, too, actually. A very, very naughty idea. I wanted to get a good look at the crime scene before the police did.

It was entirely possible. A rare opportunity to gather information that might help my client’s case had been given to me. There were only two problems. One was a hysterical, yipping, nipping little dog; the other was Ricky. How could I do it without involving him?

The answer was that I couldn’t. Even assuming I could get in the window without being boosted—even get in the house without letting him know what I was doing—I needed him to quiet the dog.

“Ricky,” I said, “did you try the door?”

He looked bewildered. “Try the door?” Clearly the man was a law-abiding citizen at least some of the time—or so he wanted me to believe. Such people did not try to break into houses except when a murdered loved one lay in plain sight.

“When she didn’t answer.”

“No.”

I got up and tried it. It opened. From the doorway you could see that in the living room, a porcelain bowl and a small sculpture had been knocked off the coffee table. I said to Ricky, “We can phone from here. Let Mellors out, why don’t you? He must be dying to go outside.”

“He already went on the rug.”

“He might want to go again.”

Obediently Ricky went to get the dog, never guessing that his lawyer was leading him a bit astray, but I thought this might fly with Jacobson and Tillman. I might take a small unauthorized tour of the house before I phoned, but there would be no need to mention that part.

I took off my shoes and jumped up on Katy’s sumptuously covered sofa, where I hoped Mellors couldn’t reach. But in a minute Ricky came through with the dog in his arms, crooning to him. “He’s friendly as a puppy now. I guess I looked like a bad guy, coming through the window.”

I wandered through the house, to Katy’s office-library. A few things were in disarray, knocked down, knocked aside, like the objects on the floor in the living room. Some were small objects. One was a chair. A couple of pictures hung awry. I tried to imagine how it could have happened. Her killer had chased her, perhaps, and one or the other of them had banged into furniture.

That fit for some things, but not for the coffee table. It was as if he had pushed her, and she had hit it.

The idea brought up a series of very nasty mental pictures—of her tormentor holding her, perhaps by a wrist, walking her through the house to the study, slapping her around as they went.

It was about the pearl. It had to be. I could hear him:

“Where is it?”

Pop
, as he slaps her.

She doesn’t answer, falls backward, knocking over a chair.

He hits her again and she slams against a wall, knocking pictures off balance.

But why? If Ricky was telling the truth, the pearl was hers—no one else’s—and was locally famous. That meant she hadn’t stolen it from an irate former owner, and it meant anyone might have tried to steal it from her at any time. Why now? Because they hadn’t found it in Sadie’s house or office?

Her office stank of various odors I don’t want to describe, or even remember. I saw now that there were bruises all over Katy—on her arms, on her face, everywhere I could see. She had been strangled with a curtain tie that was still wound round her neck, and her hands were tied behind her with another. There was disorder here, too, a lot of books on the floor, as if her assailant had banged her against the bookcases time and again. I thought the coroner would find more bruises under her blouse and slacks.

If she had let this happen to protect Ricky, she must have loved him.

The phone was off the hook, on the floor. But my illicit desire to examine the crime scene had dissipated. I’d find another phone. Protecting fingerprints with the tail of my T-shirt, I replaced the receiver and beat it to the kitchen, where there was a wall phone like Marty had.

I called the Monterey cops, asked for Jacobson just for form’s sake, and was stunned when she came on the line.

“I didn’t think you’d still be there.”

“We work on a homicide till it’s solved.” She sighed wearily and a little smugly. “Weekends, nights, whatever. What can I do for you, Miss Schwartz?”

Quickly I ran down the situation. Jacobson was beside herself. “You did right to call us. Technically it’s the sheriff’s case, being in Pebble Beach, but we know you, so we’ll come along to smooth things along.”

I had to admire her euphemism: “Smooth things along” clearly meant horn in on the sheriff’s case.

Who cared? For once, I was in the good graces of an officer of the law. It probably wouldn’t last, but I’d enjoy it while I could—and hope it helped my client.

Jacobson said she’d notify the sheriff’s office, so my only other chore was to call Ava and tell her everything was okay, she wouldn’t have to send police. She was avid. I was brusque. I’d probably pay for it.

Outside, Ricky was sitting on the bench, looking bushed, and Mellors was curled up at his feet as if nothing had happened.

“Okay, Ricky, get ready for bad stuff.”

“Oh, man. The worst has got to be over. Seeing her like that …”

“A couple of things. Where’s Amber?”

“Home with a babysitter. Grounded. On account of that little bit of thievery.” His inflection was bitter, as if Amber was the cause of his problems.

“They may keep you a long time, and they may even arrest you. You need to know that.”

He nodded.

“You’re going to tell them the truth exactly as you told me—don’t worry, I’ll be there with you the whole time—but you’re going to leave out two things. The reason Katy asked you over tonight, and any mention of the pearl. Any mention at all. Tomorrow is soon enough to tell them.”